Fear of walking (no, white lady, I am not going to steal your purse)

A long time ago in a little town in central Illinois, one of my roommates went off to a summer internship. His girlfriend Beth, needing a place to stay during the summer, moved into his room for the summer and became a substitute roomie for a couple months. Now Beth and I had always been friends, but we hadn't had a lot of deep conversations - so it came as a surprise one evening as we're talking and something she said stuck out at me "... and so I had to leave the library to get home because the sun was setting, and ..." It turns out that Beth (and apparently other young women on campus as well) wouldn't walk anywhere on campus alone after dark.

This really surprised me. Being from Chicagoland and used to Big Cities, I'm well and truly accustomed to walking wherever and whenever, and never really paying attention to whether it was day or night, swank neighborhood or sketchy neighborhood. I realized in that conversation that one difference might be that I'm male, 6 ft tall and not exactly a "target of opportunity" for a would-be mugger, and that might be most of the difference... but honestly - Champaign-Urbana isn't exactly Cabrini Green. (for that matter, Cabrini-Green isn't Cabrini-Green any more) But that was the first time I realized that friends and neighbors might not feel as safe and secure in life as I do. Ok, it was eye-opening 13 years ago to a college-age youngester.

But of late, I've noticed even more fear, and if you'll permit me a cycling segue: Riding along Fuller/Gallup Park path, one would assume that standard Rules of the Road should apply - walk/jog/ride on the right, pass on the left. But over and over again, there are these people, iPods firmly emplanted, blithely walking/jogging/riding slow on the left hand side of the path, ignorant of everyone around them and thinking that they are the only ones on the path. It's fairly unavoidable that I'm going to blast past them, but they can't hear me give them the "passing on your left" shout because of their iPods, and it's dodgy to blast by on the right (they might get freaked out, confused, jump the wrong way... and then we're a-crashin'). It was after a few times that I realized that this happens mostly in certain spots where there's vegetation on the right side of the trail, and I got to thinking "is this some sort of 'avoid the mugger who might jump out of the bushes' kind of thing?" Since all these walking-in-the-passing-lane people were women by themselves, that's the best explanation I can come up with. (either that or they're ignorant of their surroundings and selfish about sharing the road) And the thing that's remarkable about that is that it's Ann Arbor... in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Sure, we have crime here, but it's not like it's Detroit or D.C. crime rates.

More about just walking: when I'm walking by myself, what do I have to do to to put other people at ease?

All I'm doing is walking. I'm not going to murder anyone. I'm a clean-shaven, clean-clothed, suburban cracker going for a walk, relaxed and non-twitchy. When I make eye-contact with fellow pedestrians, they get skittish. When I don't make eye-contact, they swing wide on the sidewalk as if I'm about to draw a six-shooter on them. And forget about smiling or saying hello to people in passing - that only gets the "ugh, that's creepy... what kind of sick weirdo is this guy that he doesn't have a cell phone jammed into his ear whenever he's walking down the street?" look in return. I'd like to think that maybe it's just my social skills that are the problem, but what I'm really worried about is: maybe people constantly fear the world that they live in. That would be a pretty shitty life, for sure.