The Art of Sauntering: A New England Walking Practice

Thoreau opened his 1862 essay “Walking” with an etymology. Sauntering, he claimed, came from sainte-terrer, a holy-lander, the medieval pilgrim wandering toward no fixed destination. Philologists have argued with him ever since. The derivation is shaky; the better candidate is the French s’aventurer, to venture forth. But whether Thoreau was right about the word matters less than what he built on top of it: a New England walking practice that, a century and a half later, is the exact thing the step-counter on your wrist is engineered to prevent.

What Thoreau Meant by the Word

The distinction in “Walking” is sharp and deliberate. The hiker has a summit. The saunterer has none. The hiker measures the day in elevation gained, miles covered, water consumed. The saunterer measures nothing, because measurement would convert the walk into a different kind of activity, one with a goal, and therefore one with a possibility of failure. Emerson’s daily Concord walks, often with Thoreau himself, were the working laboratory of half the journals. Robert Frost’s pasture wandering shows up in the poems as a kind of method: the speaker is always already on foot, already partway into a field, already noticing. Mary Oliver’s slow circuits at Blackwater Pond and along the Provincetown dunes produced book after book of attention. The premise that holds the whole tradition together is the no-goal premise. It’s the load-bearing element. Remove it and the practice collapses into exercise, useful, measurable, and entirely beside the point.

The Four Conditions

Ninety minutes is the floor. Shorter walks reset the body, which is a real thing and worth doing, but they don’t reset the attention. The first half hour is mostly about discharging the day, running the same loops of thought you brought in with you, in slightly different scenery. Around forty-five minutes something gives. The walk starts to fill with what’s actually around you instead of what you carried into it. That requires time. No phone. No podcast. No audiobook. The noticing Oliver writes about uses silence as its working medium, the way a darkroom uses dark. A podcast is good company; it is also, structurally, a substitute for noticing, and the substitution is total. A route unplanned past the first turn. The saunter chooses itself as it unfolds. You decide where the trailhead is and which direction you’ll head when you reach the first fork, and after that the walk is allowed to make its own decisions. This sounds precious until you try it; what it actually does is hand the afternoon back to you. And finally, the hardest condition: a willingness to come back with nothing to show for it. No photos. No mileage. No anecdote at dinner. The walk happened, and there is no artifact. This is the condition the rest of contemporary life is organized against.

The Four Routes That Hold the Form

Six routes around New England hold the practice particularly well. They aren’t the most scenic walks in the region, and that’s part of why they work; scenic walks invite the camera, and the camera is its own kind of step-counter. Walden Pond, Concord, MA. The full loop is about 1.7 miles. It is also the original ground, and walking it without performing the literary pilgrimage is harder than it sounds. The trick is to do the loop twice: the first time gets the Thoreau out of your system, the second time is the actual walk. Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA. The transcendentalist quadrant near Indian Ridge Path holds the graves of half the lineage in this essay. The cemetery is a working arboretum and one of the great quiet spaces inside Route 128. The Marginal Way, Ogunquit, ME. A mile and a quarter of cliff path between Perkins Cove and Ogunquit Beach. It resists hurry because the path is narrow, the benches are frequent, and the Atlantic is doing something different every fifty yards. Quechee Gorge rim, VT. The rim trail along the Ottauquechee River is short, under a mile each way, but the gorge itself, 165 feet down, is the kind of feature that argues against forward motion. Stratham Hill Park, NH and the Wapack Trail’s open-summit stretch on Mount Watatic. Inland, less trafficked, room to drift. Watatic in particular has the open-ledge views without the trail-conference crowd of the bigger summits to the north.

Attention as the Beginning of Devotion

Mary Oliver’s line in Upstream, that attention is the beginning of devotion, is the cleanest articulation of what the practice is for. The poems prove it. “Wild Geese” begins from a posture of noticing. “The Summer Day” arrives at its famous closing question, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life, only after a full inventory of a grasshopper’s jaw and eyes and forearms. The Blackwater Pond sequence is a year of slow looking at one body of water. None of this gets written by someone walking on a treadmill while listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed. It gets written by someone who has spent ninety minutes on a path with nothing to show for it, every day, for years. The reciprocity is what Frost and Emerson keep returning to. The walker is changed by what the walk reveals, not by the distance covered. Frost’s stone wall, his road not taken, his pasture spring: these are not metaphors he went looking for. They are objects that became metaphors because he kept passing them on foot, slowly, with nothing else to do.

Against the Gamified Walk

Step counters, streak apps, and the entire genre of “mindful walking” programs share a single feature: they measure. Measurement is exactly the thing sauntering refuses, and the refusal isn’t snobbery; it’s structural. Once a walk is measured, it has an outcome. Once it has an outcome, it has a way to fail. Once it has a way to fail, the attention is on the metric instead of the path. There’s a particular contradiction in the wearable apps that ping the wrist to remind the walker to be present. The reminder is the interruption. The buzz is the announcement that you have not been paying attention, delivered by the device that is now demanding your attention. What the New England tradition offers instead is a practice with no metric, no leaderboard, no proof it happened. The walk leaves no trace, including in your phone’s health app. You come back to the car or the kitchen with the same number of photographs you left with, which is zero, and the same body weight, more or less, and a head that is slightly emptier than it was when you started. The next morning, if you’re Mary Oliver or Robert Frost or Ralph Waldo Emerson, some of what you noticed turns up on the page. If you’re not, and most of us aren’t, it turns up somewhere harder to name. It turns up in the next walk. That’s the whole tradition. There is no badge for it, and that is the point.