On Trails (44 page)

I once read a study that found that in this very parish of Louisiana—­which is predicted by scientists to be severely damaged by rising sea levels and increased storms—more than half the population disagreed with the scientific consensus that human activity was altering the climate. Eberhart too was skeptical. (“It's one hell of a leap of faith,” he'd said.) Indeed, when I considered it here, where the hurricanes raged worst, I was momentarily amazed by the idea that we tiny humans are capable of radically altering the planet, when for our whole existence it has tossed us around like so many ants. It was as if we had wounded one of the gods.

We are all children of landscapes. We first learn about the world in the place where we grow up; it shapes our language, our beliefs,
and our expectations. I was raised on the shores of Lake Michigan, among plunging ravines and manicured lawns, where human ingenuity reversed the flow of the Chicago River and converted the prairies into corn and concrete. Eberhart was from the northeastern Ozarks, a hard land, trod by Meriwether Lewis and terrorized by Jesse James, where lead ore was once pulled from the ground and hauled off by oxen until it ran out, leaving the people to scrape out a living from the acidic soil. This woman and her children were from a place where, any summer or fall, with little warning, a cloud could erase their lives.

The sun was setting by the time we left the store. We walked down the roadside searching for a dry place to sleep. First we looked behind a firehouse on stilts, then behind a cemetery named Head of the Hollow. On the far side of the graves, Eberhart spotted a motte of live oaks. He hopped nimbly over the barbed wire fence and ducked beneath their gnarled branches. “Beautiful!” he called out.

Inside was a shady grove, carpeted with slender, rippling leaves. We hurriedly set up camp and crawled into our nylon cocoons as mosquitoes descended like mist. I thought back to what Lamar Marshall had said, that Eberhart's way of walking “defeats the whole damn purpose of being in the woods.” Here we had discovered a corner of wilderness that few people ever slept in, and it was truly lovely. “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth,” the poet Gary Snyder once said. “The planet is a wild place and always will be.”

+

Wilderness, according to William Cronon, is as illusory a concept as nature. He writes that wilderness is too often seen as an Edenic escape from the modern world—“the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.” It is both our fantasy and our fallback plan; we forgive the poisoning of our local waterways so long as Yellowstone remains pristine. “By imag
ining that our true home is in the wilderness,” he writes, “we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.”

But Cronon argues that unlike the concept of nature, which tends to narrow our thinking, wilderness can broaden it. In the wild, we witness firsthand that there is a world of stunning complexity that existed prior to us and will always stubbornly resist our attempts to simplify it. “In reminding us of the world we did not make,” Cronon writes, “wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself.” (This lesson, Cronon writes, “applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things.” So his “wilderness” and Scheler's “fellow feeling” are, oddly enough, kindred concepts.)

On a farm, the land is narrowly defined by how it profits the farmer—he sees little more than crops, soil, storm clouds, pests, debt. But the defining feature of wilderness is its unruly condition: it is the land we leave to
grow wild
. The wilderness has always been defined as the land out there, beyond the fence,
not-self
, not-home.
It is open land, which no one owns, and no one can claim to fully know. Throughout history it has offered a home to all manner of prophets, explorers, ascetics, outcasts, rebels, fugitives, and freaks. Some, like Muir, found it holy; others, like the Puritans, found it horrible. None, however, could hope to fully grasp it; it is forever
beyond us
. Perhaps this is why the wilderness, as sung into being by Thoreau—“this vast, savage, howling Mother”—has managed to retain its transcendent power in our increasingly secularized and post-natural society. Whether it be a snowy mountaintop or a shady grove, the wild is a place where both Eberhart and I, different as we may be, could feel bathed in the same cosmic light.

On wild land, wild thoughts can flourish. There, we can feel all the ragged edges of what we do not know, and we make room for other living things to live differently. Cronon boldly concludes his essay on wilderness by asserting that we must learn to reinfuse this
sense of the wild back into the human landscape—for instance, to see even the trees in our backyards as wild things—and to reframe our understanding of the wilderness so that it can contain us within it. The next great leap in our ecological consciousness, he argues, would be to “discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.' ”

+

The following day was my last with Eberhart. A little after dawn we snuck back to the road and resumed walking eastward. Hot gray skies pressed earthward. Somewhere, a marsh was burning. To our left were vast ranchlands. A helicopter hovered low over them, releasing a fine chemical mist. Off to the right, bulbous storm clouds floated in from the gulf, trailing gray tentacles.

In ten miles, at the storm-ravaged town of Holly Beach, I would hitch a ride back to Houston with a group of touring Danes, rewinding, in an hour, all the progress we had made in three days. But that morning, the end still seemed a long way off, and my legs had already begun to ache. Walking on the uniform surface of a road for days wears on the body in the same way working in a factory does. The same motion is repeated, with very little variance, thousands of times each day. Odd body parts grow sore: the backs of the knees, the bottoms of the feet.

Eberhart, meanwhile, seemed fine. His posture was hunched, and he had a slight hitch in his right step, but his stride, from the outset, was remarkably steady: three miles an hour, on the tick. From time to time he stopped, leaned forward on his trekking poles, and swung first one leg backward, then the other, to loosen them up. Throughout the day, to ease his pains, he swallowed handfuls of aspirin and joint supplements.

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.