"Silent Walkers" by Jackie Hedeman
The daily walk. I am not alone in relying on it for variety. Confined to two rooms, working from home and avoiding even trips to the grocery store, there are few activities to break up the day. Unavoidable trips to the dentist add some pizazz, and I find myself chatting more than usually volubly with the receptionist. In my past life, I was a woman of measured words. Always worried I would use the wrong ones, I plotted a script in my head for every interaction. These days, I find myself improvising—asking after the hygienist’s kids, the dentist’s wine cellar. Use it or lose it, I find myself thinking. “It” being community. Spontaneous human connection.
I am fortunate, in that I am living with my parents—in the tenth month of a pandemic, I still have a bottomless supply of company and hugs—but there is still something in me that is rusting over.
On my daily walk, I watch the leaves change. Bud, grow, turn, vanish. In the Midwestern college town where I live, I can choose walking routes that are relatively untraveled. I pull my mask up when I cross paths with a couple walking a dog, or fling myself into the street when a gaggle of frat boys carrying beer round the corner. There is enough space for all of us, though I do feel resentful. These are my sidewalks, I find myself thinking. My walk.
On YouTube, there are also walkers. Their silent strolls make up an entire genre of video. Armed with a camera phone or a GoPro, they make their way through cities and towns across the globe, filming as they go. Some annotate with text and emojis, others like to snack, but the format is mostly the same silent meander from point to point. The videos, which range from ten minutes to over an hour, are not necessarily tours for tourists, though the walkers do have a keen eye for what makes a particular city unique. Rather, each walk is a love letter to a set of streets, the sun in a window, the after-dusk glow.
My dad was the one who discovered the silent walkers. This summer, with a hike on the Camino de Santiago and a visit to Paris canceled, he went looking for ways to buoy our spirits. One evening he mixed drinks and, with the sound of the cicadas buzzing through the open window, pressed play on a YouTube video.
The video, which took us through the Marais neighborhood of Paris, past gay bars and kosher bakeries, came from the Silent Walker, a YouTuber with a smiley cartoon sun as their avatar and a minimalist bio: “Long 4K walking tours. No boring introductions, no music, no fancy editing, only pure real life.” Pure real life was what we were missing. For the rest of the summer, we rationed the Silent Walker’s videos. A Tuesday evening here, a Friday there, and eventually we made our way across their Paris.
During my own masked, sunscreen-slathered daily walks, I began taking out my ear buds. Like so many, I drown out my existential thoughts with soothing murder podcasts, but under the influence of the Silent Walker, I found myself listening for the train whistle, watching the play of light in the trees, imagining what this place would look like to those who haven’t been here. By the time summer rolled around, I had walked the same five routes more times than I could count (and I have walked them many more times since), but under the Silent Walker’s influence they took on a new shine. My world, which had been narrowing in, grew a little bigger.
I remember a viral tweet from 2014. The writer Anna Breslaw shared what her sister Beth had been up to: “My sister is doing an experiment: Whenever men walk towards her, she doesn't move out of the way first. So far she has collided with 28 men.”
Watching the Silent Walker and the way the crowd parts for them as they walk, I think him, I think man. The Silent Walker moves down the street, moving on and off the narrow sidewalks, sliding between bollards and cars, and I think able-bodied, I think thin. The Silent Walker is mostly ignored, wherever he goes. I think, white.
I have no confirmation for any of these assumptions, but they do bring to mind a different silent walker. In 2014, the same year as Beth Breslaw’s experiment, the actress Shoshana Roberts was filmed from the front by a hidden camera as she made her way through New York City on a ten-hour tour of catcalling. In the subsequent two-minute video, “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman,” men she passes on the street comment on her figure and tell her to smile more. Roberts says nothing. The video was a campaign organized by Hollaback!, a grassroots anti-street harassment production company. The video is visceral, but it was rightfully taken to task for its lopsided production choices. For Slate, Hanna Rosin wrote, “the video also unintentionally makes another point: that harassers are mostly [B]lack and Latino.” The reason for this, the creators of the video explained, was that, “We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera,” so, unaware or careless of what the outcome of their choice would be, they edited them out. That process of editing created a very specific world.
On Twitter, Roxane Gay put it succinctly: “The racial politics of the video are fucked up.”
The white men who regularly catcall me haven’t catcalled me in the past ten months of the pandemic. No one has. This is not because the catcalling has stopped, but because I have removed myself. These days, I am encouraged to give everyone a wide berth. I am encouraged to cover my face. The frat boys who refused to move out of my way before, still refuse to move out of my way now; only the nature of my invisibility has changed.
On the walks I took before the pandemic, I would try to avoid detection. Channeling Harriet the Spy or George Smiley, I crossed the street to avoid after-hour encounters with coworkers because my social script wasn’t prepared. Now, I am even harder to detect. I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.
Sometimes I wonder who will walk out the other end of this.
The Silent Walker crosses Paris. I try not to get too annoyed when he turns away from the Palais Royal, following a route different from the one I would take if I were there. I feel territorial about certain areas of Paris, the places where I have spent the most time. My assumptions about the Silent Walker’s gender notwithstanding, we have a lot in common. When I go to Paris—when I go to any city—I spend my days walking around. My Paris is the Palais Royal: balance and harmony. Crunchy gravel and regimented shade trees and sky. Every time I visit, the same green metal chairs await me and the same workers are taking lunch, feet propped up on the edge of the central fountain. The Palais Royal is a historical attraction in the center of Paris, and it is quiet.
My Paris is solitary, even outside of a pandemic. Even outside of a pandemic, my life can be solitary too. I use my French, built over six months in a bilingual school and years of private tutoring and lost to time, to order food and buy transit tickets. It’s how I used my English before this era of occasional dental office chatter and Zoom delay.
I lean in to listen more closely when the Silent Walker passes people on the street. The snatches of dialogue, delivered in rapid-fire French, or English, or any number of other languages, are a warm bath. Watching these silent walks brings back the feeling of community, held at a distance but still held. I am sharing the sidewalk again, spontaneity and risk and all.
Another silent-walking YouTuber, the Watched Walker, turns their camera to face the Tour St. Jacques bathed in floodlight. I can’t help but let out an involuntary, “Oh!” These one- or two-take silent walks feel spontaneous, though I know a lot of effort must go into production. Maybe the Watched Walker timed their route, found their place on the Rue de Rivoli, hesitated, then turned. Or maybe, the video shows what might happen by chance, too.
Once, when I was walking in Paris, I followed the noise of a marching band into the Place Vendôme and came across the Dîner en Blanc, that night once a year when, on secret invitation, thousands of people dress in all white and gather to eat together. I remember standing at the edge of the square, silent, watching a sea of people laughing and talking at their long tables, as though if I moved an inch, or looked away for a second, it would all vanish.
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
