The Walking Podcast

Sometimes you're walking in the woods and stumble upon a wedding. Sometimes what looks like a wedding is a memorial service. This week's walk is brought to you by our friends at North Light, the friendliest all-day bar and kitchen, with a specially curated book and record shop, in Oakland, California.

Exploding the usual format of the show to bring you a star-studded, Yuletide spectacular that harkens back to the homespun, holiday podcast specials of days gone by! With special guest appearances by: Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, fine arts photographer Meghann Riepenhoff and friends, TV producer Jesse Ziebart, Grammy-nominee Korum Bischoff, and restauranteur and businessman Harvey Wolff from Proper Fish. Come along on a wintry ramble around the island, chasing away a case of the holiday blahs!  The WALKING Podcast Holiday Special is brought to you by Dresden Stollen Bakers. When Irmgard Maron came to the United States in 1928, she brought a cherished recipe for stollen from her native Dresden. She began baking for friends and relatives during the holidays and, at their urging, started a small bakery business. Ninety-one years later, three generations of her descendants still gather to bake this deliciously rich holiday bread once a year and sell it to families like yours around the world. The WALKING Po

The school carpool collapses last minute, scrambling my morning agenda, but I manage to sneak in a walk anyhow before getting in the car and journeying down to Portland for a meeting. Sometimes you have to walk before you can drive. Lace up and come along as we encounter a dissonant and grave disturbance in the woods.  This week's walk is sponsored by: RICHARD'S FAMOUS FOOD PODCAST. It's a food podcast that's "more like Pee Wee's Playhouse than the Splendid Table," from creator Richard Parks III. Wow, I encourage you to give it a listen! Tagline: "Jump into the Brine" (with a little tm next to it.) And don't forget: You can be a Stickfluencer! Send $5 to The WALKING Podcast (via Venmo) and I'll thank you during the ad break for "sticking up" for the show. Also, if you want, I'll mail you a stick I pick up along the way. A real-life stick!

Welcome back! It's Season 2 of The WALKING Podcast. Brrrrrr. The theme of Season 2 will be BUILDING BRIDGES (SEO interlude: Jeff Bridges, Phoebe Bridgers, Phoebe Waller-Bridge,) so let's bundle up and take a walk to an actual, new bridge, built by local non-profits and civil servants! Setting out at dawn, as a sleepy Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close, we'll hear along the way: the crunkle of boots on frost-stiffened grass; vigorous sniffling; the startling, low moan of a fog horn; a prudent jogger approaching from behind; a neighborly convergence full of cheer.  This week's walk is sponsored by Mat Honan on behalf of birds. Mat encourages us to appreciate birds and to help them. You can check this out, he says.

I'm proud to present this very special crossover episode of the WALKING podcast, in collaboration with 10 Things That Scare Me from WNYC Studios. Well, I am proud and also mildly mortified. Our most vulnerable episode to date! I took a walk and recorded myself listening to a recording of myself taking a walk--and also talking. That's what's different this time around: the talking.  I trust you are all enjoying being alive on planet earth during this ongoing hiatus of the WALKING podcast. Hope to be back with you before too long. Until then, let's all keep putting one foot in front of the other.

This is the Season 1 Finale of the WALKING podcast, and possibly the last one period. I read some prepared remarks at the ad break, while sitting on a stump, on a cliff, as the sun went down. This week's walk is brought to you by an anonymous stranger, in memory of Bear and Elmer, two good dogs who loved walks. Thank you to everyone who listened. That was nice. See you at #FootForceDelta.   

"Sometimes finding a key is not the start of a grand adventure, but the end of one." - Jon Mooallem, right now. Friends, I bumbled my way into a high-intensity snafu while recording the walk this morning. A boatload of genuine drama ensued, relative to our typical walks together, at least. It was so bad that I felt obligated to initiate the WALKING podcast's first-ever "take two." And so, here it is: take two. The other day, I heard Gwyneth Paltrow interviewed on fellow podcaster Dax Shepherd's Armchair Expert podcast. (Incidentally, both Dax--if I may--and I appear on Vulture's new list of 100 podcasts you should be listening to. Then again, not to be ungrateful, but I'm not sure how worthwhile that list is, being that all lists are sort of silly and that Mystery Show wasn't on it.) Anyway, in addition to confessing how much she loved a good walk, and extolling the emotionally curative powers of walking, Gwyneth (if I may) told Dax (if I may) something that stuck with me. She said that, as a public person, s

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Mooallem SuperValue™ (That’s my private nickname for myself when I’m working hard to meet deadlines, and when I feel less like a human writer than a scrupulously-optimized, prose-production corporation—you know, checking facts and cashing checks, etc.) I was working so hard, finishing a big magazine story and the book simultaneously, that I didn’t have an opportunity to go for a single walk—or for much self-reflection of any kind--and didn’t even realize that until the work-week was over. By Friday evening, I was beat, and settled in to read the local paper. There was an obituary for a longtime islander I’d never heard of, a man named Gale Cool. “Gale Cool was a visionary,” the notice began. I read that Gale Cool was an architect and developer, with an energetic commitment to showing people the value of “living in nature not next to nature.” In an era when everyone was starting to build big homes on small lots, he started building small homes on big lots, and clusterin

I continue to be confused as to whether anyone reads these summaries. Anyway: It’s been almost four years since we moved to the island from San Francisco. Two or three nights after we moved, my wife and I took the ferry into Seattle to attend a dinner for a friend's non-profit. It was so fun! And we met lots of fascinating people. These included: a very kind muckety muck at Starbucks; podcaster-rockstar double-threat John Roderick; and a wonderful guy who worked for Pearl Jam. A great many quintessentially Seattle-seeming things were happening in that one room. The experience left me exhilarated and optimistic; I thought to myself, “Wowzers! I just got here and I’m already having dinner with someone high up in the Pearl Jam organization!” Four years later, I get into Seattle very rarely and live a pretty quiet life on the island. Do I feel like I'm missing out sometimes? Absolutely. Is this the life I imagined for myself? No way. Still, I’m happy. I feel lucky. I take a lot of nice walks. So...did I change? I

Busy week here on the Internet, with a sterling write-up of the show on Vulture and oodles of new listeners. Meanwhile, in real life, the same old silent trees and trails. I mean, wow: it took walking alone in the woods for me to feel a part of things online. Anyway, since it’s still not apparent to me that anyone reads these show descriptions (do you?) I’ll just provide this short summary of this week's walk and be done with it. THIS WEEK'S WALK by Jon Mooallem Stopped right away: boots needed tying. Spooked some ducks, watched them flying. Beach rocks crunchin’. New house construction. This week’s walk is brought to you by media mogul Max Linksy, who calls your attention to the remarkably good and remarkably bananas new book THE MASTERMIND by Evan Ratliff. Go buy it!

We had tremendous snow. Historic snow! A back-to-back-to-back #snowmageddon scenario. School was cancelled, life was disrupted, the power went out and everything was white. Finally, I put on my big honking duck boots and noisy nylon pants and went for a proper walk. (By the way, does any one read these summaries? Just curious.) It was all so novel and disorienting: the bristly sizzle the snow made as I sunk in near to my knees; the altered, iced-over geographies of the trail; the disappeared blackberry vines, weighed down and buried somewhere in the drift. The world was familiar, but different: a semi-barren, bleached-out cousin-planet to my ordinary home. I was thinking about the Mars rover, which had shut down that week after all those years zapping back dispatches from its ramble across a similarly alien landscape; its final missive home: “My battery is low and it is getting very dark.” Well, unfortunately, my recording rig doesn’t carry itself with the same dignity. Friends, it zonked out on me unannounce

It was bound to happen. In 1864, Captain William Renton arrived on Bainbridge Island and built what would soon be lauded as the largest sawmill in the world. A town blossomed around it, with churches, a school and a 75-room hotel, and a separate village of Japanese workers, with a bath house and ice cream parlor. Then, in 1888 the mill burned down. In 1907, it burned down again. Then vertically-integrated midwestern logging concerns moved into the area, drove down timber prices, and soon, the mill was gone. Recently, calamity struck again. I was tromping around the ruins of the mill when my boot slid out from under me on a muddy embankment and—whoosh—I slammed to the ground. Does Marc Maron ever fall down while podcasting? What about the Two Dope Queens or PJ Vogt? Probably not. Probably, I am the first podcaster ever to fall down in the middle of his show. It’s a distinction I’m proud of. Damn straight I left that audio in. The rest of the walk—the upright part—was equally fulfilling: chilly, leisurely, gray

It was one of those Saturday mornings when the wide, blue sky begged to be walked under. So out I went. And I wasn’t alone. This episode features several salutary exchanges with other walkers—or, as I like to call them, fellow citizens of “The Trek-nited Feets of Walkmerica" (trademark pending.) Keep an ear out for their doppler-tinged Hi’s and Howyadoin’s as they shuffle by, all of us enjoying our solitary walks…together! Meanwhile, the journey was full of surprise Animals. Choruses of crotchety crows caw-cawed overhead; a sea lion ejected his belchy croaks somewhere offshore. Gulls just wanted to have fun. Downhill, uphill, and winding back home: I covered a lot of ground that morning—with my feet, but also with my mind. A joyous and rejuvenating loop. Enjoyed this walk so hard I got a blister on my soul. This walk is sponsored by North Light, a new, cozy all-day spot in Oakland’s Temescal Neighborhood—cafe by day, bar by night.

The quote is taken from Thoreau. The walk was taken out of stress. I took this walk after getting an email from my editor which (long story) made my work life (which is a big chunk of my total life) feel instantaneously disorienting and urgent. I panicked and started doing lots of stuff to adjust. Then, I went for a walk--to let my brain catch up with my emotions. I walked pretty fast, especially at the get-go, busting along, churning out all the nervous energy with my legs. (Listen to me go!) But by the end of the walk, I was moving at a more reasonable pace, the sun was setting and the owls were starting to make owl noises. The work problem was still bewildering, but I felt bigger in proportion to it. It was a luxury to be able to take that walk. I appreciate it. Do you ever want to hit pause on life and go for a walk? You should! And if you aren't able, come along on mine...with your ears!  This walk was sponsored by the Walking podcast's inaugural sponsor, MUSCLE, the debut novel from Alan Trotter, out Fe