These boots are made for walking

Meet the woman's who's walked every street in Sebastopol - five times over

Katherine McNeil walking near her home at Luther Burbank Heights

You’ve probably seen Katherine McNeil walking around town. She’s a sprightly 82-year-old (though she looks younger), with hiking boots and a small daypack she’s had since the 1970s.

She walks a lot—almost every day—and she doesn’t just ramble hither and thither. She puts a lot of thought into her route, mapping it out on a Chamber of Commerce map of Sebastopol before she sets out.

That’s because McNeil has a goal in mind: to walk every street in Sebastopol. She says it takes about a year for her to do this, and she’s done it five years in a row.

McNeil has two maps – one that she carries with her when she walks and another on the wall of her small apartment in Luther Burbank Heights, where she records her walks in brightly colored markers and dates them.

McNeil, who first moved to Sonoma County in 1969, started walking the streets of Sebastopol even before she moved to town.

“I was living in Santa Rosa and decided to move here, and I wanted to show the gods that I was serious about it,” she said.

She walks for a common enough reason—to stay fit physically and mentally—but she says there’s something spiritual about her walking as well. She has a friend who has walked the El Camino in Spain twice, and McNeil sees her perambulations around Sebastopol in a similar light.

“It’s a kind of pilgrimage,” she said, which is why she normally walks by herself. “I just think there's something about this—that it’s just the right thing for me to do.”

She says it’s also a mental challenge as well as a physical one.

“Part of it is in the head as well as the body because it's all about strategy: how to avoid walking up the street that you can walk down,” she says. She also tries to figure out routes that don’t make her backtrack and walk the same street twice.

Since she no longer drives, she takes the 24 bus to walk in parts of town that are farther away.

McNeil, a retired librarian who has published a book - a bibliography - on the works of poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder, says she sees a link between her approach to walking and her work on the book.

“It's the same sort of mindset, in that a lot of it is about detail and about being thorough,” she said.

It’s also a sort of walking love letter to her adopted town.

“It’s a way of taking Sebastopol in through my skin,” she said. “I often say ‘California is the best state, and Northern California is the best half of California. Sonoma County's the best county in Northern California, and Sebastopol is the best city in Sonoma County. I just think this is a remarkable place.”