REBECCA SOLNIT Irs Not surprising that Rebecca Solnit, an author with far-ranging interests, would be the one to write Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000). Unaffiliated with any university or other institution, Solnit has pursued her interests without regard to disciplinary, temporal, or geographical boundaries. In the words of one Columbia Journalism Review assessment, “irrepressible curiosity has led her to in- vestigate and reflect on a diverse range of subjects: landscapes both rural and urban, politics, the environment, indigenous people, technology, gender, art, and photography. Each of the labels that have been used to describe her—historian, journalist, cultural theorist, critic, activist—bumps up against the others.” Prior to Wanderlust, Solnit wrote two books of art criticism, and another about her ancestral homeland called A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (1997). The same year that she published Wanderlust, Solnit published Hollow City (2000), a book about the changing cultural landscape of her hometown, San Francisco. She later turned her attention to nineteenth-century photography and the evolution of motion-capture media technology in the award-winning River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), which she followed up in 2004 with Hope in the Dark, a celebration of political protest. Soinit’s wandering intellect returned to its fascination with the pathways and ‘byways that we take in life with A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). “The Solitary Stroller and the City,” a chapter from Solnit’s history of walk- ing, explores the many elements of human experience and the many sides of human character that emerge in the course of a stroll on the city streets. ’The word street,” Solnit points out, “has a rough, dirty magic to it It conjures up im- ages of transgressions and encounters that could only take place on public paths.” For Solnit, streets are more than just the space left over between build- ings: they constitute a vital public space that has, throughout history, served intermittently as the staging ground for revolutionary movements and the field Solnit, Rebecca. “The Solitary Stroller and the City,” Wanderlust: A History of Wolking. New York: Penguin, 2001. 171-195. Quotations come from “Room to Roam,” a Q&A conducted by Peter Terzian for the July/ ‘August 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, , and from Storming the Gates of Paradise (U of CA Press, 2007). S7L572 REBECCA SOLNIT for flirting young people. Though it offers its share of dangers and unsavory possibility, Solnit champions urban walking as a cultural activity of great import both in the past and in the present, when “consumption and production” are the organizing values of our cities. “The straight line of conventional narrative,” Solnit writes in the introduc- tion to Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007), her most recent book, “is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it.” By resisting the straight lines of such narratives, Solnit’s prose mirrors the content of her books. Her cultural his- tory of walking is just one of several demonstrations of what a mind can dis- cover when set to wander. The Solitary Stroller and the City lived in rural New Mexico long enough that when I came back home to San Francisco, I saw it for the first time as a stranger might. The exuberance of spring was urban for me that year, and I finally understood all those country songs about the lure of the bright lights of town. I walked every- where in the balmy days and nights of May, amazed at how many possibi ties could be crammed within the radius of those walks and thrilled by the idea 1 could just wander out the front door to find them. Every building, every storefront, seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of possibilities made all the richer by the conjunctions. Just as a bookshelf can jam together Japanese poetry, Mexican history, and Russian novels, so the buildings of my city contained Zen cen- ters, Pentecostal churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, burrito places, movie palaces, dim sum shops. Even the most ofdinary things struck me with wonder, and the people on the street offered a thousand glimpses of lives like and utterly unlike mine. Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, quali- ties best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortuneteller’s, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination. San Francisco has long been called the most European of American cities, a comment more often madeThe Solitary Strolier and the City 573 than explained. What I think its speakers mean is that San Francisco, in its scale and its street life, keeps alive the idea of a city as a place of unmediated encounters, while most American cities are becoming more and more like enlarged suburbs, scrupulously controlled and segregated, designed for the noninteractions of motorists shuttling between private places rather than the interactions of pedestrians in public ones. San Francisco has water on three sides and a ridge on the fourth to keep it irom sprawling, and several neighborhoods of lively streets. Truly urban density, beautiful buildings, views of the bay and the ocean from the crests of its hills, cafés and bars everywhere, suggest different priorities for space and time than in most American cities, as does the (gentrification-threatened) tradition of artists, poets, and social and political radicals making lives about other things than getting and spending. My first Saturday back, I sauntered over to nearby Golden Gate Park, which lacks the splendor of a wilderness but has given me many compen- satory pleasures: musicians practicing in the reverberant pedestrian under- passes, old Chinese women doing martial arts in formation, strolling Russian émigrés murmuring to each other in the velvet slurp of their mother tongue, dog walkers being yanked into the primeval world of canine joys, and access by foot to the shores of the Pacific. That morning, at the park’s bandshell, the local radio variety show had joined forces with the “Water- shed Poetry Festival,” and I watched for a while. Former poet laureate of the United States Robert Hass was coaching children to read their poetry into the microphone onstage, and some poets I knew were standing in the wings. I went up to say hello to them, and they showed me theix brand-new wedding rings and introduced me to more poets, and then | ran into the great California historian Malcolm Margolin, who told me stories that made me laugh. This was the daytime marvel of cities for me: coincidences, the mingling of many kinds of people, poetry given away to strangers under the open sky. Margolin’s publishing house, Heydey Press, was displaying its wares along with those of some other small presses and literary projects, and he handed me a book off his table titled 920 O'Farrell Street. A memoir by Harriet Lane Levy, it recounted her own marvelous experiences growing up in San Francisco in the 1870s and 1880s. In her day, walking the streets of the city was as organized an entertainment as a modern excursion to the movies. “On Saturday night,” she wrote, “the city joined in the promenade on Market Street, the broad thoroughfare that begins at the waterfront and cuts its straight path of miles to Twin Peaks. The sidewalks were wide and the crowd walking toward the bay met the crowd walking toward the ocean, The outpouring of the population was spontaneous as if in response to an urge for instant celebration, Every quarter of the city discharged its res- dents into the broad procession. Ladies and gentlemen of imposing social re- pute; their German and Irish servant girls, arms held fast in the arms of their