It is the first week of March in Jacksonville, Florida, where my mission is underway to find out whether living half an hour from family — rather than ten hours away — enhances the quality of those relationships.
So far, the answer is
complicated.
I’m thinking about the
backstory to writer Phil Terrana’s essay, “Strolling or Scrolling.” A
grandson’s visit brought Phil up close and personal with the kid’s fascination with
his cell phone’s superpower. This pinpointed something my sisters and I have
quietly stumbled into since I’ve lived a half hour from them. We’re rarely in
proximity—without a pre-scheduled drive across a bridge through heavy
traffic—at the exact moment when one of us has something to say. We scroll
instead.
Last week I faced a 40-minute
wait at the city’s Department of Motor Vehicles, and scrolled through Facebook to
message my niece Courtney. She reported on her new life in Portland, Oregon,
adding that she’d soon be in Florida to accompany her mom — my younger sister —
on a trip to Patagonia. I hadn’t known that was happening so soon, and texted
my little sis, who was packing only 28 minutes down the road from me, to tell her to
stay off the cliffs. She responded that the cliffs were, in part, why one went
to Patagonia. Efficient. Affectionate. Yet neither of us had taken a walk
together in months.
More strolling and less
scrolling? It hasn’t worked out that way so far.
As Terrana learned, his
grandson’s scrolling threatened to eat up most of the time the two had
together. Phil, who doesn’t even own a phone and relies on his wife’s device
for contact with the outside world, values what Italians call a passeggiata.
On the second day of the visit, Phil said to the boy, “Let’s walk.”
You know how that went over.
Put down the phone and leave it behind? But Phil and his grandson found, as I
have, that a stroll has as much superpower as any cell phone. The relatives got
to know each other. Sometimes, as I told my nephew on Thanksgiving Day when my
older sister and I disappeared for what he thought was an unreasonably long
walk, “Your mother had to finish her thought.”
Even a barefoot stroll
along Jacksonville Beach connects me with people I wouldn’t otherwise speak to.
We stop to speculate on why the rescue truck has arrived, or how a kayaker came
to be stuck in the surf. We share our admiration for certain canines’ finesse
at finding balls in the rolling tide. My friend Rex and I have invented a soap
opera involving a mysterious dead palm tree—a log, high on the sand—that seems
to move from place to place at night when we’re not looking.
I’ve strolled that beach
alone on windy days to yell at God and not be overheard. Interrupted only by sandy
gusts, my theatrics clear the air about what I think is not happening fast
enough. I find myself in Ponte Vedra before I’ve gotten it all out. The walk is
“long enough,” as Gail Godwin put it in her novel, Grief Cottage,
“to get out of myself.”
The return from a walk is
a revelation. Yesterday, a stroll through the historic Avondale neighborhood helped me escape a computer problem. My time out produced little in the way of
data or insight, yet I felt more positive when I got home. My feet hurt when I
sank into my chair again, but I was minus the eye twitch I’d have dealt with if
I’d stayed home scrolling for a solution.
At the conclusion of that
DMV appointment last week, Rex suggested we find Freedom Fountain. Because my
car was safely parked for the reasonable charge of a dollar an hour, I said,
“Let’s walk”—not knowing the fountain that GPS reported as only eighteen
minutes away on foot lay on the other side of a heavily-trafficked commuter
bridge. At 3 p.m., on a hot day, and in thinly-soled flats? I soon balked. “I
told you so’s” were uttered. We turned back when a closed road stopped us.
And then, as if placed
there by the city as an apology, a miniature white cruise ship appeared around a
bend—tucked in along the riverfront as though it had been waiting for us. We
stood and took it in. By the time we got back to the car, we felt lighthearted.
Bickering on a walk doesn’t carry the weight that bickering indoors can. One’s
testiness vanishes in the wind.
Today, as I walked alone
through the autumn leaves swirling around the docks in front of elegant
Riverside homes — because yes, Jacksonville has an autumn, but it arrives in
February — I spotted that same white ship gliding along the river and
disappearing into the distance. Thanks to my phone, I knew it to be the American
Liberty, pint-sized for river cruises. I wouldn’t have witnessed its grace from
my couch.
When I got home, I had no
energy for writing. I had just the right energy to sit on my sunporch, put up my
bare feet, and enjoy the output of air from a ceiling fan I hadn’t known worked
until that moment. I noticed how my plants were doing. I had a chance to simply
exist.
Phil’s musings on the
virtues of the stroll remind me that walks often end eventfully: the exploratory
walk to find out which other teens are staying at your hotel on spring break; a
chat on the walk home from school that starts a new friendship. A Thanksgiving
disappearance with a sister who needs to finish her thought. Reading old text
messages, not so much.
It’s one thing to get out
and log 10,000 steps around Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach. It’s another
thing entirely to walk, step by step, conscious of the presence of another
human being, or of a cruise ship around the bend.
Both scrolling and
strolling have superpowers. What’s different is the class of discovery we make
on them. The phone delivers news. The walk brings us together.
Both are waiting for you.
But only one will move on without you if you wait too long.
