On Trails (36 page)

Much of our modern conception of wilderness was formulated in direct opposition to the technology of mechanical travel: William Wordsworth, Britain's foremost nature poet, preceded the modern environmental movement by a century when he vociferously opposed the expansion of a proposed train line into the Lake District of Northern England. In the United States, both Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall defined wilderness as an area (in Marshall's words) that “possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means.” Benton MacKaye agreed; much of his later life was dedicated to fighting the incursion of “skyline highways” into the Appalachians. Together, these three men, along with a handful of others, founded the Wilderness Society.

In large part, the continued interest in hiking seems to stem from a desire to cut through
the techscape to get to some
natural
substratum: to borrow MacKaye's phrase, to see the “primeval influence” beneath the “machine influence
.
”
But ironically, the act of hiking is also dependent on technology. Many of the earliest hikers relied on trains and automobiles to reach the mountains. Today, some forms of technology (like cell phones or ATVs) are considered obnoxious, while others (like water purifiers, camp stoves, and GPS locators) are excused. In either case, technology inexorably trickles into the wild, allowing hikers to reach new lands, travel in new ways, think in new terms, and optimize to new values.

Wilderness looks different in the neon light of technology. In the traditional framework of wilderness preservation, a techscape is merely a despoiled wilderness landscape. But when viewed through the lens of technology, the wilderness can be seen as nothing more than an ultra-minimalist techscape designed to provide an escape from other, more baroque techscapes. Readers raised on the wild gospels of John Muir and Edward Abbey will likely cringe at this definition—as, indeed, I once did. Such is our aversion to mixing technology and
wilderness, even in theory. But while walking the IAT, I came to appreciate the matter with a bit more nuance. While most trails try to hide their fraught relationship with technology—by banning motorized transport, avoiding roads, disguising their own construction, and in all other ways, aping primordial nature as best as possible—the IAT bears it unabashedly, like a smiling mouth full of gold teeth.

+

Following the IAT north, I flew to Newfoundland and hitched more rides. For most of its length, the Newfoundland section follows a highway up the island's west coast called Route 430, which an enterprising local tourism association had dubbed the “Viking Trail.” Beginning in Deer Lake, I hitched my way from small town to small town, stopping off here and there for scenic hikes. (This combination of long drives and short hikes is precisely how the trail's architects had envisioned most people using it. Thru-hikers were manifestly not their primary concern.) Eventually, I made my way to the trail's northernmost point, a place called Crow Head. There, I walked along a gravel footpath for less than three miles before I reached a bluff overlooking a wide expanse of ocean dolloped with icebergs. I found no sign marking the trail's end. Or rather, there
was
a sign, but, as I would later learn, the sea winds had scoured it blank. I hung around on that bluff for a long time, trying to imagine how it would have felt to stand there, triumphant, after walking all the way from Georgia.

I felt no sense of triumph, not even secondhand. Instead, what I felt was something like guilt or loss. By having hitchhiked there, I had cheated myself of the slow engagement with the local landscape that thru-hiking provides. Hitching was too easy, too quick.

There was one upside to hitching, however: it was a wonderful way to get to know the local people. Snug in the confines of the car, staring ahead at the road, conversation naturally flows between drivers and passengers. In an amazingly short span of time, awkwardness, suspi
cion, and fears of impending murder give way to a form of intimacy resembling that of a second date. In Newfoundland, I caught rides with fishermen, miners, carpenters, and, once, a trucker hauling a load of recyclables whose eighteen-wheeler had a pair of red-stained moose antlers bolted to the grille. (He told me that on average he inadvertently ran over about twenty moose a year.) The drivers were exceptionally generous. They were constantly offering me beer and drugs—a welcome inversion of the traditional ass-gas-or-grass economics of hitchhiking. In return, all they wanted was someone to talk to.

At some point in our conversations, I managed to ask every one of these drivers if they had heard about the IAT, the trail they were driving on at that very moment, which would one day stretch all the way to Morocco. None had ever heard of it. A few of the drivers said they had noticed gaunt men and women carrying backpacks and “ski poles” along the side of the highway, though none knew where, or why, they were walking. On these long stretches of the IAT, drivers and thru-hikers shared the same route, but they were in two distinct landscapes—the land of the slow, and the land of the fast. It is strange, then, but also strangely appropriate, that Dick Anderson should have first dreamed up the IAT while driving along the highway. As I would later learn, hiking trails and highways, like the snakes on a caduceus, have always been both opposed and curiously entwined.

+

Most people would be surprised to learn that the American interstate highway system, as it currently exists, was first envisioned by the AT's founder, Benton MacKaye. In 1931, MacKaye (along with his friend, the forester Lewis Mumford) proposed the notion of what he called the “townless highway” to remedy the problem of high-speed traffic and congestion passing through downtown streets. The heart of the problem, as MacKaye saw it, was that the road network had evolved from ancient footpaths, which grew into bridle paths and
wagon roads. Motorcars were a wholly different technology, with different abilities and limitations, and so deserved a fresh system suited specifically to them. He proposed that cars be given their own dedicated spaces in which they could reach maximum speed, just as trains had been.

Thanks in large part to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, major highways now regularly skirt cities, and many are bordered not by rows of tacky shops (what MacKaye called “motor slums”) but by strips of forest. Cars got faster, towns got quieter, and the circuitry of civilization reorganized itself around a new mode of transport. Quicker than a horse, more flexible than a railcar, the highway-bound automobile was ideally suited to a sprawling, mobile, individualistic nation like postwar America. Now, despite a growing awareness of the automobile's many downsides—namely its inefficiency, pollution, and tendency to kill people—it remains our de facto mode of transportation, in part because everything else in the American landscape has hardened around it.

Though the modern interstate is a recent invention, the history of the highway stretches back thousands of years. When the earliest footpaths were widened into roads, the next logical step was to make those roads faster. Often this involved artificially hardening the road's surface and raising it above the surrounding land so it could shed water (hence the name
high
way). Unlike trails, highways required a massive expenditure of labor to build, so they were only built when rulers were able to marshal the necessary labor force (usually made up of slaves and soldiers). As a result, the earliest highways served as the tentacles of grand empires. Through them principally flowed three things: royal information, royal armies, and royal personages. In imperial China, wide highways (
chi dao
) of finely tamped earth, lined with shady evergreens and paved with flat stones, were built with ruts conforming exactly to the axle length of the emperor's carts and carriages; on each of these three-lane
highways, the center lane was reserved for the exclusive use of the imperial family. Along the Roman
via publicae
were installed milestones, which regularly reminded one of the distance from—and thus, the reach of—imperial Rome. When the Assyrians conquered a new region, they built new roads to more quickly transport military dispatches and allow troops to quash local revolts. The Maya did the same. Incoming Inca emperors would sometimes command their conscripted laborers to build new paved roads
even if passable stretches of road
already
existed, simply to signify their control of that land.

In colonial America, the evolution of the road system mirrored that of the nation. At first, new European settlements were relatively ungoverned, and paths were rough. Over time, when settlements became sufficiently populous, the government extended its reach, offering legal protection while extracting taxes. The tax system was designed to create more roads: by the 1740s in North Carolina, every taxable male was expected to perform as many as twelve days of roadwork each year, though wealthy people avoided this obligation by paying others to serve in their stead. Unpaid taxes could be recompensed by doing yet more roadwork.

The road network had to balance a need for expediency with a need to connect population centers, so it would often deviate from the path of least resistance in order to accommodate a large town or city. Geographers call this phenomenon “population gravity.” However, a more apt term might be “capital gravity,” in the sense that the roads, built with tax dollars, bent to service the largest sources of funding. As a general rule, in the colonial era, every publicly maintained road contained at least one large house alongside it, because that household had sufficient influence to sway the government into building a road there. In later years, this rule would hold true, but instead of big houses, the new roads led to big corporate interests, like Alaska's Dalton Highway, which was built by the oil companies in just five months
in 1974, with the help of government engineers and funding, to reach the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and service the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

“Where roads go tells you where the power is at any given time,” Tom Magnuson, an expert in the history of the colonial road network, once told me. We were driving around Hillsborough, North Carolina, and he was pointing out the spectral remnants of colonial roads in the nearby woods. The reason we could still locate bygone roads like these, Magnuson explained, was somewhat unintuitive: there are fewer official roads today than there were a hundred years ago. “It's a result of the increased weight of our carriage,” he explained. “We're carrying heavier cargo, so the road surface has to be better, more expensive. The more expensive the road, the fewer roads you build.” For example, he said, today truckers all take a single route from Raleigh to Atlanta: Interstate 85. It would be slow and costly to go any other way. However, back in 1950, there were about twelve different routes that trucks regularly used. Fifty years earlier, there were probably double that amount.

As they are woven into the fabric of civilization, highways effectively become part of the landscape, which people must then adapt to. Businesses and, in some cases, entire towns (once called “pike towns”) spring up to service the highways' passengers. Magnuson had found thirteen hamlets in North Carolina alone that had disappeared after they were bypassed by highways. Other towns, like Timberlake, had migrated to be closer to a major thoroughfare, leaving behind the husks of abandoned neighborhoods. The same phenomenon takes place whenever a fixed structure becomes an essential part of peoples' lives: even if it is initially built to serve us, we end up molding our behavior around it.

From a walker's perspective, the brutal nature of modern highways stems from the ways they have adapted to the technology of the automobile. Because cars have trouble turning at high speeds, highways must seek the straightest line they can, even if that means blasting a tunnel through a mountainside. Because driving fast is much more dangerous than walking, highways inevitably require reg
ulations and penalties—construction codes, speed limits, and, those most dreaded of all creatures, traffic cops. And because a speeding car will kill just about any living thing it runs into, highways marginalize and imperil any human being or animal walking along them.

In this way, highways have created a wholly new, highly technological landscape of movement. Optimized to the “human and machine species,” this landscape is maladapted to the naked human body, even though it is the full expression of a deeply human desire—to go farther, faster; to connect in heretofore impossible ways.

The decision to route a hiking path over a highway might seem a deeply counterintuitive one. It is not, however, uncommon. Before automobiles pushed hikers into the hills, walkers and wheeled vehicles shared the roads; in fact, road walking was a popular American pastime in the late nineteenth century. The public's lingering fondness for the concept of road walking would prove crucial to the creation of the AT, which just like the IAT today, originally routed much of the trail over (dirt) roads. This tactic had a clear rationale: in the race for federal funding, the trick to building a long trail is to first create a walkable route and attract attention. Then, once the trail is well known and funding begins pouring in, one can worry about shifting it off roads and into wilder lands, mile by mile. “For example in Maine, the Appalachian Trail once made extensive use of logging roads,” Dave Startzell, the former director of the ATC, told me. “Over time we were able to relocate a lot of those sections. But you're talking about a program that spanned more than thirty years, cost more than two hundred million dollars, and involved acquiring over three thousand parcels of land.”

There is a catch-22 inherent to this process, though. Trails need money to relocate away from roads. In order to raise money they need to attract hikers (and media coverage) to demonstrate that the trail is desired by the public. However
,
most hikers dislike walking on roads. A similar logical bind commonly arises with the creation and adoption of any new technology: With highways, for instance,
if everyone in a given region were to pitch in (with their money or their labor), a new highway could be built very quickly; but it is very hard to prove that the highway is necessary or useful until it has been completed and people are already using it. In this regard, the hikers who had committed themselves to hiking the IAT now, when it is ugly and hard, were committing something akin to an act of faith. They were walking the trail into existence.