On Trails

by Robert Moor

  Somewhat ironically, given his general aversion to technology, Lamar Marshall had ultimately been converted by the techno-­evangelists. In response to the loss of land-based learning, he has begun importing over a thousand miles of trails into digital maps—along with the stories, wild foods, and medicine to be found along those trails—so they could one day be accessed by future generations of Cherokees.

  The day after our trip up to Big Stamp, Marshall met me at the Wild South office to show me an early mock-up of the program. Using Google Earth, he had charted a shortcut trail that connected the Raven Fork Trail to the Soco Creek Trail. The satellite images were from the present day, so occasionally, as the yellow path wended through the green mountains, the gray specter of an asphalt parking lot would appear. The anachronisms had initially jarred Marshall, and he considered using Photoshop to clone trees in over the modern scars, but he ultimately decided against it. The program, he reasoned, should represent the world as it currently is—or rather, as it can be walked.

  Into these digital landscapes, here and there Marshall had inserted images that the ancient Cherokee would have found alongside the trail: ginseng leaves, elk, bison, a trail marker tree, intersections with old trading paths. On one hill, called Rattlesnake Mountain, lurked a crude rendering of Uktena, the horned serpent of Cherokee myth.

  As it was told to James Mooney, the monster Uktena was known to hide in dark, lonesome passes over the Great Smoky Mountains. One day a local medicine man named Aganunitsi went hunting for the great serpent, hoping to collect the diamond that was embedded in its forehead. He walked south through the Cherokee lands, encountering mythic snakes, frogs, and lizards, before he finally reached the top of Gahuti Mountain, where he found the Uktena sleeping. The medicine man retreated to the bottom of the mountain and made a great circle of pinecones. Inside the circle he dug a deep circular trench, and within that, he left an island on which he could stand. Then the medicine man lit the pinecones on fire, crept back up to the serpent, and shot an arrow through its heart. The snake awoke in a fury and lunged after the medicine man. The man was prepared; he ran down the hill and leaped inside the circle of flames. The snake raced down behind him, spraying venom, but the poison evaporated in the blaze. While the man waited safely inside his ring of fire, the injured serpent roiled in agony, flattening trees. Its black blood poured down the slope, filling up the circular trench. The medicine man waited on his little island until finally the beast fell limp. After waiting seven days, he visited the site where the serpent lay, and though its flesh and bones had been pecked to dust by birds, one thing remained: a luminous diamond. With that jewel, the medicine man soon became the most powerful man in the tribe.

  Encoded within the story of Uktena—which I have greatly abridged here—is an enormous amount of information, both empirical and mythic, all spun into a taut narrative thread. Even on the page, the story hums. One can only imagine how much more vivid it would have seemed if one had heard it while standing on the mountainside, looking out over the treeless expanses swept bare by the serpent’s tail and the lake filled with its black blood.

  Marshall’s program was a small but meaningful attempt to resituate the story in its rightful place. However, it still lacked the immediacy of terra firma. Marshall knew this, so he hoped to one day build an application that incorporated augmented reality technology with stories and maps, so that children could stand on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain while watching the tale of the Uktena unfold through virtual-reality goggles, or visit the sacred Kituwah mound and see a digital rendering of the site as it once was, four centuries earlier, aglow with the light of the sacred fire.

 

  Walking creates trails. Trails, in turn, shape landscapes. And, over time, landscapes come to serve as archives of communal knowledge and symbolic meaning. In this sense, the various cultures I have so far crudely lumped together under terms like Native and indigenous could perhaps be better described as “trail-walking cultures.” This classification would make modern Westerners, by extension, a “road-driving culture.” The colonization of the New World would not have been possible if Europeans could not harness domesticated animals and drive in vehicles like wagons and, later, trains and automobiles. Today, machines allow us to move radically faster—often along the very same trails Native Americans once used. But in doing so, we have lost the elemental bond between foot and earth.III

  The Blackfoot Indians of North America are an archetypal example of a trail-walking culture. According to their creation stories, the world was shaped by a quasi-divine figure named Napi, or Old Man, as he walked north through Blackfoot country. In the process, he formed rivers, planted deposits of red clay, gave birth to animals. He created plants to feed the animals. Then he created humans to hunt the animals and harvest the plants. He showed humans how to dig up edible roots, how to gather medicinal herbs, how to hunt with a bow and arrow, how to drive buffalo over a cliff, how to use a stone maul, how to build a fire, how to create a stone kettle, how to cook meat. As people moved from place to place in the landscape, performing rituals, telling stories, and singing songs at sacred sites, they reenacted the travels of Napi. “Significantly,” wrote Gerald Oetelaar, “the total landscape is necessary to tell the entire story, to complete the annual ritual cycle, to establish the social and ideological continuity of the group, and to ensure the renewal of resources.”

  “What you’ve got to realize is that the landscape is their archive,” Oetelaar explained to me. “Those places remain alive only as long as people visit them, remember the names, remember the stories, remember the rituals, remember the songs.”

  Trail-walking cultures often grow to see the world in terms of trails. The Western Apache believe the goal of life is to walk “the trail of wisdom,” in pursuit of three attributes Basso translated as “smoothness of mind,” “resilience of mind,” and “steadiness of mind”—puzzling phrases if viewed independently, but perfectly clear when viewed within a metaphorical context of someone walking (smoothly, steadily, resiliently) along a trail. The Cree model for an ideal life is called the “Sweetgrass Trail,” while the Navajos’ ultimate good is a state of peace and balance they describe as “walking the beauty way.” A creation story among the Creeks tells how their bellicose ancestors followed a “white path”—a path lined with white grass—which led them across the mountains to their current home, where they encountered a tribe of peaceful people, who were said to have white hearts. The Creeks never fully abandoned violence, but they nevertheless strove to walk the white path.

  Among the Cherokee, the proper state of being for an individual is called osi, and the ideal state of all things is called tohi. According to Tom Belt, the words osi and tohi have no direct translation in English. Osi refers to the quality of a person who is poised on a single point of balance, centered, upright, and facing forward. Tohi denotes something, or everything, that is moving at its own speed, utterly at peace. An old man shuffling along the sidewalk can be tohi, as can a young warrior running at breakneck speed. Belt compared it to the flow of a stream, which runs fast one moment and slow the next, always moving exactly the pace that the land demands. When combined, an image of the ideal emerges: a person, upright, balanced, moving at a natural gait. Such a person is on what Cherokees call the Right Path, du yu ko dv i.

  I asked Belt how physical trails—the dirt-and-stone paths people actually walk—figured into this metaphorical framework. Belt said that when he and his father would go out hunting in the woods, his father would always take time to describe what events had occurred in a given place. “Someone lived here. Someone killed a deer here. On and on and on,” he said. “There’s always some story about that place that’s going to reconnect you with it and make it yours.”

  What, ultimately, connects us to land? For most animals, I suspect the answer is a mixture of mental familiarity and symbolic marking. The deer stumbles into a strange new field. It begins to explore, with halt
ing steps, stopping often to sniff, to peer, to listen. Over time, though, it comes to recognize certain features. It learns the location of good forage. It marks certain areas with pheromones, which act as chemical signposts. It begins to move more fluidly. Lines of least resistance are discovered. Along these flow lines, with enough trips, a trail appears.

  When humans make themselves at home in a new landscape, they initially behave much like deer—seeking out resources, learning routes, making signs—but over time, that field acquires an additional layer of significance. The land grows to contain not just resources, but stories, spirits, sacred nodes, and the bones of ancestors. At the same time, a deep recognition grows among the people that their lives depend on the products of the soil. People and land become interwoven, until they are nearly indistinguishable: it is no accident that, according to a striking number of cultures around the world, the first humans were sculpted from mud or clay. One version of the Hopi creation story tells that humans were created by two gods named Tawa and the Spider Woman; Tawa thought up the notion of the first man and woman, and then Spider Woman fashioned them from mud, declaring, “May the Thought live.”

  The trails we create from the soil are likewise born of a mixture of mud and thought. Over time, more thoughts accrete, like footprints, and new layers of significance form. Rather than mere traces of movement, trails became cultural through-lines, connecting people and places and stories—linking the trail-walker’s world into a coherent, if fragile, whole.

  * * *

  I. “Champion,” also called “champaign,” is an antiquated term for open, level country. It has the same root as “campus.”

  II. When the Cherokees were forced to move to Oklahoma beginning in 1830, embers from that eternal flame were carried west, and the fire was rekindled there. Then, in 1951, the flame was brought back to North Carolina, where it now burns in front of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in the town of Cherokee.

  III. For the sake of simplicity, I have conspicuously omitted boats—both the canoes and kayaks of Native Americans and the ships of the European colonizers—from this explanation, and elsewhere in this book.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MODERN hiking trail is an uncanny thing. We hikers generally assume it is an ancient, earthborn creation—as old as dirt. But in truth, hiking was invented by nature-starved urbanites in the last three hundred years, and trails have sprouted new shapes to fulfill their hunger. To properly understand the nature of a hiking trail, one must trace the origins of that yearning, back through those early hikers to their ancestors, who set off the chain of innovations and calamities that would gradually distance humans from the planet that birthed them.

  I once asked a young Cherokee woman named Yolanda Saunooke, who works at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, if she knew any hikers. She thought for a moment and then replied that she and her friends had spent much of their childhoods running around in the woods. “I don’t know if that’s considered hiking—playing on your own land, considering that it’s mountainous . . .” she said. That phrase, “on your own land,” snagged in the tissue of my brain. Could one go hiking on one’s own land? If so, what differentiates a hike from a very long walk?

  I asked some of my fellow hikers, and they all agreed that hiking on one’s own land would be rather like camping in one’s backyard, a kind of pantomime of the real experience. A true hike requires wilderness—­land outside of one’s (or anyone’s) land.I The land must meet certain additional conditions: it must be both remote and reachable; it must be devoid of enemies or bandits, but also free of too many tourists or technology; and, most important, it must be deemed worth exploring—which is to say, people must first have learned how to derive worth from it, be it aesthetic or aerobic. This collision of circumstances only occurred in the modern era, when the mechanical creep of industrialism both gave us greater access to the wild and rendered it a vanishing, cherished commodity.

  It is no mere coincidence, then, that the English verb to hike, meaning “to walk for pleasure in open country,” dates back just two hundred years, nor that hiking, used as a gerund, only appeared in the twentieth century. Prior to that shift, the meaning of the word hike fell somewhere between “to sneak” and “to schlep.” The command to “take a hike!” (as in, “scram!”) is a remnant of this older meaning. The history of how we transitioned from the one sense of the word to the other is, in some sense, the story of how modern people, and our trails, grew to finally embrace that strange thing we call wilderness.

 

  In all the weeks I spent in Cherokee country, I only met one Cherokee hiker: Gilliam Jackson, the (aforementioned) administrator of the Cherokee-language Kituwah Academy. Lamar Marshall had put us in touch, saying that Jackson was renowned for “going on some of the most killer marches through the Smoky Mountains that you ever heard of.” This proved to be no great exaggeration. Jackson told me he had hiked as many as forty-eight miles in a single day, and he estimated that he walked a thousand miles a year.

  When I met him, he was planning to embark on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail to celebrate his retirement. If he was successful, he believed he would be the first full-blooded Cherokee to thru-hike the whole trail.II

  I once asked Jackson why so few Cherokees hike. He thought this over for a moment, then replied, “I think that life has always been such a struggle on the reservation, that just survival was the biggie.” Jackson had grown up in a small cabin—just “a box”—at the foot of the Snowbird Mountains, forty miles west of the reservation. His ancestors had managed to avoid the Removal by hiding in those mountains. Jackson was the third oldest of seven siblings: William, Lou, Shirley, Jacob, Ethel, and Esther. The whole family slept in the same room, with half the children in bed with one parent, and the other half in bed with the other. (Jackson joked that he had no idea how his parents ever found time to make more babies.) He and his siblings ran around the forest barefoot all summer. Every afternoon, it was his chore to collect firewood for the stove. His mother supplemented their meals of beans and bread with food they gathered from the woods: stewed venison or squirrel, mushrooms, and wild greens like sochan, ramps, poke, and branch lettuce. At night, they would glob pinesap onto the end of sticks and ignite them to use as torches. “Probably from the day I was born I’ve always been in the woods,” he said.

  In his teens, Jackson began exploring the trails in his area, borrowing his uncle’s truck to embark on long hikes, equipped with only a wool blanket and some food pilfered from the pantry in his rucksack. He didn’t remember what made him start hiking at a time when most other Cherokees didn’t; he just enjoyed being out on the trail. In college, he met a group of outdoorsy white friends, and his hiking trips grew longer and longer. He eventually ran seven marathons, won a national whitewater canoeing competition, and helped found an adventure camp for at-risk Cherokee teens, which ran for twenty years before the funding dried up.

  Every time I traveled back to the mountains of North Carolina, I would set aside a day to take a hike with Jackson. I loved walking with him. He hiked at a fast clip, but he paused frequently to point out plants I might have otherwise overlooked: wild iris, Indian pipe, coral mushrooms, and an odd flower called a pipsissewa, which resembled a doleful white eyeball staring at its own roots. He broke off a leaf from a sourwood tree for me to taste, and he yanked out a sassafras root, which smelled strongly of root beer. On one hike, he spotted a hen-of-the-woods mushroom, which resembled the brain of a whale: huge, gray, and labyrinthine. He carefully cut it out, took it home, soaked it in salt water to draw the insects out, and then pan-fried it in butter.

  While we hiked, we often talked about the Appalachian Trail. He had countless questions for me about the logistics of a thru-hike. I warned him that opinions differed wildly, but I nevertheless had a few pieces of ironclad advice: pack light, eat healthy, and hike from south to north. (Starti
ng out from craggy Mount Katahdin and finishing on the rolling green hills of Georgia, I opined, is like hiking from Mount Doom back to the Shire: pure anticlimax.) Finally, I advised him to arrange for some friends to meet him at various points along the trail. When you get into the middle stretches of a thru-hike, after the initial fizz has faded and before the end begins to assert its gravitational pull; when the trees leaf out and you begin to hallucinate that you are being squeezed through a giant green intestinal track; when your hips scab over and your feet swell to Flintstonian proportions; when you push hard to escape a state like Pennsylvania only to reach a state like New Jersey; when you inevitably lose sight of the purpose of the whole lunatic enterprise and just want to go home—it helps to have a few friends to cheer you along.

 

  Two years after we first met, Jackson announced on his Facebook page that he would be leaving for Springer Mountain that March to begin his long-awaited thru-hike. I wrote to congratulate him, and to ask him if he would like me to accompany him for a stretch.

  In June, on the day we had arranged to meet up, I stepped down off the bus in Hanover, New Hampshire, amid a cold rain. Jackson was waiting for me beneath the eaves of a nearby university building, looking like what he was: a man in his mid-sixties who had just walked seventeen hundred miles. Almost thirty pounds lighter than when I last saw him, he had grown cowl-eyed, concave in the cheeks. He was wearing mud-soaked low-top hiking shoes, synthetic cargo shorts, a zip-neck merino shirt with a hole in the elbow (chewed through, he said, by a mouse), and a battered baseball cap decorated with pins he’d collected along the trail. All of it was bubbled in a clear plastic poncho. Thrice in the next three hours, he revisited the details of how he had received a complimentary lunch at a pizzeria that day. That outsized gratitude for free food was the clearest sign of all that he had become a thru-hiker.