On Trails (35 page)

Everywhere that people wanted to go faster, our trails grew straighter, flatter, and harder than ever before. What set humans apart from our animal brethren is that we learned to optimize
beyond
the shape of the trail and the limits of our anatomy; technology, in a sense, provided an entirely new dimension in which trails could streamline. To travel and transport goods faster, people in Eurasia discovered that they could ride atop animals and hitch them to carts.
(Domesticated animals, in this way, became a kind of living technology.) Roads adapted in new ways to the technology of wheeled transport; in ancient Babylon, they built “rutways,” stone roads bearing parallel grooves to guide the wheels of bulky carts, which were an early precursor to wooden and then metal railways. Generation after generation, Eurasians continued to improve their vehicles and roads, until they invented the automobile, or “horseless carriage,” and the locomotive, or “steam horse.” Soon, using these machines, humans were racing across the land faster than any animal on any trail. But even that was not fast enough. So next, like Daedalus, we fabricated wings and taught ourselves to fly.

As we discovered new ways to make our bodies travel faster, we also learned to send information at even more astonishing speeds. Early communication technologies like smoke signals and drums encoded simple messages in visible and audible forms, allowing people to transmit information across long distances nearly instantaneously. The invention of electricity allowed for yet more complex messages to be sent even farther. That shift began with the invention of the telegraph, which was followed by the telephone, the radio, the television, the fax machine, and eventually the computer network. Today, information constantly spirits past us, a ghostly chatter between billions of people and machines; our connections have sleekened so drastically and spread so far that they've effectively vanished from sight.

A trace, when followed, becomes a trail. Likewise a trail, when transformed by technology, becomes a road, a highway, a flight path; a copper cable, a radio wave, a digital network. With each innovation, we're able to get where we want to go faster and more directly—yet each new gain comes with a feeling of loss.

From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows. In the same vein, many people currently worry that digital technology is making us less
connected to the people and things in our immediate environment. It is easy to dismiss these responses as overreactions, the curmudgeonly groans of the progress-averse. Yet in all these cases, a faster connection palpably diminishes our ability to experience the richness of the physical world: A person texting with her friends or riding on a bullet train is connecting very quickly to her ends, but in doing so, she skips over the immensely complex terrain that lies between those two points. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, instead of being immersed in an endless continuum of landscapes, we increasingly experience the world as a network of “nodes and connectors”: homes and highways, airports and flight routes, websites and links.

The importance of place and context—those two words whose meanings twine in the word
environment
—necessarily wanes as we transition to a world of nodes and connectors. The fact that trails enable just this kind of reduction in complexity has always been one of their chief appeals. But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse. And so, beginning roughly with the advent of locomotives, new trails were built for the very purpose of reconnecting us back to (and, later, preserving) the environment. These trails webbed together, and lengthened, until one could walk from one end of the country to the other, remaining almost always within a wild landscape, where (in the memorable language of the 1964 Wilderness Act) “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

It can be hard to see exactly where the IAT—the great connector—­fits into the grand history of trails. Is it the continuation of a trend? A return to a prior mode? Something wholly novel? To answer this question, it helps to first ask: What desire is this trail fulfilling? As I traced the IAT from Maine to Newfoundland to Iceland to Morocco, I began to realize that the IAT seeks to resolve our confused feelings about scale and interconnection. The trail itself is a surreal project: standing on a mountaintop in Scotland, you somehow understand that this is the same mountain chain you once climbed, years earlier
and an ocean away, in Georgia. In an era when we are able to travel through the air with godlike nonchalance and send information to other continents at the speed of light, a truly global footpath confirms our belief in how connected, how small, the world has become, and yet it also reminds us how unfathomably—how
unwalkably
—huge the planet remains.

+

In the fall of 2012, I traveled back to the summit of Katahdin and began walking north toward the border. I was equipped with a set of instructions and a map I had printed out from the IAT website, which gave me turn-by-turn instructions to lead me through the concatenation of forest paths and roads that made up the trail. I knew it would take me roughly a week to reach the border, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me. When you set out to hike the AT, you carry with you some sense of what the storied Long Green Tunnel will entail. I bore no such preconceptions about the IAT. It was terra incognita
.

I tiptoed along the Knife's Edge, over Pamola Peak, and then down the eastern flank. From the base of the mountain, I trudged down a wet gravel path and skated along algal-slick boardwalks. The cold air dripped. I wore three layers (merino, synth puff, rain shell) and a winter beanie, and still I shivered. It was October, and the leaves were in full death-bloom. A small frog, spotted like a leopard, flopped out of my path on drugged legs.

The route turned onto an old overgrown carriage path and continued until it reached a gate that led to a wide logging road. On my left was a brown wooden sign indicating the “southern terminus” of the International Appalachian Trail, painted in the same white-lettered, hand-carved style of those on the AT. Below it was the IAT blaze: a white metal rectangle, about the size of a dollar bill, surrounded by a blue border. Printed onto the white background were the cruciform letters:

S I A

A

T

I was officially on the IAT; this was the first of hundreds of thousands of blazes that would one day mark the trail from here to Morocco.
II
At around twelve thousand miles, it was a project on a truly planetary scale: if a hole were dug from Hawaii to Botswana through the Earth's core, one would have to walk all the way to the end of that Hadean tunnel and halfway back in order to travel an equivalent distance. The length is so staggering, and the climates so punishing, that most people doubt any person will ever walk its full extent in one continuous trip. Anderson told me he was doubtful as well, but he invited people to try. After all, he pointed out, people once thought the Appalachian Trail was too long to thru-hike. In 1922 Walter Prichard Eaton, an early architect of the trail, predicted that “The Appalachian Trail would exist in its entirety chiefly for a symbol—that is, nobody, or practically nobody, would ever tramp more than a fraction of its length.” When Earl Shaffer completed the first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1948, the ATC initially greeted his announcement with skepticism. “But the fact is that he made the Appalachian Trail
work
,”
Anderson said. “You only have to have a few people walk from one end to the other to express the purpose of your trail.”

Back when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail, I had met a rusty-bearded fanatic named Obi who told me that once he had reached Katahdin, if all went according to plan, he would continue hiking an additional eighteen hundred miles on the IAT up through eastern Canada to the northern tip of Newfoundland. He had gotten the idea from a famous thru-hiker named Nimblewill Nomad, who, in 2001,
became the first person to hike from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of Newfoundland, covering some five thousand miles. I looked upon these fanatics with mingled reverence and suspicion, as I would a gourmand who had decided to top off an enormous steak dinner by slurping down three dozen oysters. (
Wasn't the Appalachian Trail long enough?
I thought.
Why
keep going?
) But out here, all alone, I caught a glimmer of the feeling these super-thru-hikers were chasing. It was the same feeling the early AT thru-hikers must have experienced: lonesome, uncertain, faintly electric. It felt like adventure.

Northern Maine, late fall: even the sunlight has a dark, ice-­whetted edge. The trail followed a wide logging road for five miles, which undulated through stands of Jupiter-toned second-growth forest. Over the next few days, the logging road turned into a vanishingly faint dirt trail, which then turned into a riverside tow-path, then a dirt road, and then—with the exception of a maddeningly straight stretch of bike path, a set of ski runs, and a surreal section in which, for a distance of eight miles, it
became
the US-Canadian border
III
—the trail ran along paved roads until it crossed into Canada.

Once it hopped the border, the IAT became stranger still, jumping from one Maritime island to another, brazenly flaunting the notion of contiguity. Farther north, in Newfoundland, the trail sometimes split into multiple routes, or it disappeared altogether, forcing hikers to navigate with a map and compass, such as in the Tuckamore-choked section I would hike on the west coast of Newfoundland. A trail is traditionally defined as a single, walkable line. But this new, slippery, sprawling, leviathanic thing—which swallowed roads, leaped seas, and vanished from sight—was quietly redefining the term.

I dislike walking on roads, so whenever I encountered concrete, I stopped and stuck out my thumb. Sometimes I had to wait for an hour or two, but a car would inevitably pull over and pick me up. Then we zoomed away down the long, straight farm roads, covering days of walking in an hour. I must confess: it felt like magic. But I did miss the views walking affords. Staring out through the windshield and the passenger-side window, I saw much of the Maine countryside in a series of freeze-frames and blurred pans, that weird wave-particle duality familiar to all car passengers. We passed maple syrup stores, potato farms, Amish men on bicycles, and old barns, hollowed and phantasmagorically warped, but still, somehow upright.

In the areas where the trail diverged from the road, I resumed walking. In the process of hopping in and out of cars, I was forced to pay new attention to the oddly cyborgic nature of travel in the industrialized world. On a vacation to a foreign country, a person might unthinkingly use a half-dozen different modes of transportation—we walk, we drive, we fly, we ride on trains or streetcars, we sail on ferries, and then we walk some more. On the IAT, I began to notice how many other machines quietly aided in my survival: not just the cars that carried me, but the heavy machinery that paved the roads and bike paths I walked on, the computers that printed out my map, and the factories that built my gear. I ate food cooked and dehydrated and packaged and rehydrated and recooked with the use of machines. At night I slept in strangers' homes (machine-built, machine-warmed, and filled with smaller machines), or in a wooden lean-to (whose materials had been trucked or choppered in), or, one night, directly beneath the spinning white blades of a wind farm.

The oddest part, on further reflection, is that all this technology seemed utterly normal, even
natural
, to me. This deep and often unconscious reliance on technology has inspired the design theorist and engineer Adrian Bejan to dub us the “human and machine species.”

Humans adapt to their environments. One of the ways we adapt
is by creating technology. Once an invention is widely adopted, it effectively becomes part of the landscape, another feature to which our lives adapt. We then create more technology to adapt to the existing technologies. A smartphone, for example, is adapted not just to human anatomy and the physical constraints of the earth, but also to a network of cellular towers, a constellation of satellites, a standardized system of electrical jacks, a wide variety of computers, and a telephone system stretching back to the middle of the nineteenth century, which was strung together with wires made from copper, a substance we have been manipulating for the past seven thousand years.

Our innovations pile up, one atop the other, each forming the foundation for the next, until an entirely new landscape, a
techscape
, emerges—like a city built on the ruins of past empires. Any person who tries to resist the adoption of a vital new technology begins to feel this transformation acutely; Luddites become, quite literally, maladapted to the modern world. For instance, I swore for years I would not buy a smartphone, because they seemed unnecessary and expensive. But then my friends started texting me videos or web links, which my cheap flip phone couldn't open; and the fact that I would need to look up addresses and directions before leaving the house became a handicap, as GPS made it easy for others to make plans on the spot. Finally, half to keep from falling out of touch, half to keep from getting lost, I broke down and bought a smartphone too.

In this techscape, new values also emerge—often made up of old words with new connotations:
automatic, digital, mobile, wireless, frictionless, smart—
and new technology adapts to those values. The current meaning of the word
wilderness
, one could argue, emerged directly from the techscape of industrialism, just as the current meaning of the word
network
emerged from the world of telecommunications. With the advent of industrial technology we began to see wilderness less as a landscape
devoid of
agriculture and more as a landscape
free
from
technology—and thus the wild went from being a wasteland to a refuge.