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2024年3月19日发(作者：xml文档怎么编写)
Out of step
After living in England for 20 years, my wife and I decided to move back to the
United States. We wanted to live in a town small enough that we could walk to the
business district, and settled on Hanover, N.H., a typical New England town —
pleasant, sedate and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the
venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, an old-fashioned Main Street and leafy
residential neighborhoods.
It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about one’s business on foot,
and yet as far as I can tell, virtually no one does
Nearly every day, I walk to the post office or library or bookstore, and
sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Café for a
cappuccino. Occasionally, in the evenings, my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget
Theatre for a movie or to Murphy’s on the Green for a beer, I wouldn’t dream of
going to any of these places by car. People have gotten used to my eccentric
behavior, but in the early days acquaintances would often pull up to the curb and
ask if I wanted a ride.
“I’m going your way,” they would insist when I politely declined. “Really,
it’s no bother.”
“Honestly, I enjoy walking.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily,
as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name.
In the United States we have become so habituated to using the car for
everything that it doesn’t occur to us to unfurl our legs and see what those lower
limbs can do. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive
between classes, where parents will drive three blocks to pick up their children
from a friend’s house, where the letter carrier takes his van up and down every
driveway on a street.
We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves from
walking. Sometimes it’s almost ludicrous. The other day I was waiting to bring
home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside a post
office, and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside. He was in the post
office for about three or four minutes, and then came out, got in the car and drove
exactly 16 feet (I had nothing better to do, so I paced it off) to the general store
next door.
And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I’m sure he jogs extravagant
distances and plays squash and does all kinds of healthful things, but I am just as
sure that he drives to each of these undertakings.
An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of
finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times
a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from
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