The Seattle Walk Report comic completed after a walk around Seattle Center. (Image courtesy of Seattle Walk Report)

As the Monorail thunders overhead, she looks up. “I’ve never been on the Monorail,” she says. “Isn’t that a scandal?” At age 29, the lifelong Seattleite has also never had a driver’s license. In the book’s introduction she notes that, until recently, she had little interest in walking, and preferred the bus. But that all changed after an atypical walk during which the city’s workaday wonders started grabbing her attention, as if she’d put on 3D glasses. “I realized I didn’t need money, a car, or a week off from work to see new and fabulous things,” she writes. “There was an entire world hiding in plain sight in my hometown.” One of her first exciting finds: a carrot with a straw stuck through it.

“It’s really changed my life and perspective on so many things,” she says of walking. “It’s taught me about being open to all kinds of possibility.”

Pulling a reverse Henry David Thoreau, she is doubling down on urban existence. Instead of retreating to a cabin in the Walden woods, her version of his “sucking out the marrow of life” involves scanning the sidewalks of Seattle neighborhoods — such as Capitol Hill, where she recently delighted in discovering a pile of Christmas lights, a bag of rhinestones and a coupon for 20% off a noninvasive facelift.

“Walking and paying close attention to the little, overlooked details has definitely made me fall back in love with Seattle,” she says. “We mostly talk about the changes that happen on a larger scale: that building is gone, or this business shuttered. Before I walked, it felt like those types of things were all that ever happened in Seattle. But when you’re on your feet, going slow, with no barrier between you and the environment, your perspective changes.” She cites a repainted Little Free Library, a new stairway in Mount Baker Park, three darts and a potato sack on Broadway and Pine. “There’s value in acknowledging the smaller things I see on a day-to-day basis that tell a story worth talking about and even celebrating.”