Field notes 4 MIN READ
The route you walked together
The most-given map print is somebody's marathon. The most-kept one is usually a walk that took an afternoon and had no result at all.
The route prints people ask for most are races. The ones that stay on walls the longest are frequently not.
The walk nobody recorded on purpose
Somebody had a watch on. That is usually how these exist — not as a decision to document anything, just a device that records by default.
An afternoon in a city, a walk on a beach, the way back from dinner. No result, no distance worth quoting, and a shape that is entirely made of decisions: this street rather than that one, the long way round because there was no reason to hurry.
That is a better drawing than most marathons. A race route was designed by somebody else. A walk is authored.
City walks draw unusually well
A walking route through a city is a series of choices at junctions. It doubles back, it crosses itself, it stops. Drawn as a single line it looks nothing like a plan and everything like an afternoon.
Compare it to a running route in the same city, which will be a loop of the park.
What to put on it
The date and the place. That is all.
This is the one case where a full stats row is wrong. Distance is not the point, elapsed time is faintly comic, and elevation on a city walk is noise. The route and the date carry it, and anything else added is filling space that was doing fine empty.
A very short headline works: the name of the city, or nothing at all.
What we cannot do
If it was not recorded, it cannot be printed. We do not draw a plausible line between two points from memory or from a map.
That sounds unhelpful and it is the whole basis of the thing: a line that was not recorded is a picture. A line that was is evidence. Only one of those is worth keeping for twenty years, and it is not the one that was easier to make.
Questions people actually ask
- What if we did not record it?
- Then it cannot be printed. We do not draw routes from memory or from a map, because a line that was not recorded is a drawing rather than a record.
- Does it need to be a long route?
- No. An afternoon in a city draws as well as a mountain, and city walks are unusually good shapes because they are made of decisions rather than paths.
- Can two people's recordings be combined?
- Yes. Two files of the same walk can be brought together, though they will be nearly identical — the more interesting version is two different routes to the same place.
- What should it say?
- The date and where. Nothing else. This is the one case where the shortest possible text is right.
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