On Trails (5 page)

Countless times on my hike, I would reach a section where a small grove of Tuckamore stood between me and where I needed to be. I would glance at my watch to mark the time, estimating it should take
no more than ten minutes to cross. Then I would take a deep breath and enter the low green copse. It was like dipping into a nightmare. Suddenly the air was dark, and the space apportioned chaotically. As I fought to take each step, branches clawed red gashes into my skin and pulled the water bottles from the pockets of my backpack. Out of frustration, I tried stomping on the trees, to break them, or at least to punish them, but to no avail; they sprang back, unharmed. Here and there a set of moose or caribou prints would form a narrow, muddy game trail, but after a short while it would dwindle or veer astray. Off to the left, a pocket of sunlight would appear, and I would follow it, only to find a pool of mud. It was like moving through a labyrinth that left you no choice but to, from time to time, lower your shoulder and charge your way
through the walls
.

At last, exhausted and bleeding, I would emerge. My watch would reveal that an hour had passed, and I had covered no more than fifty yards.

Eventually, I learned to pick my way through these mazes by watching the movements of the moose. One trick moose use is to follow waterways, which, though muddy, often find the most expedient path through a thicket. They also walk with high, arching steps to flatten the branches underfoot. It was in perfecting this technique that I came to my greatest revelation: at one point near the end of the hike, I found that by counterintuitively selecting the densest bunches of Tuckamore, I could actually lift myself up and walk along the tops of the trees like a
wuxia
warrior.

By nightfall on the second day, I was at least two miles off course. It had already taken me a day longer than I had expected to hike the mere sixteen miles, and not once had I spent the night on level ground or near fresh water.

All night a light rain fell. Around dawn, I awoke from my bivouac high atop a ridge to observe a wide band of hyacinth sky moving toward me. At first I perceived this lovely sight as a break in the clouds
and lay back down to sleep. But as I turned back to my sleeping bag, I noticed the purple stripe was finely veined with lightning. It was not clear sky, I realized, but a massive storm cloud stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. It let out a soft digestive growl.

Within the space of a half hour, the storm cloud rushed overhead. The air was crazed with rain. Fearing a lightning strike, I scrambled out of my sleeping bag, out from under my tarp, and down to the lowest point I could find. There I crouched on my sleeping mat on the balls of my feet, hands over my head, shaking and drenched, as delicate strings of light detonated all around me.

For the better part of an hour, awash in mounting waves of tympanic rumble, I had time to reconsider the merits of hiking. Stripped of its Romantic finery, the wild ceased to inspire; only a gauzy scrim separated sublimity and horror. Jacques Cartier, upon visiting this island in 1534, declared that he was “inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain.” He was right. It was a dark and pestilential place. The apparent beauty was only a ruse to lure you into its flytrap maw. I vowed to myself that if I made it out of this alive, I would never hike again.

Upon seeing the Earth's true brutality unmasked, authors throughout history have expressed a similar sense of disillusionment, even betrayal. In his semiautobiographical short story “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane captured the chilling moment when a shipwreck victim realizes that nature is “indifferent, flatly indifferent.” Annie Dillard—after watching a giant water bug gruesomely devour a frog—grapples with the possibility that “the universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die.” Goethe went one step further, calling the universe “a fearful monster, forever devouring its own offspring.” Kant, Nietzsche, and Thoreau all describe nature not as a mother, but as a “stepmother”—a winking reference to the wicked villainesses of German lore.

The English writer Aldous Huxley came to this realization while
walking through the wilds of Borneo. Being fussy about his lodgings and terrified of cannibals, Huxley preferred to stick to “the Beaten Track.” But one day eleven miles outside of Sandakan, the paved road he was traveling along abruptly ended, and he was forced to trek through the jungle. “The inside of Jonah's whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker or damper,” he wrote. Lost in that mute, hot twilight, even the cries of birds startled him, which he imagined to be the whistles of devilish natives. “It was with a feeling of the profoundest relief that I emerged again from the green gullet of the jungle and climbed into the waiting car. . . . I thanked God for steam-rollers and Henry Ford.”

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is “a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds.” Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been “enslaved to man.” In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. “Nature,” Huxley wrote, “is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic.” And he meant
always
: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.

Once the rain had ceased, I shook the water from my tarp, packed my things, and began walking to get warm. I found myself looking with new admiration upon the Tuckamore, which looked unfazed by the storm—nourished, even. Those rugged little trees were perfectly fitted to their niche, sculpted by the wind, deeply rooted to their land. I, meanwhile, was a perpetual wanderer, ill-equipped, maladapted, and lost.

Three hours later, after a few more harrowing misadventures (ravines descended in vain; waterfalls tenuously traversed), I found my
way to the endpoint of the unmarked wilderness, where a large pyr­amidal pile of rocks marked the beginning of the trail back down to Snug Harbour. I whooped and hollered, awash in the same relief Huxley felt upon spotting his chauffeur. The trail, however rough, would return me to the human realm. Delivered from chaos, I promptly forgot my former terror, fell in love with the earth anew, and once again desired to walk every inch of it.

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I had not traveled to Newfoundland to be mauled by trees. The hike was a mere diversion, a side trip. My ultimate destination was a yet more baffling and inaccessible wilderness: the distant past. I was making my way to a rocky outcropping on the island's southeast corner, where I hoped to find the oldest trails on earth.

These fossil trails, which are roughly 565 million years old, date back to the dimmest dawn of animal life. Now fossilized and faint, each one is roughly a centimeter wide, like a fingertip's errant brush across the surface of a drying clay pot. I had read all about them, but I wanted to touch them, to trace their runnels like a blind man. I hoped that encountering them up close would resolve a question I've long harbored, like an old thorn: Why do we, as animals, uproot ourselves rather than maintaining the stately fixity of trees? Why do we venture into places where we were not born and do not belong? Why do we press forward into the unknown?

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The world's oldest trails were discovered one afternoon in 2008 by an Oxford researcher named Alex Liu. He and his research assistant were scouting for new fossil sites out on a rocky promontory called Mistaken Point, where a series of well-known fossil beds overlook the North Atlantic. Bordering one surface, Liu noticed, was a small shelf of mudstone that bore a red patina. The red was rust—an
oxidized form of iron pyrite, which commonly appears in local Precambrian fossil beds. They scrambled down the bluff to inspect it. There, Liu spotted what many other paleontologists before him had somehow missed: a series of sinuous traces thought to be left behind by organisms of the Ediacaran biota, the planet's earliest known forms of animal life.

The ancient Ediacarans, which likely went extinct around 541 million years ago, were exceedingly odd creatures. Soft-bodied and largely immobile, mouth-less and anus-less, some were shaped like discs, others like quilted mattresses, others like fronds. One unfortunate type is often described as looking like a bag of mud.

We can envision them only dimly. Paleontologists don't know what color they were, how long they lived, what they ate, or how they reproduced. We do not know why they began to crawl—­perhaps they were hunting for food, fleeing a mysterious predator, or doing something else entirely. Despite all these uncertainties, what Liu's trails undoubtedly suggest is that 565 million years ago, a living thing did something virtually unprecedented on this planet—it shivered, swelled, reached forth, scrunched up, and in doing so, at an imperceptibly slow pace, began to move across the sea floor, leaving a trail behind it.

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To reach the fossil trails at Mistaken Point, I flew to the town of Deer Lake and hitchhiked some seven hundred miles, taking a slow circuitous route that touched almost every corner of the island. Along the way I hiked mountains, swam in rivers, tasted icebergs, camped out, and slept on strangers' couches. Newfoundland is ideal for bumming around; it has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, the people are generally congenial, and everyone seems to own a big automobile. Car ride by car ride, I made my way down to the island's southeastern tip.

However, when I finally arrived at the park entrance, I was turned away. A vigilant park ranger forbid me to see the trails because I had failed to acquire the proper permits. Their location, I learned, was a matter of great secrecy due to the rise of so-called “paleo-pirates,” who had been known to carve out the more notable fossils and sell them to collectors.

Undeterred, I returned the following year—armed, this time, with the proper clearance. A saintly couple I had met the year before graciously offered to pick me up at the airport and give me a ride down to Trepassey, a town nicknamed the “Harbor of the Dead,” because its foggy waters had been the site of many shipwrecks. There, at an unprepossessing restaurant in the Trepassey Motel, I finally met with Alex Liu.

Having only read about him in press clippings, I imagined Liu as I did all paleontologists: gray at the temples, a pair of Savile Row spectacles perched on his nose, and behind them, the deep-creased eyes of a man who spends his days peering at small things lit by a harsh sun. But when Liu appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, I was surprised to discover a fresh-faced, raven-haired young man, not yet thirty, with a shy smile. Beside him were his two research assistants: Joe Stewart, who had the shorn head and handsomely punched-up physiognomy of a rugby player, and Jack Matthews, the youngest member of the group, whom I seemed to have caught in a brief hiatus in his metamorphosis from a mischievous boy into a kooky, brilliant, snowy-haired professor.

We shook hands, sat down, and ordered a round of beer and plates of fried fish. They ate heartily. Because money was tight, the team spent two out of every three nights in tents set up in an abandoned trailer park and the third night here at the motel to shower up and wash their clothes. Journalism, they assured me, was not the only field with dwindling resources. Each year, said Liu, university and government budgets for the dusty science of paleontology grew stin
gier. He smiled with resignation. “What I do is immensely important for understanding where we came from, but it has little wider social impact,” he said. “It's not going to solve climate change. It's not going to boost the economy.”

As a boy, Liu had loved dinosaurs, particularly those in
Jurassic Park.
The romance of those craning beasts, which he never fully outgrew, coupled with his love of fieldwork and knack for geology, drew him to fossil hunting. When he was pursuing his master's degree at Oxford, he had planned to study ancient mammals, but he found the field crowded; his thesis project was spent studying the teeth of Eocene-era elephants in Egypt. For his PhD work, he turned to the much older and largely unstudied Ediacarans. “If I had taken on a mammal project, then I'd have been trying to answer questions that people have looked at for hundreds of years,” he said. “Whereas I knew that Ediacaran stuff was new, uncertain. And that was more enticing, really, because the questions are bigger.”

Of all the manifold questions surrounding these elusive, soft-­bodied animals, the biggest of all might concern the origins of animal movement. Some paleontologists theorize that the first Ediacaran trail-maker may have set off a series of morphological changes leading, in fits and starts, from a serene garden of swaying anemone-like creatures to today's violent, skeletonized kingdom of sprinters, jumpers, flyers, swimmers, diggers, and walkers. It is rare in science to run across a big new question, and harder still to answer it, but Liu seemed to have this one by the scruff of its neck.

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For a respectable scientist, wading into the murky world of the Ediacarans is a treacherous endeavor. Information about that distant era is extremely limited, and even the most basic assumptions often prove unreliable. For instance, we still do not know for certain which kingdom of life the Ediacarans belonged to. At various times, it has
been proposed that they could have been plants, fungi, colonies of single-celled organisms, or, according to the trace fossil expert Adolf Seilacher, a “lost kingdom” called Vendobionta. While most Ediacaran researchers tentatively agree that they were animals, recently, some have begun arguing that lumping all the known Ediacaran species into one kingdom or another may be too reductive, and each fossil must instead be re-taxonomized one by one.