The Long Walk

I’m amazed at how little I actually read.

There’s an article in the current issue of Minneapolis’ The Rake Magazine by Jennifer Vogel titled “The Long Walk.” It’s about her experience of spending a “year on foot in Minneapolis.”

It’s pretty heavy (and pretty excellent) on urban planning and shoulda, woulda, coulda’s surrounding the development of downtown Minneapolis over the past 20 years. I was hoping for more experiential stories and anecdotes than I found. That’s not to say it was completely without.

The experiential part that most resonates with me is how alone she feels as she walks during the winter. It’s almost an exact fit with the opening lines from the movie “Crash.” My most common walk for lunch is a round trip of about ¾ mile. I come in spitting distance of probably 1,000 people. I’d have to actually get run over by one of them to actually have human contact with any of them.