Welcome

by neil caudle

Two years ago, my wife and I sold our place in the woods and moved into town, thinking we'd tolerate urban life for a while, see our kids off to college, then flee to the country again. By then, we assumed, we'd be lazy and fat, or half nuts from the noise and high taxes and neighbors so close they could bless every sneeze.

But things aren't so bad, here in town. We hear more sirens and leaf blowers and garbage trucks these days, but not so many chainsaws or baying dogs or deer rifles. We don't get our exercise splitting firewood or digging up busted water pipe with a shovel and pick. But we walk to the store, and there's time for a run in the morning, now that we've claimed forty minutes a day from the car. Speaking of which, my aging sedan gets enough rest to keep soldiering on for a while, which will help with the property taxes.

None of this would impress any dedicated urban dweller, but it came as a revelation to me. So when my neighbor, Rich Killingsworth, explained that his job was to go around the country finding ways to design communities so that people would climb from their cars and start moving around on their own, I asked him to tell me about it. Killingsworth, I've noticed, walks the talk. He rides his bike to work. He persuaded his staff to run — or walk — a marathon with him. To Killingsworth, the notion of living one place and working another and playing another and shopping another, with miles of traffic-jammed driving between, doesn't make sense. And he and his colleagues can point to a whole stack of evidence that our national addiction to driving is not only wrecking our cars but our health.

At first glance, this won't seem like the most serious research you've read in these pages — not on the order of parsing a genome or fighting disease. But as public-health officials see it, America's epidemic of inactivity and obesity is quite literally a matter of life and death. And the closer we look at the patterns of our lives, the more we find that our health reflects choices built into the landscape around us. Recasting those landscapes for people, not cars, is a daunting proposition — even for marathon runners. The cynic would say it's a starry-eyed dream. But I think the dream will come true, if for no other reason than this: In the long run, those who get moving will outlive the rest.