I’m a walker, which means I have something major in common with Superman. It’s been rainy or snowy or cold these days, but I still prefer walking to riding when I need to be at, say, my kids’ school four miles away, or need to clear my head before or after a show at the Long Wharf Theater, or just need to return library books or buy milk.

Often I can take literature along. Audiobooks on the iPod (odyssey stories work well—Homer himself, or Jim Harrison’s The English Major, or Stephen King’s Cell), paperbacks or magazines I can nimbly peruse on the quieter sidewalks…

All the sidewalks tend to be quiet. Pedestrianism has been out of fashion for decades. Yet some of the most popular writers and thinkers of the 20th century were voracious walkers: Dickens, Thoreau, silent filmmakers D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and, ironically enough, Henry Ford.

Now add Superman. I’ve been staying home and putting my feet up so I can follow the coverage of the Man of Steel’s year-long constitutional alongside browses through Aaron Sussman & Ruth Goode’s 400-page 1967 monument to foot-movement The Magic of Walking (Simon & Schuster, and available here in New Haven at the Institute Library on Chapel Street—once I walk up those stairs and return it, that is.)

The book is a litany of leg-stretching insights, including this one from Robert Louis Stevenson:

In the course of a day’s walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhiliration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A man doesn not make so many articles towards the end, not does he laugh aloud; but the purelyu animal pleasures, the sense of physical well-being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still content.

Superman’s decision to take a year off from interplanetary battle and other supersonic tasks and simply stroll across his adopted USA homeland has been met with confusion, derision and incredulity. Yet this is just a slight extension of the sort of restraint Superman has offered to America all along. He could do everything he does at super speed, all the time. He has no real need to slow down to the point where he can interact with humans, let alone cobblestones. Yet he’s always chosen to, explaining his actions and debating morality when he could easily frame his exploits as forces of nature or inexplicable miracles without need for discussion at all. He could work in mysterious ways, yet he walks among us.

Amazing, considering that he’s an extraterrestrial who is literally tireless, Superman has developed an innate understanding of the human need for contemplation, downtime and “getting away from it all.” It’s long been rumored that he has a “secret identity” through which he communes with mortals on our own terms. Another longstanding rumor concerns his Fortress of Solitude, a sort of vacation home for harried superhumans.

Whether or not it’s true that Superman disguises himself as a “regular” person (but what happens when he shakes hands?), or takes the occasional weekend to recharge (though what exactly in his literally indefatigable body or spirit he needs  recharging is beyond our understanding) doesn’t matter as much as the existence of the rumors themselves. Why on Earth would we expect someone from not on Earth to take an interest in commonplace activities like work, leisure activities or long-distance walking?

Yet Superman plays readily into these imaginings. He walks. He talks. He flies mostly out of convenience, not to distance himself from real-world relationships. A real stand-up guy. His current wanderings (chronicled monthly in the pages of the graphic magazine bearing his name, starting with issue #701 and expected to continue at least through #712) evoke some of the greatest walkers of all time: Johnny Appleseed, Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, Art Garfunkel and the countless folks who’ve trod countless miles for charitable causes. Superman’s walk is equally reflective, rejuvenating, resonant. Yet his is profoundly at odds with those other willing walkers because he’s not gaining fame or fundraising ability or even that much greater a consciousness of his surroundings through his journey. He’s exercising restraint with this exercising. He’s even predetermined that he’ll need a year to get the most out of it.

If folks didn’t grasp the power of walking before, that Stevensonian contentment outlined above, will this super example help or hinder?