On Trails Read online

 

  On a trail, to walk is to follow. Like prostration or apprenticeship, trail walking both requires and instills a certain measure of humility. To keep my pack light, I had brought along no maps, no satellite assistance, only a thin guidebook and a cheap compass for emergencies. The trail was my only real source of navigation. So I clung to it, like Theseus tracing Ariadne’s unspooling ball of twine.

  In my journal one night I wrote: “There are moments when you cannot help but feel that your life is being controlled by some not-­entirely-benevolent god. You skirt down a ridge only to climb it again; you climb a steep peak when there is an obvious route around it; you cross the same stream three times in the course of an hour, for no apparent reason, soaking your feet in the process. You do these things because someone, somewhere, decided that that’s where the trail must go.”

  It was a creepy feeling, knowing that my decisions were not my own. In the first few weeks I often thought back to an anecdote I’d once heard about E. O. Wilson, the famed entomologist. In the late 1950s, to entertain visitors, Wilson used to write his name on a piece of paper with a special chemical liquid. Afterward, a swarm of fire ants would emerge from their nest and dutifully line up to spell out each letter of his name, like members of a marching band.

  Wilson’s party trick was, in fact, the result of a major scientific breakthrough. For centuries, scientists had suspected that ants left invisible trails for one another, but Wilson was the first to pinpoint the source: a tiny, finger-shaped organ called the Dufour’s gland. When he extracted the gland from the abdomen of a fire ant and smeared it across a plate of glass, other fire ants immediately swarmed to it. (“They tumbled over one another in their haste to follow the path I had blazed for them,” Wilson recalled.) He later synthesized this trail pheromone, a single gallon of which, he estimated, could summon one trillion fire ants.

  In 1968 a group of researchers in Gulfport, Mississippi, put a new twist on Wilson’s trick: They discovered that a certain species of termite will even follow a line drawn by a normal ballpoint pen, which contains glycol compounds that termites mistake for trail pheromones. (For some reason, termites prefer blue ink over black.) Ever since, science teachers have amused their students by drawing blue spirals on sheets of paper, while termites line up and confusedly circle toward nowhere.

  On my hike, when the trail veered hard to the east or west, I would often wonder whether I too wasn’t being led in cruel circles. Seen in a certain light, trails represent a particularly grim form of determinism. “Man may turn which way he please, and undertake any thing whatsoever,” wrote Goethe, “he will always return to the path which nature has prescribed for him.” On the AT, this was certainly the case. Though I explored the surrounding woods and hitchhiked into towns, in the end I always came back to the trail. If uncertainty is the heart of adventure, I thought to myself, what kind of adventure was this?

 

  Northward I moved, through a gray southland spring. The trees were black scrags, the ground papered in old leaves. One morning in Tennessee, I awoke to find my hiking shoes bronzed in ice. In North Carolina, I hiked through knee-deep snow, then ankle-deep slush. The walking was hard, but then every few days, regardless of the terrain or the weather, I would experience the joy of slipping from the dark woods and ascending into the air and light.

  In my second week on the trail I fell in with a tight little group of fellow thru-hikers. We happily traveled together for a few weeks. But upon reaching Virginia, I quickened my pace and lost them. Weeks or months later, whenever I slowed down or they sped up, I would bump into these friends again, as if by some miraculous coincidence. The miracle, of course, was the trail itself, which held us together in space like so many beads on a string.

  Each of us adopted new trail names. Most people were given their names by fellow thru-hikers because of something they had said or done; my friend Snuggles, for example, had a habit of snuggling up against other hikers in the lean-tos at night to keep herself warm. Others picked names in an attempt to shape new, aspirational identities for themselves. A tense silver-haired woman renamed herself Serenity, while a timid young man called himself Joe Kickass; sure enough, over time, she seemed to grow incrementally calmer, and he more audacious.

  A group of jolly older women christened me Spaceman, in reference to the astral appearance of my shiny, ultralight hiking gear. The name clicked. In the trail registers—notebooks located at regular intervals along the trail, meant for recordkeeping and note sharing—I began drawing a series of comic strips. The protagonist was a spaceman who had come down to Earth and somehow found himself navigating the strange customs, odd characters, and pseudo-wildernesses of the Appalachian Trail.

  Once a week or so, a group of us thru-hikers would hitchhike into town together, find a cheap motel (sometimes piling six or eight people into a single room), and spend the day showering, washing our filthy clothes, drinking beer, eating impossible quantities of greasy food, and watching bad TV—glutting ourselves, like barbarians, on the meretricious pleasures of civilization. By the next morning we would be eager to get back on the trail, where we could sweat out the gunk and savor the clean air.

  I had expected the trail to be a refuge for loners like me; the sense of community that formed among us scattered thru-hikers took me by surprise, and then grew to be one of the hike’s nectarine joys. We were bonded by common experience. Each of us knew how it felt to walk for weeks through hail and snow and rain. We starved; we gorged. We drank from waterfalls. In the Grayson Highlands, wild ponies licked the sweat from our legs. In the Smokies, black bears haunted our sleep. We had each faced down the same Cerberus of loneliness, boredom, and self-doubt, and we had learned that the only solution was to out-walk it.

 

  As I got to know my fellow thru-hikers—a motley pack of freedom seekers and nature worshipers and outright kooks—it struck me as odd that all of us had willingly confined ourselves to a single path. Most of us saw this hike as an interlude of wild freedom before we reentered the ever-tightening hedge maze of adult life. But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what a trail offers. Quite the opposite—a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic.

  To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line. The ancient prophets and sages—most of whom lived in an era when footpaths provided the primary mode of transport—understood this fact intimately, which is why the foundational texts of nearly every major religion invoke the metaphor of the path. Zoroaster spoke often of the “paths” of enhancement, of enablement, and of enlightenment. The ancient Hindus too prescribed three margas, or paths, to attain spiritual liberation. Siddhārtha Gautama preached the āryāstāngamārga, or the Noble Eightfold Path. The Tao literally means “the path.” In Islam, the teachings of Muhammad are called the sunnah (again, “the path”). The Bible, too, is crisscrossed with trails: “Ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it, and you shall find rest for your souls,” commanded the Lord to the idolaters. (Responded the idolaters: “We will not walk therein.”)

  There are, it is often said by the more ecumenical prophets, many paths up the mountain. So long as it helps a person navigate the world and seek out what is good, a path, by definition, has value. It is rare to run across a spiritual leader preaching that there are no paths to enlightenment. Some of the Zen masters came close, though even the great Dōgen stated that meditation “is the straight path of the Buddha way.” The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti stands out in this regard. “Truth has no path,” he wrote. “All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing.” Unsurprisingly, his path of pathlessness attracted fewer adherents than the reass
uringly detailed instructions of Muhammad or Confucius. Lost in the howling landscapes of life, most people will choose the confinement of a path to the dizzying freedom of an unmarked wilderness.

 

  My spiritual path, to the extent that I had one, was the trail itself. I regarded long-distance hiking as an earthy, stripped down, American form of walking meditation. The chief virtue of the trail’s confining structure is that it frees the mind up for more contemplative pursuits. The aim of my slapdash trail religion was to move smoothly, to live simply, to draw wisdom from the wild, and to calmly observe the constant flow of phenomena. Needless to say, I mostly failed. Looking back through my journal recently, I found that rather than spending my days in a state of serene observation, much of my time was given over to griping, fantasizing, worrying over logistics, and dreaming of food. Enlightened I was not. But overall I was as happy and healthy as I’d ever been.

  Over the course of my first couple of months, my pace gradually increased, from ten miles per day up to fifteen and then twenty. I continued to accelerate as I reached the relatively low-lying ridges of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. By the time I crossed over into Vermont, I was covering as many as thirty miles a day. In the process, my body was being re-tooled for the task of walking. My stride lengthened. Blisters hardened to calluses. All spare fat, and a fair bit of muscle, was converted into fuel. At any given moment, one or two components of the machine were usually begging for maintenance—a sore ankle, a chafed hip. But on the rare days when everything was running in harmony, hiking a good stretch of trail felt like gunning a supercar down an empty interstate: a perfect marriage of instrument and task.

  My mind began to change, subtly, too. A legendary old hiker named Nimblewill Nomad once told me that eighty percent of aspiring Appalachian Trail thru-hikers who give up do so for mental reasons, not physical ones. “They just can’t deal with the daily, the weekly, the monthly challenge of being out there in the quiet,” he said. I begrudgingly learned to embrace the monastic silence of the eastern forests. Some days, after many miles, I would slip into a state of near-perfect mental clarity—serene, crystalline, thought-free. I was, as the Zen sages say, just walking.

 

  The trail leaves its mark upon its travelers: My legs became a map of black scrapes and leechy pink scars. Ragged holes opened up in my hiking shoes, and beneath those, in my socks, and beneath those, in my feet. My T-shirt began to dissolve from the months of friction and corrosive sweat. If I reached back, I could feel my shoulder blades pushing through the threadbare fabric like budding wings.

  At the same time, I began to notice that we hikers likewise alter the trail in our passing. I first recognized our impact when climbing the steep S-shaped turns up hillsides called switchbacks. When a trail is too curvy, descending hikers tend to create shortcuts to skip the turns. I also noticed that in boggy areas, hikers would scramble for dry footing, which split the trail into multiple strands. There seemed to be a basic conflict between the rationale of the trail’s architects and that of its walkers. Later, by volunteering on trail-building crews, I would learn why this is so: hikers typically seek the path of least resistance across the landscape. The trail designers, meanwhile, attempt to build trails that will resist erosion, spare sensitive plant life, and avoid private property lines. (The push to teach hikers “Leave No Trace” principles over the past twenty years has had some success in realigning these divergent value systems.) But even if one assiduously stayed within the trail bed, one would still be altering the trail, because every step a hiker takes is a vote for the continued existence of a trail. If everyone decided to stop hiking the AT forever, it would become overgrown and eventually disappear.

  Here is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking.

  Use creates trails. Long-lasting trails, then, must be of use. They persist because they connect one node of desire to another: a lean-to to a freshwater spring, a house to a well, a village to a grove. Because they both express and fulfill the collective desire, they exist as long as the desire does; once the desire fades, they fade too.

  In the 1980s, a professor of urban design at the University of Stuttgart named Klaus Humpert began studying a series of dirt footpaths that had sprung up on the campus’s greens, forming shortcuts between paved walkways. He performed an experiment where he erased the campus’s informal footpaths by resodding them with grass. Just as he suspected, new trails soon appeared exactly where the old ones had been.

  These impromptu trails, which are surprisingly common, are called “desire lines.” They can be found in the parks of every major city on earth, slicing off the right angles that efficiency deplores. Studying satellite imagery, I have found desire lines even in the capitals of the world’s most repressive countries—in Pyongyang, in Naypyidaw, in Ashgabat. Understandably, dictatorial architects, like actual dictators, despise them. A shortcut is a kind of geographic graffiti, pointing out the authoritarian failure to predict our needs and police our desires. In response, planners sometimes attempt to impede desire lines by force. But this tactic is doomed to failure—hedges will be trampled, signs uprooted, fences felled. Wise designers sculpt with desire, not against it.

  Previously, when I found an unmarked trail in the woods or across a city park, I used to wonder about its authorship. But usually, I’ve learned, the answer is that no one person made it. Instead, it emerged. Someone made a stab at a problem, took a tentative trip, and the next person followed, and then another, subtly improving the route along the way.

  Trails are not unique in this regard—a similar evolutionary process takes place with other communal creations, like folktales, work songs, jokes, and memes. Upon hearing an old joke, I used to wonder what nameless, forgotten comic genius had written it. But this was a futile question to ask, because most old jokes are not born whole; they evolve over the course of decades. Richard Raskin, a scholar of Jewish humor, has sifted through hundreds of anthologies of Jewish jokes in multiple languages, from as far back as the early nineteenth century to the present, to find the origins of classic jokes. What he discovered was that traditional Jewish jokes evolve along common “pathways”—which usually involve reframing, tweaking logic, swapping out characters and settings, and adding more surprising punch lines—all in search of “a better way of fulfilling the stories’ comic potential.” Like a good trail, a good joke is the result of an untold number of nameless authors and editors. He provides an example from 1928, in which a husband and wife are walking down a dirt road when a heavy rain begins to fall:

  “Sarah, pull your skirt up higher. It’s practically dragging in the mud!” cries the husband.

  “I can’t do that. My stockings are torn!” replies his wife.

  “Why didn’t you put a fresh pair of stockings on?” the husband asks.

  “Could I know it was going to rain?”

  Raskin deems this joke a failure; it lacks the logical contradiction that lies at the heart of the absurd. But it was a start. Twenty years later, the joke had been tweaked in a number of ways: the setting was moved from an unnamed location to the mythic town of Chelm, which was known to be full of fools; the sentences were sharpened; and the stockings were swapped out for an umbrella, giving the punch line a neater logical paradox. Having passed through countless mouths, the joke had grown from a clunker to a classic:

  Two sages of Chelm went out for a walk. One carried an umbrella, the other didn’t. Suddenly, it began to rain.

  “Open your umbrella, quick!” suggested the one without an umbrella.

 
“It won’t help,” answered the other.

  “What do you mean, it won’t help? It will protect us from the rain.”

  “It’s no use, the umbrella is as full of holes as a sieve.”

  “Then why did you take it along in the first place?”

  “I didn’t think it would rain!”

 

  One torrential afternoon on the AT, as I was hiking around Nuclear Lake, in New York, I turned a corner to discover a black bear waddling down the middle of the trail. It apparently could neither hear nor smell me amid the rain. It went on calmly snuffling along until I clacked my trekking poles together, at which point it spun around, spotted me, and then nervously trundled off into the woods. I stopped to inspect the stubby-fingered, sharp-clawed prints it had left in the mud. Over the following weeks I began to notice other prints—mostly deer, squirrel, raccoon, and, farther north, moose—pressed into the wet trail. When I left the trail to explore the nearby woods, I was surprised to find a shadow kingdom of trails connecting parts unknown.

  Humans are neither the earth’s original nor its foremost trailblazers. Compared to our clumsy dirt paths, the trails of ants are downright wizardly. Many species of mammals, it turns out, are also remarkably adept trail-builders. Even the dumbest animals are experts at finding the most efficient route across a landscape. Our languages have grown to reflect this fact: In Japan, desire lines are called kemonomichi, or beast trails. In France, they call them chemin de l’âne, or donkey paths. In Holland, they say Olifantenpad, elephant paths. In America and England, people sometimes dub them “cow paths.”