On Trails

by Robert Moor

  At his age, after all he had experienced, it was amazing he could hike at all. On his journeys, he had broken four ribs, his shinbone, and his ankle. He had suffered from excruciating bouts with shingles and an abscessed tooth. He had visited unspeakable horrors upon his feet. Once, up in Canada, he had been struck by lightning. To help me understand the sensation, he asked me to imagine being soaked in gasoline and then touched by a lit match. “It goes VOOSH,” he said. “There’s no vibration or nothing. It just passes through you.”

  He told me that when he was a young man, he had been taller than me, standing almost six feet tall, but over the years his spine had compressed. “I’m shrinking,” he said. “My body is shrinking, my mind is shrinking, my vocabulary is shrinking. My ability to maintain a thought sequence, it’s not gone, but it’s not like it was ten years ago. Part of the thing is . . .” he paused. “Look at that flatware!” he exclaimed as he bent down to pick up a crippled fork. “Look at that! Is that beautiful?”

  One of his hobbies, he told me, was to collect discarded silverware along the side of the road. He said he hoped to one day put together a full “flatware set” of flattened utensils, eight of each.

  All along our hike, he had picked up other shiny objects as well: coins, keys, marbles, car wash medallions, hearing aid batteries. When he reached the next post office, he would mail all that he had collected back to his sister’s house, where he stored his findings in two Mason jars.

  This habit of picking up jetsam on the side of the road fascinated me. It was perhaps the starkest of his many ironies. In virtually all other respects, he was a fanatical minimalist. Even at home, he saw these, the last years of his life, as a process of winnowing. He owned scarcely more than he could fit in his truck. In his sister’s basement was also a cardboard box full of mementos, photographs, a few sentimental objects that had belonged to his parents. He said he was struggling to work up the nerve to get rid of those as well, but shedding childhood attachments was “a tough, tough process.”

  “I tell my friends: Every year I’ve got less and less, and every year I’m a happier man. I just wonder what it’s going to be like when I don’t have anything. That’s the way we come, and that’s the way we go. I’m just preparing for that a little in advance, I guess.”

  A few minutes later, Eberhart paused at the intersection of a gravel road to show me the contents of his pack. He spread out his things in the dust. There was a tarp tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, the small bag of electronics, a hint of a medical kit, a plastic poncho, his maps, a pair of ultralight wind pants, and the pile of metal junk. All the fabrics had the wispiness of gossamer; a strong wind could have taken most of his earthly possessions away.

  To cook his meals, he used to rely on a tiny wood-fired stove of his own invention, but he had since ditched that. He listed some of the other things he had brought on his first thru-hike but later discarded. He had traded his heavy leather boots for trail running shoes. He exchanged a three-pound internal frame pack for an eight-ounce frameless one, and a three-pound synthetic sleeping bag for a one-pound down bag (with the zippers trimmed off). Instead of a toothbrush, he carried a wooden toothpick. He did not carry a spare change of socks, a spare set of shoes, or any spare clothes. He did not carry any reading material, or even a notebook. He did not carry toilet paper. (Instead, he used the subcontinental rinse-and-rub method. When water was scarce, he rinsed with his own urine, which he then cleaned off with a careful splash of water.) His medkit contained little more than a few Band-Aids, a pile of aspirin, and a sliver of a surgical blade.

  Shaving down one’s pack weight, he said, was a process of sloughing off one’s fears. Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. The “last vestige” of fear that even the most minimalist hikers have trouble shedding, he said, was starvation. As a result, most people ended up carrying “way the hell too much food.” He did not even carry so much as an emergency candy bar.

  Earlier, I had asked him if he was afraid to die. He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. He told me his grandfather had died in the woods (of a heart attack while hunting), his father died in the woods (of a chainsaw accident while gathering firewood), and he was “working on it.”

  “I threw my fears and worries away a long, long time ago about being out in the wild,” he said. “I’ve been out there so long and so far, by myself, and never felt more at peace and more secure and more in my element. It’s not an adrenaline pump or anything like that. It’s a resignation just to let it be the way it’s going to be.”

  As I picked over his gear, one question kept nagging at me. Feeling sheepish, I asked if the rumor I’d heard was true: Did he have all his toenails surgically removed?

  He smiled. “Oh, sure,” he said.

  He sat down and pulled off his tattered sneakers, and then peeled off his socks. His ankles were a shocked shade of pale below the sock line. His pink toes, rimmed with yellow calluses, were long and knobby. When I looked closer, I saw that it was true: They had no nails, except for a few whiskery fibers that were trying to grow back.

  He said that whenever people questioned his dedication to the life he had chosen, or tried to downplay his journeys as a mere lark, he would pull off his shoes and show them his feet.

  “Can you imagine what it’s like to have all your damn toenails ripped out at the roots and then have acid poured on them so they won’t grow back?” he said. “Do you have any idea what that feels like? You think that’s a lark?”

 

  Back home, I tracked Eberhart’s progress from the journal entries he periodically posted on his website. He reached the end of his walk one night in Florida, where he knelt beneath a streetlight and said a prayer of thanks. He had told me that this would be his last thru-hike. But the following summer, he was back on the road, walking the full length of the Oregon Trail, followed, in subsequent years, by the California Trail and the Mormon Pioneer Trail. The last time we spoke, he said he was planning to finish hiking the Pony Express Trail, from Missouri to California. On and on he’ll go, as long as his feet will carry him.

  As one of Eberhart’s favorite poets, Robert Service, once wrote:

  The trails of the world be countless, and most of the trails be tried;

  You tread on the heels of the many, till you come where the ways divide;

  And one lies safe in the sunlight, and the other is dreary and wan,

  Yet you look aslant at the Lone Trail, and the Lone Trail lures you on.

  And somehow you’re sick of the highway, with its noise and its easy needs,

  And you seek the risk of the by-way, and you reck not where it leads . . .

  Often it leads to the dead-pit; always it leads to pain;

  By the bones of your brothers ye know it, but oh, to follow you’re fain.

  By your bones they will follow behind you, till the ways of the world are made plain.

  Bid good-by to sweetheart, bid good-by to friend;

  The Lone Trail, the Lone Trail follow to the end.

  Han-shan too wrote honestly about not only the glories of the simple life, but its hardships as well. He bemoaned his crippled body, salivated over the lavish food he had renounced (roast duck, fried pork cheek, steamed baby pig in garlic), and wept over dead friends. Like Eberhart, he left his wife and son so he could roam freely. The ramifications of that decision reverberate throughout his writing; he fondly recalls the sound as his infant son “gurgles and coos”; he has haunting dreams where he returns to his wife, only to find she no longer recognizes him. A chilly sense of regret creeps into even his sunniest remembrances. “How could I know beneath the pines / I would hug my knees in a frigid wind?” he asks.

  Reading these lines, I can’t help but think of Eberhart, nearing his eighth decade on this planet, sleeping on the hard ground. (“Oh, my arthritic, bony old
body,” he wrote in his journal one cold desert night in West Texas. “I’ll be listening to it complain, for sure.”) This is what is left when the haze of romance has burned away. This is the cost of freedom. Every year, the lone, lean life grows harder. “Up high,” Han-shan wrote, “the trail turns steep.” And yet he went on climbing.

  I had gone in search of Eberhart, the modern nomad, to see what my life might have looked like if I had chosen to pursue the life of simplicity a long trail affords. Walking with him, I witnessed both the advantages and disadvantages of a life honed down to a single point: the finer the edge, the more brittle the blade. Eberhart had opted for the path toward maximal freedom, which meant shunning comfort, companionship, and security: he may have to sleep on the ground, but he can sleep anywhere he likes. If he gets sick or injured, he may well die, but, he figures, at least he’ll die outdoors.

  “It is pleasant to be free,” wrote Aldous Huxley, who, like Eberhart, for years owned little more than an automobile and a few books. “But occasionally, I must confess, I regret the chains with which I have not loaded myself. In these moods I desire a house full of stuff, a plot of land with things growing on it; I feel that I should like to know one small place and its people intimately, that I should like to have known them for years, all my life. But one cannot be two incompatible things at the same time. If one desires freedom, one must sacrifice the advantages of being bound.”

  Freedom, in other words, has its own constraints. Snipping what Han-shan called “the world’s ties” can come as a relief—from the demands of a job, the constant upkeep of a house, even the obligations of friends or family—but those same ties are often what give our lives meaning and provide a buffer against calamity. Sacrifice is unavoidable.

  Whether or not we agree with their choices, the dedication these men have to living a free life presents us with an unsettling question: What do we value above all? Is there anything we hold as dear as Eberhart and Han-shan hold their freedom? And to gain it, what would we be willing to lose? What wouldn’t we? And then what does that tell us about what we really value above all?

 

  Old age brings with it another kind of liberation: freedom from the doubt, angst, and restlessness of youth. The old can look back and see their decisions as a single concatenation, sheared of all the ghostly, untaken routes. Heidegger, a forest-dwelling philosopher enchanted with the earthy wisdom of the Feldweg (field path) and the Holzweg (wood path), discussed his life in this manner. Three years before his death, he wrote to his friend Hannah Arendt: “Looking back over the whole path, it becomes possible to see that the walk through the field of paths is guided by an invisible hand, and that essentially one adds little to it.” But he was able to make that judgment only with the benefit of hindsight. Fate is an optical illusion. From the vantage of a thirty-year-old like me, life’s path still bristles with spur trails and possible dead ends.

  And so we return, once again, to the essential question: How do we select a path through life? Which turns should we take? To what end?

  To be able to answer these questions, deftly and with foresight, is what we mean when we say someone is wise. Wisdom—not intelligence, not cleverness, not even moral goodness, but wisdom—is what guides us through the unknown. Perhaps the word wisdom sounds hoary to your ear. (Indeed, it does to mine.) As the philosopher Jim Holt has written, it has fallen out of vogue with philosophers in recent decades; the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “wisdom has come to vanish almost entirely from the philosophical map.” Ancient philosophers defined wisdom as a way to “maximize the good.” However, contemporary philosophers have shied away from discussing wisdom, because they view it as an overly “value-­saturated concept.” “It is not that philosophers are daunted or bored by wisdom,” Holt writes. “Rather, they have concluded that there is no single right balance of elements that constitutes ‘the good life for man,’ and hence no unitary value that wisdom can help us maximize.”

  He goes on:

  Suppose you are torn between dedicating your life to art (say, by becoming a concert pianist) or to helping others (say, by going to medical school and joining Doctors Without Borders). How do you decide? There is no common currency in which artistic creation and moral goodness might be compared; these are but two of a plurality of incommensurable values that can be realized in a human life. Do you then ask yourself which choice will bring you greater future happiness? That’s no good either, for the path you choose will shape the very person you become, along with the preferences you develop; so to base your decision on the satisfaction of those preferences would be circular.

  It is time, I believe, to return to the question of wisdom, but to approach it from a new angle. As Holt points out, wisdom is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but I think we can safely describe it as a time-tested means of choosing how to live. The element of time is essential. There is a valid reason that, across millennia and across cultures, wisdom has always been considered the province of old people and old books. Likewise, it is no coincidence that many of the transcultural markers of human wisdom (patience, equanimity, foresight, compassion, impulse control, an ability to reside in uncertainty) are exactly those qualities which children notably lack. Wisdom is a rarified form of intelligence born of experience, the result of carefully testing your beliefs against reality. You make an attempt at solving a problem, and sometimes you stumble upon success; other times you make mistakes, and then you correct them. Over time you learn, you adapt, you grow. In other words, wisdom is a form of judgment that evolves.

  The notion that wisdom must contain subjective values (must prize, for example, moral purity over artistic virtue, or vice versa) is a specious one. Wisdom is the means by which entities reach their varied ends—by which they gain power or create beauty or help others. Wisdom is structural, not ethical. (Machiavelli, for example, was one very wise, very unethical figlio di puttana.) In fact, I would argue that all very old things attain a certain kind of wisdom. There is, if we were to look closely enough, a wisdom of trees and a wisdom of seagrass, a wisdom of mountains and a wisdom of rivers, a wisdom of planets and a wisdom of stars. This book, in its admittedly oblique and winding way, has been a search for the wisdom of trails. It is the wisdom required to reach one’s ends while making one’s way across an unknown landscape, whether it be a sandy seafloor, a new field of knowledge, or the full expanse of a human life. It is deeply human, this wisdom, deeply animal—and it has tremendous bearing on our personal and collective future.

  Wisdom is measured by function. Trails that fulfill the needs of their walkers get used, and used trails persist. Those qualities that lead to greater use, and greater longevity, naturally become the essence of a trail’s wisdom. One of the reasons that trails are so relevant to the modern human condition is that they are fervently open-minded: a wise trail can go anywhere and carry anyone. However, every trail is not as wise as every other trail; nondiscrimination is not the same thing as radical relativism. Any forest walker can tell you this—some trails simply work better. We can then wonder: Are there some qualities that wise trails—the trails that get better with time—hold in common?

  I will venture a guess, which I hope will be improved by others in the future. What unites the wisest trails, I have found, is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, and flexibility. If a trail has only one of these qualities it will not persist for long: a trail that is too durable will be too fixed, and will fail when conditions change; a trail that is too flexible will be too flimsy, and will erode; and a trail that is too efficient will be too parsimonious, and so will lack resilience. The pheromone trails that ants make, for example, brilliantly balance durability and flexibility: they last long enough to lead other ants to a food source but fade quickly enough to allow new paths to form. And ants invariably find the most efficient route, but then wisely temper that route with redundant detours, ensuring a backup plan in case the best route sudde
nly fails. The result is a trail that is not just time-tested, as we often say, but world-tested. Or perhaps even more precisely, the trail is in a constant state of world-testing, adapting to the world even as its conditions change.

  Without ever naming it as such, humans have been putting the wisdom of trails to great use since our inception as a species. Science, technology, storytelling: all masterfully exploit the supple wisdom of trails. Our many forms of understanding the world resemble nothing so much as the trail-wise problem-solving of ants: We test multiple theories against the complexity of the world, and then pursue those that work. The better routes last, the worse ones erode, and little by little those that work improve.

  It is in this trail-wise manner that we most effectively navigate a world of forking paths. Holt’s hypothetical person, for instance, could conceivably research both paths before making a fateful decision. She could pursue both ideals, making forays into each field (long hours spent at the piano; introductory classes in medicine), to suss out which better suits her abilities and proclivities. Holt astutely points out that her goals and values will shift depending on which path she takes. So let her explore both, and see how each begins to shape her. In case she fails at one pursuit or finds it unsatisfying, she can leave herself open to pursuing the other, or some new offshoot she may have never otherwise discovered. Wisdom often wanders: St. Augustine, Siddhārtha, Li Po, Thomas Merton, Maya Angelou—the insight of each was deepened by a wild and meandering youth. “Seeking and blundering are good,” wrote Goethe, “for it is only by seeking and blundering we learn.”

  Indeed, some blundering is good. But a lifetime of blundering—to be condemned to a pathless wilderness—would be a nightmare. Fortunately, we do not wander alone. This is where the other half of a trail-wise way of life comes to the fore: The brilliance of trails stems from the fact that they can preserve the most fruitful of our own wanderings, as well as the wanderings of others; then, as those paths are followed, their wisdom further improves and spreads. Likewise, through collaboration and communication, personal wisdom is transformed into collective wisdom.