Tales the Night Walker Told

By Andrew King

In the farm fields that flank the Sangamon River in rural Illinois, along the same banks where Abraham Lincoln once walked at midnight, another night walker, Dr. John Blair, wrestles with the demons of his past and the divisions in his present. Crossing the harvested fields with his grandson in the long autumn nights, Blair shares his insights i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: May 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646633135

Andrew King

Andrew King is a leading groupwork specialist in community services, counselling and health. He is a respected author of numerous textbooks and training programs who has devoted a large part of his career to groupwork and working with men, fathering and domestic violence prevention. As a research practitioner, Andrew is known for his focus on generativity and for sharing his knowledge using a strengths-based approach. He is currently the Groupwork Practice Specialist and Community Education Manager at Relationships Australia, NSW. He has published a range of articles on groupwork leadership in the Australian context, and facilitates national and international training workshops. He regularly lectures on Group and Community Work for TAFE NSW.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE NIGHT WALKER

MY GRANDFATHER, A COUNTRY DOCTOR, was a dedicated walker. He made the rounds of his nearby patients by walking. He walked out in fog and rain and snow and heat. He preached walking as a creed and published articles on its beneficial effects in a journal he edited called The Medical Advance. In his semiretirement he invited me to walk with him on long nocturnal walks. As we traversed fields and woods in the star-shot nights of the rural Midwest, he told me that we were continuing the great American tradition of rambling, a tradition he feared was now in its sunset years.

Indeed, early Americans were often prodigious walkers. Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and foe of demon rum, urged his patients to take vigorous heel-and-toe walks. In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau walked for mental inspiration. Daniel Webster, the senator often called by his admirers a great canon loaded to the lips, walked in the evening hush so he could court the rhetorical muses without distraction. The young Abe Lincoln was said to have walked the streets of Springfield at midnight to aid his health and to clear his mind of petty concerns. John Muir, advocate of the wilderness, walked from the heartland to the Gulf of Mexico, a walk that sparked his lifelong effort to preserve America’s great natural monuments.

Robert Frost walked in order to become one acquainted with the night, and Walt Whitman walked in imitation of both Samuel Coleridge and Charles Dickens, writers who believed that walking stoked the engines of their genius. In the twentieth century, Ernest Hemmingway noted that his writer’s block was lifted by wandering the streets of Paris. In New England’s Victorian Indian summer, it became the custom among college students to take Sunday afternoon rambles in stretches of woodland that were close to campus at schools like Amherst, Colby, and Williams.

Teddy Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the Navy, boasted that he could clear his desk of work by noon and then spend an afternoon doing what he called a bash, or a vigorous march through a nearby patch of forest. In the late nineteenth century, physical culturists like Eugen Sandow and Anthony Barker began to advocate what we now call speed walking. Physical culture advocate and magazine publisher magnate Bernarr MacFadden rose at four in the morning to walk a twenty-six-mile circuit six days a week between home and office. At places like the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, students were urged to take long walks during intervals between final exams. Walking began to be thought of as a meditative practice, and there was renewed interest in walking church labyrinths as a combined spiritual and physical exercise.

After World War I, as the automobile began rolling across the nation’s newly built roads, walking temporarily lost some of its cachet, but the Roaring Twenties were followed by the Great Depression, a time that brought renewed interest in the therapeutic and physical benefits of walking. During the 1930s, the farmer’s walk (an exercise that consisted of walking while carrying heavy objects) was introduced in gyms, and weekend family walks were touted as an inexpensive form of recreation.

My grandfather, a homeopathic doctor, was as I have said a staunch advocate of the healing powers of walking. He argued that long, vigorous walks were good for mind, body, and soul. Many years after his death I discovered a set of his journals in the seat compartment of the old family Morris chair. Threaded throughout the jejune descriptions of his daily routine were observations on walking. This peripatetic material stood out like golden shards against the leaden prose of his life and work. Walking was therapy. He argued that a regimen of walking had restored his spirit after the unexpected death of a much-loved patient. After experiencing marital troubles, he claimed to have healed his relationship by means of a walking tour of the British Isles. Unable to save his sons from tuberculosis, he attempted to recover his psychic health by going hill walking in Colorado. For him the outward physical journey was just the husk of a deeper, spiritual, inward journey.

When I accompanied him on clear nights he taught me astronomy, lecturing with stormy enthusiasm about the tiny red disc of Mars that on clear moonless nights we were sometimes able to perceive through his powerful field binoculars. On other nights he spoke of the benefits of physical exercise while cutting the air vigorously with his weighted walking stick. He spoke approvingly of Rousseau’s famous solitary walks, and of Emanuel Kant’s walks in all weathers while guarded by a huge Prussian body servant equipped with two large umbrellas. He was a great reader of George Bernard Shaw’s plays and essays, and although he often dismissed him as a cocksure, shallow pate, he spoke approvingly of Shaw’s lifelong advocacy for long, strenuous walks.

Between the middle of my twelfth year and the end of my thirteenth year I must have walked with him perhaps ten or twelve times per month. These were the last years of his life, but his apparent hardihood gave no hint of his impending death. To the very last he seemed solid as a stone barn, brimming with strength and enthusiasm. As a semiretired doctor he still maintained a small office in my parents’ house, and he engaged in many hobbies and leisurely pursuits. His office was crammed with medical instruments, antique shot-weighted dumbbells, and about 4,000 books. Before my twelfth birthday he began to give me books to read from his library. I read and discussed with him Oliver Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer, Samuel Johnson’s humorous novel Ressalas, Shaw’s Man and Superman, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Swift’s Voyage to Lilliput. I look back on that era of night walks as my Wonder Years, a time of intellectual awakening and expanded understanding.

These walks were the true foundation of my education. I see us now in my mind’s eye, striding along together on a crisp October night, laughing abut an unexpectedly wise saying of Sancho Panza or an outrageous observation by Dean Swift, the light of a half-moon picking out the white stones of our path. Family groups, friends, and late wayfarers greeted us as we passed, for it was still a time, although nearing the end, when many people routinely took walks in the evening.

But I was not with him on his final night walk. After delivering the baby of a surprised neighbor at two in the morning, he never completed the half mile to our home. An apparent detour through another neighbor’s little orchard may have been his undoing. We conjectured that he had been struck down by a sudden heart attack or felled by the zigzag lightning of a massive stroke. We never knew.

After missing him at breakfast, we searched everywhere for two hours and at about ten found him barely 200 yards from home, lying under the canopy of a fragrant, madly blossoming Hawkeye apple tree. From a short distance he looked like someone who had fallen asleep on a soft spring night and slept still, with his leonine head resting comfortably on his arm and his medical bag nearby. Perhaps it is just a trick of my memory, but I somehow recall that when Dr. Ferriday moved his body on to the gurney, carried by assistants into the orchard, the place where he had lain was suddenly bathed in warm golden light. It was all aflutter with yellow butterflies.

Long after his death, he mysteriously and unaccountably presided over my life. When I recovered his old journals seemingly by accident as I closed up the ancient family house, I remembered why in difficult times I have never ceased to hear his voice or ask his counsel.

Those diaries deepened my understanding of his long and strenuous life, and of his indelible sorrow over the four dead sons he was unable to save, and brought back stark memories of those night walks of my youth. Beyond that central tragedy of his stormy, star-crossed existence, I saw how this sense of failure brought him a deeper understanding of the nature of things, the kind of higher knowledge that the world-weary poet Alfred Lord Tennyson called my late won auburn tinted wisdom, a wisdom that brings me comfort and hope. Grandfather learned that he was not master of his fate or the author of his own destiny. Every ageing person who is not deeply asleep learns that. But he learned something far more wonderful. Late in life, my grandfather hurled himself into a wild confrontation and found resolution of his sorrow. This is the story of that discovery, and the tale of a doctor who loved night walks.

CHAPTER TWO

THE OUTER MAN

UNTIL I WAS TWELVE I never knew anything about the thing my grandfather called his incurable wound. A widower with all his children either deceased or dispersed except for my father, he occupied two rooms of our rambling ancestral home. Although mostly retired, he still retained a few patients, delivered the occasional baby, lectured the locals on nutrition, read and collected novels, and took all his meals with us. Many years of delivering babies and treating patients all over the township made him a much-loved figure. The steady flow of affectionate visitors gave the whole house a sense of warmth and security and belonging that I sorely missed when he passed on. Of four resident grandchildren, I was his favorite and, being the youngest, endured grumbling from my siblings that I was petted and protected by the old lion.

Until the last three years of his life, I never thought of him as anything but a jolly, confident man overflowing with good humor. I recall him popping up to my room when my six-year-old body was on fire with measles. He seemed to bring a tide of healthy weather with him as he strode into the room. He not only brought me cool water and medicine but also a little package of Mexican jumping beans that cheered me instantly as he sent them jackknifing down my pillows. He set a new Little Big Book entitled Secret Agent X9 by my lamp table. While he took my temperature, his rich baritone voice calmed and soothed me.

You know I am always here when the chips are down, he said.

And I felt that what he said was true. It was he who saw to it that I got a left-handed baseball glove and a pogo stick and a telescope, things of great importance to me but matters of indifference to my parents.

I have said that he was much beloved. On the Sunday morning of my eighth birthday, I recall that a woman from a farm in the deep countryside, far from the town of Redburn, caught up my hand on the steps of our little Episcopal church and asked me if I was Doc Blair’s grandson. When I said I was, she told me that he had brought their family through the great scarlet fever epidemic fifteen years earlier and that I should be proud to be his grandson. I constantly met people whose babies he had delivered or who had themselves been delivered by him decades earlier.

He seemed never to be distracted or indifferent like my parents, his son and daughter-in-law. He was always interested in what I was reading and gave me the run of his library. He bought me comic books and art supplies and provided me with chocolate caramels, which he cautioned me to devour in secret as his puritanical son, my father, denounced every kind of sweet or candy as brain-rotting poison. When he saw that I was interested in astronomy and fascinated with his powerful military binoculars, he bought me a set of convex optical lenses and a six-foot mailing tube mounted on a tripod and helped me construct a telescope that we named Mount Blair.

In those days, advertisements for a three-inch-diameter objective lens with a six-foot focal length and a set of eyepieces were standard mail-order faire in the back of every comic book and pulp magazine. A chimpanzee might have assembled our telescope. Together we used Mt. Blair to sweep the zodiac for the five visible planets and even one invisible to the naked eye, Uranus, at last tracking it as a turquoise dot wiggling in the eyepiece. And all this made me the envy of my fourth-grade classmates. A kid who has a stash of chocolate caramels and who is able to show you Jupiter and Saturn through a six-foot telescope is a kid well worth having as a good buddy.

But I am getting ahead of myself. He was a great teller of tales, and these started when I was about five. The early stories were greatly embellished versions of Aesop’s Fables. My father and mother sometimes read storybooks to me, but my grandfather’s stories poured from him like water from a gargoyle—spontaneously at any hour of the day or night. Years afterward I noticed the book in his library called 270 Tales from Aesop, the lost originals of his formidable repertoire. The foreword spoke of Aesop as a sixth-century-BCE Greek slave who was cited by Aristophanes, Plato, and Herodotus. It also argued that the tales were intended to be guides to a good life and that even today they might still function as vehicles for the communication of timeless social values.

The book contained only the barest outlines of the stories I had heard. Where Aesop had supplied one conflict, Grandfather had included four; where there were two main characters, he added a third and often a fourth. In the famous tale of The Tortoise and the Hare, the triumphant turtle was given an additional long speech on the virtues of careful preparation, steadfastness in pursuit of one’s goals, and never taking one’s opponent for granted. In The Ant and the Grasshopper, the ants not only denounced instant gratification, they gave eulogies for their community, celebrating the dignity and importance of work and the virtues of planning for the future.

My grandfather’s favorite tale was called The Fox and the Wolf. He told it more often than any other. He had what used to be called the myna bird gift, the faculty of imitation, and he developed special voices for all of the characters. It was his favorite story, and over the years the tale evolved to become richer and ever more complex. It was the story of a starving wolf who wanders the snowy winter woodland in search of food and is not very successful in doing so. His friend Reynard the Fox assures the wolf that if he learns a new set of skills, he will be able to find food at a surprising number of locations in the forest. In addition to good tracking, the wolf is told he must gain the communication skills of a courtier. The clever fox offers to instruct him in the arts of courtesy and communal civility. The wolf accepts. The fox begins his instruction in the arts of manners and persuasive address, but the wolf proves unable to learn them. Even after the fox provides a hugely successful demonstration, the wolf bungles his attempt to join the banquet so