99% Invisible - 419- Take a Walk

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is walking. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to do, take a walk. We’ve been working so hard on the book release and new miniseries we’re launching in December that we’re going to take a walk with our friends at Pop Up Magazine. Pop Up Magazine's team spent weeks interviewing dozens of people about walking, including Jenny Slate, Anna Sale (Death, Sex & Money), Antwan Williams (Ear Hustle), author and radio host Lulu Miller, writer Sam Jay (Saturday Night Live), NASA Astronaut Drew Feustel, Sergeant Julian Torres, and many others. Take a Walk Buy The 99% Invisible City now!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. While I was doing interviews to promote the book, someone asked me, what is your favorite way to experience the city? The answer is walking. I love to walk. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to do. Also, take a walk.

We've been working so hard on the book release and in many series that were launching in December that we're gonna take a walk with our friends at Pop Up magazine. They are a live magazine show created to be performed on stage in front of a live audience. Pop Up is this really beautiful groundbreaking leap forward in journalism, but since there are no theater shows happening right now,

they've been making stories to enjoy at home. And this one was so delightful and so of my alley. I just wanted this all to do it together. So let me introduce you to my friend, Haley. Hi, this is Haley Hall from Popup Magazine. And I'm going to take you on a walk. If you need a second to get ready, press pause. Grab some headphones, don't forget your keys and your mask, then come back and we'll head out.

You good? All right, let's go. There are a million ways to walk in this world. So whatever walking means to you, in this moment, do that. It could be going on a walk in your mind while laying on the couch. That's totally fine. It really is. But if you're up for it, go outside. If you're like me, maybe you found yourself taking more walks recently. I don't really

have anywhere to go, but I really need to get out of the house. So I walk. For today's walk, you don't need a destination. And that's kind of the point. All you need to do is breathe and move forward. As you hear stories from some of our friends about what walking means to them. Okay? Here we go. I'm Anna Sail and I host the podcast Death, Sex, and Money. I'm Anna Sale and I host the podcast Death, Sex, and Money. The best solo walks I can remember are like, before when I was like single living in New York City,

you start at Union Square in Manhattan and you've discovered that you don't have much to do in a day and you just like start walking. And then you like look up the movie times. And then you like realize you could go to a movie and you're gonna walk to Dwayne Reed ahead of time and get a big leader of club soda and trail mix and maybe a little bit of chocolate,

and stuff in your purse. Man, to spend a day that way, I know, I saw only two little kids, and a couple of the like to just walk with no destination seems so luxurious. I also want to give a special shout out to the walking in New York City while crying on a cell phone walk. At a certain point you're like, I don't care. I don't care who's seeing me, who's walking past me. Like, I liked having this way of creating my own little personal

crying space on the busy streets of Manhattan. on the busy streets of Manhattan. I cried my first 90 days, and I wanted to quit. But, you know, seeing the people faces when we're out there walking and the smiles on their face when they see us coming. To me, that made my postal career just fascinating. I'm Kelly Mathon. I'm a male carrier at the Indytrate Michigan out of Wrightmore station. I have been a male carrier for 26 years now. My route I walked between 8 to

10 miles a day. I can handle the cold. It's just when the snow the first snow fall. It looks so beautiful when you first going out there. It's like, oh, it looks so pretty until you get out there and have to start walking and people don't shovel

you slipping the slide and down the street. And I'm not embarrassed to say it's been a few times I had to sit on the steps to get down off the porch Yeah, cuz I do not want to fall in it's been times I have fallen down some stuff and it wasn't cute The good things about being on the route As long as I've been on theirs knowing everyone that they look out for me and Since the pandemic one of my customers made a poster sign. And he put on their head Kelly Americans are awesome.

And so are you. Thank you. And I was walking up to the house because I had my head down getting the mail ready. And when I looked up, it made me cry. And I knocked on the door. He came to the door, and I was like, that's so sweet of you to put that out there. He's like, I just want to let you know you are awesome carrier.

You always look out for us because when he gets medicine, I walk to the side door. I knock on the door, him and his wife come and get it. I don't leave it on the front porch. I don't want anyone to take it. Not under my watch. Hahaha. Lulu Miller is a radio producer and author of the book Why Fish Don't Exist. So this is the exercise that my wonderful sister Alexa Rose Miller told me about.

I'm joined here by my co-host. My 22 month old son. We're going on a walk. In the surprisingly beautiful Indiana dunes. This is a mob of this. And the exercise is this. As you walk, look for one of each of every color of the rainbow. And pick it up, take it home with you.

First thing, got a piece of green grass and I will keep you posted as we go. My name is Dan Brune. I'm a bush walker and photographer from Tasmania. Tasmania is an island bottom of Australia. Australia of course is a continent at the bottom of the world, so I live under down under. It has many of the most mountainous islands on earth, and so every walk you go on your start close to the ocean and then you just walk up, it will really quick. But as you go up, you traverse different vegetation layers and you go through curtains and curtains and curtains. So you might start in coastal scrub with this

hundered rimer of the pit soils and you'll climb up into a deeper forest along a creek line and it will be rainforest. A temperate rainforest. The air is cold in your face. It's filled with every type of grain from the muscles and the liplines to the rainforest trees and the metals of the sassupras. And as you go through these various vegetation layers, finally, finally, finally, you'll just see sky.

And everything becomes small. Everything becomes intricate and tiny and detailed. And that's what it is when you're in the Alfonso of Tasmania. Hi, I'm Jenny Slate. I'm an actor, comedian and writer. So when I came back to Massachusetts this year, there just wasn't anyone around and people don't tell you and you never remember even if you're like me and you grew up here that March is just February And it's cold and it's very dark, but I really really need to walk every day and I need I guess what I need is to be able to greet someone or something and so in the woods by our house is a pet cemetery and I started to bundle up and go for the short walk out to the pet cemetery to say hello to the buried pets. There's cheeky and booby, and Nedzie.

I say their names and Sometimes I just like sort of crew at them and say like hello sweethearts and I sort of imagine like You know transparent little ghost dogs like nipping at my heels I could imagine that they felt found again. And what's happening here, of course, is a projection. And that I just want to be also found. I'm John Sterl. I'm a resident in the Southern Valley, West Minister of Canterbury, continuing care retirement community.

And I made E1. I do go for walks every day. I've gotten to the point that I like to walk 10 miles. I have downloaded the United States Air Force band Susan Marches and I'll march instead of walking and I've been knowing to pick up a sticker too and pretend I'm a drum major because I have been a drum major in the past but I only do that after 10 o'clock a night after all the other residents go to bed. And then if I get bored with the marches and I have polka accordion music on and I'll start dancing my way around instead of walking or marching. Oh my god, awesome contender for bright orange.

Tasty little like a racer size neon orange mushrooms. Okay, Jude vetoes. I think I'm gonna leave them where they are because they look happy, but I'll take a picture. Oh, Jude's huge. Look. This sleeve, oh, my mom needs this sleeve has a little everything. Right on the outside, yellow and green on the inside. If you squint at it, it's kind of orange. It's a contender for my film. I have a German Shepherd's Sing I Dog named Milo. He's my walking buddy and we walked all over the world. He's my walking buddy and we walked all over the world.

My name is Haven Germa, I'm the disability rates advocate. When I walk with Milo, I'm holding his harness. His harness wraps around his middle and his front. So when he turns to the left, to the right, I can feel it. Most people assume that the guide dog is deciding where we go. Sometimes he does try to make those decisions. So if he is walking and he sees a squirrel, his ears perk up. I feel it in his body.

His attention is distracted. And I make the choice to tell him, no, keep going. Move past it. It's kind of like a ballroom dance. We're constantly connected. I'm constantly adjusting my movements to mirror his movements so that we can keep moving

across the floor. Ballroom is a culture of competitive artists or artistic competitors. That's how I see it. And it was pioneered by Black and Latina transgender women who basically created a space for LGBTQ youth of color to compete in different categories for cash prizes. So my name is Sydney Blue, AKA Sid extravaganza. I remember the first time I walked realness as a category. Realness actually refers to when somebody

of a particular gender identity puts on a performance of an archetype of another. On the flyer, it said, butch, realness. And I was like, ooh, what's that? And so I asked my house mother at the time, and she was like, sit, this is your category. All you have to do is you have to present as a cisgendered man, a straight man.

And so, you know, I had to look ready, the category was coming up. I was so nervous, cause I'd never walked this category before. And I was just like, oh man, a man, you know, I'm gonna pull this off, oh gosh. And then I remember they called out the category, the commentator called it out, okay, anybody walking,

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, nobody's coming out, 5, 4, and then finally I was like, all right, I'm gonna do it. And let me tell you, the crowd went... Flannan! Forming people got out of their seats. Oh my God, it was like 10s, 10s, 10s, 10s, 10s across the board.

Like people were just living for me. And it was incredible. I'd never experienced anything like that. And for me, especially being somebody who was maligned for my masculinity as a woman, for being told that I should look a certain way, sit a certain way, have my hair a certain way, all this kind of stuff, and then getting to that point

in my life where I could be in a room of my peers and completely celebrated for who I was, it was just like the greatest feeling in the world. I'm Alice Sheppard, Dancer and writer. So I'm a wheelchair user. I encounter the world from the point of view of wheeling. I use the word walk, a fair amount that often makes people uncomfortable. often makes people uncomfortable. Some of the most important walks that I have ever had

are with other wheelchair users. There's a moment where we sink strokes. There's something about the rhythm of pushing a chair and the sounds that our wheels make. The fact that we are connected in this way is sometimes it's really sexy sometimes it's really just piece-bringing sometimes it's joyous this kind of walking this is community walking My name is Aaron Reese. I'm a journalist and I live in Mexico City. What's cool about Mexico City is walking is fascinating all the time. There's so much happening on the street that it's hard to be bored when you're walking. Whether you're getting your shoes fixed

or you're getting a piece of clothes mended or you're buying a taco, it's all happening like on the sidewalk and oftentimes in the street. But there's a certain subset of mobile street vendors that have sounds to alert people as to their presence. And so if you hear enormous steam whistle, you know that the sweet potato salesman is outside and you have 10 minutes to catch him before you have to jog and catch him on the block.

And as you look around, the street is sort of coming alive. You see a guy pop his head up the window and yell down like, hey wait for me, I'll be there in a second. People pull pull over people jog to catch up And then there's the knife sharpener guy and his sound is probably my favorite because it's like a little musical performance. He has a pamphlet and all the knife sharpeners have pamphlets that play these different chord progressions, but each one has its own little style. And you hear it coming, you know, like Doppler Effect style, and you're like, okay, I'm pretty sure he's coming from the left. And you're like, no, no, he's coming from the right.

And you like have to go, you know, wind your way through the neighborhood, following your ear to catch the guy. Our walk continues even even into space. After this. Come on, forest. Show me blue and purple. Oh, man, I just got my purple. I got my purple.

I got my purple. It's a little leaf. It's a gorgeous, true freaking purple. Okay, all I have to do now is blue. And suddenly I feel the weight of a large head on one of my neck for the brain, which is the feeling of my son falling asleep in this hiking backpack sick of my musings upon the colors of the forest there. My name is Sam Day. I'm a comedian and a writer for Saturday Night Live. When I was younger, I used to hang out with my older cousin.

His name is Gerald. And he lived in this place in Boston called The Stop In or The Bad Bay. They had built this housing development in The Bad Bay. But the rest of The Bad Bay was full of rich people. And it's where all the rich shops were. You could really just go out and walk around and cause mischief for a lack of a better word. We used to buy all these joke-gag things from the joke shop downtown,

so like a dollar snatcher and like stinky bombs and like things that make fart noises. All this goofy stuff. And we would take it down Newberry Street and trick people, we'd put the dollar statue or down to watch people try to pick it up and snatch the dollar and laugh. Or while someone was sitting outside of Restaurant, we hit the fart thing and make it sound like they farted

and then run off and just like, goofy little silly kid stuff. and just like goofy little silly and can't stop. You're so aware when you're growing up in poverty, that like all this stuff around you is not for you. And like, they're not considering you in any of this. And so it was a way for us to kind of push back against the thing by just going and being like, well, we could be in here too, you know. My name is Antoine Williams and I'm the co-creator and the sound designer for

the hip podcast, Ear Hustle. I grew up in prison. I spent my late teens and all of my 20s inside of California's prisons and the way that we protest on the inside is completely opposite from how people protest on the outside. The way that we protest on the inside is to sit down. So upon my release I was able to join Black Lives Matter protest and rallies and marches for the equality and the equity of disenfranchised people. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, out there. I was out there, out there, out there. In the entire march, I was silent. And just every step that I took, I felt good. I was stepping with intention.

Like I can walk for however long the people want to walk. Yeah! I climbed Machille, Majaro on Veterans Day 2015. My name is Julian Torres, I'm a former sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. I got hurt in 2013. I'm left below the knee amputation right above the knee amputation. The idea of Kilimanjaro really came from, I wanted to see what kind of capabilities I had post like missing half my body. I needed to know where I landed on the spectrum of like liability and an asset. But it was my first time walking through mud. That was like ankle deep. Walking through that was like walking on the slip and slide. You know what I mean?

It's just like, when I would fall, one or two things happened, like, nothing. If nothing happened, if I just fell, I met the ground, gave it a hug, and then I got back up, or a part of my legs would break. And they did break. And so, like on day two, I guess you would say where my ankle was, my right ankle, right? Bolt had broken off, so like every three or four steps I would have to stop and then turn my foot because it would pivot and my toes would be facing like my back.

But I'm going to make it to the moon if I have to crawl. I don't think I walked away not gonna fake it. Perfect blue. Blue were then blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, not gonna fake it. Perfect these. We have completed. Right now. I'm Caroline Shaw. I'm a musician. And I like to walk. I grew up with all these cassette tapes of the lives of the great composers, which my mom had a box of and she kept in our minivan and you know, pick one out and put it in and

that was how I learned about music. And one of those tapes was called Mr. Beethoven Lives Up Stairs. They would talk about him walking through the woods and hearing the birds and writing the sixth symphony. And that was kind of how I, for a long time, pictured what being a composer was. And recently I wrote a string quartet called The Evergreen after this very particular walk in the woods

on an island off the west coast of Canada called Galeano Island. I just found myself kind of slowing down completely. I wasn't trying to like oh get to that turn point so you could go over here and then you see the vista and you see the view and that's the goal. I was like I don't really tear about the goal anymore. I just want to be here and listening and looking and I ended up seeing this beautiful evergreen tree that I wouldn't have seen if I had just been going towards what I wanted to go to and I just wrote a piece as like a little gift to this tree. I guess that makes me just like Beethoven, so you know. Our walks are a little different than what most people think about as walks. The reality is we don't actually walk in space. We float and we clam around with our fingertips mostly and just use our hands from ability.

This is NASA astronaut Drew Foistle and I'm here to talk to you about my very first space walk. What you see is the earth below you. That's it, you look between your feet and you see the tips of your toes and the blue planet, in our case over 300 miles beneath us and then the darkness, the blackness of space

is set against that contrast. And one of the things that I always remember is thinking to myself, there's nothing out there. Earth is its own spaceship and we're all here alone and it's really a vulnerable place. And I don't think you really truly get the sense of that until you're staring at it from 300 miles up, watching it just float in nothing. It's incredible. ... you This story was brought to you by Poppet Magazine Productions. Written and produced by me, Haley Howell, with Anna Martin, Charlie Locke, Marin Cogan, and Maureen Tauy.

Our Managing Editor is Elise Craig. Our Executive Editor is Anita Baudigio. Our Editor in Chief is Doug McGregor. Music and Sound Design by Alex Overington. Annie Jen is our Art Director and Lauren Smith is Director of Operations. Researched by Cheetah Chamcheng, we had production help from Al Shatz and Andy Spillman, Ben Hickey did the episode art. Special thanks to third-angle music and Portland Oregon for letting us share their world premiere performance of Caroline Shaw's string quartet, The Evergreen.

performance of Caroline Shaw's String Quartet, the Evergreen. Special thanks also to Alexa Rose Miller at Arts Practica, Oscar Malina, Palestina, and all the fantastic folks we interviewed about walking, but weren't able to fit in this episode. This story was part of our fall issue. If you want to take a longer walk with us, an extended version of this episode is available for pop-up magazine members. Learn more and join us at pop-upmagazine.com. We will have an original in-house 99% visible for you next week. If you need more at 99PIs stories before then, we have a whole book about them. It's called the 99% visible city.

It's a beautiful physical object. But if you want me to read it to you, we have an audio book available too. It's all at 99PI.org. Slashbook. Radio Tapio from PRX.