On Trails

by Robert Moor

  Tree Frog was bent over his journal, scribbling down the day’s events. He was working on a book about his mother’s attempt to thru-­hike the AT, which was halted by cancer, and his subsequent quest to scatter her ashes atop Mount Katahdin. In exchange for the muffin, I offered him my dimpled copy of the latest New Yorker, the fiction issue. He politely waved me off. “Sounds heavy,” he said. He meant the weight of the paper, not the subject matter.

  They talked primarily about time and food; when they would reach certain mountains or towns or states; what they were eating, had eaten, would eat, would like to eat. The interior life of a thru-hiker this far into a long hike is a mixture of waning adventure-lust, intensifying hunger, mild impatience, and calm, single-pointed focus. The pull of Katahdin drew them inexorably along the same trail, at roughly the same pace, like marbles in a downward groove. They had recently agreed to try to summit Katahdin as a group, even if that meant slowing down to accommodate the slower members. After consulting his guidebook that night, Tree Frog suggested that they should try to finish by July 7. Doyi smiled at the thought of that golden, mirrored numeral—7/7—a sacred number for the Cherokees. It had the glow of fate.

 

  What makes a trail wild? Is it the people who built it, the people who walk it, or the land around it? The answer is a combination of all three. In large part, the Appalachian Trail gained its wild reputation from the iconic wildernesses it managed to string together: not just Katahdin, but also the Great Smokies, the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, the Greens, the Whites, the Bigelows, the 100 Mile Wilderness. Thanks to a massive land acquisition project led by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the gaps between those wilderness areas were later filled in. Today, the trail is surrounded by an almost uninterrupted, thousand-foot-wide belt of protected land—what is sometimes referred to as “the longest, skinniest part of America’s national park system.”

  Those lands, though, would never have been protected if likeminded hikers and activists hadn’t fought for their protection. The AT—like any trail—is the creation of multitudes: walkers, trail-­builders, conservationists, administrators, donors, and government officials. Before all of them, however, the trail was born from the imagination of a single man—a forester, wilderness advocate, and utopian dreamer named Benton MacKaye. Even today, the trail bears the imprint of his brilliant and idiosyncratic mind.

  The idea for the Appalachian Trail reportedly first occurred to MacKaye while hiking through the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1900, at the age of twenty-one. He and a friend had climbed a tree atop Stratton Mountain to admire the view, and, dizzy with a “planetary feeling,” as he later described it, MacKaye suddenly envisioned a single trail stringing together the entire Appalachian range from north to south. Two years later, while working at a summer camp in New Hampshire, he mentioned the idea to his boss, who replied that it sounded like “a damn fool scheme.”

  History would prove otherwise. In fact, at that precise moment, disparate forces were aligning to allow something as audacious as a two-thousand-mile-long hiking trail to one day exist. In newspapers and books from the turn of the century, America was increasingly being seen as a land of worsening health, degenerating morals, and rampant money grubbing. Boys were growing too weak, while girls were “overheated, overdressed, and over-entertained.” These fears stemmed in part from a rapid and unprecedented surge in urbanization; Manhattan, for instance, housed more people in 1900 than it does today. Time spent outdoors, in the “fresh air”—a newly popular phrase—was seen as a curative for society’s ills. Locomotives (and soon, automobiles) made trips to the mountains easier and faster. Summer camps sprang up throughout the Northeast. (The summer camp I attended, Pine Island, was founded in 1902.) The turn of the century also marked the birth of the scouting movement. In 1902, a nature writer named Ernest Thompson Seton founded a club for boys called the League of the Woodcraft Indians, which later inspired Robert Baden-Powell to form the Boy and Girl Scouts. “This is a time,” wrote Seton in 1907, “when the whole nation is turning toward the outdoor life.”

  Meanwhile, the federal government—at the urging of hiking-­cum-conservation groups like the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Sierra Club—had begun setting aside huge tracts of public land. This process began in 1864, when Abraham Lincoln, following the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted, signed a bill setting aside the Yosemite valley and a nearby grove of giant sequoia trees as public land. Olmsted, the famed designer of Central Park—which he insisted remain open to all, “the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous”—warned Lincoln that, if the Yosemite valley fell into private hands, it could end up as a walled garden for the sole enjoyment of the rich, like many parks in England. By signing the Yosemite Grant Act, Lincoln set a key precedent for the creation of the national park system. The conservationist movement began to reach a new peak in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, assumed the presidency. His first address to Congress called for the creation of a series of national forests. By the end of his presidency in 1909, he would set aside one hundred fifty national forests, fifty-one federal bird reserves, and five national parks. All told, he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land.

  Meanwhile, a new conception of trails was spreading. Trail designers began to reconsider the isolated clusters of trails that had once surrounded the most popular hiking destinations and discovered ways to connect those clusters into cohesive networks. Soon, there arose the notion of a “through trail”—a trail that would keep going. In 1910, James P. Taylor, a schoolmaster who enjoyed taking his students on long hikes, proposed the construction of a single trail connecting all of the tallest mountains in Vermont. He called it “The Long Trail.”

  Into this intellectual environment stepped MacKaye. He graduated from Harvard a few months before Roosevelt’s inauguration, and shortly after earned his master’s degree from the Harvard School of Forestry. In the following decades, he took a series of forestry and planning jobs, which gave him a better sense of how people can transform landscapes (and vice versa). During one such project, in 1912, he conducted an influential study on the effects of rainwater runoff in the White Mountains, which proved that deforestation contributes to flooding. Partly as a result of his study, the White Mountains were later designated a national forest.

  Over the course of twenty years, MacKaye grew from a gangly young forestry student into a bespectacled, dark-haired, hawk-faced intellectual, with a pipe permanently clenched between his teeth. All the while, his idea for what he called “an Appalachian Trail” grew along with him. In 1921, he lost his wife, Betty—a suffragist and peace advocate—when she drowned herself in Manhattan’s East River. Grieving, MacKaye holed up in a friend’s farmhouse in New Jersey, where he paused his forestry work long enough to put his idea for the Appalachian Trail down on paper. What emerged was more than a mere trail. The innocuous title he gave to his now-historic proposal—“An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning”—belied its radical vision. In fact, he saw the trail as nothing less than a remedy to the worst ills of urbanization, capitalism, militarism, and industrialism—what he called “the problem of living.”

  MacKaye’s thoughts on how to transform our society were strongly shaped by a five-hundred-page philosophical treatise called The Economy of Happiness, authored by his brother James. Drawing on the works of Bentham, Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx, James MacKaye sought to devise a rigorous response to the ugliest aspects of industrialism. Rather than a society of independent actors each seeking to maximize profit—which unintentionally resulted in a “vast and increasing surplus of misery”—he envisioned a steady-state economy managed by a technocratic elite, who strove to maximize the “output of happiness.” Anticipating the inevitable question of how a government could possibly measure a nation’s happiness, the book was littered with equations and graphs attempting to quantify well-being. (The biographer Larry Anderson quippe
d that it was, ironically, “possibly the most humorless and austere tract ever devoted to the subject of happiness.”)

  Most significantly, MacKaye’s brother taught him that the key to solving societal problems was to change systems, not human nature. As MacKaye became an increasingly prominent voice in the conservation movement, he seldom wrote about greed or excess. He chose instead to focus on environments—how they can weaken us, or how they can be altered to strengthen us. Having spent much of his childhood in New York City (which he loathed), he chose to attack the ills of modernity through its most obvious manifestation: the de-natured, overpopulated, hyper-competitive metropolis.

  From the outset, the overarching goal of Benton’s work was to circumvent the sense of alienation that had been growing among Euro-­Americans for centuries. The crucial first step, he concluded, was to secure a space outside the reach of the metropolis—“a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life”—in which people could learn to live anew. He applauded the rise of the national parks, but lamented the fact that they were all so far away; at the time, of the seventeen national parks, only one was east of the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, he wrote, a continuous green belt of wild land, the Appalachian range, lay “within a day’s ride from centers containing more than half the population of the United States.”

  Along the trail, MacKaye wanted to build not just a string of rustic shelters, but also nonprofit wilderness camps, collective farms, and health retreats where the citizens of America’s industrial centers could escape for fresh air.V The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get “back to the land,” MacKaye wrote.

  Some elements of the proposal eventually proved surprisingly prescient. As he had envisioned, a series of rustic shelters were built along its full length, each no more than a day’s hike apart. He insisted that the trail should be maintained by volunteers, not paid workers, because for volunteers “ ‘work’ is really ‘play.’ ” And, as he astutely argued, constructing a two-thousand-mile trail was less daunting than one might think, because it need not be constructed ex nihilo. Instead, trail-builders could simply stitch together a string of existing trails, including the Long Trail, one hundred fifty miles of which would later be folded into the Appalachian Trail.

  In 1927, MacKaye was invited to articulate his vision to the New England Trail Conference. The paper he delivered, entitled “Outdoor Culture: The Philosophy of Through Trails,” was not quite what they had anticipated. In fiery tones, MacKaye laid out the full breadth of his plan for a connected corridor of wilderness work camps. Drawing from the example of ancient Rome, his dialectic positioned the decadent metropolis against the barbarian hinterlands. He railed against the “lollipopedness” of jazz-loving, picnic-eating city dwellers, and he contrasted these human “jellyfish” with the strong, tough, wilderness-­savvy proletariat his trail would attract.

  “And now I come straight to the point of the philosophy of through trails,” MacKaye concluded. “It is to organize a Barbarian invasion. It is a counter movement to the Metropolitan invasion . . . As the Civilizees are working outward from the urban centers, we Barbarians must be working downward from the mountain tops.”

  In the end, the genteel East Coast trail-building community blanched at the more utopian elements of MacKaye’s vision. But work on the trail itself began in earnest. The task of actually constructing the trail, which MacKaye showed little interest in, fell largely on the shoulders of a Maine native named Myron Avery, a husky, weather-­beaten pragmatist with the bearing of a football halfback. Under his leadership, the trail was completed in 1937, by linking together a chain of logging roads, old hiking paths, and hundreds of miles of fresh-cut trail. But the bulk of MacKaye’s vision had been pared away. Gone were the camps, the farms, and the sanitariums. The many-limbed idea streamlined, until it emerged as a single, sinuous trail through the woods.

  MacKaye eventually grew to accept the trail’s new, narrower mission: to provide a “path of endless expeditions” through the wilderness. By 1971, when an interviewer asked him to state the Appalachian Trail’s “ultimate purpose,” MacKaye, then ninety-two and nearly blind, had whittled down his answer to Zen simplicity:

  1.to walk;

  2.to see; and

  3.to see what you see!

  Nevertheless, intentions have echoes. The trail’s radical origins began to manifest themselves in unforeseen ways in the decades that followed, most notably in the community of hikers who, in ever-­increasing waves since the end of the Second World War, undertook pilgrimages from one end to the other in search of their own answers to the problem of living. Nomadic, hirsute, and reeking, they were, and remain, the very image of MacKaye’s barbarians. Come July, one can spot them lining a highway in southern New Hampshire, thumbing rides in the rain; roaming like wolves through the mammoth, icily lit grocery stores of Virginia; and shacking up, three to a bed, in a motel in Pennsylvania. Once in a while, one might even catch them in Times Square, having ridden the afternoon train in from Bear Mountain, looking at once shell-shocked and childishly delighted at the flood of light and sound. As one former thru-hiker told me, “Most people live in civilization and visit the woods. But when you’re thru-hiking, you’re living out in the woods and visiting civilization.”

 

  Snug and dry in the lean-to, Team Osda Nigada nestled down to sleep. I plugged my ears with wax to keep out the sound of snoring and the pock of the rain on the tin roof. Around ten P.M., long after sunset, the bright star of a headlamp appeared inside the lean-to. It hovered insistently above me. I unplugged my ears. “Hey,” a voice said. “Sorry. Can you please move over? I don’t have a tent.” Grumpily, we rearranged our things to accommodate the dripping newcomer, until we were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder.

  Just after sunrise, people began rustling around. Nothing had dried out overnight, despite being hung up on a clothesline. When the thru-hikers wrung out their wool socks, they produced something resembling milk coffee. Nobody took the time to cook breakfast; an energy bar, a few handfuls of trail mix, or a heaping scoop of peanut butter sufficed.

  The daylight revealed the late-night arrival to be a south bounder (or a SoBo, in trail parlance)—one who was hiking south from Katahdin to Springer Mountain. In the Northern states, the SoBos were easy to spot, since unlike NoBos, they hadn’t had time to grow a long beard, and because they tended to be loners. This one was no exception. He told us he had started only thirteen days ago from Katahdin. (The night before, Tree Frog had calculated that it would take them at least twenty-four days to reach Katahdin.)

  Doyi did some quick mental math. “You hiked four hundred thirty miles in thirteen days?”

  “Yep,” was all the SoBo said, before he lightly lifted his backpack and stepped out of the shelter.

  The other thru-hikers were quiet for a little while.

  “He’s scootin’,” Doyi said.

  “Doing thirty-mile days through Maine and New Hampshire?” Tree Frog said. “Wow.”

  One by one, the thru-hikers put on their wet boots and, with a sharp breath, as if plunging into cold water, stepped out of the shelter and into the clouds. I was the last one to depart. There was no sun. Plants drooped, as if hungover from the night before; a pink orchid wept.

  Eager to catch up, I raced over the mountain and down the other side. At the bottom I crossed a road and entered a field of high grass, where I was startled to find a pink plastic flamingo and a handmade sign depicting a cheerful old man holding a pink ice-cream cone. The sign read: “BILL ACKERLY / HIS ICECREAM BRINGS ALL THE HIKERS TO THE YARD / HIS WATER TASTES BETTER THAN YOURS / DAMN RIGHT, HIS CROQUET GAME IS BETTER THAN YOURS / IT�
�S ALL FREE, YEAH THERE IS NO CHARGE!!” I followed a little side trail to find a blue house with white trim, festooned with Tibetan prayer flags. In the backyard, a pristine croquet court had been hacked out of the high grass. Doyi sat on the porch, talking with Ackerly, who got up to shake my hand. Ackerly had a long face topped with vanishing gray hair, large glasses, and a moony smile.

  He asked my name. I told him.

  “Spaceman?” he said, dreamily. “Like all of this beautiful space . . .”

  We sat for a long while on Ackerly’s porch, talking about Tibet (where he had visited), the works of Homer (which he had studied), and other thru-hikers (whom he had been feeding, for free, every summer for over a decade—a practice hikers call “trail magic”).

  Somehow, our conversation turned to Doyi and his Cherokee heritage.

  “We need to honor this man here,” Ackerly said, gesturing to Doyi. “He is our ancestor. His people were here first. You know, people always say Christopher Columbus was here first, but he wasn’t.”

  “He was lost,” Doyi said.

  “That’s right. Columbus was a terrible man.”

  Doyi nodded, gravely.

  “Well, anyway,” Ackerly added, “in the grand scheme of things, we’re all children.”

  As we hoisted our packs and prepared to leave, Ackerly gave each of us a hug. Back on the trail, I asked Doyi if he found it odd that Ackerly had referred to him as “our ancestor.” He brushed it off. “There are a lot of good people on this earth,” he said. “What I’ve enjoyed most about this hike is meeting people like Bill.” He was continually awestruck by the goodness the trail brought out in people. One day, when his knee was really hurting, a fellow thru-hiker had offered to carry his pack for him. Doyi passed on the offer, but he was moved nonetheless—a stranger was willing to practically double his own suffering to alleviate Doyi’s. “That’s the real trail magic, to me,” he said. “People helping people.”