Sole

By R.Z. Sheppard

WALKING DAVIS

by DAVID ELY 233 pages. Charterhouse. $6.95.

In the beginning were the feet. Between them and the head developed a remarkably complex apparatus that enabled one foot to be placed in front of the other alternately and repeatedly. The procedure was called walking, and when done over a period of time, walking became automatic, even natural.

The head was then left free to think or just look out through the eyes and enjoy the scenery. Thinking, looking and walking proved to be mutually helpful activities. Oldtime writers like Henry David Thoreau thought so and wrote a lot about walking, including an essay titled Walking to be read by people who were sitting. Thoreau provided a lot of health food for thought, including an explanation of the word "sauntering," which he saw as a fermentation of the medieval pilgrim's phrase, `a la Sainte Terre--to the Holy Land.

Modern pilgrims, like Novelist David Ely's Pierce ("Walking") Davis, have no such goal. Davis does not even have a fixed idea of what the Holy Land might be. An ordinary Midwestern auto mechanic with a wife and kids, he has only the urge to put one foot in front of the other and the vague though practical notion that if a common man engaged in such a common activity long enough, he could walk around the world.

This Davis does, starting out as a publicity stunt for a fertilizer company and continuing on his own after the company's president changes his mind. No one can persuade Davis to stop. He refuses to accept rides--even in elevators--and generally sheds material and cultural encumbrances. Mostly he sleeps wherever night catches him, of ten outdoors, though occasionally he takes shelter with gypsies or nomads.

It can be argued that the unrecognizable assemblage of rags and bones that finally shuffles back into Spark, Iowa, and back out again, is not Pierce Davis, but the spirit of walking itself. It can also be argued that David Ely solves some difficult problems by the simple expedient of avoiding them. How Davis crosses some large bodies of water on foot remains a pesky mystery; how he hobbles across Scotland on a broken leg is only slightly clearer.

But by that time, the importance of such details has been overshadowed by the magnitude and cheerful inexorability of Davis' undertaking. In addition, the author, who demonstrated his narrative skills, quiet humor and satire in such pointed novels as Seconds and The Tour, succeeds in the delicate job of balancing the complete ordinariness of Davis with a weighty implication: salvation (whatever it may be) lies in the pilgrimage, not in any destination. Should this prove too transcendental for some tastes, it is worth noting that according to a recent item in the Wall Street Journal, hiking boots are a growth Stock.

R.Z. Sheppard

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