Cross-country skier on a sea of pavement

DR. ROY MEALS strides along Miner Street in San Pedro, one of the paths he wrote about in “Walking the Line: Discoveries Along the Los Angeles City Limits.”

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MEALS’ prescription for life: “Venture forth on foot, and make interesting, life-enriching discoveries. Wherever you live, be neighborly, curious, fit and engaged!”

Meals slipped on loose rocks near the summit of Mt. Lukens and tumbled, scuffing elbows and knees, and snapping the aluminum shaft of one of his walking sticks.

But Meals is not one to wave a white flag or call for a helicopter evacuation.

“Later, at home, I employed my orthopedic skills to repair the broken pole,” Meals writes in “Walking the Line: Discoveries Along the Los Angeles City Limits,” his just-published book about his travels.

Meals, now 80 and still seeing patients once weekly at a UCLA clinic, remained upright most of the rest of the way, adhering to his self-imposed rule of venturing no farther than one mile in from the city limits. To get back to his starting point each day, he often took buses and found that although it was slow going, riders often exited with a thanks to the driver, which struck him as “wonderful grace notes of acknowledgment.”

The doctor ambled about with the two trekking poles, a cross-country skier on a vast sea of pavement. He carried a small backpack, wore a “Los Angeles” ball cap and a shirt with the city limits outline on the front, and handed out business cards with a link to his book project.

Those who clicked on the link were advised to escape their own neighborhoods and follow Meals’ prescription for life: “Venture forth on foot, and make interesting, life-enriching discoveries. Wherever you live, be neighborly, curious, fit and engaged!”

Meals was all those things, and as his surname suggests, he was never shy about sampling L.A.’s abundant offerings.