by Robert Moor
In the fall of 2012, I traveled back to the summit of Katahdin and began walking north toward the border. I was equipped with a set of instructions and a map I had printed out from the IAT website, which gave me turn-by-turn instructions to lead me through the concatenation of forest paths and roads that made up the trail. I knew it would take me roughly a week to reach the border, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me. When you set out to hike the AT, you carry with you some sense of what the storied Long Green Tunnel will entail. I bore no such preconceptions about the IAT. It was terra incognita.
I tiptoed along the Knife’s Edge, over Pamola Peak, and then down the eastern flank. From the base of the mountain, I trudged down a wet gravel path and skated along algal-slick boardwalks. The cold air dripped. I wore three layers (merino, synth puff, rain shell) and a winter beanie, and still I shivered. It was October, and the leaves were in full death-bloom. A small frog, spotted like a leopard, flopped out of my path on drugged legs.
The route turned onto an old overgrown carriage path and continued until it reached a gate that led to a wide logging road. On my left was a brown wooden sign indicating the “southern terminus” of the International Appalachian Trail, painted in the same white-lettered, hand-carved style of those on the AT. Below it was the IAT blaze: a white metal rectangle, about the size of a dollar bill, surrounded by a blue border. Printed onto the white background were the cruciform letters:
S I A
A
T
I was officially on the IAT; this was the first of hundreds of thousands of blazes that would one day mark the trail from here to Morocco.II At around twelve thousand miles, it was a project on a truly planetary scale: if a hole were dug from Hawaii to Botswana through the Earth’s core, one would have to walk all the way to the end of that Hadean tunnel and halfway back in order to travel an equivalent distance. The length is so staggering, and the climates so punishing, that most people doubt any person will ever walk its full extent in one continuous trip. Anderson told me he was doubtful as well, but he invited people to try. After all, he pointed out, people once thought the Appalachian Trail was too long to thru-hike. In 1922 Walter Prichard Eaton, an early architect of the trail, predicted that “The Appalachian Trail would exist in its entirety chiefly for a symbol—that is, nobody, or practically nobody, would ever tramp more than a fraction of its length.” When Earl Shaffer completed the first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1948, the ATC initially greeted his announcement with skepticism. “But the fact is that he made the Appalachian Trail work,” Anderson said. “You only have to have a few people walk from one end to the other to express the purpose of your trail.”
Back when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail, I had met a rusty-bearded fanatic named Obi who told me that once he had reached Katahdin, if all went according to plan, he would continue hiking an additional eighteen hundred miles on the IAT up through eastern Canada to the northern tip of Newfoundland. He had gotten the idea from a famous thru-hiker named Nimblewill Nomad, who, in 2001, became the first person to hike from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of Newfoundland, covering some five thousand miles. I looked upon these fanatics with mingled reverence and suspicion, as I would a gourmand who had decided to top off an enormous steak dinner by slurping down three dozen oysters. (Wasn’t the Appalachian Trail long enough? I thought. Why keep going?) But out here, all alone, I caught a glimmer of the feeling these super-thru-hikers were chasing. It was the same feeling the early AT thru-hikers must have experienced: lonesome, uncertain, faintly electric. It felt like adventure.
Northern Maine, late fall: even the sunlight has a dark, ice-whetted edge. The trail followed a wide logging road for five miles, which undulated through stands of Jupiter-toned second-growth forest. Over the next few days, the logging road turned into a vanishingly faint dirt trail, which then turned into a riverside tow-path, then a dirt road, and then—with the exception of a maddeningly straight stretch of bike path, a set of ski runs, and a surreal section in which, for a distance of eight miles, it became the US-Canadian borderIII—the trail ran along paved roads until it crossed into Canada.
Once it hopped the border, the IAT became stranger still, jumping from one Maritime island to another, brazenly flaunting the notion of contiguity. Farther north, in Newfoundland, the trail sometimes split into multiple routes, or it disappeared altogether, forcing hikers to navigate with a map and compass, such as in the Tuckamore-choked section I would hike on the west coast of Newfoundland. A trail is traditionally defined as a single, walkable line. But this new, slippery, sprawling, leviathanic thing—which swallowed roads, leaped seas, and vanished from sight—was quietly redefining the term.
I dislike walking on roads, so whenever I encountered concrete, I stopped and stuck out my thumb. Sometimes I had to wait for an hour or two, but a car would inevitably pull over and pick me up. Then we zoomed away down the long, straight farm roads, covering days of walking in an hour. I must confess: it felt like magic. But I did miss the views walking affords. Staring out through the windshield and the passenger-side window, I saw much of the Maine countryside in a series of freeze-frames and blurred pans, that weird wave-particle duality familiar to all car passengers. We passed maple syrup stores, potato farms, Amish men on bicycles, and old barns, hollowed and phantasmagorically warped, but still, somehow upright.
In the areas where the trail diverged from the road, I resumed walking. In the process of hopping in and out of cars, I was forced to pay new attention to the oddly cyborgic nature of travel in the industrialized world. On a vacation to a foreign country, a person might unthinkingly use a half-dozen different modes of transportation—we walk, we drive, we fly, we ride on trains or streetcars, we sail on ferries, and then we walk some more. On the IAT, I began to notice how many other machines quietly aided in my survival: not just the cars that carried me, but the heavy machinery that paved the roads and bike paths I walked on, the computers that printed out my map, and the factories that built my gear. I ate food cooked and dehydrated and packaged and rehydrated and recooked with the use of machines. At night I slept in strangers’ homes (machine-built, machine-warmed, and filled with smaller machines), or in a wooden lean-to (whose materials had been trucked or choppered in), or, one night, directly beneath the spinning white blades of a wind farm.
The oddest part, on further reflection, is that all this technology seemed utterly normal, even natural, to me. This deep and often unconscious reliance on technology has inspired the design theorist and engineer Adrian Bejan to dub us the “human and machine species.”
Humans adapt to their environments. One of the ways we adapt is by creating technology. Once an invention is widely adopted, it effectively becomes part of the landscape, another feature to which our lives adapt. We then create more technology to adapt to the existing technologies. A smartphone, for example, is adapted not just to human anatomy and the physical constraints of the earth, but also to a network of cellular towers, a constellation of satellites, a standardized system of electrical jacks, a wide variety of computers, and a telephone system stretching back to the middle of the nineteenth century, which was strung together with wires made from copper, a substance we have been manipulating for the past seven thousand years.
Our innovations pile up, one atop the other, each forming the foundation for the next, until an entirely new landscape, a techscape, emerges—like a city built on the ruins of past empires. Any person who tries to resist the adoption of a vital new technology begins to feel this transformation acutely; Luddites become, quite literally, maladapted to the modern world. For instance, I swore for years I would not buy a smartphone, because they seemed unnecessary and expensive. But then my friends started texting me videos or web links, which my cheap flip phone couldn’t open; and the fact that I would need to look up addresses and directions before leaving the house became a handicap, as GPS made it easy for others to make pl
ans on the spot. Finally, half to keep from falling out of touch, half to keep from getting lost, I broke down and bought a smartphone too.
In this techscape, new values also emerge—often made up of old words with new connotations: automatic, digital, mobile, wireless, frictionless, smart—and new technology adapts to those values. The current meaning of the word wilderness, one could argue, emerged directly from the techscape of industrialism, just as the current meaning of the word network emerged from the world of telecommunications. With the advent of industrial technology we began to see wilderness less as a landscape devoid of agriculture and more as a landscape free from technology—and thus the wild went from being a wasteland to a refuge.
Much of our modern conception of wilderness was formulated in direct opposition to the technology of mechanical travel: William Wordsworth, Britain’s foremost nature poet, preceded the modern environmental movement by a century when he vociferously opposed the expansion of a proposed train line into the Lake District of Northern England. In the United States, both Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall defined wilderness as an area (in Marshall’s words) that “possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means.” Benton MacKaye agreed; much of his later life was dedicated to fighting the incursion of “skyline highways” into the Appalachians. Together, these three men, along with a handful of others, founded the Wilderness Society.
In large part, the continued interest in hiking seems to stem from a desire to cut through the techscape to get to some natural substratum: to borrow MacKaye’s phrase, to see the “primeval influence” beneath the “machine influence.” But ironically, the act of hiking is also dependent on technology. Many of the earliest hikers relied on trains and automobiles to reach the mountains. Today, some forms of technology (like cell phones or ATVs) are considered obnoxious, while others (like water purifiers, camp stoves, and GPS locators) are excused. In either case, technology inexorably trickles into the wild, allowing hikers to reach new lands, travel in new ways, think in new terms, and optimize to new values.
Wilderness looks different in the neon light of technology. In the traditional framework of wilderness preservation, a techscape is merely a despoiled wilderness landscape. But when viewed through the lens of technology, the wilderness can be seen as nothing more than an ultra-minimalist techscape designed to provide an escape from other, more baroque techscapes. Readers raised on the wild gospels of John Muir and Edward Abbey will likely cringe at this definition—as, indeed, I once did. Such is our aversion to mixing technology and wilderness, even in theory. But while walking the IAT, I came to appreciate the matter with a bit more nuance. While most trails try to hide their fraught relationship with technology—by banning motorized transport, avoiding roads, disguising their own construction, and in all other ways, aping primordial nature as best as possible—the IAT bears it unabashedly, like a smiling mouth full of gold teeth.
Following the IAT north, I flew to Newfoundland and hitched more rides. For most of its length, the Newfoundland section follows a highway up the island’s west coast called Route 430, which an enterprising local tourism association had dubbed the “Viking Trail.” Beginning in Deer Lake, I hitched my way from small town to small town, stopping off here and there for scenic hikes. (This combination of long drives and short hikes is precisely how the trail’s architects had envisioned most people using it. Thru-hikers were manifestly not their primary concern.) Eventually, I made my way to the trail’s northernmost point, a place called Crow Head. There, I walked along a gravel footpath for less than three miles before I reached a bluff overlooking a wide expanse of ocean dolloped with icebergs. I found no sign marking the trail’s end. Or rather, there was a sign, but, as I would later learn, the sea winds had scoured it blank. I hung around on that bluff for a long time, trying to imagine how it would have felt to stand there, triumphant, after walking all the way from Georgia.
I felt no sense of triumph, not even secondhand. Instead, what I felt was something like guilt or loss. By having hitchhiked there, I had cheated myself of the slow engagement with the local landscape that thru-hiking provides. Hitching was too easy, too quick.
There was one upside to hitching, however: it was a wonderful way to get to know the local people. Snug in the confines of the car, staring ahead at the road, conversation naturally flows between drivers and passengers. In an amazingly short span of time, awkwardness, suspicion, and fears of impending murder give way to a form of intimacy resembling that of a second date. In Newfoundland, I caught rides with fishermen, miners, carpenters, and, once, a trucker hauling a load of recyclables whose eighteen-wheeler had a pair of red-stained moose antlers bolted to the grille. (He told me that on average he inadvertently ran over about twenty moose a year.) The drivers were exceptionally generous. They were constantly offering me beer and drugs—a welcome inversion of the traditional ass-gas-or-grass economics of hitchhiking. In return, all they wanted was someone to talk to.
At some point in our conversations, I managed to ask every one of these drivers if they had heard about the IAT, the trail they were driving on at that very moment, which would one day stretch all the way to Morocco. None had ever heard of it. A few of the drivers said they had noticed gaunt men and women carrying backpacks and “ski poles” along the side of the highway, though none knew where, or why, they were walking. On these long stretches of the IAT, drivers and thru-hikers shared the same route, but they were in two distinct landscapes—the land of the slow, and the land of the fast. It is strange, then, but also strangely appropriate, that Dick Anderson should have first dreamed up the IAT while driving along the highway. As I would later learn, hiking trails and highways, like the snakes on a caduceus, have always been both opposed and curiously entwined.
Most people would be surprised to learn that the American interstate highway system, as it currently exists, was first envisioned by the AT’s founder, Benton MacKaye. In 1931, MacKaye (along with his friend, the forester Lewis Mumford) proposed the notion of what he called the “townless highway” to remedy the problem of high-speed traffic and congestion passing through downtown streets. The heart of the problem, as MacKaye saw it, was that the road network had evolved from ancient footpaths, which grew into bridle paths and wagon roads. Motorcars were a wholly different technology, with different abilities and limitations, and so deserved a fresh system suited specifically to them. He proposed that cars be given their own dedicated spaces in which they could reach maximum speed, just as trains had been.
Thanks in large part to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, major highways now regularly skirt cities, and many are bordered not by rows of tacky shops (what MacKaye called “motor slums”) but by strips of forest. Cars got faster, towns got quieter, and the circuitry of civilization reorganized itself around a new mode of transport. Quicker than a horse, more flexible than a railcar, the highway-bound automobile was ideally suited to a sprawling, mobile, individualistic nation like postwar America. Now, despite a growing awareness of the automobile’s many downsides—namely its inefficiency, pollution, and tendency to kill people—it remains our de facto mode of transportation, in part because everything else in the American landscape has hardened around it.
Though the modern interstate is a recent invention, the history of the highway stretches back thousands of years. When the earliest footpaths were widened into roads, the next logical step was to make those roads faster. Often this involved artificially hardening the road’s surface and raising it above the surrounding land so it could shed water (hence the name highway). Unlike trails, highways required a massive expenditure of labor to build, so they were only built when rulers were able to marshal the necessary labor force (usually made up of slaves and soldiers). As a result, the earliest highways served as the tentacles of grand empires. Through them principally flowed three things: royal information, royal armies, and royal personages. In imperial China, wide highways (chi dao)
of finely tamped earth, lined with shady evergreens and paved with flat stones, were built with ruts conforming exactly to the axle length of the emperor’s carts and carriages; on each of these three-lane highways, the center lane was reserved for the exclusive use of the imperial family. Along the Roman via publicae were installed milestones, which regularly reminded one of the distance from—and thus, the reach of—imperial Rome. When the Assyrians conquered a new region, they built new roads to more quickly transport military dispatches and allow troops to quash local revolts. The Maya did the same. Incoming Inca emperors would sometimes command their conscripted laborers to build new paved roads even if passable stretches of road already existed, simply to signify their control of that land.
In colonial America, the evolution of the road system mirrored that of the nation. At first, new European settlements were relatively ungoverned, and paths were rough. Over time, when settlements became sufficiently populous, the government extended its reach, offering legal protection while extracting taxes. The tax system was designed to create more roads: by the 1740s in North Carolina, every taxable male was expected to perform as many as twelve days of roadwork each year, though wealthy people avoided this obligation by paying others to serve in their stead. Unpaid taxes could be recompensed by doing yet more roadwork.
The road network had to balance a need for expediency with a need to connect population centers, so it would often deviate from the path of least resistance in order to accommodate a large town or city. Geographers call this phenomenon “population gravity.” However, a more apt term might be “capital gravity,” in the sense that the roads, built with tax dollars, bent to service the largest sources of funding. As a general rule, in the colonial era, every publicly maintained road contained at least one large house alongside it, because that household had sufficient influence to sway the government into building a road there. In later years, this rule would hold true, but instead of big houses, the new roads led to big corporate interests, like Alaska’s Dalton Highway, which was built by the oil companies in just five months in 1974, with the help of government engineers and funding, to reach the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and service the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.