Authors: Robert Moor
On Trails (34 page)
I.
It is important to note here that the notion of the American wilderness being unowned is also a relatively modern European belief. Of course the American wilderness once
was
ownedâat least, in the usufruct senseâby Native peoples. As described in Mark David Spence's
Dispossessing the Wilderness
, prior to the Civil War, many Euro-Americans conceived of the American West as an “Indian wilderness”âa concept that was possible only because Native Americans were considered natural (i.e., not fully human) beings. However, as the conservation movement gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, the Native Americans' active management of the land (through hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and the strategic use of fire) was seen as ruining the “pristine” and “primordial” qualities that conservationists had grown to cherish. William Cronon aptly captured the irony of this shift: “The myth of the wilderness as âvirgin,' uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God's own creation.”
II.
I checked with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which keeps detailed records of all the thru-hikers who registered their hikes, and they told me that out of the fourteen thousand total thru-hikers, thirteen had self-identified as American Indian, and two as Cherokee. However, there was no way to know whether those people were one-half Native American, one-quarter, one-sixty-fourth, or only Native at heart.
III.
The Watermans' statement was somewhat coy. Abel and Ethan most likely cut the path in a gradual fashion because they knew that it would one day need to suit both skittish horses and wilting urbanites.
IV.
The shape of these structures, properly called Adirondack lean-tos, was inspired by the kinds of impromptu bark shelters that mountain guides like the Crawfords once built for their clients.
V.
It is surely no coincidence that MacKaye, having just lost his wife to what was then called “nervous depression,” stressed the importance of wilderness in maintaining mental health. A note of mad hope can be detected as he writes, “Most sanitariums now established are perfectly useless to those afflicted with mental diseaseâthe most terrible, usually, of any disease. Many of these sufferers could be cured. But not merely by âtreatment.' They need acres not medicine. Thousands of acres of this mountain land should be devoted to them with whole communities planned and equipped for their cure.”
CHAPTER 6
T
HE IDEA
to radically lengthen the Appalachian Trail occurred to Dick Anderson one afternoon in the fall of 1993. He was driving north through Maine on Interstate 95, a major highway that runs the length of the East Coast and dead-ends at the border of Canada. As his eye followed that north-south line, his mind made a parallel hop. Anderson knew that the Appalachian mountain range continued north past Katahdin and ran up along Canada's east coast, before slumping into the ice-clotted North Atlantic. Why, then, he wondered, couldn't someone extend the trail into Canada?
He had no idea where the idea came fromâhe had never hiked a single mile of the Appalachian Trail. It was, he later recounted, as if his mind's antenna accidentally intercepted a message intended for someone else.
Holy shit!
he thought.
How come no one ever thought of this? This is a wicked idea!
He pulled over to get gas, and, impatient to share his plan, he began explaining it to a man at an adjacent pump. “Of course, he's over there looking at me like I'm freaking
nuts
,” Anderson recalled.
Anderson, a former commissioner of the state's Department of Conservation, went home that night and unfurled a regional geophysical mapâone virtually devoid of towns, roads, or bordersâand began laying a line of little blue sticky dots along the ridge of the Appalachian range, linking the highest peaks in Maine, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec. Furtively at first, he began showing the map around and gauging his friends' and colleagues' reactions.
When he finally made his proposal for the International Appalachian Trail public, on Earth Day 1994, representatives from New Brunswick and Quebec quickly agreed to the extension. Over the next few years, he began receiving calls from representatives of the Atlantic islands of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundlandâplaces that also possessed Appalachian geologyâurging him to lengthen the trail even farther. He eagerly said yes to each. Of course, hikers would have to ride on a ferry or an airplane to reach these islands, but, Anderson thought, so what?
Shortly after the International Appalachian Trail committee approved the Newfoundland extension in 2004, one of Dick Anderson's friends, Walter Anderson (no relation), a former director of the Geological Society of Maine, began circulating a map showing that, in fact, the geological Appalachians continued on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, in a more or less mirror image of the North American range. Some four hundred million years ago, he explained, the continental plates began to collide, forming the Pangaea supercontinent. That slow-motion crash lifted up the ancient Appalachians to heights rivaling those of the modern Himalayas. But when Pangaea broke apart two hundred million years later, the continents that would become North America, Europe, and Africa split along that raised seam, like a piece of paper folded and torn. For this reason, Appalachian rocks can be found scattered throughout the soil of Western Europe and North Africa.
Dick Anderson was smitten with this notion. If the Appalachians
continued all the way to Morocco, why stop in Canada? What was holding the trail back? A few (admittedly, sizable) bodies of water? A few (okay, most) people's antiquated notions of what a trail should look like?
At the time, the full reality of what he was proposingâthe daunting task of blazing and maintaining the world's longest hiking trailâwas still far off. But Anderson, like Benton MacKaye, intuitively understood that the task of creating a super-long trail principally consisted not of trail-building but trail-linking. The artistry lay in the elegance of the connections, the tightness of the joints, the sinuosity of the curves, and, more than anything, the strength of the idea that would hold them all togetherâwhat Anderson referred to as the trail's “philosophy.” In those years between 1993 and 2004âthe brightening dawn of the Internet Ageâit was only natural that the big idea undergirding Anderson's trail, when it came to him, was
connection
: of people, of ecosystems, of countries, of continents, and of geologic epochs.
+
Certain trails are so elegant that they seem to lie sleeping just beneath the surface of the earth. Rather than being created by
us, it is as if these trails unveil themselves
through
us. When humans, bison, deer, and other woodland animals go in search of the shallowest pass in a mountain chain, they tend to decide on the same route. Who, then, invented the trail? The humans? The bison? The deer? The answer, it seems, is that no one can claim full credit, because an essential trailâa path of least resistanceâis predetermined by the shape of the topography and the needs of its walkers. Just as biologists sometimes say that “function precedes structure,” in some sense, a trail precedes
the trail-maker, waiting there for someone to come along and brush it off.
Brilliant technological innovations, according to the tech philosopher Kevin Kelly, are created in the same seemingly inevitable way.
For instance, once humans had invented the road network, the horse-drawn carriage, the internal combustion engine, and a fuel like gasoline, it was only a matter of time before someone synthesized them into an automobile. It is no coincidence that Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler independently created the modern automobile within a year of each other (and that several other inventors created their own variations within a few short years). Once there is a use for a technology and the right components exist, inventors simply need to make the right connections. This rule applied in turn to each of the technologies that made up the automobile: the engine, the metallurgy, the wheels. Each was, in retrospect, an inevitable shortcut across the intellectual landscape, which then allowed for future shortcuts.
Viewed in hindsight, it can appear that great trails and great inventions are both preordained. But Kelly is careful to point out that while various forces can create the right conditions for a given technological breakthrough, the final form that technology will take is not predestined; any new invention is still profoundly shaped by its inventor. The incandescent lightbulb, for example, was invented by twenty-three separate men, each of whom imbued the same basic mechanism with his own unique shape and design. Kelly likened this interplay between inevitability and serendipity to the formation of snowflakes, which unfurl into unique existence when a seed (usually a mote of dust) encounters the right environmental conditions (a supersaturated, supercooled cloud). “The path of freezing water is predetermined,” Kelly wrote, “but there is great leeway, freedom, and beauty in the individual expression of its predestined state.”
When Benton MacKaye first proposed the Appalachian Trail, the conditions were in place for the birth of a new kind of hiking path: hikers were walking farther; trails were growing longer; and planners were thinking on a grander scale. In fact, by the time the AT was first proposed, there had already been numerous proposals for long trails to stretch the extent of the Appalachian range. “The one big
supertrail,” wrote Guy and Laura Waterman, “was inevitable.” However, Benton MacKaye's proposal, with its inspiring rhetoric about wilderness preservation and the plight of the working class, was the formulation that ignited the public's imagination. Once MacKaye proposed it, the trail burst into being.
In 1993 Dick Anderson seemed to have also stumbled on that golden thingâan unrealized inevitability. At that precise moment, a hunger was growing in the world for longer and longer trails. The shift toward monumentalism had begun with the Appalachian Trail; then, in the 1980s and '90s, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail sprang up and outgrew it. Supertrailsâhiking paths measuring more than a thousand milesâstarted being built in Russia, New Zealand, Nepal, Japan, Australia, Italy, Chile, and Canada. Much of Western Europe was also webbed with supertrails, like the famed Grande Randonnée network of walking paths. In part, this growth was fueled by the availability of ever lighter hiking gear, which allowed people to walk greater distances. As long-distance hiking grew in popularity, long trails became more crowded. By the turn of the twenty-first century, some thru-hikers had begun to complain that supertrails like the AT had lost the lonely, wild quality that originally made them alluring. The conditions were ideal for a radically longer long-distance trail to be born.
Virtually as soon as Anderson proposed extending the IAT overseas, the proposal took hold, with Scotland and Spain both expressing interest in 2009, and most of the other countries following close behind. Much of its route already contained trails that were simply waiting to be stitched together. Where the IAT crossed over from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, Anderson encountered contiguous trails that were managed by different (and mutually unfriendly) trail groups. Connecting them required no work at allâonly a paradigm shift. When I first met Anderson, in Portland, Maine, in the spring of 2011, he had just learned that the maintainers of the
North Sea Trail, which passes through seven countries in Northern Europe, had voted to join the IAT. “That's six thousand miles right there!” he said. “Schwoop! Cross that off the list.”
When this idea first occurred to him back in 1993, Anderson had no way of knowing that it would grow so smoothly or so far. In fact, early on it had looked like the plan might face fierce opposition. Not long after his great brainstorm, he had showed the map covered in blue dots to his friend Don Hudson. “Dick, this is a great
idea,” Hudson had replied. “And they're going to
hate
it.” Hudson was referring to members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the managers of Baxter State Park, both of which resisted the idea of extending the AT into Canada, because that would entail blurring out the near-sacred terminus of Katahdin. (Even two decades later, the word
extension
remained so taboo that Don Hudson referred to it as “the e-word.”) The AT and IAT factions eventually reached a fortuitous compromise: instead of an “extension,” Anderson opted to instead call the IAT a “connector trail.” The IAT would
connect
to the AT, and in turn connect the AT to the world.
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The core function of any trail is to connect. The root of that word, from the Latin
connectere
, means to “bind together” or to “unite.” In this sense, a trail strings a line between a walker and her destination, uniting the two in an uninterrupted corridor so that the walker can reach her end swiftly and smoothly. Since the rise of electrical engineering in the nineteenth century, a second sense of the word has gained widespread use. When two things remain distant, to connect them means to create a conduit through which matter or information can flow. Here again, trails act as connectors: when a trail is blazed between two towns, a line of communication is established; people can travel back and forth, goods can be exchanged, and information can spread.
Humans and other animals have long used trails to link the essential loci of our environments. The brilliance of trails is that, over time, they naturally streamline to reach their goals faster or with less effort. Like elephant trails, humanity's footpaths eventually grew taut along the landscape's paths of least resistance. However, efficient as these connections may have been, even the best trails had a speed limit: walkers could only reach the trail's end as fast as their legs could carry them. So our next impulse would have been to train ourselves to run faster. Larger societiesâdating back at least to the ancient Sumerian city of Urukâdesignated a specialized class of running messengers, who could transmit our messages even faster across long distances.
I
In many empires, new kinds of paths were built to accelerate the flow of messengers. These advanced footpaths reached their apogee in the Inca Empire, where trails were paved with flat stones and equipped with staircases, shade trees, bridges, rest huts, and watering holes. Along these paths, imperial messengers ran relay-style, six miles at a time, while passing along knotted strings called
quipus
, which bore simple (often numeric) messages. In this manner, information could move about one hundred fifty miles a day.