An early morning walk out where the sidewalk ends

I took a walk this morning out where the sidewalk ends.

Ask any city kid how to get to the end of the sidewalk, and he will thumb his nose at you, because any city kid knows that the sidewalk has no end.

In the city, every sidewalk connects with some other sidewalk, and that sidewalk eventually meets another sidewalk, and that one meets another, to form a never-ending web of concrete that must surely span the entire world, if a boy only had the time and tenacity to walk them all.

But it’s been a long time since I was a city kid. Today I live on the rural edge of urban development, where rows of homes finally give way to rows of corn — an alien world for a city kid, where sidewalks must inevitably end.

I have lived here for more than a decade, and for all that time that sidewalk has sat there, waiting for me to walk to its end.

And this morning, for the first time, that is what I did.

It’s not far from my house — maybe fifteen minutes or so. If I had driven past it in my car, as I have done a thousand times before, I could tell you to the tenth of a mile exactly how far away it is. But that is not how distance is measured to a man walking.

Every traveler must measure the world in terms that make sense to him. And while it makes sense for a traveler in a car to parcel out the planet in miles so he can know how many gallons of gas it will take to get him back home, to a walker time is all that matters, because a mile-long walk under the September sun is an entirely different voyage than that same walk in deep snow.

Boaters measure the trip in yet another way. Once, while in my canoe paddling an unfamiliar stretch of river, I asked a man on his dock how far it was to a certain bridge. “It’s four sees,” he said. When I shook my head in confusion, he pointed to the river ahead of me. “See there, where the river bends out of sight? That’s one see. Paddle around that bend and look as far as you can see to where the river turns out of sight. That’s another see. Four sees to the bridge.”

And so this morning I decided to walk fifteen minutes to the farthest edge of my housing development — I don’t know how many miles, or how many sees — to the end of the sidewalk that has been sitting there waiting for my footsteps for more than a decade.

Fifty yards before the end of the sidewalk, another sidewalk jutted off to a nearby cul-de-sac. It would have made sense to end the sidewalk there, which would have meant that the sidewalk has no end at all, just an endless link to all those other sidewalks that span the world.

But no. The sidewalk went on another fifty yards past that cul-de-sac turnoff, all the way to the end. There is no reason for any walker to travel that last fifty yards, because there is nothing there. The sidewalk leads nowhere.

Unless you’re the kind of walker who doesn’t consider the end of a sidewalk to be “nowhere.”

At the end, the sidewalk takes a gentle turn to meet up with the street, as if inviting the walker to continue on his way to…

Well, to nothing. Because when the sidewalk meets the street, there is no crosswalk. Even if there were, it would be a crosswalk to nothing, because there is no building or sidewalk on the other side of the street for it to link up with.

It is the end of the sidewalk.

I stood and gazed past where the sidewalk ends, to the small farm right at the edge of my housing development. It was a different world, one in which the distance a man must travel across his land is measured not in miles or minutes or sees, but in some other way altogether. The tomatoes and beans in the garden were ripe and ready for canning, and in the fields the corn was green and lush. It would be a good harvest. In the little paddock behind the house, two miniature horses nosed the ground for any oats that might have escaped notice since their last feeding.

I stood at the end of the sidewalk and wondered: Did that last fifty yard spur of cement lead to this spot just so a suburban man out for a stroll could gaze out at this bucolic scene?

Or (knowing how way leads unto way) was it just the end of the sidewalk…for now?

In the farmyard, a man carrying a pail walked from the back door of his farmhouse to an outbuilding.

And I wondered: When he hears the pop-pop-pop of roofing guns nailing shingles on new homes that draw closer every year, does that farmer ever take the short walk across his field to this very spot — where the sidewalk begins — and wonder where it ends?

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