On Trails

by Robert Moor

  II. I checked with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which keeps detailed records of all the thru-hikers who registered their hikes, and they told me that out of the fourteen thousand total thru-hikers, thirteen had self-identified as American Indian, and two as Cherokee. However, there was no way to know whether those people were one-half Native American, one-quarter, one-sixty-fourth, or only Native at heart.

  III. The Watermans’ statement was somewhat coy. Abel and Ethan most likely cut the path in a gradual fashion because they knew that it would one day need to suit both skittish horses and wilting urbanites.

  IV. The shape of these structures, properly called Adirondack lean-tos, was inspired by the kinds of impromptu bark shelters that mountain guides like the Crawfords once built for their clients.

  V. It is surely no coincidence that MacKaye, having just lost his wife to what was then called “nervous depression,” stressed the importance of wilderness in maintaining mental health. A note of mad hope can be detected as he writes, “Most sanitariums now established are perfectly useless to those afflicted with mental disease—the most terrible, usually, of any disease. Many of these sufferers could be cured. But not merely by ‘treatment.’ They need acres not medicine. Thousands of acres of this mountain land should be devoted to them with whole communities planned and equipped for their cure.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE IDEA to radically lengthen the Appalachian Trail occurred to Dick Anderson one afternoon in the fall of 1993. He was driving north through Maine on Interstate 95, a major highway that runs the length of the East Coast and dead-ends at the border of Canada. As his eye followed that north-south line, his mind made a parallel hop. Anderson knew that the Appalachian mountain range continued north past Katahdin and ran up along Canada’s east coast, before slumping into the ice-clotted North Atlantic. Why, then, he wondered, couldn’t someone extend the trail into Canada?

  He had no idea where the idea came from—he had never hiked a single mile of the Appalachian Trail. It was, he later recounted, as if his mind’s antenna accidentally intercepted a message intended for someone else. Holy shit! he thought. How come no one ever thought of this? This is a wicked idea! He pulled over to get gas, and, impatient to share his plan, he began explaining it to a man at an adjacent pump. “Of course, he’s over there looking at me like I’m freaking nuts,” Anderson recalled.

  Anderson, a former commissioner of the state’s Department of Conservation, went home that night and unfurled a regional geophysical map—one virtually devoid of towns, roads, or borders—and began laying a line of little blue sticky dots along the ridge of the Appalachian range, linking the highest peaks in Maine, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec. Furtively at first, he began showing the map around and gauging his friends’ and colleagues’ reactions.

  When he finally made his proposal for the International Appalachian Trail public, on Earth Day 1994, representatives from New Brunswick and Quebec quickly agreed to the extension. Over the next few years, he began receiving calls from representatives of the Atlantic islands of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland—places that also possessed Appalachian geology—urging him to lengthen the trail even farther. He eagerly said yes to each. Of course, hikers would have to ride on a ferry or an airplane to reach these islands, but, Anderson thought, so what?

  Shortly after the International Appalachian Trail committee approved the Newfoundland extension in 2004, one of Dick Anderson’s friends, Walter Anderson (no relation), a former director of the Geological Society of Maine, began circulating a map showing that, in fact, the geological Appalachians continued on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, in a more or less mirror image of the North American range. Some four hundred million years ago, he explained, the continental plates began to collide, forming the Pangaea supercontinent. That slow-motion crash lifted up the ancient Appalachians to heights rivaling those of the modern Himalayas. But when Pangaea broke apart two hundred million years later, the continents that would become North America, Europe, and Africa split along that raised seam, like a piece of paper folded and torn. For this reason, Appalachian rocks can be found scattered throughout the soil of Western Europe and North Africa.

  Dick Anderson was smitten with this notion. If the Appalachians continued all the way to Morocco, why stop in Canada? What was holding the trail back? A few (admittedly, sizable) bodies of water? A few (okay, most) people’s antiquated notions of what a trail should look like?

  At the time, the full reality of what he was proposing—the daunting task of blazing and maintaining the world’s longest hiking trail—was still far off. But Anderson, like Benton MacKaye, intuitively understood that the task of creating a super-long trail principally consisted not of trail-building but trail-linking. The artistry lay in the elegance of the connections, the tightness of the joints, the sinuosity of the curves, and, more than anything, the strength of the idea that would hold them all together—what Anderson referred to as the trail’s “philosophy.” In those years between 1993 and 2004—the brightening dawn of the Internet Age—it was only natural that the big idea undergirding Anderson’s trail, when it came to him, was connection: of people, of ecosystems, of countries, of continents, and of geologic epochs.

 

  Certain trails are so elegant that they seem to lie sleeping just beneath the surface of the earth. Rather than being created by us, it is as if these trails unveil themselves through us. When humans, bison, deer, and other woodland animals go in search of the shallowest pass in a mountain chain, they tend to decide on the same route. Who, then, invented the trail? The humans? The bison? The deer? The answer, it seems, is that no one can claim full credit, because an essential trail—a path of least resistance—is predetermined by the shape of the topography and the needs of its walkers. Just as biologists sometimes say that “function precedes structure,” in some sense, a trail precedes the trail-maker, waiting there for someone to come along and brush it off.

  Brilliant technological innovations, according to the tech philosopher Kevin Kelly, are created in the same seemingly inevitable way. For instance, once humans had invented the road network, the horse-drawn carriage, the internal combustion engine, and a fuel like gasoline, it was only a matter of time before someone synthesized them into an automobile. It is no coincidence that Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler independently created the modern automobile within a year of each other (and that several other inventors created their own variations within a few short years). Once there is a use for a technology and the right components exist, inventors simply need to make the right connections. This rule applied in turn to each of the technologies that made up the automobile: the engine, the metallurgy, the wheels. Each was, in retrospect, an inevitable shortcut across the intellectual landscape, which then allowed for future shortcuts.

  Viewed in hindsight, it can appear that great trails and great inventions are both preordained. But Kelly is careful to point out that while various forces can create the right conditions for a given technological breakthrough, the final form that technology will take is not predestined; any new invention is still profoundly shaped by its inventor. The incandescent lightbulb, for example, was invented by twenty-three separate men, each of whom imbued the same basic mechanism with his own unique shape and design. Kelly likened this interplay between inevitability and serendipity to the formation of snowflakes, which unfurl into unique existence when a seed (usually a mote of dust) encounters the right environmental conditions (a supersaturated, supercooled cloud). “The path of freezing water is predetermined,” Kelly wrote, “but there is great leeway, freedom, and beauty in the individual expression of its predestined state.”

  When Benton MacKaye first proposed the Appalachian Trail, the conditions were in place for the birth of a new kind of hiking path: hikers were walking farther; trails were growing longer; and planners were thinking on a grander scale. In fact, by the time the AT was first proposed, th
ere had already been numerous proposals for long trails to stretch the extent of the Appalachian range. “The one big supertrail,” wrote Guy and Laura Waterman, “was inevitable.” However, Benton MacKaye’s proposal, with its inspiring rhetoric about wilderness preservation and the plight of the working class, was the formulation that ignited the public’s imagination. Once MacKaye proposed it, the trail burst into being.

  In 1993 Dick Anderson seemed to have also stumbled on that golden thing—an unrealized inevitability. At that precise moment, a hunger was growing in the world for longer and longer trails. The shift toward monumentalism had begun with the Appalachian Trail; then, in the 1980s and ’90s, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail sprang up and outgrew it. Supertrails—hiking paths measuring more than a thousand miles—started being built in Russia, New Zealand, Nepal, Japan, Australia, Italy, Chile, and Canada. Much of Western Europe was also webbed with supertrails, like the famed Grande Randonnée network of walking paths. In part, this growth was fueled by the availability of ever lighter hiking gear, which allowed people to walk greater distances. As long-distance hiking grew in popularity, long trails became more crowded. By the turn of the twenty-first century, some thru-hikers had begun to complain that supertrails like the AT had lost the lonely, wild quality that originally made them alluring. The conditions were ideal for a radically longer long-distance trail to be born.

  Virtually as soon as Anderson proposed extending the IAT overseas, the proposal took hold, with Scotland and Spain both expressing interest in 2009, and most of the other countries following close behind. Much of its route already contained trails that were simply waiting to be stitched together. Where the IAT crossed over from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, Anderson encountered contiguous trails that were managed by different (and mutually unfriendly) trail groups. Connecting them required no work at all—only a paradigm shift. When I first met Anderson, in Portland, Maine, in the spring of 2011, he had just learned that the maintainers of the North Sea Trail, which passes through seven countries in Northern Europe, had voted to join the IAT. “That’s six thousand miles right there!” he said. “Schwoop! Cross that off the list.”

  When this idea first occurred to him back in 1993, Anderson had no way of knowing that it would grow so smoothly or so far. In fact, early on it had looked like the plan might face fierce opposition. Not long after his great brainstorm, he had showed the map covered in blue dots to his friend Don Hudson. “Dick, this is a great idea,” Hudson had replied. “And they’re going to hate it.” Hudson was referring to members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the managers of Baxter State Park, both of which resisted the idea of extending the AT into Canada, because that would entail blurring out the near-sacred terminus of Katahdin. (Even two decades later, the word extension remained so taboo that Don Hudson referred to it as “the e-word.”) The AT and IAT factions eventually reached a fortuitous compromise: instead of an “extension,” Anderson opted to instead call the IAT a “connector trail.” The IAT would connect to the AT, and in turn connect the AT to the world.

 

  The core function of any trail is to connect. The root of that word, from the Latin connectere, means to “bind together” or to “unite.” In this sense, a trail strings a line between a walker and her destination, uniting the two in an uninterrupted corridor so that the walker can reach her end swiftly and smoothly. Since the rise of electrical engineering in the nineteenth century, a second sense of the word has gained widespread use. When two things remain distant, to connect them means to create a conduit through which matter or information can flow. Here again, trails act as connectors: when a trail is blazed between two towns, a line of communication is established; people can travel back and forth, goods can be exchanged, and information can spread.

  Humans and other animals have long used trails to link the essential loci of our environments. The brilliance of trails is that, over time, they naturally streamline to reach their goals faster or with less effort. Like elephant trails, humanity’s footpaths eventually grew taut along the landscape’s paths of least resistance. However, efficient as these connections may have been, even the best trails had a speed limit: walkers could only reach the trail’s end as fast as their legs could carry them. So our next impulse would have been to train ourselves to run faster. Larger societies—dating back at least to the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk—designated a specialized class of running messengers, who could transmit our messages even faster across long distances.I In many empires, new kinds of paths were built to accelerate the flow of messengers. These advanced footpaths reached their apogee in the Inca Empire, where trails were paved with flat stones and equipped with staircases, shade trees, bridges, rest huts, and watering holes. Along these paths, imperial messengers ran relay-style, six miles at a time, while passing along knotted strings called quipus, which bore simple (often numeric) messages. In this manner, information could move about one hundred fifty miles a day.

  Everywhere that people wanted to go faster, our trails grew straighter, flatter, and harder than ever before. What set humans apart from our animal brethren is that we learned to optimize beyond the shape of the trail and the limits of our anatomy; technology, in a sense, provided an entirely new dimension in which trails could streamline. To travel and transport goods faster, people in Eurasia discovered that they could ride atop animals and hitch them to carts. (Domesticated animals, in this way, became a kind of living technology.) Roads adapted in new ways to the technology of wheeled transport; in ancient Babylon, they built “rutways,” stone roads bearing parallel grooves to guide the wheels of bulky carts, which were an early precursor to wooden and then metal railways. Generation after generation, Eurasians continued to improve their vehicles and roads, until they invented the automobile, or “horseless carriage,” and the locomotive, or “steam horse.” Soon, using these machines, humans were racing across the land faster than any animal on any trail. But even that was not fast enough. So next, like Daedalus, we fabricated wings and taught ourselves to fly.

  As we discovered new ways to make our bodies travel faster, we also learned to send information at even more astonishing speeds. Early communication technologies like smoke signals and drums encoded simple messages in visible and audible forms, allowing people to transmit information across long distances nearly instantaneously. The invention of electricity allowed for yet more complex messages to be sent even farther. That shift began with the invention of the telegraph, which was followed by the telephone, the radio, the television, the fax machine, and eventually the computer network. Today, information constantly spirits past us, a ghostly chatter between billions of people and machines; our connections have sleekened so drastically and spread so far that they’ve effectively vanished from sight.

  A trace, when followed, becomes a trail. Likewise a trail, when transformed by technology, becomes a road, a highway, a flight path; a copper cable, a radio wave, a digital network. With each innovation, we’re able to get where we want to go faster and more directly—yet each new gain comes with a feeling of loss.

  From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows. In the same vein, many people currently worry that digital technology is making us less connected to the people and things in our immediate environment. It is easy to dismiss these responses as overreactions, the curmudgeonly groans of the progress-averse. Yet in all these cases, a faster connection palpably diminishes our ability to experience the richness of the physical world: A person texting with her friends or riding on a bullet train is connecting very quickly to her ends, but in doing so, she skips over the immensely complex terrain that lies between those two points. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, instead of being immersed in an endless continuum of landscapes, we increasingly experience the world as a network of “nodes and connect
ors”: homes and highways, airports and flight routes, websites and links.

  The importance of place and context—those two words whose meanings twine in the word environment—necessarily wanes as we transition to a world of nodes and connectors. The fact that trails enable just this kind of reduction in complexity has always been one of their chief appeals. But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse. And so, beginning roughly with the advent of locomotives, new trails were built for the very purpose of reconnecting us back to (and, later, preserving) the environment. These trails webbed together, and lengthened, until one could walk from one end of the country to the other, remaining almost always within a wild landscape, where (in the memorable language of the 1964 Wilderness Act) “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

  It can be hard to see exactly where the IAT—the great connector—­fits into the grand history of trails. Is it the continuation of a trend? A return to a prior mode? Something wholly novel? To answer this question, it helps to first ask: What desire is this trail fulfilling? As I traced the IAT from Maine to Newfoundland to Iceland to Morocco, I began to realize that the IAT seeks to resolve our confused feelings about scale and interconnection. The trail itself is a surreal project: standing on a mountaintop in Scotland, you somehow understand that this is the same mountain chain you once climbed, years earlier and an ocean away, in Georgia. In an era when we are able to travel through the air with godlike nonchalance and send information to other continents at the speed of light, a truly global footpath confirms our belief in how connected, how small, the world has become, and yet it also reminds us how unfathomably—how unwalkably—huge the planet remains.