One of the many reasons I moved from the South West suburbs of Portland into ‘town’ was I that I do not like to drive. It’s not that I’m a bad driver or that I haven’t driven a lot in my life. In the late eighties and early nineties I used to drive from Northern California to Upstate New York at the start and end of the college school year. I’ve spent a month on the road in the US and have probably logged at least a hundred of thousand of miles in driving in my life. Road trips have their appeal, but the day to day grind of hopping in my car and driving eighteen or so minutes from home to the city was simply getting old.

I’d like to say that I moved because of high oil prices, sure paying $60 a gallon does give you pause, but in moving I traded my fairly cush Washington County property taxes and traded them for the heftier Multnomah County Taxes. Like everyone now a days, I do care about the environment, not in the green washing was so many people have paraded their ecofriendliness of late. My views of environmentalism were shaped back in college after reading books like Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (which ironically is set in the Pacific Northwest). My senior seminars for the Political Science part of my education: Environmental Politics and Chinese Politics (yeah a pretty good selection in 1991).

But not driving goes beyond the desire to ‘save the environment’, it’s about a quality of life, and experience of the world you don’t get whizzing by at 40 miles an hour. So the first full Sunday we’ve been in the new home we laced up our shoes and walked. From home to Sweet Pea Bakery is just under two miles and the walk through the tree lined streets is a literal breath of fresh air. The walk took the five of us just over thirty minutes (with Ivy in her Bob stroller). Sitting down to our Vegan Sunday brunch there was an added sense of accomplishment. Getting there by foot made the experience all that sweeter.

The family dynamics change when you ‘hoof it’. Rather than being squeezed together in a car, the kids have room to roam. Sibling squabbles happen a lot less when you’re paying attention to them rather than the road ahead of you and the drivers around you. Kids are also a lot more likely to talk to you when you walk with them. Walking hand in hand with my son he expresses his feelings about the move in a way that just wouldn’t happen from the back seat of a car. My daughter skips down the street and then my son follows suit hopping off the steps of houses as we pass. I hold my wife’s hand as she pushes my youngest. There’s a reason why walking is the oldest and trustiest form of transportation.

We did get caught in a late summer shower the last quarter mile of our walk. The rain was part of the whole experience as we dashed between trees to avoid getting soaked. I’ve been talking a long time about improving the quality of my life by getting out of my car and living in an area where life can been done on foot, and this weekend I began to walk the talk.