On Trails (41 page)

There is a catch, however: How do we know
which
paths to choose? The essayist James Fitzjames Stephen vividly captured this dilemma: “We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to
pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do?”

Even a cursory reading of ancient philosophy reveals that it has never been easy to choose a path through life. But it is becoming ever more difficult. Rapid changes in technology, culture, education, politics, trade, and transportation have combined to allow people access to an array of lifestyles that was previously unthinkable. In the aggregate, this is a positive development, proof that our life's paths are evolving to meet our varied desires. But a side effect of this shift—halting, gradual, and unevenly distributed as it may be—is that life's options continue to abound until they overwhelm.

Take, for example, the commonplace question of what you are going to “do for a living.” In the earliest days of humankind, there was likely just one answer: gather plants and scavenged meat, an activity all people participated in equally. Later, new specializations emerged: first, the invention of hunting, then of medicine, shamanism, arts, and agriculture. According to the Standard List of Professions, a five-thousand-year-old catalog of occupations from ancient Mesopotamia—ranked in descending order from king down to some as-yet-untranslatable, but surely unpleasant, job—there were 120 separate professions on offer. Today, it is estimated there are anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand distinct occupations in the United States.

Our selection of religious and philosophical traditions is scarcely less varied. Due to the difficulty of defining what constitutes a proper religion, estimates differ, but most agree it is easily in the thousands. And this is merely a tally of the organized religions; the number of personal belief systems—cobbled together in private, one piece at a time, like the car in the old Johnny Cash song—is impossible to quantify.

In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the
paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us. I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand on the Appalachian Trail. The trail was modified with each step we hikers took, but ultimately, the trail steered our course. By following it, we streamlined to its conditions: we lost weight, shed possessions, and increased our pace week after week. The same rule applies to our life's pathways: collectively we shape them, but individually they shape us. So we must choose our paths wisely.

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When I returned to New York City from the Appalachian Trail in 2009, the experience of thru-hiking lingered in my bones. The intricate machinery of my feet—the tarsals and phalanges, the cuboid and cuneiform bones, the ligaments and tendons, the muscles, arteries, and veins—ached for a month afterward. In the mornings I would rise from bed and hobble to the bathroom with cringing, nonagenarian steps.

Thru-hiking is metamorphosis: over five months, I had acquired a new name, a new body, a new set of priorities. By the trail's end, I was as trim and clear-headed as a wild animal. But back home, over a matter of months, I gradually regressed into something resembling my old self. First, I shaved my scraggly, Mansonesque beard, which had begun to draw nervous stares from strangers; then, a few weeks later, I cut my hair. The weight I had shed slowly filled back in, layer by later, as if I were being dipped in paraffin. I went back to living in a box full of possessions and spending my days staring at glowing screens. The path of least resistance, that old rut, drew me inexorably back in. As the architect Neil Leach has noted, “The city modifies its occupants, no less than the occupants modify the city.”

I often thought about a very old poem I had once read, by a mountain hermit in ancient China named Han-shan.
I

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,

The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain

The pine sings, but there's no wind.

Who can leap the world's ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

Han-shan was raised in a thriving metropolis and groomed for life as an imperial envoy, but at age thirty, he left home and traveled a thousand miles east to a cave on the slopes of Cold Mountain, where he remained for the rest of his life, writing poems and “wandering completely free.” Upon moving there, he took the mountain's name as his own: Han-shan is a trail name of sorts, which means Cold Mountain. His needs were few; his pillow was a “boulder,” and his quilt was the “dark blue sky.” What he desired from this new life, he wrote, was to lie down in a cold clear stream and wash out his ears.

Han-shan would eventually become one of China's most beloved poets, and a hero to seekers and vagabonds around the world. His poems often return to the dichotomy between the roads of town life, which he avoided, and narrow mountain trails, which he sought out. Buddhists and Taoists both, of course, had long employed the metaphor of the trail to describe their philosophies, but the Tao and the Dharma were portrayed as broad paths, for one and all. Han-
shan broke from this tradition: He believed that a way of life could become too common, that a trail could be too crowded or too worn; he urged his readers to “leave the dusty rut behind” and seek out “paths of newly trampled grass.” A millennium later and half a planet away, Thoreau would make this same metaphorical connection: “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels,” he wrote. “How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

What these men were describing, I realized, was a phenomenon of path-breaking common to all living things: One caterpillar finds a new leaf, and ten more follow its trail. By the time the eleventh arrives, the leaf has been chewed down to its skeleton, and so the eleventh caterpillar grows hungry and sets off in a new direction. The same principle applies to foraging ants and grazing herds, to fashion trends and stock markets, to traffic-clogged roads and eroded hiking paths. By striking off into the “darkest wild” of the Tiantai Mountains, Han-shan found a space free from suffocating conventions, where he could live a refreshingly stripped-down existence.

In the years following my thru-hike, I began to realize that the Appalachian Trail had been my Cold Mountain—a wild space defined by simplicity and freedom, relatively untouched by violence or greed, with a clear goal and few distractions. But unlike Han-shan, I had left it and returned to the metropolis. That other life haunted me.

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It was possible, I gathered, to spend one's life doing little else but walking. Life on the trail being exceedingly cheap, a handful of full-time hikers have managed to live for years or even decades off meager savings and seasonal work. These wanderers reminded me of mendicant monks, slipping free of the gravitational pull of society to live plainly, outdoors.

Over the years a curious name kept popping up, in the oddest places, as an example of a perpetual hiker, perhaps
the
perpetual hiker. This man called himself Nimblewill Nomad. Following the completion of his first thru-hike of the International Appalachian Trail in 1998, the Nomad had reportedly given away all his money and taken to hiking long trails more or less full-time. He proudly referred to himself as “hiker trash,” a modern update on the archetypal tramp. I'd heard he spent his winters living out of his pickup truck, sleeping in Walmart parking lots and national parks. As soon as the weather warmed, he walked.

His exploits tended to take on a mythic cast. I heard from more than one person that the Nomad had chosen to have all ten of his toenails surgically removed to avoid infections. Famously minimalist, he was said to never carry more than ten pounds on his back. People joked that his cook kit consisted of nothing more than a bent spoon and a cigarette lighter. Whenever possible, to avoid carrying food, he opted to eat at cheap roadside diners and gas stations.

This style of hiking was not universally admired. Lamar Marshall, who met the Nomad in 2001, told me he thought that hiking marathon distances to reach a restaurant each night “defeats the whole damn purpose of being in the woods.
”
But the Nomad, it seemed, had long ago moved
beyond
the woods. I was fascinated by his refusal to respect the boundary we have erected between the human world and the natural one. Each day, he somehow carved out a graceful path through the many-chambered heart of the behemoth—­wandering the postindustrial wilderness, from forest to forest, fryolator to fryolator, in what he called “a desperate search for peace.”

Over fifteen years, he had hiked some thirty-four thousand miles. First he completed the so-called Triple Crown: the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. Then he went on to complete all eleven National Scenic Trails, an achievement that has somewhat awkwardly been deemed the Undecuple
Crown, in 2013. He finished that hike atop Mount Monadnock, where he was congratulated by Dick Anderson and a host of other friends. Triumphant, fulfilled, and nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, he vowed to hang up his hiking shoes. Then, the next spring, he was back. He announced he would complete a grueling road walk from New Mexico to Florida, in order to complete a route he had named The Great American Loop, which connected the four farthest corners of the continental United States. This, he claimed, would be his last long hike.

Without having met him, I had no way of knowing whether the Nomad was merely a bitter misanthrope or, in the words of Jack Kerouac, “a new kind of American saint.” I wanted to see what this lifestyle truly entailed, and what kind of man it shaped. So I wrote to him one afternoon to ask if I could join him for a few days on his final hike. After some delicate negotiation—he harbored a deep if not altogether ill-founded suspicion of journalists—he agreed to let me walk with him. He told me that he would be hiking east on TX-73 somewhere outside Winnie, Texas, on a certain day in early June. If I could find him, I was welcome to tag along, but he wasn't slowing down for anybody.

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On the appointed day, my sister and I drove southeast from Houston, eyes peeled for a walker by the side of the road. As we passed a place on the map called Alligator Hole Marsh, we spotted him: a white apparition on the far side of the highway, walking upstream against the traffic. We circled around and parked on the shoulder some fifty yards up the road. He waved as he drew near. He carried a blue backpack no larger than a preschooler's knapsack. A single plastic water bottle was tied to his belt with a piece of frayed blue string. His trekking poles were folded in the crook of his arm. In his hand, he carried a chipped Styrofoam coffee cup.

When he reached the car, I shook his hand, and he smiled. He had a wild head of white hair streaked with yellow, and a white beard threaded with black. Both reached down to his collar, where they whorled, oceanic. Atop his head he wore a white runner's cap. He took his sunglasses off, and his eyes, arced against the sun, were fixed with deep, leathered creases, pale in their depths. His hands too were deeply tanned, but only up to around the base of his thumb; the rest, shaded by the cuffs of his shirt, was pink.

Any repeated action will create patterns, and after forty-six days on the road, he was embroidered with them. He showed off his beat-up black running shoes, with holes where his toes poked up, the soles slightly sloped from his tendency to pronate. His white button-down dress shirt, which he picked up for fifty cents at a secondhand shop, bore a dark stain from where his pack rode, like a burn shadow.

His real name was M. J. Eberhart. He said I could call him “Eb.”

Bright slabs of metal and glass roared past, summoning a hot wind. Eberhart sat down on the rear bumper of my sister's station wagon. We had brought him an ice-cream cone and some cold water, which he accepted bashfully. “Oh, this is such a blessing,” he said. “Oh man.” A smile lingered on his lips as he slurped at the vanishing cone.

“I've always heard that it's better to give than to receive, but someone has to receive, and I've learned to do it,” Eberhart wrote in his hiking memoir,
Ten Million Steps.
The book is filled with stories of people paying for his meals, taking him into their homes, and pressing wads of cash into his hands. He usually protested, and, ultimately, always relented. He received his first trekking poles, a pair of expensive titanium walking sticks from Germany, from a fellow hiker he had known for less than three hours. Both in person and in writing, Eberhart was unfailingly grateful. The words
thank
and
thanks
appear more than one hundred times in
Ten Million Steps.
(By way of comparison, the book contains only sixty-seven uses of the word
trail
.)

Finishing his ice cream and handing the wrapper back to my sister, Eberhart topped off his water bottle and filled the Styrofoam cup with ice. With that, he was ready to go. I hugged my sister good-bye. She got back in the car and drove off, leaving me and Eberhart alone with a million acres of green ranchland.

“Welcome to my backyard,” Eberhart said, waving at the vastness with his cup of ice. The land was flat (elevation: eleven feet), but the clouds above it were colossal—a white mountain range, severed and levitated.

As we walked, Eberhart recounted his travels thus far. He had begun forty-six days earlier at the southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail. From there, he headed east, through the blackened badlands of New Mexico, through the gateway city of El Paso, and onto an endless spread of dry dun plains haunted by dust devils. The traffic consisted almost entirely of semitrailer trucks, silvery leviathans that surged past every ten seconds at speeds of a hundred miles per hour. He learned to take shallow breaths through his nose, so as to not inhale their fumes. The sound was meteoric.