Cavewoman gets walking, but do the rest of us?

Have you ever asked yourself, “What would caveman or cavewoman do in this situation?”

I worry that if I stray too far from the sensibility of cavewoman, I will find myself lost in the flotsam that believes we have no common sense at all.

I just refuse to believe that.

This week, I noticed my community had hired a “walkability expert” to share how walkable our town is.

I’m falling off my chair! What would cavewoman do? How did she manage without a “walkability expert”?

I’m not a walkability expert, but I can tell you that I grew up in a town that had incredible things called sidewalks. Those sidewalks were darn useful to encourage walking and avoiding being hit by a car.

For me to walk the six blocks into my town, and I do it frequently, I must walk in the street because we haven’t discovered sidewalks yet. But I walk anyway.

I guess the fact that many of my neighbors walk on streets without sidewalks makes our town walkable enough.

Really, I think if we want a more walkable town, we should look at it from the perspective of our dogs. A dog whisperer would be an excellent consultant. Someone should come and interview my dog. My little Chihuahua, Romeo, hates going out for walks. He becomes a paranoid schizophrenic walking in his little community. You wouldn’t want to walk on the street if the unleashed barking maniac bipolar dogs chased your ass up the block. Unleashed dogs, AWOL from their owners, really discourage people from walking.

But I’m not the expert on this topic.

The walkability expert is truly an expert. He has consulted on this topic with the United Nations, China and many others.

It is a worldwide problem. We have gotten so detached from cavewoman and caveman that worldwide we don’t know how to build a place where people can walk from point A to point B.

Because there are so few experts on walkability, this guy has lots of business explaining the concept to folks. This troubles me.

I’m not trying to slash the walkability expert. He’s figured out that many of us really are clueless. It’s our cluelessness that is troubling.

I worry that a population that find these simple things so darn confounding isn’t prepared to deal with the ugly stuff. Problems that are even trickier.

Maybe it just feels better to rally around something as soft and gentle as walkability. Hey, how is your sidewalk? Nothing really scary is going to jump out of the closet at this meeting. It’s lovely to ponder walking, peacefulness, shopping local, quiet.

I just don’t get how it became so complicated. I don’t think it stumped cavewoman.

Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@ heraldnet.com.