This is an excerpt of an essay that first appeared in Free­man’s in Sep­tem­ber 2015.

I had taught myself a set of rules: No running, especially at night; no sudden movements; no hoodies; no objects—especially shiny ones—in hand; no waiting for friends on street corners, lest I be mistaken for a drug dealer; no standing near a corner on the cell phone (same reason).

My love for walk­ing start­ed in child­hood, out of neces­si­ty. No thanks to a step­fa­ther with heavy hands, I found every rea­son to stay away from home and was usu­al­ly out — at some friend’s house or at a street par­ty where no minor should be — until it was too late to get pub­lic trans­porta­tion. So I walked.

The streets of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1980s were often ter­ri­fy­ing — you could, for instance, get killed if a polit­i­cal hench­man thought you came from the wrong neigh­bor­hood, or even if you wore the wrong col­or. Wear­ing orange showed affil­i­a­tion with one polit­i­cal par­ty and green with the oth­er. No won­der, then, that my friends and the rare noc­tur­nal passer­by declared me crazy for my long late-night treks that tra­versed war­ring polit­i­cal zones.

I made friends with strangers and went from being a very shy, awk­ward kid to being an extro­vert­ed, awk­ward one. The beg­gar, the ven­dor, the poor labor­er — those were expe­ri­enced wan­der­ers, and they became my night­time instruc­tors; they knew the streets and deliv­ered lessons on how to nav­i­gate and enjoy them. The streets had their rules, and I loved the chal­lenge of try­ing to mas­ter them. I learned how to be alert to sur­round­ing dan­gers and near­by delights, and prid­ed myself on rec­og­niz­ing telling details that my peers missed. I’d nav­i­gate away from a preda­to­ry pace, and speed up to chat when the cadence of a gait announced friendliness.

I imag­ined myself a Jamaican Tom Sawyer, one moment saun­ter­ing down the streets to pick low-hang­ing man­goes that I could reach from the side­walk, anoth­er moment hang­ing out­side a street par­ty with bat­tling sound sys­tems. The streets had their own safe­ty: Unlike at home, there I could be myself with­out fear of bod­i­ly harm. Walk­ing became so reg­u­lar and famil­iar that the way home became home.

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