by Robert Moor
By the 1790s, a rough wagon road—following, as always, an old Native trail—was opened through a notch in the White Mountain chain along the western flank of Mount Washington. As it was gradually widened and improved, the road provided the most direct route from southern New England to northwest New Hampshire and Maine—“a great artery,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “through which the life-blood of internal commerce continually throbbed.”
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a young woodsman named Abel Crawford decided to open an inn alongside that road and began guiding curious adventurers up the mountain, where they could enjoy a sublime panorama of the surrounding mountains. To facilitate the trip to the summit, Abel and his son Ethan cut trails. The first of these, called the Crawford Path, might well be the oldest continuously used hiking trail in the country. It is a slow, circuitous path, winding slowly back and forth up across the mountain “as if reluctant to approach too directly into such an august presence,” wrote Laura and Guy Waterman in Forest and Crag, their authoritative history of hiking in the Northeast.III At first, the path was faint—one early hiker described it as “obscure, often determined only by marked trees, some of which ‘Old Crawford’ alone could discover”—but over time it became clear and wide. More than a century later, the last leg of this path would become part of the Appalachian Trail.
A new curiosity and admiration for the mountains was taking hold, and Mount Washington loomed prominently. The peak was climbed by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau (twice). They all seemed to recognize some twinkling of the divine in it. Hawthorne found it “majestic, and even awful”—not horrible, but full of awe. Thoreau, writing to a friend who had recently climbed the peak, wrote, “You must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. I suppose that I feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church.”
By the 1830s, the barren mountains were being valued for the same reasons they had once been reviled: their terrific heights, their unpredictable weather, and perhaps most of all, their remoteness from the lowland clutter of civilization. Like storm clouds, slowly, and then all at once, around the mountaintop an aesthetic appreciation had coalesced. “It became almost an obligatory mark of a vigorous public man of New England in those years that he had made the ascent of Mount Washington,” wrote the Watermans. The sentiment seems to have originated among city dwellers, for whom mountains were exotic. The people who lived at the base of the peaks—who were necessarily fixated on extracting economic and subsistence value from the land—were unlikely to ever climb them. One farmer at the base of Mount Washington told the pastor Thomas Starr King that he wished the mountains were flat.
Many urban tourists were eager to see the mountains, but were unable or unwilling to walk up them. So, in 1840, the Crawfords widened their path to make it fit for horses; Abel, then seventy-four, was the first man to ride on horseback all the way to the summit. By the 1850s, all five paths up Mount Washington had been converted into horse paths. A decade later, a carriage path had been cleared, and around the same time, another path cut by the Crawfords was used to lay out the tracks of a cog railway. It became possible to travel from the back alleys of Boston to the top of Mount Washington without taking more than a few steps. One prominent writer recommended that his readers catch a train to Gorham, take a wagon “through primeval forests” to the Glen House Hotel, and then ascend the mountain on a pony. “That is de rigeur,” he insisted. With newfound ease and expediency, as many as five thousand people reached the summit of Mount Washington each year.
In the early days, if one of their clients had wanted to spend the night on the mountainside, the Crawfords would have built a pole-and-bark shelter for them, and inside, they would have fashioned a bed of fragrant balsam boughs. By the 1850s, to accommodate the new flood of tourists, two stone-walled hotels—aptly named the Tip-Top House and the Summit House—were built directly on top of the peak. On mountaintops throughout the Northeast, similar buildings—hotels, huts, concession stands, even a small newspaper office—were popping up like mushrooms. Meanwhile, vast vacation resorts sprawled across the valleys; one hotel, built in the Catskills, boasted a thousand rooms. Guests were known to spend whole summers at these “grand hotels,” taking short day trips out into the mountains to amuse themselves. Walking paths tendriled out around the hotels, many of them equipped with wooden ladders, scenic overlooks, and designated resting areas.
The Civil War brought a decades-long drought to mountain tourism. But around the turn of the century, the arrival of the automobile granted people easy access to previously unreachable mountains, and the public’s interest in hiking revived. A slew of hiking clubs formed to maintain old trails and build new ones. Meanwhile, for those disinclined to walk, a series of road improvements made it possible to drive right to the crest of Mount Washington. Like anywhere cars and tourists converge, a large souvenir shop and a cafeteria opened up to cater to the crowds. To this day, atop that storied peak, drivers can be found proudly purchasing bumper stickers that read: “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.”
When I reached the summit of Mount Washington on my own thru-hike, it struck me as a kind of suburban horror. As I neared the summit, a red-and-white radio antenna rose into view, followed in time by a stone tower, a cog railroad, a cafeteria, and a crowded parking lot. It was a clear, warm Saturday in July, and the peak writhed with tourists. After four months of walking over more or less barren peaks, it felt like I had stumbled into an outdoor mall.
Almost four hundred years earlier, Darby Field had deemed Mount Washington a barren wasteland, devoid of economic value. In the intervening centuries, the peak’s barrenness had served as a beacon for hikers, offering a rare island of wilderness in a sea of tamed fields. As one hiker wrote in 1882, “The climber here tastes the full enjoyment of an encounter with untamed nature.” It was a perverse fate, then, that the mountain’s untamed allure would be precisely what led to its own taming.
Little did I know that, but for a few flukes of history and a widespread shift in popular sentiment, many of the other peaks I had crossed on the Appalachian Trail could have looked the same.
A few hundred miles north of Mount Washington stands its wild twin, Mount Katahdin. At the outset of the American experiment, the two were not dissimilar. Like Washington, indigenous people living near the base of Katahdin reportedly never climbed it, for fear of a winged thunder spirit named Pamola. Both mountains would one day be recognized as the tallest in their respective states: indeed, the Penobscot name for Katahdin means “the greatest mountain.” From similar beginnings, though, the two parted ways soon after colonists arrived. While the slopes of Mount Washington experienced ever-growing waves of visitors, Katahdin, walled off by miles of the gloomy North Woods, remained unclimbed. It was finally crested by an eleven-man team of government surveyors in 1804, more than a century and a half after Mount Washington.
In 1846, Thoreau made a failed bid to climb Katahdin. He and two companions made their way to its base by canoe, guided by an old Native American man named Louis Neptune, who advised Thoreau to leave a bottle of rum on top of the mountain to appease the mountain spirit. On their climb, Thoreau and his companions followed moose trails and scrambled cross-country. In one harrowing instance, while crawling over the flattened tops of the black spruce trees that had grown up between the mountain’s massive boulders, Thoreau looked down to find that below him, in the crevices, lay the sleeping forms of bears. (“Certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled,” he wryly observed.)
The party became lost in fog and never made it to the summit. But on his descent, passing through an area called the Burnt Lands, Thoreau—who had spent almost his entire life in bucolic Concord, where a surplus of farms and fences had rendered the landscape “tame and cheap”—suddenly realized he had stumbled upon a wholly wild place. He found the Burnt Lands savage, awful, and unspeakably beautiful. Here, h
e sensed, was the universal bedrock underlying the artifices of humankind. Recalling the experience, he wrote:
This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!
How, one must wonder, had a human being—indeed, a whole generation of human beings—become so abstracted from the land (the solid earth! the actual world!) as to warrant such an epiphany? The answer, as we’ve seen, stretches back through our ancestral past: through agriculture, which obviated the hunter-gatherer’s need to walk, study, and interact with whole ecosystems; through writing, which replaced the landscape as an archive of communal knowledge; through monotheism, which vanquished the animist spirits and erased their earthly shrines; through urbanization, which concentrated people in built environments; and through a snug pairing of mechanical technology and animal husbandry, which allowed people to travel over the earth at blurring speeds. Euro-Americans had been working for millennia to forget what an unpeopled planet looked like. To see it afresh came as a shock.
Ever since Thoreau’s revelation, a steady trickle of hikers has flowed toward Katahdin in search of the same ineffable experience. It gained a reputation as the antithesis to mountains like Washington, where, according to one account, “large flocks of hitherto ‘un-mountain-fähig’, both male and female, streamed up the mountains like a transplanted tea party.” But despite its growing popularity, Katahdin resisted all attempts to tame it. During the height of the summit house craze of the 1850s, Maine politicians, envious of the commercial success of Mount Washington, chartered a road to be built over Katahdin. A crew was sent out to survey a path, but they returned with a route so absurdly steep that no carriage could climb it, and the project was soon abandoned. Even into the 1890s, while trail-builders on Mount Washington were rearranging boulders to construct paths so smooth they reportedly could be walked blindfolded, the paths on Katahdin remained, in the Watermans’ words, “the roughest of cuts through the north woods.”
The longer Katahdin resisted attempts to tame it, the Watermans wrote, the more it attracted “pilgrims” who enjoyed its wild character—and who, moreover, would fight to keep it that way. In 1920, an eccentric millionaire named Percival Baxter climbed Katahdin via the vertiginous Knife’s Edge route. Greatly impressed, he vowed to ensure that the land would remain “forever wild.” The following year, as governor of the state, he fought to have the area recognized as a state park. When the state legislature refused, he began buying the land with his own fortune, eventually acquiring two hundred thousand acres, which was later designated as a state park. From the outset, Baxter insisted that “Everything in connection with the Park must be left simple and natural and must remain as nearly as possible as it was when only the Indians and the animals roamed at will through these areas.”
Ten years later, there was a push by Baxter’s political nemesis, Owen Brewster, to make the area look more like the White Mountains, by building new motor roads (now feasible, thanks to technological advances) along with a large lodge and a series of smaller cabins. Baxter successfully fought them back, and the park remained stubbornly inaccessible. The park’s wildness, in other words, was not given. It was made.
It may sound strange (even sacrilegious) to some, but in a very real way, wilderness is a human creation. We create it in the same sense that we create trails; we do not create the soil or the plants, the geology or the topology (although we can, and do, shift these things). Instead, we delineate the place, by defining its boundaries, its meaning, and its use. The history of Katahdin is emblematic of the wilderness as a whole, which has always been the direct result of human ingenuity, foresight, and restraint.
“Civilization,” wrote the historian Roderick Nash, “invented wilderness.” According to his account, the wilderness was born at the dawn of agro-pastoralism, when we began cleaving the world into the binary categories of wild and tame, natural and cultivated. Words for wilderness are notably absent among the languages of hunter-gatherer peoples. (“Only to the white man,” wrote Luther Standing Bear, “was nature a wilderness.”) From the vantage point of a farmer, the wilderness was a strange, barren land, full of poisonous plants and deadly animals, antithetical to the warmth and security of home. To these land-tamers, wilderness became synonymous with confusion, wickedness, and suffering. William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, was representative of this mindset when he deemed the uncolonized countryside “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.”
For centuries after the rise of agriculture, we erected fences to keep our cultivated land safe from whatever lurked in the darkness. But the realm of cultivation continued to spread, insatiably, until it at last began to endanger the wilderness, rather than the other way around. Then we began fencing in the wild, to keep it safe from us. For obvious reasons, this shift came much earlier on the isle of Britain—which began walling off its forests a thousand years ago—than it did on the seemingly endless American continent.
Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy. That switch allowed a new set of moral attitudes toward the nonhuman world to take hold. Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.”
This is the most succinct definition of the wilderness I have found: the not-self. There, in the one place we have not remolded in our image, a very deep and ancient form of wisdom can be found. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote Albert Camus. We glimpse this inhuman heart only once the rosy lens of familiarity has fallen away. Then, Camus wrote, we realize that the world is “foreign and irreducible to us”—a sensation acutely familiar to both Thoreau and Huxley. “These hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them,” he wrote. “The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.” We over-civilized humans cherish wilderness because it both fosters and embodies that sense of not-self—it is a brazenly naked land, where a person, in mingled fear and awe, verging on nonsense, can cry out: Contact!
Doyi and I followed the Appalachian Trail northward. We climbed up and over a bulge called Moose Mountain, falling into an easy rhythm. The trail bore a string of deep moose prints and a pile of olivey pellets, but no moose. The view from the summit was the same as from the window of a cloud-socked airplane. On the downhill side, the wind shouldered through the trees, shaking down leaves and water. We were glad to reach the lean-to—a wooden shelter, ubiquitous on the trail, shaped like a heavily italicized letter L.IV Someone had strung up a tarp over the entrance to keep out the wind and rain.
“Hello? Anybody in there?” Doyi called.
“Doyi!” voices cheered, in unison.
Inside it was dark, steamy, sour-smelling. The thru-hikers were all burrowed in their sleeping bags, some leaned upright against the back wall, others supine. Headlamps blazed coldly from the center of their foreheads. Doyi introduced me to them, from right to left: Gingko, an albinic young German man with an ice-white beard and startling blue eyes; Socks, a cheerful, dark-haired young woman, so named after her resemblance to Sacajawea, though she was Korean-American; Catch-Me-If-You-Can, a Korean-American man in h
is forties, quiet, high-cheek-boned, forever smiling, and renowned for his speed; and Tree Frog, a young white man with bushy brown hair, who often told strangers along the trail he was employed as a butler, because he had learned it was more interesting to lie about being a butler than to tell them the truth about being an engineer. Doyi had known some of them for months and others only a few days, but he had an easy rapport with all of them. As we dropped our packs inside the shelter, he asked them to please scooch over and make room for us. Distracted, they were slow in moving, so he joked, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it right away. Anytime in the next ten seconds would be fine.” They laughed, and then moved over.
Doyi and I changed clothes, got in our sleeping bags, and prepared dinner. Tree Frog said that as he hiked he had been practicing the Cherokee words that Doyi had taught him: “shit” (di ga si), “shit!” (e ha), “water” (ama), and Osda Nigada, which means, roughly, “It’s all good.” Osda Nigada! had become a kind of rallying cry for the rain-drenched hikers, and soon became their unofficial name for themselves: Team Osda Nigada.
As I sat over my Coke-can stove cooking a pot of soba noodles, I found myself slipping back into the headspace of a thru-hiker. Tree Frog generously offered me and Doyi two muffins he’d carried up from town. They were sticky and dense; we both scraped the muffin paper clean with our teeth. (Nothing tastes better, the old thru-hiker adage says, than food you haven’t had to carry.) The gift prompted Doyi to teach the group a new Cherokee phrase: “Gv Ge Yu A,” which means “I love you,” except, Doyi said, that it cannot be used casually; it can only be spoken when one truly means it.