OUT OF EDEN WALK

I am walking across the planet.

For more than two years, I have hopscotched over searing lava fields. I have crabbed sideways through alleys in vast migrant slums. I have traversed sun-hammered deserts and scaled peaks in blinding snow. I have swaggered down fashionable boulevards. What has all this plodding taught me? It has taught me one thing: Georgians are the most inept pedestrians in the world.

This is a painful verdict to accept.

Georgians are wonderful people. Warm. Hospitable. Funny. Cultured. Life-loving. If Earth were ever to dispatch an emissary to another planet in the Milky Way, a planet inhabited by intelligent life forms, I would vote that our species’ envoy be a Georgian. A Georgian would charm the aliens. A Georgian would make the two-headed little green men laugh with us, dance with us, drink Kakhetian wine with us, love us. Unless—of course—our Georgian ambassador ventured to take the extraterrestrials for a stroll in his earthbound capital, Tbilisi. Then Homo sapiens would go extinct. We would be exterminated. Our enraged cosmic guests would vaporize us.

The Out of Eden Walk is paused for the summer in Tbilisi, a pretty entrepôt nestled along the Mtkvari River in the Caucasus. In a few months, my 21,000-mile trek in the wake of the first humans who walked out of Africa will resume. Meanwhile, I have swapped continental horizons for micro-migrations: for short foot commutes. To museums. To embassies. To cafes. Naturally, I bump into Georgians every day. Occasionally, they knock me down.

The spatial awkwardness of Tbilisi’s walkers is an enduring mystery.

At rush hour, when commuters pour from the subways and clog the narrow sidewalks, people insist on walking four or five abreast, forming impassable human chains. Other walkers meander, rudderlessly, while texting or daydreaming or perhaps while actually still asleep. Men smoke in maddening gaggles, carelessly blocking strategic bottlenecks. There is no concept of “lanes” of sidewalk traffic. No one budges a micron to accommodate old ladies or the lame or even Orthodox high clergy. It is chaos. It is anarchy. Georgians walk the way atoms vibrate in a vacuum—randomly, without volition, in a manner that physicists describe as Brownian Movement: a form of walking nihilism.

This isn’t how it is supposed to be.

Researchers writing last year in the journal Physical Review Letters studied how human beings act—and react—while walking in urban environments.

Using sophisticated computer modeling to analyze individual movements, the scientists discovered a long-sought-after grail: pedestrian behavior in crowds is in fact mathematically predictable. It involves a variable they call “time to collision.” Walkers adjust their courses depending on the seconds (or yards) that separate them from oncoming foot traffic. Any pedestrian who is more than three seconds away falls off our perceptual radar. Any walker who approaches within this radius triggers evasive action. It is a question of anticipation, of foreknowledge, of instinct.

As described in the article, “Universal Power Law Governing Pedestrian Interactions,” the amount of energy that an average walking human invests in avoiding an elbow to the ribs can be calculated thus, with “t” equaling time to impact:

1/t2

This tidy equation is most likely very ancient. Doubtless, it is embedded in our two-legged DNA. Clearly, Georgians lack the gene.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Erekle Urushadze, a Tbilisi resident and the Loneliest Community Activist in the World, tells me. “But it’s really true. We don’t know how to walk.”

Why is Urushadze so wretchedly lonesome?

Because: He wishes to challenge the utter supremacy of the automobile in Tbilisi. He speaks of “green spaces.” He talks, wistfully, of “walking malls.” How quaint! In Tbilisi, cars reign triumphant. Cars rule. They have conquered the urban commons so categorically, so ruthlessly, that no Tbilisian in his right mind questions the apex predator status of the auto driver. Even I accept this rueful fact. True, I also have attempted yanking the scowling horn-honkers bodily—by their throats—out through their open car windows. And sadly, this has proven impossible. Georgia recently enacted a seat belt law: Drivers are now strapped in. But I accept it.

But back to pedestrian pathologies. There are theories.

Not surprisingly, urban design advocates such as Urushadze blame the brutal hegemony of the internal combustion engine. With cars in possession of all the spatial rights—they commonly use up sidewalk space for parking—the powerless prey (pedestrians) turn on each other.

A few locals ascribe the absence of sidewalk etiquette in Tbilisi more grandly to geopolitics. Having only recently cast off the shackles of Soviet Union rule, Georgians will not be constrained. To hell with the physics of walking. Georgians stride where they wish!

Still others cite rapid urbanization: Tbilisi is swollen with immigrants from villages. In the wide-open countryside, one can ramble freely, pasturing a flock of lambs here or a herd of piglets there. Why not on Freedom Square?

Yet perhaps the most compelling explanation of all is also the most intangible: the Georgian joie de vivre.

A typical scene in Tbilisi, Georgia:

A young man falls abruptly to one knee on a bustling sidewalk. He holds up a lipstick-red rose to his beloved, to a young woman strolling beside him. Only Georgians can pull this off with commitment, with grace. It is why Russia invades so often: panache envy. Russians see Georgians as the Tahitians of the old Soviet empire.

“Will you marry me?” the young man asks.

The young woman smiles. She bends down fetchingly. She cups her ear. She cannot hear. “What?” she says.

The man inhales a mighty lungful of air. He bellows: “WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

“WHAT?” the woman hollers back.

At least this is what I think they say. My Georgian is not so good. I cannot make out their words, anyway: It is a sidewalk on Rustaveli Avenue, howling with rocketing traffic, and one of loudest streets in the world. About these deafened and oblivious lovers stalls a mass of frustrated foot commuters. The sidewalk is instantly blocked. First ten, then thirty, then fifty rushing pedestrians pile up, clumping blindly into each other, struggling to get past, a colossal and growing clot in a cracked and love-struck artery.

The week I arrived in Tbilisi, the noted Georgian paleoanthropologist David Lordkipanidze, the discoverer of the famous Dmanisi Man, shook my hand. His rare hominid finds date back 1.8 million years. They are the oldest human fossils outside Africa.

“Thank you,” Lordkipanidze said, “for proving that Dmanisi Man could walk here from Africa.”

I didn’t know what to say. I have no idea how humans got to the Caucasus. But on the evidence, it wasn’t by walking.