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  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The path is made in the walking of it.

  —ZHUANGZI

  PROLOGUE

  ONCE, YEARS AGO, I left home looking for a grand adventure and spent five months staring at mud. It was the spring of 2009, and I had set out to walk the full length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. My departure date was timed so that I would transition seamlessly from a mild southern spring to a balmy northern summer, but for some reason the warmth never arrived. It stayed cool that year, rained often. Newspapers likened it to the freak summer of 1816, when cornfields froze to their roots, pink snow fell over Italy, and a young Mary Shelley, locked up in a gloomy villa in Switzerland, began to dream of monsters. My memories of the hike consist chiefly of wet stone and black earth. The vistas from many of the mountaintops were blotted out. Shrouded in mist, rain hood up, eyes downcast, mile after mile, month after month, I had little else to do but study the trail beneath my nose with Talmudic intensity.

  In his novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac refers to this kind of walking as “the meditation of the trail.” Japhy Ryder, a character modeled after the Zen poet Gary Snyder, advises his friend to “walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by.” Trails are seldom looked at this intently. When hikers want to complain about a particularly rough stretch of trail, we gripe that we spent the whole day looking down at our feet. We prefer to look up, away, off into the distance. Ideally, a trail should function like a discreet aide, gracefully ushering us through the world while still preserving our sense of agency and independence. Perhaps this is why, for virtually all of literary history, trails have remained in the periphery of our gaze, down at the bottommost edge of the frame: they have been, quite literally, beneath our concern.

  As hundreds—and then thousands—of miles of trail passed beneath my eyes, I began to ponder the meaning of this endless scrawl. Who created it? Why does it exist? Why, moreover, does any trail?

  Even after I reached the end of the AT, these questions followed me around. Spurred on by them, and sensing in some vague way that they might lead to new intellectual ground, I began to search for the deeper meaning of trails. I spent years looking for answers, which led me to yet bigger questions: Why did animal life begin to move in the first place? How does any creature start to make sense of the world? Why do some individuals lead and others follow? How did we humans come to mold our planet into its current shape? Piece by piece, I began to cobble together a panoramic view of how pathways act as an essential guiding force on this planet: on every scale of life, from microscopic cells to herds of elephants, creatures can be found relying on trails to reduce an overwhelming array of options to a single expeditious route. Without trails, we would be lost.

  My quest to find the nature of trails often proved trickier than I had expected. Modern hiking trails loudly announce their presence with brightly painted signs and blazes, but older trails are more inconspicuous. The footpaths of some ancient indigenous societies, like the Cherokee, were no more than a few inches wide. When Europeans invaded North America, they slowly widened parts of the native trail network, first to accommodate horses, then wagons, then automobiles. Now, much of that network is buried beneath modern roadways, though remnants of the old trail system can still be found when you know where—and how—to look.

  Other trails are yet more obscure. The trails of some woodland mammals dimple the underbrush so faintly that only an experienced tracker can point them out. Ants nose along chemical pathways that are wholly invisible. (One trick to seeing them, I learned, is to sprinkle the area with lycopodium, the same powder police use to dust for fingerprints.) A few trails are tucked away underground: termites and naked mole-rats carve tunnels through the earth, marking them with traces of pheromones to keep their bearings. Finer still are the tangled neural pathways within a single human brain, which are so multitudinous that even the world’s most advanced computers cannot yet map them all. Technology, meanwhile, is busy knitting itself into an intricate network of pathways, dug deep underfoot and strung ethereally overhead, so that information can race across continents.

  I learned that the soul of a trail—its trail-ness—is not bound up in dirt and rocks; it is immaterial, evanescent, as fluid as air. The essence lies in its function: how it continuously evolves to serve the needs of its users. We tend to glorify trailblazers—those hardy souls who strike out across uncharted territory, both figurative and physical—but followers play an equally important role in creating a trail. They shave off unnecessary bends and brush away obstructions, improving the trail with each trip. It is thanks to the actions of these walkers that the trail becomes, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place.” In bewildering times—when all the old ways seem to be dissolving into mire—it serves us well to turn our eyes earthward and study the oft-overlooked wisdom beneath our feet.

 

  I was ten years old when I first glimpsed that a trail could be something more than a strip of bare dirt. That summer, my parents shipped me off to a small, antiquated summer camp in Maine called Pine Island, where there was no electricity or running water, only kerosene lanterns and cold lake. During the second of my six weeks there, a handful of us boys were loaded into a van and driven many hours away to the base of Mount Washington, for what was to be my first backpacking trip. As a child of the concretized prairies of suburban Illinois, I was apprehensive. The act of lugging a heavy pack through the mountains looked suspiciously like one of those penitent rituals that adults sometimes forced themselves to perform, like visiting distant relatives or eating crusts of bread.

  I was wrong, though; it was worse. Our counselors had allotted us three days to climb the eight miles to the top of Mount Washington and back down, which should have been ample time. But the trail was steep, and I was scrawny. My backpack—a heavy, ill-fitting, aluminum-­framed Kelty—resembled a piece of full-body orthodontia. After only an hour of climbing the wide rocky trail leading up Tuckerman Ravine, my stiff new leather boots had already begun to blister my toes and rasp the skin from my heels. A hot liquid ache perfused the muscles of my back. When my counselors weren’t looking, I made pleading, pained faces at passing strangers, as if this were all part of some elaborate kidnapping. That night, as I lay in my sleeping bag in the lean-to, I considered the logistics of an escape.

  On the second morning, a gray rain blew in. Instead of summiting the peak, which our counselors deemed unsafe, we took a long hike around the southern flank of the mountain. We left our packs back at the shelter, each of us carrying only a single water bottle and a pocketful of snacks. Free from the dreaded weight of my pack, warm inside my rubberized rain poncho, I began to enjoy myself. I inhaled the fir-sweet air, exhaled fog. The forest gave off a faint chlorophyllic glow.

  We walked in single file, floating through the trees like little ghosts. After an hour or two, we rose above the tree line and entered a realm
of lichen-crusted rock and white mist. The trails around the mountain branched and twined. At the juncture with the Crawford Path, one of our counselors announced that we were turning onto a leg of the Appalachian Trail. His tone suggested we were meant to be impressed. I had heard that name before, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. The path beneath our feet, he explained, followed the spine of the Appalachians north to Maine and south all the way to the state of Georgia, almost two thousand miles away.

  I still recall the tingle of wonder I felt upon hearing these words. The plain-looking trail beneath my feet had suddenly grown to colossal scale. It was as if I had dived down into the camp lake and discovered the slow, undulant vastness of a blue whale. Small as I felt back then, it was a thrill to grasp something so immense, if only by the very tip of its tail.

 

  I kept hiking. It got easier—or rather, I got tougher. My pack and boots softened until they slid into place with the dry fluidity of an old baseball glove. I learned to move nimbly beneath a heavy load and push on for hours without breaks. I also came to savor the satisfaction of dropping my pack at the end of a long day: the warm animal weight would fall coolly away, and I would rise from my burden with a weird heliated feeling, as if my toes were merely grazing the dirt.

  Hiking proved to be the perfect pastime for a free-floating kid like me. My mother once gave me a leather-bound journal that was meant to have my name embossed in gold along the spine, but instead the printer erroneously engraved the words ROBERT MOON. The mistake was oddly fitting. Growing up, I often felt extraterrestrial. It wasn’t that I was lonely or ostracized; I just never felt fully at home. Before I went off to college, no one knew I was gay, and I knew no other gay people. I did my best to blend in. Each year I would dutifully put on a suit and tie for the spring formal, the cotillion, or the prom. I donned athletic uniforms, first-date uniforms, drinking-pilfered-cans-of-Old-Style-in-a-friend’s-basement uniforms. All the while, though, part of me wondered: What’s the point of this elaborately costumed performance we put on?

  In my family I was the youngest child by nearly a decade. My parents, who were already in their forties by the time I was born, granted me an unusual amount of freedom. I could have run wild. Instead, I spent much of my time in my room reading books, which, I discovered, was like running away from home, minus the risk and parental heartache. And so, from the third grade on, I burned through books the way a chain-smoker smokes, picking up one even as I was extinguishing the last.

  The book that kicked off my habit in earnest was a flimsy paperback copy of Little House in the Big Woods. I learned that my home, in northern Illinois, was just a few hundred miles southeast of where the book’s author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was born in 1867. However, her descriptions of the Big Woods of Wisconsin were wholly foreign to me. “As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods,” she wrote. “There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.” I was intoxicated by Ingalls’s sense of isolation and self-reliance.

  I don’t remember how many of the Little House books I read in a row, but it was enough to require an intervention from my teacher, who gently suggested I move on to something else. In the coming years I progressed from Little House to Hatchet to Walden to A Sand County Almanac to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I enjoyed lingering over the minutiae of a life spent outdoors. During my first summer at Pine Island, I discovered a parallel genre of wilderness adventure books: first the boyish yarns of Mark Twain and Jack London, then the alpine reveries of John Muir, the Antarctic agonies of Ernest Shackleton, and the existential odysseys of Robyn Davidson and Bruce Chatwin.

  These two lineages of outdoor writers were roughly divided between those who were deeply rooted to a piece of land and those who were proudly untethered. I preferred the drifters. I held no profound connection to my land, my ancestors, my culture, my community, my gender, or my race. I was raised without religion, and without hatred of religion. My family was diffuse: my parents, two Texans living in the frigid North, were already divorced by the time I was in the first grade; not long after, my two older sisters went away to college and never moved back. A vague restlessness seemed to run in our blood.

  Nine months out of every year I drifted through the halls of one academic institution after another, changing costumes, learning new dialects, faking fluency. It was only during the summers, on a series of ever-lengthening sojourns in the wilderness, that I felt wholly natural. I worked my way up from the Appalachians to the mighty Rockies, then to the Beartooths, the Winds, the snowy behemoths of the Alaska Range, and, later, high-altitude peaks ranging from Mexico to Argentina. Up there, far from etiquette or ritual, I could walk unscrutinized, unbound.

  For two summers in college I took a job back at Pine Island leading kids on short hikes through the Appalachians. On trips along the AT I would occasionally bump into hikers who were attempting to walk the trail’s full length in a single, mammoth, months-long effort. These “thru-hikers” were easy to spot: They introduced themselves with odd “trail names,” ate ravenously, and walked with a light, lupine gait. I was intimidated by them, but also envious. They resembled the rock musicians of an idealized past—the same long hair, the same wild beards, the same wasted physiques, the same esoteric argot, the same peripatetic lifestyle, the same faint, vain awareness of being, in a way, heroic.

  I sometimes talked with these thru-hikers, plying them with chunks of cheese or handfuls of candy. I remember one old man who had hiked the whole trail in a Scottish kilt and sandals, and a young man who carried no tent, but a full feather pillow. A few of them proselytized zealously for one church or another, while others spoke of preparing for a looming ecological apocalypse. Many of the people I talked to were between jobs, between schools, or between marriages. I met soldiers returning from war and people recovering from a death in the family. Certain stock phrases were repeated. “I needed some time to clear my head,” they said, or “I knew this might be my last chance.” One summer during college, I told a young thru-­hiker that I hoped to make an attempt someday. “Drop out,” he told me flatly. “Do it now.”

 

  I did not drop out. I was too careful for that. In 2008 I moved to New York, where I worked a series of low-paying jobs. In my free time I planned my thru-hike. I read guidebooks and online message boards, drew up tentative itineraries. Less than a year later I was ready to embark.

  Unlike many people, I had no clear impetus for going on a long hike, no inciting incident. I wasn’t grieving a death or recovering from drug addiction. I wasn’t fleeing anything. I had never been to war. I wasn’t depressed. I was maybe only a little insane. My thru-hike was not an attempt to find myself, find peace, or find God.

  Perhaps, as they say, I simply needed some time to clear my head; perhaps I knew this might be my last chance. Both were mostly true, as clichés often are. I also wanted to find out what it would be like to spend months on end in the wilderness, to live in a prolonged state of freedom. But more than that, I think I wanted to answer a challenge that had loomed over me since childhood. When I was small and frail, hiking the whole trail had seemed a herculean task. As I grew, its impossibility became precisely its appeal.

 

  Over the years, I had picked up some useful tips from the thru-hikers I’d met. Above all, I knew that weight was the enemy of a successful thru-hike, so I retired my trusty old pack and invested in a new ultralight one. Then I traded in my bulky tent for a hammock, bought an airy goose-down sleeping bag, and exchanged my leather boots for a pair of trail running shoes. I pared my medkit down to a few anti-­diarrheal pills, some iodine swabs, a thumb-sized roll of duct tape, and a safety pin. I replaced my white gas stove with one made out of two aluminum Coke cans, which weighed practically nothing. When I crammed all of my gear into my new pack and lifted it for the first time, I was amazed
and slightly terrified. It seemed too insubstantial to house, clothe, and feed a human for five months.

  So I wouldn’t be forced to live off an anemic diet of instant ramen and freeze-dried mashed potatoes, I began cooking heaping piles of nutritious slop (beans and brown rice, quinoa, couscous, whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce) and dehydrating them. I poured sparing amounts of olive oil and hot sauce into small plastic bottles. I filled plastic baggies with baking soda, Gold Bond, vitamins, and painkillers. I divided all of the supplies up into roughly five-day increments and packed them into fourteen cardboard boxes. Into each box, I also placed a chapbook of poetry or a heftier paperback novel that I had cut into slimmer volumes using a straight razor and packing tape.

  I addressed these boxes to post offices along the trail—towns with names like Erwin, Hiawassee, Damascus, Caratunk, and (my favorite) Bland—and left them with my roommate to mail on specified dates. I quit my job. I sublet my apartment. I sold or gave away everything I could spare. Then, on a cold day in March, I flew down to Georgia.

 

  On the summit of Springer Mountain, the trail’s southern terminus, I was greeted by an old man who called himself Many Sleeps, a moniker he had reportedly earned while completing one of the slowest thru-hikes ever recorded. With his droopy eyes and long white beard, he looked like a nylon-clad Rip Van Winkle.

  In his hand he held a clipboard. His job was to collect information from all the passing thru-hikers. He told me it had been a busy year: twelve thru-hikers had registered with him that day, and thirty-seven the day before. In total that spring, almost fifteen hundred people would set out from Springer aiming for Maine, though scarcely a quarter of them would make it.

  There on the mountaintop, before starting my long-awaited hike, I paused to admire the land below: swells of frost-burned earth, fading from brown to gray to blue as they hazed out toward the horizon. The mountains dipped and heaved, jostled and collided. No towns or roads were in sight. It occurred to me that I would never be able to find my way to Maine without the trail. In this foreign, involuted terrain, I would have struggled to even make it to the next ridge. For the next five months, the trail would be my lifeline.