On Trails (33 page)

A professional trail-builder named Todd Branham once told me that he too would resort to dropping a pile of branches or a big rock in a place where people would be tempted to create a shortcut. “But if the trail is well-designed,” he said, “I won't have to do that, because people will
want
to stay on the trail. They'll be having so much dang fun they won't want to get
off
the trail.”

The central task of the trail-builder is to navigate an age-old dilemma: to convince people to do what they
should
do (to best serve the long-term collective good), rather than what their basest instincts tell them to do (to best serve themselves in the short run). As I learned while shepherding, the easiest way to bend a group's trajectory is to accommodate their desires. That was Branham's credo, too. For example, if people can hear a waterfall but don't have a trail leading to it, he said, they will just create their own crude trail. Impromptu trails like these are notoriously difficult to get rid of, because other hikers will inevitably be drawn to them. Instead, a smart trail-builder will aim to find the most sustainable route to that waterfall in advance and then guide hikers there. That way, the trail can both preserve the integrity of the land and fulfill the hikers' desires.

To know all the potential routes a trail could take, a trail-builder must have a wide-ranging knowledge of the surrounding landscape. The first step to building a sustainable trail is to study a map of the region and gather a rough idea of where the best route might lie. Next, the trail-builder scouts out the route on foot. I watched Branham one day while he went through this process in a patch of woods in Brevard, North Carolina. He began by walking the proposed route of the trail, feeling out the angle of ascent and the quality of the
soil. He tried multiple iterations of each line, searching for the most graceful approach. (Watching him pace up and down the hillside, I was reminded of how ants will try out multiple routes before settling on the best one. He was doing the same thing, only far in advance.) Then, using a roll of orange plastic tape, he “flagged” each section of the trail by tying little orange strips to overhanging branches at eye level. Every time he tied on a new flag, he glanced back to see how it lined up with the preceding one. As he did this, Branham tried to envision which trees would need to be cut down. He compared this process to playing chess. “You gotta always be thinking seven moves ahead. You're looking at these trees, and you're thinking,
These will be gone. These will be gone. I can weave around this one
 . . .”

It struck me that this kind of trail-building was unlike anything else in the animal kingdom: Instead of sketching out a rough line, which would be improved by subsequent walkers, modern trail-­builders attempt to find the sleekest route in advance—so that subsequent walkers will never have a reason to diverge from it. In this sense, a hiking trail shares more in common with a modern highway than it does with an ancient Cherokee footpath.

The construction of a trail can appear strangely unnatural, too. Most of the time, trail work involves using a primitive tool called a Pulaski (an axe-adze hybrid) to cut out a narrow, flat trail bed from a hillside, but as a professional trail-builder who spent most of his time working alone on private land, Branham opted for a 2,500-pound machine called a skidsteer, which he used to move soil around until he had achieved the correct grade. Once the trail was finished, he used a leaf blower to cover the trail with plant litter, then, to compact the surface, he would sometimes ride back and forth a few times on his '87 Yamaha BW350 dirt bike.

On a wilderness trail like the AT, the goal of trail-building is, somewhat paradoxically, to artificially create something natural. I witnessed this process up close one summer, while volunteering on
a trail-building crew called Konnarock. Here I helped to construct a stone wall, known as “cribbing,” to buttress a section of trail across a particularly steep hillside. The wall took three days of backbreaking labor to complete. (“Building a crib wall is like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” one of the veteran trail-builders in my crew joked. “Except all the pieces weigh five hundred pounds. And they're all missing.”) Once it was finished, we covered the top with dirt and leaves, so that future hikers would scarcely know it was there. This, explained our crew leader, Kathryn Herndon, was the ultimate aim of trail-­building: meticulous construction, artfully concealed. One famous trail-builder in Maine, named Lester Kenway, was known to carefully fill in every hole he drilled in a rock face, so that hikers climbing one of his rock staircases could be fooled into thinking some benevolent god had simply dropped the rocks in that arrangement. “The ultimate compliment paid to a trail crew,” wrote Woody Hesselbarth, “is to say, ‘It doesn't look like you had to do much work to get through here.' ”

Benton MacKaye once said, “The Appalachian Trail as originally conceived is not merely a footpath
through
the wilderness but a footpath
of
the wilderness.” The same can be said of all wilderness trails: They are both a conduit and a symbolic representation of the wild. Trail-building handbooks invariably stress the importance of maintaining the trail's “primitive character.” This is more than a matter of mere aesthetics. There is a crucial difference between a trail that “lies lightly on the land,” as trail-builders like to say, and a wide footpath lined with handrails and park benches: the former allows us to experience the complexity and roughness of the world beyond us, while the latter gives us the impression that the world was put here
for
us.

Herein lies the delicate task of the trail-builder: to capture a sense of the wild, to bring order to an experience that is by definition disordered. It is akin to catching a butterfly with one's bare hands. Cup too gently and the butterfly will flutter away, but clap too hard and the butterfly will cease to be.

+

At the top of Smarts Mountain stood a lone fire tower, rising high above the trees. Doyi and I dropped our packs and climbed up the spiraling steel spine of a staircase. At the top, I lifted a heavy wooden trapdoor and we crawled inside. The interior was empty, dusty, enclosed by broken windows. Down below, in every direction, green waves rolled toward the horizon.

Doyi took off his shoes, releasing a swampy, dead smell. “Man, these things are
rotten
,” he said. We both hung our socks out the window to dry, while we sat on the wooden floor and ate dried fruit. Doyi sat with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. His feet were a horror. White, wrinkled, and blistered, they would have looked at home on the body of a dead grunt. The toenails on both big toes were plum colored, and his pinkie toenails had already fallen off. He began pointing out others that would soon go: “I'm gonna lose this toenail, this toenail, this toenail, and probably this one,” he said. “My feet have
never
hurt this bad before,” he said. “Ever.”

Five years earlier, on my thru-hike, I had sat in that exact spot, atop the same fire tower, for an entire afternoon, unable to summon the strength to leave. To pass the time, I lay on the floor and listened to a little yellow pocket radio I had purchased to ward off loneliness, but which rarely got clear reception. My body was failing under me. After almost four months on the Appalachian Trail, with only a month left to go, I was a sorry sight. There was scant insulation left on my frame—fat, muscle, or otherwise—with the exception of my legs, where equine muscles flickered and pulsed. I was always wet and cold, and I seemed to have caught some kind of flu back in Vermont. At night: shivers, followed by fever sweats that stunk of ammonia, and then worse shivers. In the morning: more miles to walk. Always, more miles.

Then, without warning, I bumped into my friend Snuggles, whom
I hadn't seen in months. I found her fetused in her sleeping bag on the floor of a damp lean-to; she had been there for three days, lost in a sunless funk. Shortly after we joined up, we ran across another friend of ours named Hi-C. And at last, just as the three of us were entering the White Mountains, the months-long spell of rain broke. The following weeks were sunny, idyllic. Reenergized by good weather and good company, all three of us reached the top of Katahdin one warm morning that August.

I told Doyi this story as we sat atop the fire tower, but it was of no comfort to him. No matter what I said, he still had to put his wet boots back on.

We climbed down the fire tower. I stopped to refill my water bottles from a thin spring that slunk along over the rocky ground. Doyi hiked off ahead, saying I would surely catch up with him. For a long time, though, I didn't. The rain had stopped and the sun again warmed the plants. I savored the spicy air. As I walked, I saw the trail with new eyes; I noticed how water flowed off it, where it pooled, where hikers had tiptoed outside of the trail bed, widening it. At one point during my time working with the Konnarock crew, Herndon told me that being a trail-builder had permanently altered the way she saw trails. “It always takes a few miles, when I go backpacking, to stop analyzing problems and mentally building staircases,” she said. “It's hard to stop looking for that stuff, once you've trained your brain to analyze it.”

When I caught up to Doyi, he was almost hobbling, his large, green pack swaying from side to side with each step. We descended the mountain at a jerky pace, rather than in the rolling gait—faster and more fluid than a walk but not quite a jog—that thru-hikers tend to adopt.

Doyi talked more about his feet, and home, and missing his grandson. We arrived at the Hexacube Shelter around six. Inside were Doyi's friends, who chatted boisterously as they cooked dinner. Socks
had fashioned a balaclava into a fake beard and was doing an impression of a male thru-hiker. The others were toppled over with laughter.

Doyi remained quiet. He cooked two dinners and ate them, back to back, with the air of a man beyond the condolences of food. When the conversation died down, he waited a beat, then said:

“Guys, there's something I have to tell you. I'm thinking about getting off the trail.”

They all spoke at once, in disbelief.

“I'm just feeling so weak,” Doyi explained. “Climbing up here, I almost fell backwards at one point.”

There was a pained pause. Gingko was the first to speak. He too was often dizzy, he said, and his bones hurt. Socks said she had considered quitting once after taking two days off in Virginia, and again in Massachusetts when the mosquitoes were torturing her. Tree Frog began asking Doyi a series of gently probing questions to find out what the source of the problem might be. He asked him what he regularly ate (buffalo jerky, dried fruit, mac and cheese, oatmeal) and in what quantities (not nearly enough). Tree Frog suggested that Doyi buy food that was more calorically dense—a good rule of thumb was that any food worth carrying should have one hundred calories for every ounce it weighs, he said. Each of the hikers began suggesting foods that fit this criteria: peanut butter, olive oil, summer sausage.

They began fishing items out of their backpacks and handing them to Doyi. Tree Frog gave him some trail mix and a packet of electrolyte powder. Gingko chipped in a candy bar. With a solemn air, Catch-Me carried over a black package of ginseng—the real stuff, he said, very expensive—and a small bag of pink rock salt. Someone offered Doyi a jar of peanut butter, but he politely waved it off. He said he already had one, and lifted up a sixteen-ounce jar.

“How long has that lasted you?” Tree Frog asked.

“About two weeks,” Doyi said.

“I eat one of those in
two days
,” Tree Frog said. He suggested
Doyi keep the jar on top of his pack, and anytime he stopped, for any reason, to stop and eat a spoonful. After a few minutes more of this, I pointed out that by the time these guys were done with him, they'd have to change his trail name from Doyi to Doughy. Doyi laughed. His gloom had lifted slightly.

Next, Doyi's friends started going through his pack and suggesting things he could leave behind: a trowel (meant for digging cat holes, but generally extraneous, since any old stick works almost as well), a large bottle of tick repellant (too big), a Nalgene water bottle (too heavy), a water filter (could be replaced with two tiny bottles of chlorine dioxide solution), a blue tarp (could be swapped for a piece of Tyvek home wrap, or ditched altogether), a knee brace he never used, spare clothes, spare shoes. Tree Frog even offered to send his tent home so he and Doyi could split the weight of Doyi's two-man tent. This was a generous offer, because logistically, it would lash the two of them together for the rest of the trip, hell or high water.

Watching Doyi's fellow thru-hikers come to his aid, it occurred to me how remarkably humane a space the AT has become, compared to most wilderness footpaths. Some hikers deride the AT as a mere “social trail,” as opposed to the wilder, lonelier trails out west. But I imagine Benton MacKaye would have borne that label proudly. His original intention was not just to give people an escape from urban environments; he wanted to set aside a space where people could unite around the common effort of living outdoors, a place where “cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, [and] emulation replaces competition.” The trail that eventually grew out of that vision wasn't utopia, exactly, but it was a start.

“If you want to finish, we'll do whatever we have to in order to get you there,” Tree Frog said.

Doyi thought a moment. He made a small, pained smile.

“I do,” he said, firmly.

“We'll get you there,” Tree Frog said.

Doyi thanked him.

Tree Frog shrugged. “
Nigada Osda
,” he said.

At the time, I mistook that phrase for the group's rallying cry:
Osda Nigada,
“It's all good.” In fact, Doyi later told me, some weeks after returning home from the windy summit of Katahdin, what Tree Frog had said was another Cherokee phrase:
Nigada Osda.
“Everybody is good.”