50,000 Steps
Early on October 27, 2016, I left our quaint AirBnB apartment in the Westerpark neighborhood of Amsterdam and for the next several hours, I walked. And walked and walked and walked. A 2017 Stanford University study showed the average American takes less than 5,000 steps per day. That morning, according to an app on my iPhone, I walked 30,344 steps for a total distance of 12.4 miles. For me, this wasn’t anything extraordinary - when you’ve spent most of your young adult life without a car, you tend to rely on your feet quite a bit to get from place to place. Even after buying a car in my mid-thirties, I gratefully never broke the walking habit. While most research touts the physical benefits, to me the rewards of walking are far greater - by circulating blood and oxygen not only to our muscles, but to our brain, walking enlivens our thoughts and senses, blending the two in a magical way, especially when traveling.
Before I visit a place I’ve never been, I dive into books and websites, absorbing all I can about its history and culture, art and architecture, its patchwork of roads, its topography. I read blogs written by people like me (i.e., not the suburban mom advising on how best to keep toddlers entertained during a ten-hour overseas flight, nor the twenty-something beers-and-babes-seeking bro who thinks Bourbon Street is NoLa). I hit up friends, acquaintances and sometimes complete strangers who’ve been to where I’m heading, tucking into my back pocket their suggestions on what to see, where to eat and imbibe, as well as how to avoid pesky pitfalls that can make or break a vacation (like not being able to use your credit card at an unmanned petrol station in the far reaches of Iceland because you failed to get a PIN). While this knowledge is invaluable, I ensure to leave room for the unexpected that lies between Point A and Point B. Because this is where the lifeblood of a place is found. If you’re zooming by on a subway or a train or a taxi, you’ll miss it. Granted, there are situations when distance and time don’t add up to a day of perambulation. But if you can swing it - foot it.
That morning in Amsterdam, I weaved my way through streets and alleys, camera in tow, as I loosely aimed for a handful of spots I mapped out over coffee that morning. I was on my own for the day while my wife attended a design conference. Some people don’t like to travel solo, but I feel a tingling sense of glee when a new world is awaiting me, and I can explore every inch of it exactly how I see fit, in complete and thrilling anonymity like a spy.
Amsterdam is a visual feast - the tight and tidy rows of narrow Dutch Renaissance houses, their steeply-pitched gables leaning from the weight of vast histories; the calm canal waters that mirror the glorious colors of autumn leaves; the glistening chrome handles of one hundred bicycles clustered in Dam Square; and the people - blonde, tall and beautiful. Every one of them.
As a shy kid, I did a lot of quiet observation. I watched people’s faces, where they focused their eyes, how they moved their hands (or not) when they talked. I noted the differences in how people behaved in groups versus when alone, how they interacted with their environment and with each other. Over time, I perfected the art of being part of a crowd, yet completely invisible within it. And it is during these periods of anonymous gazing that I strike gold - while the southwest facade of the Rijkmuseum, with its oversized ‘IAMSTERDAM’ letters, symbolizes the city in an iconic sense, I find that its true essence lies in the young, starry-eyed couple attaching a lock to the Bridge of Love in Vondelpark, in the group of middle-aged gentlemen encircling a small table in Cafe Slijterij Oosterling, engaged in a loud, albeit friendly, debate over beers and bread. It is in the throng of locals flowing past the vendor stalls of Albert Cuyp Market, eating stroopwafels and laughing heartily at some private joke. It is in the young boy holding his own in an outdoor game of chess against a man three times his age, the oversized checkerboard populated by pieces as high as his waist. He needs both hands to move them.
Walking through Amsterdam, I took a lot of pictures of the city’s brick and mortar. And they’re lovely images. But the photos I get most excited about are those that capture a frozen instant in people’s lives - spontaneous, unposed, imperfect. Real. I don’t know who they are, how they afford the clothes on their backs, whether or not they’re loved. What prompts my finger to click the shutter open at this moment and not that moment is as inexplicable as why we are attracted to one person and not another. It’s for my eyes to decide, my heart to decipher, and my brain to determine much later on if the right choice was made.
In “Street Haunting - A London Adventure”, Virginia Woolf writes of an evening spent trekking through the city on a winter evening in search of a pencil to buy. She describes in lovely poetic detail various people she encounters in the streets - a dwarf trying on shoes, her feet the size of a full-grown woman; two bearded blindmen accompanied by a young boy, the ‘little convoy’ seeming ‘to cleave asunder the passers-by’; and a bookseller’s wife who prefers hats to tomes. During her jaunt, Woolf notes that when we leave the cocoon of our homes and step outside, ‘we are no longer quite ourselves’, instead becoming ‘part of the vast republican army’ of other human beings with its ‘oddities and sufferings and sordidities’, and that while the ‘eye is not a miner’, our brain can’t help but draft the backstory of those we see, by determining someone’s entire character based on how they smile, or by filling the blanks in snippets of conversations we overhear in passing.
Photographing in the Albert Cuyp market, I decided the young man with his eyes closed was thinking of his lover who was still sprawled across their bed, petting the cat as he waited for his boyfriend to return; that the two punk-lite girls were recent art grads heavily engaged in local immigration activism; that the attractive blonde, her attention turned left, was on her way back from lunch to a job she hates and she's counting the days until her next holiday break when she can re-think her life's direction.
The above stories weren't anything I could have articulated the second I snapped these pictures. Instead they became tangible when I was back at the apartment leisurely reviewing the shots I'd taken that day. Yet somehow these stories must have existed within me at the point of shutter release, as a crude instinct telling me 'this one is worth it, take the shot now'.
Although I was a complete stranger amongst strangers, there was a kinship I felt with those whose image I chose to capture, manifested as pieces of myself that were being reflected back at me - my passion for love, my interest in giving back to the world around me, my own growing desire to do something different with my life. As Oscar Wilde said, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter".
There's a paragraph in Woolf's "Street Haunting", where, during her evening winter stroll, she stops to look at a pearl necklace hanging in a jeweler's window and is instantly catapulted to a time in June when she was gazing off a London balcony onto the Thames. "What could be more absurd?" she wonders with incredulity. But further pondering brought her to the conclusion that it is in these moments - wandering amongst strangers, taking in all that surrounds us - we actually discover ourselves.
After Amsterdam, my wife and I took the Thalys train to Paris, where we stayed for several days. One afternoon, we walked. And walked and walked and walked, for a total of 23,782 steps (or approximately 10 miles), blood and oxygen pumping through our veins, feeding our muscles, our minds. During that time, we merged seamlessly with the flow of strangers, our eyes grabbing hold of the beauty found in the architecture and faces alike, in the golden leaved trees, the cobblestoned streets, the Seine. On that day, we didn't create backstories about the people we passed. Nor did we fill the gaps in conversations with our own fictional suppositions. We were too busy talking, just the two of us - exchanging our own stories, sharing our own authentic selves as we admired that incredible city together. While solo exploration of a new place can be wonderful, true magic happens when a loved one taps you on the shoulder and points out something so amazing your heart skips a beat. "I thought you'd appreciate that," she says, because she knows you so well.
