Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

Walking all day is tiring. That isn’t so surprising. Simply standing on your feet, having your legs support your weight, these muscles only take so much. After enough hours, I am tired.

There are other situations on the road that increase fatigue. Rain is one; cold is another, and another is the four-lane divided highway.

Four-lane highways are nice for cars. Slower traffic stays to the right, and faster traffic can pass on the left and keep moving faster. It really is a nice thing for people in cars trying to move from one place to another. Four-lane roads, however, are not nice for taking a walk.

There are several nice things about walking on the side of a four-lane highway. One is that they usually have wide shoulders. You can walk safely three or four feet outside the painted edge of the road and still be on smooth pavement. Another nice thing is that approaching cars can move over a bit into the left lane and give you a little extra space as they pass.

There are several bad things about the four-lane highways. The first is that the shoulders, while wider, have a steeper slope away from the road. You walk while leaning. Your left leg reaches down lower than your right. You walk with a limp. This means sore ankles after 15 miles and often blisters on your feet after just a couple of miles.

The worst thing about walking on the side of a four-lane highway is the speed of the cars. The cars go faster; we knew that from above. The trouble for the walker with all this speed is the noise, heat, and wind from the cars. 70 mile-per-hour cars push a lot of wind. One car after another after another for six hours is A  L O T  O F wind hitting you in the face. The wind brings noise – the loud, punishing, white noise of the the wind. A constant SHHHHHHHHHHH in your ears. You hear it hours into the night and wake at midnight with it still whistling. Finally, fast cars mean engines churning harder, and that means more heat from the engines. This was okay on cold mornings in Tennessee in the chilly fall of 2008. It was not pleasant during the hot fall of 2009 in Alabama.

Heat, wind, noise – fatigue. A day on a four-lane road is like three days on a two-lane road.

I am thankful that I didn’t walk on four-lane roads much. The longest stretch was in Tennessee. Route 11 split into 11E and 11W. We took 11E, and it was four-lane for several days. I only had about half a day of four-lane in Alabama. I recall it being a lot of up and down, hot and humid. Aside from these two stretches, we only hit four-lanes in a few big towns. Good.