Beware the strides of March: A foot soldier dedicated to the core

A jogger moving doggedly against traffic is explainable; we all know what a hitchhiker wants, a long-haul trekker with a backpack and firkin calves is, if not normal, at least fathomable and a bystander with a mobile phone and popped bonnet is a fast-fact tableau of woe ... but a walker? Someone in everyday clothing out for a constitutional on the asphalt? That's unsettling, provocative, suspicious even; it represents an abhorrent vacuum of exposition.

Just as we automatically assign familiar, comforting shapes to the clouds and the stars, we want to make immediate sense of an apparition on the bitumen, so by the time a blank-page antagonist is diminishing in our rear-view, we've already plotted the arc of their journey and the intersecting point at which they skimmed off our own, suddenly fallible trajectories.

And it's the very inapposite nature of an omni-crumple-zone meat bag going from A to B unprotected by an exoskeleton on wheels, their subtext tends to stray into the negative because something must have gone badly wrong if you've been reduced to relying on your legs and reflexes for transportation and safety.

I can feel this unauthorised biographical intensity burrowing into me as I stride along the road linking our village with town.

I've had to leave the ute a couple hundred metres back on a rare slice of flat verge because recent maintenance has elevated and angled our important artery by such a degree, you can no longer get your vehicle out of harm's way without capsizing. Similarly, all that earthmoving clearly wasn't undertaken with walkers in mind and I've been funnelled up onto the tar away from the quagmire down to my side.

It's another dying La Nina afternoon and I'm trapped in unfiltered sunlight, the kind we haven't experienced for days because the mist has maintained a velvet-gloved stranglehold on our escarpment community. The treacle atmosphere is a welcome balm in this era of extremities but it heightens every sound, promotes mildew and fungus and arrests the ripening process, so the tomatoes stare back at you each morning in pale green defiance (not unlike our teenager).

To the south-east, that cool, white fog is blanketing the hills of home, as if aping the tendrils of doomsday smoke that occupied the same position some 14 months ago but, out here, between these swaying paddocks, it's all sweat and solar energy.

Once, I would've waved to every passing car, but things have changed so quickly in these parts, it's impossible to keep track of all the new arrivals and I haven't recognised anyone who's sped by; a small mercy, not only because I'm in no mood to explain myself, but because, as with riding a bike, when you're on foot and sharing a road with these dangerously unempathetic tanks, you develop something of an adversarial relationship with the motorists cocooned within.

In fact, right now, compared with the gross mechanics of driving, the delicate act of walking has taken on a distinctly noble quality and, as I stroll, I scroll through some notable wanderers who've left a footprint on my memory; members of that rare breed who opened the door one day, headed to the shops and simply kept going.

One of my favourites is Harry Dean Stanton's Travis Henderson from the 1984 movie Paris, Texas; a deadbeat dad for whom life went so seriously pear-shaped, he fled his burning caravan and drifted into the desert "until every sign of man had disappeared".

But at least Travis made it out alive to reunite his kid with Nastassja Kinski, unlike our own Burke and Wills, their doomed interior trek an example of antipodean lore which feels so crass and nouveau in the face of more ancient and global legends, such as that of the "irrepressible" Monkey King, who, as every after-school-TV-addicted Gen-X kid knows, walked (along with a bit of psychedelic cloud-surfing) all the way from China to India accompanied by the pig guy, the fish guy and that whiny Buddhist, whose gender we never really had a firm handle on.

Another much mythologised pedestrian was John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed; the nurseryman who straddled the 18th and 19th centuries germinating thousands of trees across the American Midwest.

As walkers go, JA sets the Golden Delicious standard for aerobic enterprise and his exploits are very much on my mind today because the whole reason I'm out arousing so much suspicion in the first place is because I'm picking apples.

MORE BY B. R. DOHERTY

This year, our go-to roadside tree - covered as it is in a thick film of scalping dust - is stooped with crisp, tangy baubles (don't ask me the variety, they're sort of red and round) and speculating about how it and others have come to occupy such remote locations is something of a seasonal brain-teaser.

To our knowledge, there was no Aussie equivalent of Johnny Appleseed (Bruce the Fruit Bloke?), so the core-out-the-car-window theory seems most feasible but some locals like to engage in more romantic origin stories, such as gingham-swaddled, horse-and-cart pioneers sowing seeds in spots where weary travellers would stop and rest on their way to and from the big top, the big dance, the big fight, the big wedding, the big wake...

Regardless of how the trees got there, we're always grateful for an autumnal injection of heritage fibre and no-frills fructose because we're convinced modern, mass-distributed fruit has become so sickly sweet, you feel it should be locked away with the chips and chocolate.

And we may be right.

Last month, Australian food regulators classified fruit juice as less healthy than diet cola. The move might have outraged some quarters of the agriculture industry but it certainly wouldn't have come as a shock to many parents who, like us, have long banished that particular trophic Trojan Horse from the fridge.

With or without a star-rating system, keeping tabs on what the kids eat is just another exhausting task of parenthood, so it's a godsend when you can point them to a bowl of imperfect, peristalsis-friendly ballast plucked from a bush barely three food miles away and tell them to go for their lives (it's also satisfying watching those little faces contort at all that alien tartness).

Not that the benefits of old-school fodder should be exclusive to developing minds and bodies.

Anyone struggling with a sluggish, middle-aged metabolism knows there's nothing better than bingeing on something you don't have to walk off.