Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: The Walker

DOCUMENTARY
Radio Netherlands International - www.rnw.nl
TX: Wednesday 22nd & Friday 24th & Sunday 26th of February 2006
Production No: 1007100
WEEK NO: 8
Producer / Presenter : Laura Durnford
Contents: ?The Walker? - featuring
- Jan Visser: Walking enthusiast (http://www.learndev.org/People/JanVisser/Walking.html)
- Lillith T?rk: Therapeutic stretching Instructor (http://www.activehealthcenter.nl)
- Marja Westhoff: Human Movement Scientist, Dutch Heart Foundation
- Quotes from ?Wanderlust, A History of Walking?: by Rebecca Solnit ? published by Penguin Books (ISBN 0 14 02.8601 2)

VO 1: Where does it start? Muscles tense: One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the Earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind...
PRESENTER: Radio Netherlands presents 'The Walker' ? with Laura Durnford (4?)
DRUM TAPs begin
VO1: Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again.
JV clip 1/1: I'm Jan Visser ? and I'm a walker. 4?
DRUM TAPs starting to speed up.
VO1: The legs reverse position.
JV metaphor short: ?Walking for me is not?
??metaphor for other things.? (5?)

VO 1: It starts with a step and then another step and
then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world.
Rebecca Solnit ? in her book 'Wanderlust ? A History of Walking'
DRUM TAPs at walking speed blending with sound of walking in leaves.
JV trades short: ?I?m a theoretical?
??this phenomenon of walking.? (17?) 1?28
LD link: Jan Visser is a tall, bespectacled middle-aged man. I meet him one fine day in the Hoge Veluwe ? his favourite national park in his native Netherlands.
Jan is passionate about pedestrianism. He has a website on the subject - and he has made the activity an integrated part of his everyday life ? which has taken him to live, work, and walk, on five continents.
For more than a decade he has recorded his every step with a small, electronic device ? his trusty pedometer... (35)

JV pedo 3: You actually fasten this to your belt...
...came all those messages!
messages mix:
Dear Jan, Congratulations! The distance you have attained is remarkable, but even more so is the knowledge you must have gained. Years ago, when you told me that to make better use of your time you read while you walked, I was incredulous. But I saw you do it.
Live long, propser and watch where you walk!
Dear Jan, I just heard it through the grapevine that you walked the planet in 7 years. Say it isn;t so! That is so great.
40 million steps for Jan Visser, and one small step for mankind. May the rest of us do as well!
Congratulations my friend! I see that some other friends of yours have already made many different kids of speculations and calculations regarding your trip. But how many pairs of shoes did it take? Be well and walk on!

JV medical: Why don?t we go ?
? medical advice I got in my life! 1?58
Lil: Intro ? cannot be correct. 3?37
VO1: Walking upright is considered to be the Rubicon the evolving species crossed to become hominid, distinct from all other primates and ancestral to human beings.
The list of what we eventually got from bipedalism is long and alluring, full of all the gothic arches and elongations of the body.
Go up the long straight walker?s legs to the buttocks, round and protuberant thanks to the massively developed gluteus maximus of walkers, a minor muscle in apes but the largest muscle in the human body.
Then go on to the flat stomach, the flexible waist, the straight spine, the low shoulders, the erect head set atop a long neck.

Sfeers women yoga
Lil eleg: Of course many spp can stand up, but...
?do you know anything which is
more elegant (laugh)... (32?)

LD link 2:
Not everyone would agree with this admiration of the ambulatory female form however.
VO1: Consider the pelvis as a secret theater where thinking and walking meet and, according to some anatomists, conflict.
One of the most elegant and complicated parts of the skeleton, it is also one of the hardest to perceive, shrouded as it is in flesh, orifices and preoccupations.
LD LINK
In her book, ?Wanderlust?, American author Rebecca Solnit challenges the scientific tradition that the female of the species is an inefficient biped ? thanks to her broad, child-bearing hips. And she highlights how this bony cat?s cradle is intimately connected with the birth of our large-brained, hands-free-while-we-walk species.

To learn to walk is one of our earliest instincts. Yet, in an ever-faster world of time-saving technology, where to arrive is more important than to travel, fewer and fewer people do it on a routine basis. Do we need to learn to walk again?
SFEERS ? me and Marja walk and talk re pregnancy ? hartstocht
Mar 2: Intro ? hartstocht, incorp daily life ? doesn't harm. NL walking nation poll - hype in Holland ? walk in groups.
SFX group walkers
SFX radio broadcast from Vierdaagse event (NL) (FROM RNW ARCHIVE)
LD link 3:
The most famous of Dutch group-walking events is the vierdaagse ? 4 days of marching and music and madcap fun, that attracts many thousands of people each year.
MUSIC
CD Title: Meesterlijke Marsen
Catalogue Number: DCD 1
Fonotheek Number (RNW): C200155
Track Number and Title: 9: Vierdaagse Mars
Composer?s Name: H.A.V. Mechelen
Performer Name: Amsterdamse Politie Kapel
Label: Dureco Benelux
Duration used: 17?
LD LINK
But Jan Visser prefers quieter walks, in the company of a few friends or family, or alone with his thoughts? (20)

JV medit: Prefer old walks / new experinece? ? both ? meditation ? metaphors etc (3?11) 22 mins?
LD link 4:
The creative potential that walking can release is thoroughly explored in ?Wanderlust?.
The author guides us through the paths that link the activity to a host of famous artists, poets, writers, philosophers and others, who have helped to shape western cultural history.
Political marches, land disputes, religious parades, female sexuality and the origins of the environmental movement ? many threads are drawn together.

But Rebecca Solnit also questions our values, in a world increasingly given over to tarmac, concrete and technologies designed to speed up our everyday activities? (45)

VO1: I know these things have their uses?, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival.
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.
If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

JV stat - steps & statue
VO1: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between the stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before.

This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers - but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.
JV end gate sfx ? what do friends and family think? ? so why don;t they! laugh
SFX walking in leaves

PRESENTER
"The Walker" featured Jan Visser, Lillith Turk and Marja Westhof - with quotations from Rebecca Solnit's, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking", published by Penguin Books.
The producer was Laura Durnford.
There?s more on this on our website ? www.radionetherlands.nl
If you?d like to comment on this or any other RN programme, you can email letters @rnw.nl.
This has been a Radio Netherlands presentation.
********************************30 ?INTRO
SFX walking
CLIP: I?m Jan Visser and I?m a walker.
LAURA:
A man with a passion for pedestrianism, integrated into his everyday life.
A physical activity that means so much more than simple movement.
In the Radio Netherlands documentary ?The Walker?, join me, Laura Durnford, as I wander through experiences and ideas that make this very human activity a metaphor, for life ? and more!
1 Min Tailer
SFX walking
CLIP: I?m Jan Visser and I?m a walker.
LAURA: Jan Visser has a passion for pedestrianism ? as an integrated part of his everyday life?
CLIP: Here it is, a small device just 2 inches wide.
LAURA: Jan has been wearing a pedometer daily for more than a decade, recording his every step?
CLIP: On the day and almost on the hour, in 7 years I completed walking around the Earth, the 1st time. Now I?m on my 2nd round...
LAURA: But for Jan, it?s more than just a physical act of movement?
CLIP: Walking for me is also a metaphor for all kinds of other things?
LAURA: ?a symbol of human origins, a therapeutic and creative tool?
Join me, Laura Durnford for the Radio Netherlands documentary, as I wander through experiences and ideas that make this very human activity a metaphor for life, and more!