I am reading The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson, a fascinating book about not only how to walk -- well, actually, not so much that -- as about a lot of tales of walkers -- some the writer says are well known.

But it's Nicholson's own story of a walk he took and ended with a broken arm that caught my attention. He says he was walking in the Hollywood Hills, when he somehow tripped while on a level sidewalk.

I've tripped while entering or leaving a door, when I didn't see the root that grabbed my innocent toe, over one of our two kitties who insist on being exactly where my foot is landing during a walk around the house at exactly the same moment as my foot is landing, and for a variety of other reasons.

The author writes about his fall, "...incomprehensibly, the negotiations broke down. I lost it. I tripped, I stumbled, I began to fall."

"The older you get the bigger a deal it is for you to fall down," Nicholson explains.

He doesn't need to explain that to me. At the ripe -- and continous -- old age of 29.5, I've learned that on my own. The School of Hard Falls, it could be called.

And Nicholson continues his tale of going down, "Even as I was falling I thought, Oh crap, I'm not really going to go all the way to the ground, am I? I'll stop myself somehow. I'll keep my footing. I'll regain my balance. And then I knew I was wrong about that. I was going all the way. I'd passed the tipping point. Oh crap, indeed."*

When I was much younger, I was thrown from a horse. No big deal. I got up, remounted, and rode on back to the barn. I once was having a jumping contest with my little sister, and on one of her runs to the edge of the porch from around the corner of the house, she bumped me as I too was making a run to the edge of the same porch from around the corner -- out of her sight. I carried the lump on my forehead for most of my adult life. Either it is gone now, or I've lost part of my sight due to impending declining years and just don't see it any more.

Moving on a few years, I recall somehow tripping while descending the wooded Appalachian Trail on the north side of Baldpate. That trip resulted in a very sore ankle -- some three miles from the road. Still later, I was coming down the steep backside of Cadillac, heading toward Bubble Pond late one afternoon. Dusk had joined my weariness, and the combination of the two caused my heel to miss a six-inch-wide rock outcropping on a minor cliff not far from the bottom of the trail. My elbow didn't miss, and the pain remained with me for about eight years. I could have gone to the doctor, but he would have probably told me I had hurt my elbow, maybe chipped it. And charged me a small fortune.

One day, while packing the car to head off to do some volunteer work on the Appalachian Trail, I failed to notice that my son had removed a rock from the front walk as part of some project -- I don't remember the project exactly, perhaps trying to kill Dad. I do remember that missing rock had me limping on a cane for several weeks, until some "wise" school kids in the private school in which I was supposedly teaching grabbed the cane and raced off down the hallway, laughing. When I raced down the hall and caught them, I realized I probably no longer needed the cane. I could have then used a club, but lacking that implement, I too laughed and continued on -- without the cane.

I even smiled.

One day I was standing still in a snowy woods, idly clinging to a sapling's branch. Next thing I knew I was sitting on a patch of ice, still clinging to the branch. That one pulled my shoulder pretty badly. It only hurt for about  five months.

The most recent fall occurred when I stopped my bus to go for a walk in the woods alongside Upper Hadlock Pond. The nice, smooth boglogs were not yet in place, and the trail was rough, muddy, rocky, and crisscrossed with roots. I knew all this, yet this is when I experienced the same disbelief at having tripped on a root and being in the same slow-motion process of falling as Nicholson described that ended his sidewalk walk. I was wearing shorts and finished driving the bus home with a very bloody and painful right knee.

I've read various books on walking, including how to -- none of which instructed me in how to fall. I've read the virtues, the psychological advantages brought by walking, the medical stuff, and how much fun it is.

Due to my one afternoon in another woods having pulled the same right leg and it's being sore for several years -- healing too slowly, I now walk a lot slower. My race walks now measure about one mile per hour -- for a short mile and a long hour.

I've walked a lot over the years, and am still a mediocre walker.

But I can fall with the best of them.

*Nicholson's book also covers a long history of walking, including strange walks in places such as England, where apparently a century or two or three ago, strange walking as contest material was common. I haven't finished The Lost Art of Walking yet, but I hope somewhere it will clue me in on how to walk without breaking my neck. The subtitle of this book, which I recommend for reading on those nights -- which includes most of them -- when there is nothing worth viewing on TV, is The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2010

Down the Road Column Magic City