On Trails (31 page)

Ten years later, there was a push by Baxter's political nemesis, Owen Brewster, to make the area look more like the White Mountains, by building new motor roads (now feasible, thanks to technological advances) along with a large lodge and a series of smaller cabins. Baxter
successfully fought them back, and the park remained stubbornly inaccessible. The park's wildness, in other words, was not given. It was made.

It may sound strange (even sacrilegious) to some, but in a very real way, wilderness is a human creation. We create it in the same sense that we create trails; we do not create the soil or the plants, the geology or the topology (although we can, and do, shift these things). Instead, we delineate the place, by defining its boundaries, its meaning, and its use. The history of Katahdin is emblematic of the wilderness as a whole, which has always been the direct result of human ingenuity, foresight, and restraint.

“Civilization,” wrote the historian Roderick Nash, “invented wilderness.” According to his account, the wilderness was born at the dawn of agro-pastoralism, when we began cleaving the world into the binary categories of wild and tame, natural and cultivated. Words for wilderness are notably absent among the languages of hunter-­gatherer peoples. (“Only to the white man,” wrote Luther Standing Bear, “was nature a wilderness.”) From the vantage point of a farmer, the wilderness was a strange, barren land, full of poisonous plants and deadly animals, antithetical to the warmth and security of home. To these land-tamers, wilderness became synonymous with confusion, wickedness, and suffering. William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, was representative of this mindset when he deemed the uncolonized countryside “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.”

For centuries after the rise of agriculture, we erected fences to keep our cultivated land safe from whatever lurked in the darkness. But the realm of cultivation continued to spread, insatiably, until it at last began to endanger the wilderness, rather than the other way around. Then we began fencing
in
the wild, to keep it safe from us. For obvious reasons, this shift came much earlier on the isle of Britain—­which began walling off its forests a thousand years ago—than it did on the seemingly endless American continent.

Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word
wilderness
was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy. That switch allowed a new set of moral attitudes toward the nonhuman world to take hold. Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.”

This is the most succinct definition of the wilderness I have found: the
not
-self. There, in the one place we have not remolded in our image, a very deep and ancient form of wisdom can be found. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote Albert Camus. We glimpse this inhuman heart only once the rosy lens of familiarity has fallen away. Then, Camus wrote, we realize that the world is “foreign and irreducible to us”—a sensation acutely familiar to both Thoreau and Huxley. “These hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them,” he wrote. “The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.” We over-civilized humans cherish wilderness because it both fosters and embodies that sense of not-self—it is a brazenly naked land, where a person, in mingled fear and awe, verging on nonsense, can cry out:
Contact!

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Doyi and I followed the Appalachian Trail northward. We climbed up and over a bulge called Moose Mountain, falling into an easy rhythm. The trail bore a string of deep moose prints and a pile of olivey pellets, but no moose. The view from the summit was the same as from the
window of a cloud-socked airplane. On the downhill side, the wind shouldered through the trees, shaking down leaves and water. We were glad to reach the lean-to—a wooden shelter, ubiquitous on the trail, shaped like a heavily italicized letter L.
IV
Someone had strung up a tarp over the entrance to keep out the wind and rain.

“Hello? Anybody in there?” Doyi called.

“Doyi!” voices cheered, in unison.

Inside it was dark, steamy, sour-smelling. The thru-hikers were all burrowed in their sleeping bags, some leaned upright against the back wall, others supine. Headlamps blazed coldly from the center of their foreheads. Doyi introduced me to them, from right to left: Gingko, an albinic young German man with an ice-white beard and startling blue eyes; Socks, a cheerful, dark-haired young woman, so named after her resemblance to Sacajawea, though she was Korean-­American; Catch-Me-If-You-Can, a Korean-American man in his forties, quiet, high-cheek-boned, forever smiling, and renowned for his speed; and Tree Frog, a young white man with bushy brown hair, who often told strangers along the trail he was employed as a butler, because he had learned it was more interesting to lie about being a butler than to tell them the truth about being an engineer. Doyi had known some of them for months and others only a few days, but he had an easy rapport with all of them. As we dropped our packs inside the shelter, he asked them to please scooch over and make room for us. Distracted, they were slow in moving, so he joked, “Don't worry, you don't have to do it right away. Anytime in the next ten seconds would be fine.” They laughed, and then moved over.

Doyi and I changed clothes, got in our sleeping bags, and prepared dinner. Tree Frog said that as he hiked he had been practicing
the Cherokee words that Doyi had taught him: “shit” (
di ga si
), “shit!” (
e ha
), “water” (
ama
), and
Osda Nigada
, which means, roughly, “It's all good.”
Osda Nigada!
had become a kind of rallying cry for the rain-drenched hikers, and soon became their unofficial name for themselves: Team Osda Nigada.

As I sat over my Coke-can stove cooking a pot of soba noodles, I found myself slipping back into the headspace of a thru-hiker. Tree Frog generously offered me and Doyi two muffins he'd carried up from town. They were sticky and dense; we both scraped the muffin paper clean with our teeth. (Nothing tastes better, the old thru-hiker adage says, than food you haven't had to carry.) The gift prompted Doyi to teach the group a new Cherokee phrase: “
Gv Ge Yu A
,” which means “I love you,” except, Doyi said, that it cannot be used casually; it can only be spoken when one truly means it.

Tree Frog was bent over his journal, scribbling down the day's events. He was working on a book about his mother's attempt to thru-­hike the AT, which was halted by cancer, and his subsequent quest to scatter her ashes atop Mount Katahdin. In exchange for the muffin, I offered him my dimpled copy of the latest
New Yorker,
the fiction issue. He politely waved me off. “Sounds heavy,” he said. He meant the weight of the paper, not the subject matter.

They talked primarily about time and food; when they would reach certain mountains or towns or states; what they were eating, had eaten, would eat, would
like
to eat. The interior life of a thru-hiker this far into a long hike is a mixture of waning adventure-lust, intensifying hunger, mild impatience, and calm, single-pointed focus. The pull of Katahdin drew them inexorably along the same trail, at roughly the same pace, like marbles in a downward groove. They had recently agreed to try to summit Katahdin as a group, even if that meant slowing down to accommodate the slower members. After consulting his guidebook that night, Tree Frog suggested that they should try to finish by July 7. Doyi smiled at the thought of that
golden, mirrored numeral—7/7—a sacred number for the Cherokees. It had the glow of fate.

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What makes a trail wild? Is it the people who built it, the people who walk it, or the land around it? The answer is a combination of all three. In large part, the Appalachian Trail gained its wild reputation from the iconic wildernesses it managed to string together: not just Katahdin, but also the Great Smokies, the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, the Greens, the Whites, the Bigelows, the 100 Mile Wilderness. Thanks to a massive land acquisition project led by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the gaps between those wilderness areas were later filled in. Today, the trail is surrounded by an almost uninterrupted, thousand-foot-wide belt of protected land—what is sometimes referred to as “the longest, skinniest part of America's national park system.”

Those lands, though, would never have been protected if likeminded hikers and activists hadn't fought for their protection. The AT—like any trail—is the creation of multitudes: walkers, trail-­builders, conservationists, administrators, donors, and government officials. Before all of them, however, the trail was born from the imagination of a single man—a forester, wilderness advocate, and utopian dreamer named Benton MacKaye. Even today, the trail bears the imprint of his brilliant and idiosyncratic mind.

The idea for the Appalachian Trail reportedly first occurred to MacKaye while hiking through the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1900, at the age of twenty-one. He and a friend had climbed a tree atop Stratton Mountain to admire the view, and, dizzy with a “planetary feeling,” as he later described it, MacKaye suddenly envisioned a single trail stringing together the entire Appalachian range from north to south. Two years later, while working at a summer camp in
New Hampshire, he mentioned the idea to his boss, who replied that it sounded like “a damn fool scheme.”

History would prove otherwise. In fact, at that precise moment, disparate forces were aligning to allow something as audacious as a two-thousand-mile-long hiking trail to one day exist. In newspapers and books from the turn of the century, America was increasingly being seen as a land of worsening health, degenerating morals, and rampant money grubbing. Boys were growing too weak, while girls were “overheated, overdressed, and over-entertained.” These fears stemmed in part from a rapid and unprecedented surge in urbanization; Manhattan, for instance, housed more people in 1900 than it does today. Time spent outdoors, in the “fresh air”—a newly popular phrase—was seen as a curative for society's ills. Locomotives (and soon, automobiles) made trips to the mountains easier and faster. Summer camps sprang up throughout the Northeast. (The summer camp I attended, Pine Island, was founded in 1902.) The turn of the century also marked the birth of the scouting movement. In 1902, a nature writer named Ernest Thompson Seton founded a club for boys called the League of the Woodcraft Indians, which later inspired Robert Baden-Powell to form the Boy and Girl Scouts. “This is a time,” wrote Seton in 1907, “when the whole nation is turning toward the outdoor life.”

Meanwhile, the federal government—at the urging of hiking-­cum-conservation groups like the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Sierra Club—had begun setting aside huge tracts of public land. This process began in 1864, when Abraham Lincoln, following the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted, signed a bill setting aside the Yosemite valley and a nearby grove of giant sequoia trees as public land. Olmsted, the famed designer of Central Park—which he insisted remain open to all, “the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous”—warned Lincoln that, if the Yosemite
valley fell into private hands, it could end up as a walled garden for the sole enjoyment of the rich, like many parks in England. By signing the Yosemite Grant Act, Lincoln set a key precedent for the creation of the national park system. The conservationist movement began to reach a new peak in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, assumed the presidency. His first address to Congress called for the creation of a series of national forests. By the end of his presidency in 1909, he would set aside one hundred fifty national forests, fifty-one federal bird reserves, and five national parks. All told, he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land.

Meanwhile, a new conception of trails was spreading. Trail designers began to reconsider the isolated clusters of trails that had once surrounded the most popular hiking destinations and discovered ways to connect those clusters into cohesive networks. Soon, there arose the notion of a “through trail”—a trail that would keep going. In 1910, James P. Taylor, a schoolmaster who enjoyed taking his students on long hikes, proposed the construction of a single trail connecting all of the tallest mountains in Vermont. He called it “The Long Trail.”

Into this intellectual environment stepped MacKaye. He graduated from Harvard a few months before Roosevelt's inauguration, and shortly after earned his master's degree from the Harvard School of Forestry. In the following decades, he took a series of forestry and planning jobs, which gave him a better sense of how people can transform landscapes (and vice versa). During one such project, in 1912, he conducted an influential study on the effects of rainwater runoff in the White Mountains, which proved that deforestation contributes to flooding. Partly as a result of his study, the White Mountains were later designated a national forest.

Over the course of twenty years, MacKaye grew from a gangly young forestry student into a bespectacled, dark-haired, hawk-faced intellectual, with a pipe permanently clenched between his teeth. All the while, his idea for what he called “an Appalachian Trail”
grew along with him. In 1921, he lost his wife, Betty—a suffragist and peace advocate—when she drowned herself in Manhattan's East River. Grieving, MacKaye holed up in a friend's farmhouse in New Jersey, where he paused his forestry work long enough to put his idea for the Appalachian Trail down on paper. What emerged was more than a mere trail. The innocuous title he gave to his now-historic proposal—“An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning”—belied its radical vision. In fact, he saw the trail as nothing less than a remedy to the worst ills of urbanization, capitalism, militarism, and industrialism—what he called “the problem of living.”