Issue link: http://tcnj.uberflip.com/i/1030484
8 The College of New Jersey Magazine P R A I R I E BILL CARDONI J uda Bennett doesn't rememBer how long the walks lasted. In the 1970s, when the English professor was a younger man, he lived in a commune in Ithaca, New York. He would often commute the 13 miles to work at a downtown vegetarian restaurant by foot. "I didn't do that a couple times; I didn't even do it a couple dozen times — I did it a lot," he says. This was especially true during snow, when travel by foot was probably safer than by car. (Hitchhiking was his alternative mode of travel.) After that, there were longer roadside walks as he sought rides on a trip across the country, traveling from Virginia to Michigan to Iowa. The exact measurement of how much time he spent walking, though — that is a distant thing, hard to remember. It was hours, of course. But it hardly mattered. Walking was a meditation, a time to be alone with his thoughts and the planet he inhabited. That connection is at the heart of "Walking in the Anthropocene," a new course he is teaching this semester as a First Seminar Program for freshmen. The genesis of the course was itself a winding road. Walking can be a metaphor for a journey through life, a walk further into knowledge.