On Trails (3 page)

There are, it is often said by the more ecumenical prophets, many paths up the mountain. So long as it helps a person navigate the world and seek out what is good, a path, by definition, has value. It is rare to run across a spiritual leader preaching that there are
no
paths to enlightenment. Some of the Zen masters came close, though even
the great D
ō
gen stated that meditation “is the straight path of the Buddha way.” The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti stands out in this regard. “Truth has no path,” he wrote. “All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing.” Unsurprisingly, his path of pathlessness attracted fewer adherents than the reassuringly detailed instructions of Muhammad or Confucius. Lost in the howling landscapes of life, most people will choose the confinement of a path to the dizzying freedom of an unmarked wilderness.

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My spiritual path, to the extent that I had one, was the trail itself. I regarded long-distance hiking as an earthy, stripped down, American form of walking meditation. The chief virtue of the trail's confining structure is that it frees the mind up for more contemplative pursuits. The aim of my slapdash trail religion was to move smoothly, to live simply, to draw wisdom from the wild, and to calmly observe the constant flow of phenomena. Needless to say, I mostly failed. Looking back through my journal recently, I found that rather than spending my days in a state of serene observation, much of my time was given over to griping, fantasizing, worrying over logistics, and dreaming of food. Enlightened I was not. But overall I was as happy and healthy as I'd ever been.

Over the course of my first couple of months, my pace gradually increased, from ten miles per day up to fifteen and then twenty. I continued to accelerate as I reached the relatively low-lying ridges of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. By the time I crossed over into Vermont, I was covering as many as thirty miles a day. In the process, my body was being re-tooled for the task of walking. My stride lengthened. Blisters hardened to calluses. All spare fat, and a fair bit of muscle, was converted into fuel. At any given moment, one or two com
ponents of the machine were usually begging for maintenance—a sore ankle, a chafed hip. But on the rare days when everything was running in harmony, hiking a good stretch of trail felt like gunning a supercar down an empty interstate: a perfect marriage of instrument and task.

My mind began to change, subtly, too. A legendary old hiker named Nimblewill Nomad once told me that eighty percent of aspiring Appalachian Trail thru-hikers who give up do so for mental reasons, not physical ones. “They just can't deal with the daily, the weekly, the monthly challenge of being out there in the quiet,” he said. I begrudgingly learned to embrace the monastic silence of the eastern forests. Some days, after many miles, I would slip into a state of near-perfect mental clarity—serene, crystalline, thought-free. I was, as the Zen sages say, just walking.

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The trail leaves its mark upon its travelers: My legs became a map of black scrapes and leechy pink scars. Ragged holes opened up in my hiking shoes, and beneath those, in my socks, and beneath those, in my feet. My T-shirt began to dissolve from the months of friction and corrosive sweat. If I reached back, I could feel my shoulder blades pushing through the threadbare fabric like budding wings.

At the same time, I began to notice that we hikers likewise alter the trail in our passing. I first recognized our impact when climbing the steep S-shaped turns up hillsides called switchbacks. When a trail is too curvy, descending hikers tend to create shortcuts to skip the turns. I also noticed that in boggy areas, hikers would scramble for dry footing, which split the trail into multiple strands. There seemed to be a basic conflict between the rationale of the trail's architects and that of its walkers. Later, by volunteering on trail-building crews, I would learn why this is so: hikers typically seek the path of least re
sistance across the landscape. The trail designers, meanwhile, attempt to build trails that will resist erosion, spare sensitive plant life, and avoid private property lines. (The push to teach hikers “Leave No Trace” principles over the past twenty years has had some success in realigning these divergent value systems.) But even if one assiduously stayed within the trail bed, one would still be altering the trail, because every step a hiker takes is a vote for the continued existence of a trail. If everyone decided to stop hiking the AT forever, it would become overgrown and eventually disappear.

Here is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking.

Use creates trails. Long-lasting trails, then, must be
of use
. They persist because they connect one node of desire to another: a lean-to to a freshwater spring, a house to a well, a village to a grove. Because they both express and fulfill the collective desire, they exist as long as the desire does; once the desire fades, they fade too.

In the 1980s, a professor of urban design at the University of Stuttgart named Klaus Humpert began studying a series of dirt footpaths that had sprung up on the campus's greens, forming shortcuts between paved walkways. He performed an experiment where he erased the campus's informal footpaths by resodding them with grass. Just as he suspected, new trails soon appeared exactly where the old ones had been.

These impromptu trails, which are surprisingly common, are called “desire lines.” They can be found in the parks of every major city on earth, slicing off the right angles that efficiency deplores. Studying
satellite imagery, I have found desire lines even in the capitals of the world's most repressive countries—in Pyongyang, in Naypyidaw, in Ashgabat. Understandably, dictatorial architects, like actual dictators, despise them. A shortcut is a kind of geographic graffiti, pointing out the authoritarian failure to predict our needs and police our desires. In response, planners sometimes attempt to impede desire lines by force. But this tactic is doomed to failure—hedges will be trampled, signs uprooted, fences felled. Wise designers sculpt
with
desire, not against it.

Previously, when I found an unmarked trail in the woods or across a city park, I used to wonder about its authorship. But usually, I've learned, the answer is that no one person made it. Instead, it
emerged
. Someone made a stab at a problem, took a tentative trip, and the next person followed, and then another, subtly improving the route along the way.

Trails are not unique in this regard—a similar evolutionary process takes place with other communal creations, like folktales, work songs, jokes, and memes. Upon hearing an old joke, I used to wonder what nameless, forgotten comic genius had written it. But this was a futile question to ask, because most old jokes are not born whole; they evolve over the course of decades. Richard Raskin, a scholar of Jewish humor, has sifted through hundreds of anthologies of Jewish jokes in multiple languages, from as far back as the early nineteenth century to the present, to find the origins of classic jokes. What he discovered was that traditional Jewish jokes evolve along common “pathways”—which usually involve reframing, tweaking logic, swapping out characters and settings, and adding more surprising punch lines—all in search of “a better way of fulfilling the stories' comic potential.” Like a good trail, a good joke is the result of an untold number of nameless authors and editors. He provides an example from 1928, in which a husband and wife are walking down a dirt road when a heavy rain begins to fall:

“Sarah, pull your skirt up higher. It's practically dragging in the mud!” cries the husband.

“I can't do that. My stockings are torn!” replies his wife.

“Why didn't you put a fresh pair of stockings on?” the husband asks.

“Could I know it was going to rain?”

Raskin deems this joke a failure; it lacks the logical contradiction that lies at the heart of the absurd. But it was a start. Twenty years later, the joke had been tweaked in a number of ways: the setting was moved from an unnamed location to the mythic town of Chelm, which was known to be full of fools; the sentences were sharpened; and the stockings were swapped out for an umbrella, giving the punch line a neater logical paradox. Having passed through countless mouths, the joke had grown from a clunker to a classic:

Two sages of Chelm went out for a walk. One carried an umbrella, the other didn't. Suddenly, it began to rain.

“Open your umbrella, quick!” suggested the one without an umbrella.

“It won't help,” answered the other.

“What do you mean, it won't help? It will protect us from the rain.”

“It's no use, the umbrella is as full of holes as a sieve.”

“Then why did you take it along in the first place?”

“I didn't think it would rain!”

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One torrential afternoon on the AT, as I was hiking around Nuclear Lake, in New York, I turned a corner to discover a black bear waddling down the middle of the trail. It apparently could neither hear nor smell me amid the rain. It went on calmly snuffling along
until I clacked my trekking poles together, at which point it spun around, spotted me, and then nervously trundled off into the woods. I stopped to inspect the stubby-fingered, sharp-clawed prints it had left in the mud. Over the following weeks I began to notice other prints—mostly deer, squirrel, raccoon, and, farther north, moose—pressed into the wet trail. When I left the trail to explore the nearby woods, I was surprised to find a shadow kingdom of trails connecting parts unknown.

Humans are neither the earth's original nor its foremost trailblazers. Compared to our clumsy dirt paths, the trails of ants are downright wizardly. Many species of mammals, it turns out, are also remarkably adept trail-builders. Even the dumbest animals are experts at finding the most efficient route across a landscape. Our languages have grown to reflect this fact: In Japan, desire lines are called
kemonomichi
, or beast trails. In France, they call them
chemin de l'âne
, or donkey paths. In Holland, they say
Olifantenpad
, elephant paths. In America and England, people sometimes dub them “cow paths.”

“We say the cows laid out Boston,” wrote Emerson, in reference to the (probably apocryphal) belief that the city's crooked grid was the result of paving old cow paths. “Well, there are worse surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path through the thicket, and over the hills: and travelers and Indians know the value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure to be the easiest possible pass through the ridge.” More than a hundred years later, a study from the University of Oregon has lent credence to Emerson's claim: forty cattle were pitted against a sophisticated computer program and tasked to find the most efficient path across a field. In the end, the cows outperformed the computer by more than ten percent.

Before colonization, many North American tribes followed deer and bison trails, which found the lowest passes across mountain ranges and the shallowest fords across rivers. Elephants, too, are
thought to have cleared the most expedient roads through many parts of India and Africa. Nonhuman animals achieve this efficient design not through superhuman intelligence, but through sheer persistence. They continually search for better routes, and once one is found, they adopt it. In this manner, trail networks of incredible efficiency can arise simply, organically, iteratively, without any forethought necessary.

A clever and patient observer can watch a trail sleeken in real time. The physicist Richard Feynman, for instance, witnessed this phenomenon while studying the ants that infested his home in Pasadena. One afternoon, he took note of a line of ants walking around the rim of his bathtub. Though myrmecology was far from his area of expertise, he was curious to find out why ant trails inevitably “look so straight and nice.” First, he placed a lump of sugar on the far side of the bathtub and waited for hours until an ant found it. Then, as the ant carted a piece of the sugar back to its nest, Feynman picked up a colored pencil and traced the ant's return path along the bathtub. The resulting trail was “quite wiggly,” full of errors.

Another ant emerged, followed the first ant's trail, and located the sugar. As it plodded back to the nest, Feynman marked its trail with a different color of pencil. But in its haste to return with its bounty, the second ant repeatedly lost the first ant's trail, cutting off many of the unnecessary curves: The second line was noticeably straighter than the first. The third line, Feynman noted, was even straighter than the second. He ultimately followed as many as ten ants with his pencils, and, as he'd expected, the last few trails he traced formed a neat line along the bathtub's edge. “It's something like sketching,” he observed. “You draw a lousy line at first; then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice line after a while.”

I later learned that this streamlining process extended beyond ants, or even animals. “All things optimize in nature, to some degree,” an entomologist named James Danoff-Burg told me.

Intrigued, I asked him if there was a good book I could read on optimization.

“Sure,” he said. “It's called
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin.”

Evolution, he explained, is a form of long-term, genetic optimization; the same process of trial and error takes place. And, as Darwin showed, in the great universal act of streamlining, even the errors are essential. If some ants weren't error-prone, the ant trail would never straighten out. The scouts may be the genius architects who blaze the trails, but any rogue worker can be the one who stumbles upon a shortcut. Everyone optimizes, whether we are pioneering or perpetuating, making rules or breaking them, succeeding or screwing up.