The Sun Valley Center Will Present ‘The World Before Your Feet’
By DANA DUGAN
How well do you know your town? For over eight years, Matt Green, 39, has been walking every block of every street in New York City, encompassing five boroughs and more than 8,000 miles. And he’s not done. He figures he’s 98 percent there, with a few random areas yet to cover.
Hosted by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, a documentary about Green’s walk, “The World Before Your Feet,” will be shown at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 9, at the Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum. Green will be in attendance at the screenings.
“I’d always been a walker,” he said in a phone interview last week. “I started a walking group; we’d walk on weekends. I’d post and a dozen random people would show up and we’d go for dinner after.”
The walks became his raison d’être; the journey, the purpose. In 2010, he gave up his civil engineering job, his apartment, and most of his possessions and took off on a walk across the country.
“It took about five months,” he said. “I was thinking nine months, at about 15 miles a day.”
Once he started going, he got into a groove, and was able to double his mileage to about 30 miles a day.
“It was so cheap. People let me shower, and camp at their houses,” Green said. “When I got to Idaho, I crossed through the skinny part south of Coeur d’Alene.”
Green found that you can learn about your town or city by simply walking it, talking to people, taking your time. Upon his return to New York, he was inspired to do the same in his own city.
“That idea of just going to every block of a place stuck in my head,” he said. “I wondered, could I go to all five boroughs?”
Now, 39, Green began exploring both on the ground and online. He posted about his walk. He couch-surfed and even now doesn’t have an apartment of his own; he catsits instead.
“It’s just a normal part of my life now,” he said. “I work on the project every day, though what it consists of has changed over the years. In the early days, every day I was walking a little, plus doing a bit of other stuff, researching all these things I was interested in. The balance has shifted. Now I do catch-up on the writing.”
In 2014, a friend of Green’s, the director Jeremy Workman, asked if he could walk along with his camera.
“There wasn’t a plan to make a movie at first, but he shot about 500 hours, over three and a half years,” Green said.
The film was selected for countless film festivals, including South By Southwest, where it was picked up by Greenwich Entertainment. Jesse Eisenberg eventually came on as an executive producer.
I ask if he can conjure up a block just by hearing the address, eager to see if he’d know my block.
“One interesting thing is that most of what I remember, I don’t remember where I was. But I’ll remember random details.” Oh well.
Now he leads walks in which he encourages people to talk about what they’re seeing and experiencing, and he does some teaching.
“People will have things to look at, and things to talk about,” Green said. “Mostly, you walk with a destination, even if you have no deadline. It’s the act of getting there.”
While in the Wood River Valley for the film screening, Green will present to students on Friday, and guide a snowshoe walk in the woods at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 18.
Participants will gather at The Center to carpool to the destination together. The walk will be followed by an optional no-host gathering and chat with Green at Galena Lodge for drinks and snacks.
To sign up for the walk, or to buy tickets for the two screenings, visit sunvalleycenter.org, or call (208) 726-9491.