Anne LeClaire

We are obsessing here.

I lay it all at the feet of Martha Tod Dudman, a writer from Maine who arrived two weeks ago. Or perhaps I should say I place the blame at Martha’s hip. Where she wears a green pedometer.

Martha’s target goal is 10,000 steps a day. This, she tells us, equals five miles. Most of the time she does more.

Within days she has two of us heading off to purchase our own pedometers. $4.88 plus tax at the nearby Wal-Mart. Let the obsession begin.

We check our tallies at breakfast. At lunch. Mid-afternoon. At dinner. Not that we’re competitive. Oh, no.

I find myself making excuses to run back to the residence from the studio. Four hundred and thirty-seven steps. On my writing breaks, instead of reading, I walk. From the rear of the studio barn up the road to the little church by the field with the baby goats and back is four thousand and twenty-seven steps. Two miles. When returning to the studio after lunch, I no longer use the shortcut across the yard. Forty more steps. No steps too few to tally.

Sara says she’s going over to the college to swim. I offer my car.

“That’s okay,” she says. “I’ll walk.” After dinner she plays - no, competes - in ping-pong. “Play,” she says is too friendly a word. It’s serious business. Intense. We’re all truly amazed at how many steps you can click off during a game.

On a warm day, taking a walk, Martha ties her sweater around her waist. When she returns she discovers that not one step has registered. The sweater has made the pedometer malfunction. For the rest of the day she is fixated on the lost steps. At breakfast the next morning she still grieves their loss, the way you’d mourn a canary that has escaped from its cage and flown through an open window.

But Martha is our cheerleader, her numbers our standard. When it turns unseasonable cold, we walk. When it rains, we walk. After dinner, we walk, usually from the residence down the drive to the highway. Two thousand, two hundred and seven steps. One mile round trip.

Soon Martha and I are sent back to Wal-Mart to get five more pedometers for other Fellows. All women. We’d walk but the store is in the next town up the highway.

There are seven men here at the moment and although we’ve offered to pick up “clickers” for them, not one is interested In fact all of them - the Irani playwright, the painters from North Carolina and Santa Fe, the San Francisco novelist, Wisconsin poet, New York film-maker and Nigerian artist - all are amused at how seriously we’re into this walking thing. They make secret man-eyes at each other as we compare tallies. And they’re the ones eating the potato chips at lunch.

Ten thousand steps - when you spend your working day at a computer - is a lot of steps to aim for. Almost a part-time job.

The artists are luckier. Cheryl notes that she racks up steps in the studio while painting. Apparently artists walk around a lot while they work.

Sadly, Martha left yesterday, returning to her real life in Maine. We picture her striding the streets of Bar Harbor. We vow not to slack off without her. We’ll see.

Stay tuned.