All the while, Shattuck acknowledges his privilege to walk carefree, as a man, and to walk without the burden of racial profiling, as a white man. This structure provides a nice contrast, inviting us to share his experiences walking through despair and in times of joy. The second part of the book is written much later than the first, when Shattuck has met and married actress Jenny Slate, with whom he has a child. But the ease of the vocabulary and comfortable pacing do not diminish the depth of ideas in this book. Both a memoir and a work of nature writing, Shattuck’s prose flows effortlessly, and you will find yourself reading the whole book in perhaps two or three sittings. He encounters characters that will seem familiar to us as he traverses the landscape in Wellfleet and Truro, and even finds his way to Commercial Street in Provincetown. The book Six walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau begins with Shattuck walking on Cape Cod after a recent break-up, lost and heartbroken, but fully self-aware.
Writer Ben Shattuck took Thoreau’s Cape Cod writings as a jumping off point for his own walking meditation, a project that had him on foot on the Outer Cape, up in Mount Ktahdin and Mount Wachusett, and in the woods of Maine.
And of course, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote about his epic journeys on foot including those undertaken right here on Cape Cod. (She did live 9 more years after that… just sayin’). Buddhist spiritual leader Thich Nhat Han said “When we take mindful steps on the earth, our body and mind unite, and we unite with the earth.” Filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked from Munich to Paris to see his dying friend and mentor film historian Lotte Eisner, in the belief that the walk itself could somehow cure her. People engage in walking meditations or for other spiritually guided reasons. Walking has long been used as more than just a means of getting from place to place.
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