On Trails

by Robert Moor

  “Where roads go tells you where the power is at any given time,” Tom Magnuson, an expert in the history of the colonial road network, once told me. We were driving around Hillsborough, North Carolina, and he was pointing out the spectral remnants of colonial roads in the nearby woods. The reason we could still locate bygone roads like these, Magnuson explained, was somewhat unintuitive: there are fewer official roads today than there were a hundred years ago. “It’s a result of the increased weight of our carriage,” he explained. “We’re carrying heavier cargo, so the road surface has to be better, more expensive. The more expensive the road, the fewer roads you build.” For example, he said, today truckers all take a single route from Raleigh to Atlanta: Interstate 85. It would be slow and costly to go any other way. However, back in 1950, there were about twelve different routes that trucks regularly used. Fifty years earlier, there were probably double that amount.

  As they are woven into the fabric of civilization, highways effectively become part of the landscape, which people must then adapt to. Businesses and, in some cases, entire towns (once called “pike towns”) spring up to service the highways’ passengers. Magnuson had found thirteen hamlets in North Carolina alone that had disappeared after they were bypassed by highways. Other towns, like Timberlake, had migrated to be closer to a major thoroughfare, leaving behind the husks of abandoned neighborhoods. The same phenomenon takes place whenever a fixed structure becomes an essential part of peoples’ lives: even if it is initially built to serve us, we end up molding our behavior around it.

  From a walker’s perspective, the brutal nature of modern highways stems from the ways they have adapted to the technology of the automobile. Because cars have trouble turning at high speeds, highways must seek the straightest line they can, even if that means blasting a tunnel through a mountainside. Because driving fast is much more dangerous than walking, highways inevitably require regulations and penalties—construction codes, speed limits, and, those most dreaded of all creatures, traffic cops. And because a speeding car will kill just about any living thing it runs into, highways marginalize and imperil any human being or animal walking along them.

  In this way, highways have created a wholly new, highly technological landscape of movement. Optimized to the “human and machine species,” this landscape is maladapted to the naked human body, even though it is the full expression of a deeply human desire—to go farther, faster; to connect in heretofore impossible ways.

  The decision to route a hiking path over a highway might seem a deeply counterintuitive one. It is not, however, uncommon. Before automobiles pushed hikers into the hills, walkers and wheeled vehicles shared the roads; in fact, road walking was a popular American pastime in the late nineteenth century. The public’s lingering fondness for the concept of road walking would prove crucial to the creation of the AT, which just like the IAT today, originally routed much of the trail over (dirt) roads. This tactic had a clear rationale: in the race for federal funding, the trick to building a long trail is to first create a walkable route and attract attention. Then, once the trail is well known and funding begins pouring in, one can worry about shifting it off roads and into wilder lands, mile by mile. “For example in Maine, the Appalachian Trail once made extensive use of logging roads,” Dave Startzell, the former director of the ATC, told me. “Over time we were able to relocate a lot of those sections. But you’re talking about a program that spanned more than thirty years, cost more than two hundred million dollars, and involved acquiring over three thousand parcels of land.”

  There is a catch-22 inherent to this process, though. Trails need money to relocate away from roads. In order to raise money they need to attract hikers (and media coverage) to demonstrate that the trail is desired by the public. However, most hikers dislike walking on roads. A similar logical bind commonly arises with the creation and adoption of any new technology: With highways, for instance, if everyone in a given region were to pitch in (with their money or their labor), a new highway could be built very quickly; but it is very hard to prove that the highway is necessary or useful until it has been completed and people are already using it. In this regard, the hikers who had committed themselves to hiking the IAT now, when it is ugly and hard, were committing something akin to an act of faith. They were walking the trail into existence.

  After returning home from Canada, I tracked down two such thru-hikers, Warren Renninger and Sterling Coleman. In 2012 they both successfully hiked from the southern tip of Florida up to the northern tip of Newfoundland along the IAT (a trip of some five thousand miles). Coleman told me he enjoyed how the road walks connected him to local people—he was often offered food, and on one occasion, a pack of boys chased him down to ask for his autograph—­but overall he found it an alienating experience. The long, straight stretches of road played tricks on both their minds. Renninger said that if he had it to do over again, he would have brought along a bike to make these sections go by quicker. Coleman said that, since many of the roads were never blazed, over time the trail seemed to dissolve before his eyes. “It started to feel more and more like I wasn’t actually on a trail,” he said. “It just felt kind of arbitrary that I had a piece of paper that said I had to go here, here, and here . . .”

 

  Somewhere around Iceland, things began to fall apart. In the spring of 2012 I received word from Dick Anderson that the IAT would be holding its first overseas general assembly in Reykjavik, a historic event, designed to cement the ties between the scattered branches of the organization. He warmly invited me to attend, and so, using the remaining funds of a fellowship I’d been awarded, I booked a ticket.

  I landed in Reykjavik at midnight, underneath an apricot sky. It was late June, close to the summer solstice, when the dark of night lasts just three hours. I slept restlessly, and then woke with a start at two P.M. the following day. Already late, I brushed my teeth and washed my face with the sulfurous tap water, then hastened to a reception that was being held for the IAT committee at the US embassy.

  The inside of the ambassador’s home was awash in timeless sunlight. Gray-haired men and short-haired women held glasses of ice water and small plates ravaged of hors d’oeuvres. I greeted Dick Anderson, who wore a brown corduroy jacket and a tie. Don Hudson introduced me to the chairperson of the IAT, Paul Wylezol, a pale Newfoundlander with a dark Caesar haircut. Wylezol was a stern, saturnine presence, with an odd habit of referring to the IAT as a “brand”: at one point, he said that the routing of the IAT over preexisting trails, like the ancient Ulster Way in Ireland, wasn’t “rebranding,” but “another level of branding.” (I also overheard him compare the IAT to McDonalds.) In his spare time, Wylezol toiled over a dense tome of deductive logic, which he hoped to one day publish not on paper, but in a sprawling, nonlinear, hyperlinked electronic document. I had long wondered who had given the IAT its curiously postmodern flavor—surely it wasn’t Dick Anderson, the septuagenarian Maine woodsman. Upon meeting Wylezol, I understood.

  Before coming to Iceland, Wylezol had visited Greenland, which he assured me would be unlike any other section of the trail. Since there was no physical trail, hikers would be obliged to carry a map, compass, and (ideally) a GPS; since there were wide, frigid river crossings, they were advised to carry a small inflatable raft and telescoping paddle; and since there were polar bears, they were encouraged to carry a rifle.

  That summer, René Kristensen, the director of the trail’s Greenland chapter, and five native Greenlandic boys flew to Maine to see the beginning of the trail. The trip was an example of exactly the kind of cross-cultural interaction Anderson was hoping to foster. Though they were walking over roughly the same rocks as back home, the flora and fauna were totally alien; the only place they felt at home, Kristensen said, was the barren summit of Katahdin. One night, a brief thunderstorm rolled through. The boys, for whom the Northern Lights are as common as clouds, were mesmerized. (“I’ve been in north Greenland for twelve
years, and I have never, ever seen lightning,” Kristensen said. “People don’t know what it is.”)

  Outside the ambassador’s house, I sat down on a couch next to Walter Anderson, the geologist. I asked him how Iceland fit into the larger picture of the Appalachian geology. “Oh, there are no Appalachian rocks in Iceland,” he replied, shrugging. “In that way, it is a little bit artificial. But the reason the trail is coming here is because this lies directly on the Mid-Atlantic rift, where the two plates are separating. The rift is the connection. So, you see, it’s part of the geologic story.”

  A few days later, the IAT committee members would all drive out to see the rift. When we stepped off of the tour bus at the Thingvellir National Park, we found a landscape swept bare of trees. Erupting through the grassy fields were rows of steep, flat-topped stone dusted with a sugary green. The sun dipped behind a cloud, and we felt a faint, black presentiment of winter.

  The park’s warden, Ólafur Örn Haraldsson, welcomed us with a short speech. Iceland, we were told, was born of division. Where the tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America pried apart, lava poured forth into the oceans, creating a submarine mountain chain. In one spot, an unusually active volcano continued to plume and pile up, rising tens of thousands of feet through the water column until it burst, black and steaming, above the waves. On the uppermost reaches of that peak, the nation of Iceland was built.

  The two continental plates continued to widen at a rate of a few millimeters annually over the past ten thousand years, which, Haraldsson explained, had opened up the rift valley below. We wound our way down into the rift along a gravel path, the jumbled stone walls widening the deeper we went. Dick Anderson, gray-haired, slightly stooped in his blue rain shell, was lit up with childlike wonder.

  “Oh my God, Don,” he said at one point, gesturing toward a bird with a long orange beak. “What is that thing? What is that?”

  “An oystercatcher,” Hudson said.

  “Wow,” Anderson said. “They have oystercatchers here?”

  As we moved deeper into the rift, he pointed to the rock wall and asked Walter Anderson, “Is this all lava?”

  “All lava,” Walter said.

  “But some of it’s different colors . . .”

  “Well, that’s bird shit.”

  At the bottom of the rift, we all posed for a picture by joining hands and stretching from one side of the rift to the other. The symbolism was clear: Wylezol announced that the Atlantic had once divided us, but now “the IAT is bringing us back together.”

  That sentiment also proved to be the refrain of the general assembly meeting, which had been held in a conference room at the office of the Iceland Touring Association the day before. Over the course of six hours, as committee members from around the world gave their presentations, an overhead projector cycled through photos and videos depicting the landscapes of Maine, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and Spain. When Don Hudson got up to speak, he pointed out that one of the original goals of the Appalachian Trail was to bring like-minded communities together. “Today, Benton MacKaye must be smiling on top of some ethereal mountain,” he said.

  The presentations went smoothly, but as the day wore on, people began, tentatively at first, to raise objections. First, a woman from Denmark asked whether countries where French was not the official language could drop the “SIA” (Sentier International des Appalaches) in the IAT/SIA logo. “Is it possible to make it more . . . simple in the future?” she asked.

  Wylezol explained that the logo had been added to appease the Quebecois, but mentioned that it also worked in France and Spain (where the s could stand for “sendero”). “People may not understand why it’s there,” he said. “But it’s like any logo, whether it be Mercedes Benz or whatever. It’s just an image.”

  Don Hudson, who had invented the logo a decade earlier at his kitchen table, was less protective of it. “All these things are temporary and mutable, particularly when you think of geologic time,” he said.

  In the end, it was loosely agreed that trail clubs could put whichever three letters they liked on their blazes, so long as they kept the general shape and color scheme.

  A woman from the Faroe Islands voiced her concern that hikers would become lost on the Faroese trails, which were marked only with cairns, and had always been navigated using only traditional knowledge. There was a brief, inconclusive discussion of how technology like GPS and QR codes could be incorporated into the trail. Then Startzell, the former director of the ATC, raised his hand and asked what the guidelines were for deciding how closely the trail must adhere to the geology of the Appalachians. “For example, if somebody proposed a section of the trail in Barcelona, which is I believe pretty well removed from the Appalachians, would we say, ‘That’s great, but that’s not really part of what we’re striving for’? Or is this kind of a come-one-come-all kind of thing?”

  Wylezol replied that, “to the greatest extent possible,” the trail should strive to adhere to the Appalachian geology. However, there were instances where that was not feasible. In Greenland, for example, the Appalachian chain ran up the east coast, but because the east was too difficult to access and navigate, the trail ran along the island’s western edge. “Conceivably we could have a trail in Western Sahara,” Wylezol added. “But right now I don’t think anyone expects to go there and return with their two arms attached. So we have to be flexible.”

  Next, Wylezol asked those attending how linear they thought the trail should be. Before opening the topic up for discussion, Wylezol gave his opinion. His stance was decidedly nonlinear: He referred to the section he maintained in Newfoundland not as a trail but as a “route.” Wylezol urged the attendants to keep in mind that “thru-hikers—the rock stars of hiking—as important as they are as a symbol and so on, are very, very few in the overall scheme of things.” Most people would hike sections of the trail in (at most) one- or two-week stints, and for them, linearity was not such a pressing concern. In parts of the UK, the trail was split into spur trails in order to accommodate the most scenic areas of England, Scotland, and Ireland. “We don’t want to abandon that just for some theoretical position that we have to be linear,” he said.

  Don Hudson again stressed the fact that connectivity, not linearity, was the trail’s defining ethos. However, he admitted, strangers often had trouble wrapping their minds around this concept. When the trail had been extended to Newfoundland, people had said to him, “You can’t walk to Newfoundland. How can that be part of the International Appalachian Trail?” His answer was that the trail existed “so long as we can describe to people how to get around the network.”

  A woman from Ireland excitedly called out that perhaps the trail could be renamed the International Appalachian Trail Network. Hudson mentioned that they had initially called it the International Appalachian Trails, plural. “I don’t know why we dropped it,” he said.

  Finally, Wylezol asked the audience if anyone would like to speak in defense of strict linearity.

  No one did.

 

  To a great extent, the IAT was the offspring, and embodiment, of a very recent invention: that global reticulum of cables and code we call the Internet. The language and ethos of the Internet—a decentralized network of networks, designed to connect far-flung but like-minded people—infused (and facilitated) the trail committee’s every discussion.

  Fittingly enough, from its embryonic days, the Internet has always been an expansion upon one of the functions of trails (and, later, roads)—transmitting information quickly across long distances. Before roughly the nineteenth century, roads and pathways were the primary conduits of information in most countries. “Nobody lived more than a couple feet from the road until you got newspapers and telegraphs and internal combustion,” Tom Magnuson told me. “In the age of muscle power, people lived as close as they co
uld to the road, because that was the Internet. Every bit of your information came down that road.”

  With the advent of the telegraph, the dual function of trails (transporting matter; transmitting information) split. Matter followed one route, rolling along roads and railways (and water routes and air routes), whereas information was carried along wires, where it could travel far faster. And like trail networks, these wire networks created new ways of structuring the information they transmitted. As we saw in previous chapters, organisms as simple as slime molds use trails to externalize and organize information (food is here; food is not there), and indigenous human communities around the world have long used trails to make sense of landscapes, give shape to their stories (first this happened here, then that happened there), and to link together places of special (medicinal, spiritual, historical) interest. The dual invention of the computer and the Internet served as the latest breakthrough in our millennia-long search for better ways to transmit, store, sort, and process information.

  In 1945 a prominent engineer named Vannevar Bush presciently anticipated the advent of the modern networked computer. That summer he published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly in which he envisioned a machine called the “memex” (memory+index). It would consist of a desk, two monitors, and a library of texts imprinted on microfiche—in addition to a great deal of technology that had yet to be invented, like touch-screens and modifiable print. Theoretically, wrote Bush, a memex user would be able to scroll through a series of linked documents while inserting his own links, comments, and edits. Looking back on this essay seventy years later, his device resembles nothing so much as a steampunk rendering of Wikipedia.