On Trails

by Robert Moor

Hammou seemed to particularly resent the fact that his boss was a woman. Whenever one of his friends called to ask how Asselouf and I were faring, he would joke that Asselouf was crying. Once, Asselouf told me, he turned to her and asked, “Why don’t you go home and raise babies like a normal woman?” Asselouf shrugged off these provocations. She’d heard worse.

  From the outset, Asselouf’s chosen line of work had been a struggle. Back when she was in her early twenties, she had told her mother she wanted to take a course in mountain guiding, but her mother forbade her. When Asselouf persisted, her mother slapped her face. Asselouf went anyway. She was now thirty-nine years old. She lived in the same home where she and her seven siblings had grown up. They all eventually moved out, leaving her to take care of her ailing mother, alone. Currently, she was one of only two female guides she knew of in all of Morocco.

  In the Berber highlands, she stuck out. She dressed unconventionally, in gray yoga pants, a knee-length merino sweater, and a black rain shell. When we passed through villages, she was regarded as the oddity, not me. The children gathered behind her, speculating in whispers whether she was from France or America. When she turned on her heels and told them that she was a Berber too, they burst into fits of nervous laughter.

  The three of us made for odd travel companions; though we were walking the same path, we each had different goals. It seemed Hammou simply wanted to get us to Taroudant as easily as possible, get paid, and go home. Asselouf was trying to expose me to the local culture and natural beauty, while also heading off any potential disaster. And I was here, above all, to chart a potential route for the IAT. Asselouf often tried to communicate my rationale to Hammou, but it was clearly a struggle. He’s here to map out a very long hiking trail that will one day stretch from North America and Europe to Morocco, I imagined her saying in Berber. I could tell by his reaction he found the whole idea a bit preposterous.

  Indeed, I was beginning to have doubts of my own. Aside from Hammou and Asselouf, my interactions with Moroccans had mostly been fleeting—a smile, a wave, but little more. I realized hiking might be a deeply inappropriate means of connecting disparate cultures. To truly connect to the people living here, one would need to stop for a year (or ten), set down roots, and learn the language. Hiking is about movement, a continual sliding over the surface of things. What meaningful cross-cultural communication could possibly come of it?

  On our second night, we stayed in a home where everything smelled of fresh paint; the walls of the main entry hall had been painted robin’s egg blue in preparation for an upcoming wedding. We sat in the kitchen as the matriarch of the household poured out glasses of milky Berber tea, redolent of thyme, and ordered around her five daughters and four granddaughters. Later, the patriarch ambled in, a ninety-two-year-old former judge with ears like giant moth wings. In a show of deference, everyone offered him their seat. Asselouf wisely intuited that the old man would like to rest his back against a hard surface, so she got up and moved a stool against the wall, where he gladly eased himself down. (Later, Hammou complained that Asselouf concerned herself too much with other people’s feelings. “That,” she replied, “is why I am the best guide in all of Morocco.”)

  Once we had exchanged pleasantries, Asselouf began peppering the judge with questions about the local topography. As part of his job, he had traveled extensively throughout the mountainous countryside, settling cases and arbitrating disputes, so he knew the name of every village and the most efficient route over every mountain. (He praised the French for widening trails and cutting new roads, if nothing else.) After a while he pointed to me and asked Asselouf something. I watched her explain, over the course of many minutes, using vivid hand gestures, the story of the breakup of Pangaea, the cleaving of the Appalachian Mountains, and the proposed trail that would link them all together. I turned to watch their faces, expecting to see bewilderment or mockery. The old man nodded his head slowly and said something. “He says that was the will of Allah,” Asselouf said. “He says that long ago we all came from the same place, but just this”—she pinched her cheek—“became different. Beneath, bones, blood, it’s all the same. You understand what I am saying?”

 

  We hiked on, over snowy mountain passes, along dirt roads and sheep trails. We hired yet more mule drivers, including one young man who routinely beat his mule with a wooden club; every few minutes the mule would retaliate by lifting its tail and releasing a pneumatic stream of gas into his face. The hills varied between gray, taupe, and blood-black. When the continents were joined in the Pangaea supercontinent, parts of Morocco would have nestled up against northern Maine. But I had trouble seeing the kinship between these sandy mountains and my green-backed, granite-spined Appalachians. (In fact, I would later learn, we were still in the High Atlas, which was a much younger formation, geologically speaking. Only later would we reach the Appalachian geology of the Anti-Atlas.)

  Two days later, we caught a microbus and skipped about fifty kilometers of the trail, so we could make it to Taroudant in time for me to catch my flight. Asselouf was careful to note the names of all the villages we would have passed through, so I could mark them down on my map later. On the bus, a young man with a round face offered to let us stay at his house. Asselouf eyed him suspiciously.

  “Is your house clean?” she asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  “Do you wash your dishes?”

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  Before she could go on, he preempted her. “Please, stop asking questions. Do you want to stay or not?”

  When we finally arrived at his house—which lay at the end of a long road cutting through farms and fruit orchards—he turned to Asselouf and said, “Now you see. Everything is dirty.”

  Asselouf sighed. Without another word, she began rinsing out the unwashed tea glasses and sweeping the kitchen floors.

  The house was little more than a concrete shanty. The layout was bisected. Two of its four rooms were for humans: a kitchen, with a dirt floor and benches made of cinder blocks and wood boards; and a bedroom, where blankets covered a hardwood pallet. The remaining two rooms were dedicated to housing a milk cow. In this small, disheveled space lived four cousins. The three oldest—ages twenty-­three, nineteen, and seventeen—worked on nearby watermelon farms and orange orchards. The youngest of them, who was only twelve, worked as a shepherd.

  To illuminate the room, one of the boys lit a large, swan-necked propane lantern, which resembled something from a chemistry lab. We sat down on the bedroom floor, and Asselouf served a dinner of lamb stew in a tagine. The boys, who were used to simple bachelor fare like lentils and rice, devoured the stew, peeling off hunks of flatbread to sop up the juices. They were shy at first, especially the youngest, who hid behind his brothers and peered at us with suspicion. Before long, though, Asselouf was playing Wendy among the Lost Boys; she taught them phrases in Arabic and French, and teased them for their messiness. By the end of the night they were begging her to move in with them.

  After dinner, the oldest of the boys, Abdul Wahid, challenged me to a game of checkers. The checkerboard was a piece of plywood where the squares had been drawn in by hand. For the pieces, we used small rocks he gathered from the yard. Checkers is a very old game—a three-thousand-year-old checkerboard was found in the biblical city of Ur—but its modern form was shaped by the French, who most likely introduced it to the Berbers. The French rules, which Abdul Wahid played by, were slightly different from those I had grown up with. (For example, when a piece was “kinged,” it could travel diagonally across the board, like a bishop in chess).

  When our game was finished, the boys started playing with Latifa’s camera. The two younger boys took turns posing while wearing my glasses and pretending to read my copy of Waiting for the Barbarians. Then Abdul Wahid posed with my iPhone held to his ear. At first I thought they were poking fun at me, but as the boys gathered around Asselouf’s c
amera to inspect the pictures of themselves, I realized it was a kind of play-acting. They were imagining themselves into a different life.

  “Real travel,” wrote Robyn Davidson, “would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another’s eyes.” However, I was discovering that this process works both ways: a journey is never simply the act of gaining a new perspective, but also the experience of being newly seen. Again, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of the unheimlich, but this time, surrounded by kind, curious faces, the feeling was warmer, more expansive. Boundaries were dissolving.

  As the night wound down we cleared away the dishes and lay down together—Hammou, me, and Asselouf—on the wooden pallet in the living room. In the kitchen, the Lost Boys were bedded down on blue plastic bags of grain. A radio warbled gently in the background as they whispered themselves to sleep.

 

  In the morning, we set off for Taroudant. The land that lay ahead was a hard clay pan between two mountain ranges, known as the valley of Souss. We passed by watermelon farms, citrus orchards, wheat fields, and groves of Argan trees. Heat wavered up from the earth and was dispersed by the wind; it felt like walking across the scorched bottom of a tagine. At one point, we were chased by three scrawny, vicious dogs, which we had to fend off with rocks. When we asked their owner why he didn’t call off his dogs, he smiled and replied that we shouldn’t be walking across his land if we didn’t want to get chased.

  In the mountains to the north of Taroudant, I had hoped to find a peak that would provide a suitable terminus to the trail, a Moroccan Katahdin. However, we were running behind schedule, and, without telling either me or Asselouf, Hammou began altering the plans to catch us up. It wasn’t until around midday that I realized we weren’t taking an indirect route to the mountains, as I had assumed, but were instead cutting a long hypotenuse across the flat farmlands directly to Taroudant. I turned to Asselouf and asked her what was going on. She asked Hammou, and then explained that he had taken this shortcut because it was faster and “closer to modern things.”

  It was too late to change our route; we would never reach the mountains and make it back to Taroudant in time. I was disappointed, but not surprised. I had watched Asselouf attempt to explain the trip’s rationale to Hammou on multiple occasions, always to his utter bafflement. He seemed to have no sense of why anyone would voluntarily choose to hike through mountains. Over the course of our hike, he had often taken drastic shortcuts through less-than-scenic areas—on one memorable occasion, to save a few minutes, he had led us down a gulch snowed over with balled-up plastic diapers. Now, in one last shortcut, he had lopped off the journey’s last, most important segment.

  My flight home was scheduled for the following day. While I had done enough legwork to give the IAT board members a sense of what the trail might look like, I hadn’t done nearly enough to recommend a route. Asselouf and I talked through our options, and we agreed that she would have to complete that task on her own. Which, in retrospect, was how it should have always been. These were her lands to map, her story to tell.

  Weeks later, she wrote to inform me that she had returned to the High Atlas above Taroudant, where she passed through forests of oak trees, slept in goat huts, and eventually climbed to the lofty mountain hamlet of Imoulas, from which one could reach the towering twin peaks of Jbel Tinergwet and Jbel Awlim. Strictly speaking, neither bears Appalachian geology, but photos reveal that both are eerily reminiscent of Katahdin—which would in some odd way make for an even more fitting conclusion to this long, strange, puzzling epic of a trail.

 

  Back home, I found myself wondering about the ultimate endpoint of the IAT. The last time I checked, the trail committee was still in the process of setting up a local chapter of the trail in Morocco and consulting with guides, including Asselouf, to decide on a terminus.

  If history is any indication, whichever mountain the Moroccan chapter chooses will likely prove an unstable endpoint—more of an ellipsis than a full stop. The impetus of a long trail is to grow ever longer. The architects of the AT once shifted its terminus from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer Mountain, and then from Mount Washington to Katahdin. Then Dick Anderson extended the trail from Katahdin up through Canada, and then again, over the Atlantic and down to Morocco. But the world’s longest trail could feasibly grow even longer. Technically, the Appalachian range continues south, far beyond Taroudant, into the disputed nation of Western Sahara. Likewise, on the other end of the trail, remnants of the Appalachian range technically continue beyond Georgia, through Alabama, all the way to the Wichita Mountains of Missouri and the Ouachita Mountains of Oklahoma. Delegations from both states had been lobbying the IAT for an extension. “It would be a hell of a walk,” Walter Anderson, the geologist, told me, “but their scientific rationale is perfectly legitimate.”

  Curious as to how far the trail could ultimately stretch, I called up a few geologists. One told me that his research suggests there is a pocket of Appalachian rocks in southern Mexico, which was marooned by the opening of the gulf as the continents drifted. Another told me she hadn’t heard about the Mexican Appalachians, but she had heard there might be Appalachian remnants in Costa Rica. Yet another geologist could not vouch for the Mexico and Costa Rica theories, but had reason to believe there might be traces of the Appalachians as far south as Argentina.

  When I next talked with Dick Anderson, I mentioned what these geologists had told me. I half expected him to grow defensive, but he seemed to find the notion delightful. “The way this project has worked is that it’s expanded as people wanted to expand it. We don’t have any big campaign to expand it,” he said. “But we’re willing to go wherever that original principle leads us.”

  Before my hike through the Atlas Mountains, that original principle sounded noble and ambitious: to trace the remains of an ancient, scattered mountain range; to grapple with the immensity of geologic time; to blur political boundaries; and to connect distant people and places. But when I arrived in Morocco it had suddenly begun to seem wildly idealistic. Unlike in America, the Moroccan leg of the trail would not pass through empty parklands; much of the trail’s length would be inhabited. I wondered what would happen when thru-­hikers began arriving from Georgia. Would the local people generously welcome them, as they had me, or would they grow irritated by the steady trickle of camera-wielding strangers? And what about the hikers? Would they have respect for the local people, or would they regard them—as hikers so often have throughout history—as pests befouling an otherwise pristine landscape?

  I had begun to doubt whether mere physical connection—mere trails, mere highways, mere fiber optics—could bridge meaningful divides between people. In the era of the jet and the Internet, the world is in many ways more connected than it has ever been. But there is another meaning of connection that our networks don’t capture, what we refer to when we say that we “have a connection with someone.” The philosopher Max Scheler has called this intimate quality fellow feeling—a sense of deep, mutual understanding. He argued that this type of connection requires us to recognize that the minds of other people have “a reality equal to our own.” This recognition in turn allows us to extend beyond the confines of our individual minds to more bonded, collective ways of thinking. “It is precisely in the act of fellow feeling,” Scheler wrote, “that self-love, self-centered choice, solipsism, and egoism are first wholly overcome.”

  The problem facing the IAT’s planners was that this kind of connection—­bound up in the slow-shifting and still largely mysterious landscape of the human brain—cannot be accelerated at the same rapid rate as other forms of connection. We can travel at the speed of sound and transmit information at the speed of light, but deep human connection still cannot move faster than the (comparatively, lichenous) rate at which trust can grow.

  This is the unexpected disconnect that a vastly interconnected landscape ends up creating. Connection without fellow feeling invariably l
eads to conflict; when two cultures are abruptly put in contact, the differences between the two groups often jump out in sharper relief than the similarities. For example, when Europeans first crossed the ocean and encountered Native Americans they became fixated on their differing religious and cultural values and overlooked their commonalities. The result was centuries of warfare, followed by an exploitative power imbalance that continues to this day. This same dynamic replayed itself countless times throughout the history of imperialism.

  In recent decades, with the rise of globalization and mass communication, though the cultural differences between nations have greatly lessened, this sense of contrast has only grown more visible. Because far-off places now feel so close, and because it takes less work to make contact, we assume that the people elsewhere will share our way of seeing the world. When they don’t, we often conclude that they are foolish or bad or irremediably strange. If we can be in direct contact with someone and still feel so distant, one starts to wonder, how can that distance ever be bridged?

  On my hike through the Atlas, I had mulled over this question many times in regard to our pathfinder Hammou. I spent a week with him; we walked together, ate together, and slept side by side on a wooden pallet together. I often tried to converse with him, with Asselouf acting as our translator. But at the end of the trip I still felt no sense of fellowship with him. His approach to many aspects of his life—his derisive attitude toward Asselouf, his penchant for checking his text messages rather than admiring the mountains, his near-­comical affinity for shortcuts—grated against my own.

  On top of everything else, Hammou and I differed radically in our regard for the landscape. I had often felt that Hammou saw the Atlas Mountains as nothing more than impediments to our progress, and that he, like the New England farmers of yore, would gladly flatten them if he could. This kind of thinking in the United States had ultimately led to a deeply destructive mind-set, the most obvious manifestation of which was a string of notorious Appalachian mining operations involving the literal removal of mountaintops. But I had overlooked the possibility that Hammou, who had grown up among these mountains, might have a connection to them that was subtler but vastly more intimate than what I felt for my beloved Appalachians.