The Footpath Way: A Yesterweird Book
I am a fan of the English Person Goes For A Walk genre, which seems to have been a thing in the 19th century, but which still crops up today, although, thankfully, the scope’s broadened out quite a bit. And while the English Cream of it all can be more than a bit much at times, plenty of writers I like took a hand at writing essays about walking. So my plan for July and August over at my Patreon is to do something a bit different and take a long leisurely stroll through an early 20th century book called The Footpath Way: An Anthology For Walkers. It contains essays, poems, and bits by such notables as Chuck Dickens, Wally Whitman, Tommy De Q, Bob Stevenson, Bill Hazlitt, and everyone’s favorite cinnamon doughnut eater, High Definition Thoreau. The plan’s to read thirty – forty pages a week over the next eight weeks and make a weekly post.
Here’s the link to the book on Project Gutenberg.
Feel free to come along!
Above the Confluence
The walkway above the newly built canal near my school.
Roof Dog
Roll for initiative.
Yes.
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing back
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.
The Eye’s a Filter For You to See
Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I’ll probably write about the place one day, but if you’re ever in Pohang it’s behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.
Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There’s certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing the city has people in it, and most of it doesn’t look like the weird, dirty, and empty parts I post pictures of.
This coming week I’ll post more mundane pictures. Maybe the quotidian will be as strange.
Up a Mountain
Mossy roots. Also the best picture I took all day.
This one is for the Mossy Skull.
I did a bit of hiking today on Mount Naeyeon outside of Pohang City. It’s actually still in Pohang county but an hour by bus north of downtown. It was a beautiful late summer day: windy and relatively cool. It rained when we got off the bus but cleared up when we reached the trail. The trail runs beside a river then loops around one of the peaks. There’s thirteen (twelve?) waterfalls along the trail. We passed maybe seven of them. There’s also a Buddhist temple, Bogyeonsa, with various hermitages and buildings nestled in the valley.
If you’re in Pohang it’s a great day trip.
Now come the blurry cellphone pictures.
A waterfall
LOOK INTO THE LIGHT!
300 years ago a monk probably lived in this cave.
The folks on the right were a father and son pair meditating above a small waterfall.
Overall a pretty fun day.
The bus trip is cheap, about 2USD (1,500 Won), with another 2.5USD tacked on for admittance to the park. We didn’t visit any of the temple buildings although most of them were open to the public and you could hear monks chanting from various points of the trail. This added to the calm atmosphere (as an aural environment it was amazing: water trickling over rocks, wind blowing through leaves overhead, and monks chanting… yeah, I wanted to record it all).
The one thing I wished I got a picture of was the coffee vending machine in the middle of the forest where the trail branched towards the temple. It wasn’t even near a rest area, just there beside the trail.
Next time.
Yesterweird 