On Trails (38 page)

In the emerging technology of microfilm, Bush saw the potential for information to be radically condensed and rearranged, allowing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
to be “reduced to the volume of a matchbox.” (Before the advent of digital technology, Bush had no way of knowing that, thanks to microchips, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
would soon be shrunk to the size of a pinhead.) However, a desk full of a million tiny books would not on its own solve the problem of information overload; if anything, it would exacerbate it. To remedy this problem, Bush envisioned that the texts could be strung together
into “associative trails.” Largely, this task would fall to hardy souls “who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” It would be the job of these “trail blazers” to wade through the mass of information and connect them thematically, and then to share their trails, like guidebooks.

He gave the following example:

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

In this scenario, Bush imagined that the scholar might later have a conversation with a friend who mentions that he is interested in the ways certain people resist innovation. Remembering the case of the Turkish bow and the English archers who failed to adopt it, the scholar could summon his trail, copy it, and give it to his friend, “there to be linked into the more general trail.”

Bush's key insight was to realize that computers needed to evolve to fit the contours of the human brain. At the time, the prevailing
mode of organizing information (whether in a filing cabinet or a library) was rigidly categorical and hierarchical. For example, to find a copy of Borges's
Ficciones
,
one would begin by going to a library, traveling to the floor dedicated to literature, then to the section for Spanish-language literature, then to the row dedicated to authors whose names start with
B
, and so on. “Having found one item, [in order to find the next item] one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path,” Bush wrote. “The human mind does not work that way.” According to Bush, thoughts are not grouped into categories; they are connected via “trails of association.” By 1945 this was already a somewhat familiar notion, most famously elucidated in William James's
The
Principles of Psychology
, in which he introduced the concept of “stream of consciousness.” Bush believed that connecting the corpus of written texts in an associative manner would allow the human mind to make the most of what had always been writing's strength (and the brain's weakness): permanence of memory. “The personal machine,” he wrote, will deliver “a new form of inheritance, not merely of genes, but of intimate thought processes. The son will inherit from his father the trails his father followed as his thoughts matured
,
with his father's comments and criticisms along the way. The son will select those that are fruitful, exchange with his colleagues and further refine for the next generation.” Every step in the research process would be preserved: the stream of consciousness, he believed, could finally be frozen, extracted, and handed down over time.

Bush's essay was deeply influential on later generations of computer engineers, from Douglas Engelbart (an early visionary of personal computing) to Ted Nelson (the inventor of hypertext). The following decades saw the rise of two parallel but largely independent technologies: the invention of the personal computer, and the development of the Internet, which began by linking together various extant academic and military computer networks. The two paths fully converged with the invention of the World Wide Web and HyperText
Markup Language by Tim Berners-Lee. The pairing allowed people around the world to communicate and share information through a meta-network of personal computers, forming what Berners-Lee called “a single information space.” Text, that hidebound technology, tendriled out into hypertext: documents were strung together into trails through hyperlinks; the trails sprouted side trails, which could loop back to the start; and a textual network emerged. The biographer Walter Isaacson has described this historic breakthrough as Bush's memex “writ global.”

Like Bush, Berners-Lee also believed that texts should be malleable, so that readers could edit and improve texts as necessary. However, as the first successful web browsers, like Mosaic, began rolling out, Berners-Lee found, to his dismay, that they were composed of fixed columns of text surrounded by dazzling images, more like a magazine spread than a chalkboard—and, thus, more like a highway than a trail.

The Web has since sprawled, sending threads out across the globe, into each of our homes, our pockets, and almost inevitably, one day into our skulls. The current estimate of total web pages is almost fifty billion; if it were all bound into a single book, that tome would weigh over a billion pounds and would stand twice as tall as Mount Katahdin.

In recent years, people have begun to realize that the Web, which was designed as a tool to manage information overload, has ironically worsened it. A single trail reduces complexity and eases travel, but connect a thousand trails, and suddenly you have a maze that requires its own guide. Likewise, the Internet is a network of trails so vast it has become its own wilderness, “an uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost,” wrote Kevin Kelly. “Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle.”

In the beginning, there was chaos, blank fields. Out of them, meaning emerged: first one trail, then another. Then the trails branched and webbed together, until they reached a density and complexity that again resembled (but was not quite) chaos. And so the wheel turned over. Benton MacKaye put it succinctly: “Mankind,” he wrote, “has cleared the jungle and replaced it with a labyrinth.” In this maze, a higher order of path making emerges—written guides, signposts, maps—which are then linked together and require yet higher orders of exegetical path making: written guides to the maps, and then guides to the map-guides, guides to the map-guide guides, and so on. (At first glance this notion sounds somewhat absurd, but I was recently amused to run across a medical text entitled
Guide to the Guides: Evaluator's Resource Algorithm to the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment
,
Fifth Ed
.) On each successive level of path making, knowledge is accrued and the world becomes easier to navigate, but new paths must constantly be marked out to simplify the vast wilderness of older paths into something humans can manage.

The function of the IAT, I realized, was yet another of these paths: it layered a higher order of guidance over the existing transportation network (which was in turn layered upon the older footpath network). And yet, in its desire to visit every place and connect everyone, the IAT was in danger of sprawling into yet another network, yet another wilderness.

+

Last on the schedule that day in Reykjavik was printed my name, and beside it, the word
Morocco
. Rising to the podium, I tried to tamp down the audience's expectations as I loaded up the photo slideshow of the scouting trip I had taken to the trail's end. The committee members were expecting camels and deserts—Wylezol had said as much at least twice in the hours preceding—whereas my photos mostly
contained stony hillsides, olive orchards, old televisions, and flat red fields haunted by dogs.

Many months earlier, back in Portland, when I had asked Dick Anderson where the trail would end, he told me they had agreed on a town called Taroudant in the Anti-Atlas Mountains. He said the word
Taroudant
slowly, with a faint smile, as if it held some exotic magic. He told me a former Peace Corps volunteer had mapped out the route from Marrakech to there. However, when I wrote to the volunteer, he told me that Anderson was mistaken. The final stretch of trail had yet to be mapped. If I wanted to see the trail's end I had a choice to make: I could wait for someone else to map it out, and write about it while peering over her shoulder (in my usual, wraithlike way), or I could go there and map the thing myself.

I wrote to Anderson and told him to expect a mapped route to Taroudant by the end of the spring.

Initially, I imagined I would travel to Morocco and, map in hand, explore the desert wilderness between Marrakech and Taroudant. However, I soon scrapped that plan as fantasy. Between Marrakech and Taroudant lay not a wilderness, but a vast swath of hillside farms, pastures, and mountain hamlets. Since I spoke almost no French and absolutely no Berber, I would have been unable to converse with most of the people I met there. (Only fifteen percent of all Moroccans speak English, and even less in the remote mountains.) The topographic maps I had ordered of Taroudant, care of the Russian military, revealed a network of hundreds of spidery trails, marked with faint dotted lines, on which one could easily become lost. I knew I would need guidance through this network, so with Anderson's help I hired a local guide named Latifa Asselouf. She promised to arrange everything, including meals and lodging.

When I arrived at the Marrakech airport, a driver was waiting for me with a sign. In lieu of a hello, he had handed me his cell phone. It was Asselouf.

“Hello, Robert? This is Latifa. The driver will take you to my home now.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

She hung up.

In an attempt to be friendly, I tried to ask the driver his name.

“Je ne parle pas l'Anglais,”
he replied, apologetically.

“D'accord,”
I said. I asked him again, this time in my halting French.

He handed his phone to me. It was Latifa again.

“Hello, Robert? The driver, he does not speak English.”

“Okay, thanks.” I said.

He led me to a battered white Mercedes. As our car slipped loose of the pink city of Marrakech, I looked out the window and took note of things—a horse cart hauling bags of grain, a herd of goats parting fluidly around our car, two women riding on a motorbike with a child sandwiched between them—and then I took note of the fact that I was only taking note of things that seemed “Moroccan,” as opposed to the things our two countries had in common: the garish advertisements, the electric wires zigging up the valleys, the paved roads swarming with cars, the red-and-white cell towers standing like the skeletons of decommissioned spaceships.

As we entered the town of Amizmiz, the air grew cool. Asselouf was standing outside her front door, smiling broadly and wiping her hands on a dish towel. She had the body of a walker, thin and long-limbed. Unlike her light-skinned neighbors, her skin was deeply tanned—a mark of her family's Saharan ancestry. Her “crazy hair,” as she called it, was tied back with a violet headscarf.

She ushered me into her living room and set down a clay
tagine
filled with stewed lamb and prunes. A man wearing a red windbreaker and a small black watch cap walked in, sat down beside me, and shook my hand. He had a thin face, a prominent nose, and a small black mustache. His name, Asselouf informed me, was Mohamed Ait ­Hammou. He had been hired to serve as our pathfinder, while As
selouf would handle the logistics, accommodations, and my endless barrage of questions. He did not speak English, so, while Asselouf was busy in the kitchen, we ate in silence.

After lunch, we piled our things into a microbus and drove to a town about an hour up the road. As we rode, Asselouf pointed out the flora that grew on the terraced hillsides: groves of gray walnut trees and pink peach blossoms; gardens of mint, thyme, and tulips. The walls of the buildings were constructed out of flat stones, which had been piled like loaves of bread in a shop window, a snug jumble. From far off, the villages disappeared, camouflaged into the rocky hillsides, with the exception of the white mosques and perhaps a newer, concrete house painted Marrakech pink. The local men and boys mostly wore tan or brown
djellabas
, long robes with peaked hoods, which gave them the air of Franciscan monks.

These roads—unlike roads built in the United States and most of Europe—were mostly made by voluntary communal labor; villages came together to build and maintain them. A few days later, we would pass a group of eight smiling men who were constructing a crib wall to reinforce the road that connected their two villages. A ninth man crouched over a fire nearby, making tea.

At a certain point, the van stopped and Asselouf signaled for us to get out. We grabbed our backpacks from the roof and began walking down the road. It was now cold, and the sky was growing dim. We walked for about an hour. Then, as she did every night that week, Asselouf approached the nearest village and began asking around if any of the local residents would give us dinner and a place to sleep on their floor (for a reasonable fee). That night, we stayed in a small home overlooking a vast, vapor-capped valley. Before dinner, the men all sat together watching television with our legs under a single blanket in the living room.