Hamish Fulton at Little Big Horn Battlefield, Montana, Summer 1969.

Hamish Fulton understands the connection between art and walking. Notes Wikipedia,

Hamish Fulton (born 1946 ,London England), is a “Walking artist” and photographer. His initial work concerned the experience of walking but in the last twenty years Fulton has painted more directly on exhibition walls. Author and writer of books and essays. His wall installation A 21 day coast to coast walking journey, Japan 1996 at the John Weber Gallery, NY incorporates the concrete poetry format and his earlier work A Seven day walk in the mountains Switzerland early summer 1984 was the inspiration for the ‘fulton’ Visual poetry form.

I thought about Hamish Fulton tonight when I read a profile of the British (another walking Brit artist!) novelist Ian McEwan in the February 23, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, The Background Hum: Ian McEwan’s art of unease:

We ascended the crop field; behind us, solar panels on the roof of McEwan’s cottage glistened in the sun. Entering a fern-carpeted wood, McEwan joked that he places his friends along a divide: those who enjoy hiking (Barnes, Michael Frayn) and those who consider it a fatuous premodern practice (Amis, Christopher Hitchens). McEwan relishes the mental restoration that comes from being in nature. “The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” he said. “It has knock-on effects when you go back to work.”

Much of McEwan’s best writing can be tied directly to a long walk….

“The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” is a fantastic description of the in-the-moment feeling I have when hiking, and even more so when skiing. Two days ago I went skiing for the day up at Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe, California. I left home near Berkeley at 5:15 in the morning, drove for three hours, skied from nine until just after 3:00pm, then drove the three hours back home. On the drive home, I was thinking about the beauty of skiing, for me, being inexorably linked to the focus of concentration that this sport demands of me: if I don’t give what I am doing 100% of my attention, I could be horribly injured or die on the mountain. Really good skiers and snowboarders may be able to do it blindfolded, but for me, a merely decent intermediate slope tumbler, exhilaration and terror are bound at the wrists and poised at the edge of a cornice, awaiting my push.

Though I have never been a soldier, I think this feeling must have something in common with the oft-mentioned notion that many soldiers fighting in wars feel most alive when their lives are most threatened. I don’t think it’s a case of being more or less “alive” at any given moment, only that certain situations provide us with a moment of focus and clarity where we are really paying attention to life to a much greater degree than we normally do in our daily lives. This is certainly what Zen Buddhism and mediation point toward, but for me I find it easier and more natural to achieve while flying down a steep snowy mountain nearly out of control than sitting cross-legged on a mat “trying” to think of nothing. While skiing, I don’t have to “try” to think of nothing but the task at hand, it is simply gone from my mind for those blissful moments that I am “trapped fiercely in the present.” And being forced by circumstance to fully confront the moment is a great gift.