Do you ever walk outside your door without knowing where you are going?
When I lived deep in the heart of Houston ~ the principal Texan metropolis so-named after a man who once ran away from home as a teen to live with the Cherokee for three years ~ I used to take long walks about the city.
I did so without ever really pathing out my destination, with the music of ISIS or Tool in my ears {or a CushVlog} and a pair of ruddy yet ever-durable adidas Ultraboosts on my feet. It began during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, when I grew tired of being indoors all day.
Essentially, at the end of every “work” day {eh, at that point I was actually half-unemployed, scratching out my fledgling freelancing career and playing Xenogears and Deus Ex and Planescape and Metal Gear as my day job} I would step outside my door at dusk and head in the direction of the bayou. Inevitably, by nightfall, I would end up somewhere brand new.
And oh yeah, it is important to note that Houston, TX is perhaps the least walkable city in America.
This fact certainly annoyed me ~ and also spurred me on. Going against the grain, I wanted to see where I could get to purely on foot. What new paths may I derive over a landscape filled primarily with mega highways and big box parking lots?
These urban explorations often left me exhausted, but also invigorated. I previously used day-end walks as ways to brainstorm my writings or give me the time to ponder ~ reliving my day or rethinking my future. You know, like anyone else that writes or otherwise thinks for a living, I was on some Ralph Waldo Emerson ish.
This was still true. But now, I was also using these long walks to rediscover the city in which I lived. I was finding new paths, crossing streets and bridges and hills that I would never have any real need to traverse. I was people watching at parks and housegazing along Kirby and skyscraper ogling downtown; I was stepping along train tracks to nowhere and jumping across sludge-laden streams. I was smiling at dogs and astral-projecting myself into distant airplanes.
I was wandering and wondering with a decidedly purposeless purpose, ever pathfinding novel routes of returning home.
I was doing it all just to see over the next horizon.
Such ten-thousand-step days made old sights new again and odd destinations more grandiose and majestic; everything I encountered became more appreciable given the time and effort it was taking me to get there. Believe me: eating a Shake Shack double cheeseburger after an hour-long walk to get there will make you enjoy it that much more.
Years later, I come to find out about the “revolutionary strategy” of Dérive ~ mentioned off-hand from Alan Moore’s BBC Maestro course on the art of storytelling.
Dérive ~ is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” ~
Moore offered it up as a research method for a writer, this “walking with an agenda.” That agenda being the seeking out of the nooks and crannies of your living spaces for the sake of constructing your own fictional settings in your stories, filling in the gaps of your town’s most striking or mysterious locales by dreaming up stories around them. Why is this a landmark? What is going on in that weird house? And so on.
Dérive seemed to be a way for mid-20th experimental artists, and wannabe revolutionaries, to recontextualize ~ and reterritorialize ~ all the oft forgotten, yet deeply significant, places and paths that make up our modern civilization.
Dérive is intertwined with the concept of Psychogeography, both being “developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory as well as the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists.”
Psychogeography ~ is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes. ~
For me, though I was taking these walks alone, I can’t help but realize that I was unconsciously following such a strategy as those described above. Had I, over the months of my long-pathing through my local urban sprawl, made a full psychogeographique of Houston, Texas? Maybe. But I definitely think I had, as this Aeon piece guides the reader, unwittingly taught myself how to wander.
Upon these walks, I acted out of curiosity, tedium, the creative flourishing to make each new day a new adventure ~ and certainly out of defiance of the city’s infrastructure and its directed method of travel {car} and pathing {roads in lieu of sidewalks}. I won’t say that I did anything revolutionary or even useful, beyond exercising and the accumulation of new knowledge about how to traverse my metropolis on foot. But I am now confident that I could convince others of the benefit and need to reconsider their own prospective walks through their urban living environments.
Why not begin your own Dérive practice over local landscapes, contribute to the psychogeography of your home, if not with a group of comrades then at least within the spaces of your own mindscape?
As I have grown older, I have become increasingly weary of car travel and the exhausting fumes of the highways and tediums of endless traffic around me. When I want to get from one place to another, whether starting from home or from somewhere inside the city, my first instinct has become to derive some way to walk there.
Living in Texas, against all the odds, I ever yearn to walk.
And Lo, as some kind of suburban druid-in-training, wondering and wandering, I still do.
Thanks for reading! And walking. ~