I needed to go for a walk. I’d been marooned in a convention center in Anaheim for four days and on the fifth morning I needed to stretch my legs—and lungs—outside. The only “outside” I’d seen for days was the mirage-like space that linked one dense air-conditioned region to another––hotel to convention center, convention center to hotel bar; convention center to parking garage; parking garage to Target; Target to hotel bar. I’d woken that morning with a born-again belief, that there was more … out there.
I bypassed the long line for the concierge in the lobby, deciding to rely on my own divination powers. I took a deep, brave breath in, and exhaled the hotel’s cool artificial air as I stepped beyond the automatic doors. I quickened my step as I walked past the orderly line waiting for taxis, breaking into a run when the bellhop recognized me for the escaped patient that I was. I was determined to find a patch of soft real grass for my asphyxiated little toes—the plastic plants in the lobby had scraped my soles raw. I needed nature.
It quickly dawned as I walked alongside the highway that I had neither the wheels nor the wherewithal to find nature, so I settled for the nearest thing, the wild.
I was in denial even as my little legs power-walked me up the prolonged driveway to Disneyland. I kept telling myself that I really wasn’t going to go in. I was simply stretching my legs to the gate and back. I was sure that no matter what the cost of a day pass was, it was more than I should spend for a walk, especially when there was a perfectly free treadmill positioned next to a perfectly sweaty––and vocal––running man back at the hotel.
“Sixty-three dollars,” the paid-to-be-perky person behind the window responded, and I quickly assured her that if she could not already tell by my pasty complexion and nervous ticks, I was from the convention center, and I wasn’t planning to go to Disneyland at all, I just wanted to go for a walk.
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