SPEAKER_15: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and t-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. While I was doing interviews to promote the book, someone asked me, what is your favorite way to experience the city? The answer is walking. I love to walk. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to do, also take a walk. We've been working so hard on the book release and the new mini series that we're launching in December that we're going to take a walk with our friends at Pop Up Magazine. They are a live magazine show created to be performed on stage in front of a live audience. Pop Up is this really beautiful, groundbreaking leap forward in journalism. But since there are no theater shows happening right now, they've been making stories to enjoy at home. And this one was so delightful and so up my alley. I just wanted us all to do it together. So let me introduce you to my friend, Haley.
SPEAKER_14: Hi, this is Haley Howell from Pop Up Magazine, and I'm going to take you on a walk. If you need a second to get ready, press pause. Grab some headphones. Don't forget your keys and your mask. Then come back and we'll head out. You good? All right. Let's go. There are a million ways to walk in this world. So whatever walking means to you in this moment, do that. It could be going on a walk in your mind while laying on the couch. That's totally fine. It really is. But if you're up for it, go outside. If you're like me, maybe you found yourself taking more walks recently. I don't really have anywhere to go, but I really need to get out of the house. So I walk. For today's walk, you don't need a destination. And that's kind of the point. All you need to do is breathe and move forward as you hear stories from some of our friends about what walking means to them. OK, here we go.
SPEAKER_11: I'm Anna Sale and I host the podcast Death, Sex and Money. The best solo walks I can remember are like before when I was like single living in New York City. You start at Union Square in Manhattan and you discover that you don't have much to do in a day. And you just like start walking and then you like look up the movie times and then you like realize you could go to a movie and you're going to walk to Duane Reade ahead of time and get like a big liter of club soda and trail mix and maybe a little bit of chocolate. Stuff. And to spend a day that way. I saw it with two little kids and a couple of dogs like to just walk with no destination seems so luxurious. I also want to give a special shout out to the walking in New York City while crying on a cell phone walk. At a certain point, you're like, I don't care. I don't care who's seeing me, who's walking past me. Like, I liked having this way of creating my own little personal crying space on the busy streets of Manhattan.
SPEAKER_02: I cried my first 90 days and I wanted to quit. But, you know, seeing the people faces when we're out there walking and the smiles on their face when they see us coming to me, that made my postal career just fascinating. I'm Kelly Mathur. I'm a mail carrier in Detroit, Michigan, out of Brightmoor Station. I have been a mail carrier for 26 years now. My route, I walk between eight to 10 miles a day. I can handle the cold. It's just when the snow, the first snowfall. It looks so beautiful when you first go on out there. It's like, oh, it looks so pretty. Until you get out there, you have to start walking and people don't shovel, you slip and slide down the street. And I'm not embarrassed to say it's been a few times I had to sit on the steps to get down off the porch. Yeah, because I do not want to fall. There's been times I have fallen down some steps and it wasn't cute. The good things about being on a route as long as I've been on there is knowing everyone name. They look out for me. And since the pandemic, one of my customers made a poster sign and he put on there, Hey, Kelly, Americans are awesome and so are you. Thank you. And I was walking up to the house because I had my head down getting the mail ready when I looked up. It made me cry and I knocked on this door. He came to the door and I was like, that's so sweet of you to put that out there. He's like, I just want to let you know you are awesome carrier. You always look out for us because when he get his medicine, I walk to the side door. I knock on the door. Him and his wife come and get it. I don't leave it on the front porch. I don't want anyone to take it. Not under my watch.
SPEAKER_14: Lulu Miller is a radio producer and author of the book Why Fish Don't Exist.
SPEAKER_09: So this is a exercise that my wonderful sister, Alexa Rose Miller told me about. I'm joined here by my co-host.
SPEAKER_04: My 22 month old son.
SPEAKER_09: We're going on a walk. In the surprisingly beautiful Indiana dunes. And the exercise is this. As you walk, look for one of each of every color of the rainbow. And pick it up. Take it home with you. First thing, got a piece of green grass. And I will keep you posted as we go.
SPEAKER_05: My name's Dan Broon. I'm a bushwalker and photographer from Tasmania. Tasmania is an island at the bottom of Australia. Australia, of course, is a continent at the bottom of the world. So I live under down under. Tasmania is the most mountainous island on earth. And so every walk you go on, you start close to the ocean and then you just walk uphill really quick. But as you go up, you traverse different vegetation layers and you go through curtains and curtains and curtains. So you might start in coastal scrub with this hundred aroma of peat soils and you'll climb up into a deeper forest along a creek line. And it will be rainforest. A temperate rainforest. The air is cold on your face. It's filled with every type of rain from the mosses and the lichens to the rainforest trees, the myrtles and the Sassenfries. And as you go through these various vegetation layers, finally, finally, finally, you just see sky. And everything becomes small. Everything becomes intricate and tiny and detailed. And that's what it is when you're in the alpine zone of Tasmania.
SPEAKER_03: Hi, I'm Jenny Slate. I'm an actor, comedian and writer. So when I came back to Massachusetts this year, there just wasn't anyone around. And people don't tell you. And you never remember, even if you're like me and you grew up here, that March is just February and it's cold and it's very dark. But I really, really need to walk every day. And I need I guess what I need is to be able to greet someone or something. And so in the woods by our house is a pet cemetery. And I started to bundle up and go for the short walk out to the pet cemetery to say hello to the buried pets. There's Cheeky and Boopy and Nedsy. I say their names and sometimes I just like sort of croon at them and say, hello, sweetheart. And I sort of imagine, like, you know, transparent little ghost dogs like nipping at my heels. I could imagine that they felt found again. And what's happening here, of course, is a projection and that I just want to be also found.
SPEAKER_21: I'm John Stearl. I'm a resident in the Southern Valley West Minister Canterbury Continuing Care Retirement Community, and I'm 81. I do go for walks every day. And I've gotten to the point that I like to walk 10 miles. And also I have downloaded the United States Air Force Band. Susan marches and I'll march instead of walking. And I've been known to pick up a stick or two and pretend I'm a drum major because I have been a drum major in the past. But I only do that after 10 o'clock at night, after all the other residents go to bed. And then if I get bored with the marches, I have polka accordion music on and I'll start dancing my way around instead of walking or marching.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, my God. Awesome contender for bright orange. Little like a racer size neon orange mushrooms. OK, Jude vetoes. I think I'm going to leave them where they are because they look happy. But I'll take a picture. Oh, Jude. Look, this leaf. Oh, my mom needs this leaf has a little of everything red on the outside. Yellow and green on the inside. If you squint at it, it's kind of orange. The contender for many.
SPEAKER_04: I have a German Shepherd seeing a dog named Milo. He's my walking buddy. And we walked all over the world. My name is Haben Girma. I'm a disability rights advocate. When I walk with Milo, I'm holding his harness. His harness wraps around his middle and his front. So when he turns to the left. To the right. I can feel it. Most people assume that the guide dog is deciding where we go. Sometimes he does try to make those decisions. So if he is walking and he sees a squirrel, his ears perk up. I feel it in his body. His attention is distracted. And I make the choice to tell him, no, keep going. Move past it. It's kind of like a ballroom dance. We're constantly connected. I'm constantly adjusting my movements to mirror his movements so that we can keep moving across the floor.
SPEAKER_13: Ballroom is a culture of competitive artists or artistic competitors. That's how I see it. And it was pioneered by black and Latina transgender women who basically created a space for LGBTQ youth of color to compete in different categories for cash prizes. So my name is Sydney Blue, a.k.a. Sid Extravaganza. I remember the first time I walked realness as a category. Realness actually refers to when somebody of a particular gender identity puts on a performance of an archetype of another. On the flyer, it said Butch Realness. I was like, oh, what's that? And so I asked my housemother at the time and she was like, Sid, this is your category. All you have to do is you have to present as a cisgendered man, a straight man. And so, you know, I had the look ready. The category was coming up. I was so nervous because I'd never walked this category before. And I was just like, oh, man, man, you know, I'm going to pull this off. Oh, gosh. And then I remember they called out the category. The commentator called it out. OK, anybody walking 10, nine, eight, seven, six. Nobody's coming out. Five, four. And then finally I was like, all right, I'm going to do it. And let me tell you, the crowd went bananas for me. People got out of their seats. Oh, my God. It was like tens, tens, tens, tens, tens across the board. Like people were just living for me. And it was I have it was incredible. I'd never experienced anything like that. And for me, especially being somebody who was maligned for my masculinity as a woman, for being told that I should look a certain way, sit a certain way, have my hair a certain way, all this kind of stuff. And then getting to that point in my life where I could be in a room of my peers and completely celebrated for who I was. It was just like the greatest feeling in the world.
SPEAKER_16: I'm Alice Shepherd, dancer and writer. So I'm a wheelchair user. I encounter the world from the point of view of wheeling. I use the word walk a fair amount. That often makes people uncomfortable. Some of the most important walks that I have ever had are with other wheelchair users. There's a moment where we sink strokes. There's something about the rhythm of pushing a chair and the sounds that our wheels make. The fact that we are connected in this way is is is sometimes it's really sexy. Sometimes it's really just peace bringing. Sometimes it's joyous. This kind of walking. This is community walking.
SPEAKER_20: My name is Aaron Reese. I'm a journalist and I live in Mexico City. What's cool about Mexico City is walking is fascinating all the time. There's so much happening on the street that it's hard to be bored when you're walking. Whether you're getting your shoes fixed or you're getting a piece of clothes mended or you're buying a taco, it's all happening like on the sidewalk and oftentimes in the street. But there's a certain subset of mobile street vendors that have sounds to alert people as to their presence. And so if you hear enormous steam whistle, you know that the como te, the like the sweet potato salesman is outside and you have 10 minutes to catch him before you have to like jog and catch him down the block. And as you look around, like the street is sort of coming alive. Like you see like a guy pop his head out the window and yell down like, hey, wait for me, I'll be there in a second. People pull over, people jog to catch up. And then there's the knife sharpener guy and his sound is probably my favorite because it's like a little musical performance. He has a pan flute and all the knife sharpeners have pan flutes that play these different chord progressions, but each one has its own little style. And you hear it coming, you know, like Doppler effect style. And you're like, OK, I'm pretty sure he's coming in from the left. And you're like, no, no, he's coming from the right. And you like have to go, you know, wind your way through the neighborhood, following your ear to catch the guy.
SPEAKER_15: Our walk continues even into space after this. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to Kachava.com slash invisible spelled K A C H A V A and get 10% off your first order. That's K A C H A V A dot com slash invisible Kachava dot com slash invisible. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva dot com. The home for every brand.
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SPEAKER_09: Come on, Forrest, show me blue and purple. Oh, man, I just got my purple. I got purple. I got my purple. It's a little leaf. It's a gorgeous, true freaking purple. OK, all I have to do now is blue. And suddenly I feel the weight of a large head on one of my neck vertebrae, which is the feeling of my son falling asleep in this hiking backpack. Sick of my musings upon the colors of the forest fair.
SPEAKER_18: My name is Sam Jay. I'm a comedian and a writer for Saturday Night Live. When I was younger, I used to hang out with my older cousin. His name is Gerald, and he lived in this place in Boston called the South End or the Back Bay. They had built this like housing development in the back bay, but the rest of the back bay was full of like rich people. And it's where all the rich shops were. You could really just go out and walk around and cause mischief for the lack of a better word. We used to buy all these joke gag things from the joke shop downtown, so like a dollar snatcher and like stinky bombs and like things that make fart noises, all this like goofy stuff. And we would take it down Newberry Street and like trick people. We put the dollar snatcher down and watch people try to pick it up and snatch the dollar and laugh. Or while someone was sitting outside a restaurant, we, you know, hit the fart thing and make it sound like they farted and then run off and just like goofy little silly kid stuff. You're so aware when you when you're growing up in poverty that like all the stuff around you is not for you. And like they're not considering you in any of this. And so it was a way for us to kind of push back against the thing by just going and being like, well, we could be in here, too, you know.
SPEAKER_01: My name is Antoine Williams, and I am the co-creator and the sound designer for the hit podcast, Ear Hustle. I grew up in prison. I spent my late teens and all of my 20s inside of California's prisons. And the way that we protest on the inside is completely opposite from how people protest on the outside. The way that we protest on the inside is to sit down. So upon my release, I was able to join Black Lives Matter protests and rallies and marches for the equality and the equity of disenfranchised people.
SPEAKER_17: No justice, no peace, no justice, no peace.
SPEAKER_01: In the entire march, I was silent. And just every step that I took, I felt I felt good. I was stepping with intention. Like I can walk for however long the people want to walk.
SPEAKER_06: I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on Veterans Day 2015. My name is Julian Torres. I'm a former sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. I got hurt in 2013. I'm a left below the knee amputation and a right above the knee amputation. The idea of Kilimanjaro really came from, I wanted to see what kind of capabilities I had post, like missing half my body. I needed to know where I landed on the spectrum of like liability and an asset. But it was my first time walking through mud that was like ankle deep. Walking through that was like walking on the slip and slide. You know what I mean? It's just like, whoa, whoa.
SPEAKER_06: When I would fall, one or two things happened, like nothing. Nothing happened. I just fell. I met the ground, gave it a hug, and then I got back up. Or a part of my legs would break. And they did break. And so like on day two, I guess you would say where my ankle was, my right ankle, right? Bolts had broken off. So like every three or four steps I would have to stop and then turn my foot because it would pivot. And my toes would be facing like my back. But I'm going to make it to the moon if I have to crawl. I don't think I walked away from Kilimanjaro knowing anything except that I can endure.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, my God. I just audibly gasped, but I wasn't recording and I'm not going to fake it. Perfect blue. Bluer than blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue. Blueberries, not the blueberries we eat, but these comically cartoon freaking fantasy-esque blueberries right before the end. Child's still asleep. I'm going to grab a couple of these.
SPEAKER_02: We have completed the rainbow.
SPEAKER_07: I'm Caroline Shaw. I'm a musician and I like to walk. I grew up with all these cassette tapes of the lives of the great composers,
SPEAKER_08: which my mom had a box of and she kept in our minivan and pick one out and put it in. And that was how I learned about music. And one of those tapes was called Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs. They would talk about him walking through the woods and hearing the birds and writing the sixth symphony. And that was kind of how I for a long time pictured what being a composer was. And recently I wrote a string quartet called The Evergreen after this very particular walk in the woods on an island off the west coast of Canada, called Galliano Island. I just found myself kind of slowing down completely. I wasn't trying to like, oh, get to that turn point so you could go over here and then you see the vista and you see the view. And that's the goal. I was like, I don't really care about the goal anymore. I just want to be here and listening and looking. And I ended up seeing this beautiful evergreen tree that I wouldn't have seen if I had just been going towards what I wanted to go to. And I just wrote a piece as like a little gift to this tree. I guess that makes me just like Beethoven. So, you know.
SPEAKER_17:
SPEAKER_19: Our walks are a little different than what most people think about as walks. The reality is we don't actually walk in space. We float and we climb around with our fingertips mostly and and just use our hands for mobility. This is NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, and I'm here to talk to you about my very first spacewalk. What you see is the earth below you. That's it. You look between your feet and you see the tips of your toes and the blue planet, in our case, over 300 miles beneath us. And then the darkness, the blackness of space is set against that contrast. And one of the things that I always remember is thinking to myself, there's nothing out there. Earth is its own spaceship and we're all here alone and and it's really a vulnerable place. And I don't think you really truly get the sense of that until you're staring at it from 300 miles up, watching it just just float in nothing. It's incredible.
SPEAKER_17: You.
SPEAKER_14: This story was brought to you by Pop-Up magazine productions written and produced by me, Haley Howell, with Anna Martin, Charlie Locke, Marin Kogan and Maureen Towey. Our managing editor is Elise Craig. Our executive editor is Anita Botejo. Our editor in chief is Doug McGray. Music and sound design by Alex Overington. Annie Jen is our art director and Lauren Smith is director of operations research by Cheetah Cham Chang. We had production help from Al Schatz and Andy Spillman. Ben Hickey did the episode art. Special thanks to Third Angle Music in Portland, Oregon, for letting us share their world premiere performance of Caroline Shaw's string quartet, The Evergreen. Special thanks also to Alexa Rose Miller at Arts Practica, Oscar Molina-Palestina and all the fantastic folks we interviewed about walking, but weren't able to fit in this episode. This story was part of our fall issue. If you want to take a longer walk with us, an extended version of this episode is available for Pop-Up magazine members. Learn more and join us at popupmagazine.com.
SPEAKER_15: We will have an original in-house 99% Invisible for you next week. If you need more 99PI stories before then, we have a whole book about them. It's called The 99% Invisible City. It's a beautiful physical object, but if you want me to read it to you, we have an audiobook available too. It's all at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_19: Radiotopia from PRX.
SPEAKER_12: We'll be right back.
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