On Trails (40 page)

My flight home was scheduled for the following day. While I had done enough legwork to give the IAT board members a sense of what the trail might look like, I hadn't done nearly enough to recommend a route. Asselouf and I talked through our options, and we agreed that she would have to complete that task on her own. Which, in retrospect, was how it should have always been. These were her lands to map, her story to tell.

Weeks later, she wrote to inform me that she had returned to the High Atlas above Taroudant, where she passed through forests of oak trees, slept in goat huts, and eventually climbed to the lofty mountain hamlet of Imoulas, from which one could reach the towering twin peaks of Jbel Tinergwet and Jbel Awlim. Strictly speaking, neither bears Appalachian geology, but photos reveal that both are eerily reminiscent of Katahdin—which would in some odd way make for an even more fitting conclusion to this long, strange, puzzling epic of a trail.

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Back home, I found myself wondering about the ultimate endpoint of the IAT. The last time I checked, the trail committee was still in the process of setting up a local chapter of the trail in Morocco and consulting with guides, including Asselouf, to decide on a terminus.

If history is any indication, whichever mountain the Moroccan chapter chooses will likely prove an unstable endpoint—more of an ellipsis than a full stop. The impetus of a long trail is to grow ever longer. The architects of the AT once shifted its terminus from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer Mountain, and then from Mount Washington to Katahdin. Then Dick Anderson extended the trail from Katahdin up through Canada, and then again, over the Atlantic and down to
Morocco. But the world's longest trail could feasibly grow even longer. Technically, the Appalachian range continues south, far beyond Taroudant, into the disputed nation of Western Sahara. Likewise, on the other end of the trail, remnants of the Appalachian range technically continue beyond Georgia, through Alabama, all the way to the Wichita Mountains of Missouri and the Ouachita Mountains of Oklahoma. Delegations from both states had been lobbying the IAT for an extension. “It would be a hell of a walk,” Walter Anderson, the geologist, told me, “but their scientific rationale is perfectly legitimate.”

Curious as to how far the trail could ultimately stretch, I called up a few geologists. One told me that his research suggests there is a pocket of Appalachian rocks in southern Mexico, which was marooned by the opening of the gulf as the continents drifted. Another told me she hadn't heard about the Mexican Appalachians, but she had heard there might be Appalachian remnants in Costa Rica. Yet another geologist could not vouch for the Mexico and Costa Rica theories, but had reason to believe there might be traces of the Appalachians as far south as Argentina.

When I next talked with Dick Anderson, I mentioned what these geologists had told me. I half expected him to grow defensive, but he seemed to find the notion delightful. “The way this project has worked is that it's expanded as people wanted to expand it. We don't have any big campaign to expand it,” he said. “But we're willing to go wherever that original principle leads us.”

Before my hike through the Atlas Mountains, that original principle sounded noble and ambitious: to trace the remains of an ancient, scattered mountain range; to grapple with the immensity of geologic time; to blur political boundaries; and to connect distant people and places. But when I arrived in Morocco it had suddenly begun to seem wildly idealistic. Unlike in America, the Moroccan leg of the trail would not pass through empty parklands; much of the trail's length would be inhabited. I wondered what would happen when
thru-­hikers began arriving from Georgia. Would the local people generously welcome them, as they had me, or would they grow irritated by the steady trickle of camera-wielding strangers? And what about the hikers? Would they have respect for the local people, or would they regard them—as hikers so often have throughout history—as pests befouling an otherwise pristine landscape?

I had begun to doubt whether mere physical connection—mere trails, mere highways, mere fiber optics—could bridge meaningful divides between people. In the era of the jet and the Internet, the world is in many ways more connected than it has ever been. But there is another meaning of connection that our networks don't capture, what we refer to when we say that we “have a connection with someone.” The philosopher Max Scheler has called this intimate quality
fellow feeling—
a sense of deep, mutual understanding. He argued that this type of connection requires us to recognize that the minds of other people have “a reality equal to our own.” This recognition in turn allows us to extend beyond the confines of our individual minds to more bonded, collective ways of thinking. “It is precisely in the act of fellow feeling,” Scheler wrote, “that self-love, self-centered choice, solipsism, and egoism are first wholly overcome.”

The problem facing the IAT's planners was that this kind of connection—­bound up in the slow-shifting and still largely mysterious landscape of the human brain—cannot be accelerated at the same rapid rate as other forms of connection. We can travel at the speed of sound and transmit information at the speed of light, but deep human connection still cannot move faster than the (comparatively, lichenous) rate at which trust can grow.

This is the unexpected disconnect that a vastly interconnected landscape ends up creating. Connection without fellow feeling invariably leads to conflict; when two cultures are abruptly put in contact, the differences between the two groups often jump out in sharper relief than the similarities. For example, when Europeans first crossed
the ocean and encountered Native Americans they became fixated on their differing religious and cultural values and overlooked their commonalities. The result was centuries of warfare, followed by an exploitative power imbalance that continues to this day. This same dynamic replayed itself countless times throughout the history of imperialism.

In recent decades, with the rise of globalization and mass communication, though the cultural differences between nations have greatly lessened, this sense of contrast has only grown more visible. Because far-off places now
feel
so close, and because it takes less work to make contact, we assume that the people elsewhere will share our way of seeing the world. When they
don't
, we often conclude that they are foolish or bad or irremediably strange. If we can be in direct contact with someone and still feel so distant, one starts to wonder, how can that distance ever be bridged?

On my hike through the Atlas, I had mulled over this question many times in regard to our pathfinder Hammou. I spent a week with him; we walked together, ate together, and slept side by side on a wooden pallet together. I often tried to converse with him, with Asselouf acting as our translator. But at the end of the trip I still felt no sense of fellowship with him. His approach to many aspects of his life—his derisive attitude toward Asselouf, his penchant for checking his text messages rather than admiring the mountains, his near-­comical affinity for shortcuts—grated against my own.

On top of everything else, Hammou and I differed radically in our regard for the landscape. I had often felt that Hammou saw the Atlas Mountains as nothing more than impediments to our progress, and that he, like the New England farmers of yore, would gladly flatten them if he could. This kind of thinking in the United States had ultimately led to a deeply destructive mind-set, the most obvious manifestation of which was a string of notorious Appalachian mining operations involving the literal removal of mountaintops. But I had overlooked the possibility that Hammou, who had grown up among
these mountains, might have a connection to them that was subtler but vastly more intimate than what I felt for my beloved Appalachians.

I came to this realization as the three of us sat in our shared hotel room in Taroudant that final night of our trip, trying to reconstruct our journey on the map. Asselouf turned to Hammou for help at one point, and I watched him recite the names of each town, mountain, and landmark we had passed that week, entirely from memory, with a faint, fond smile on his lips:

. . . Taddaret,

Akhferga,

Wawzrek,

Al-Khoms,

Toug-El-Hir,

Tazlida,

Tnin-Tgouga,

Tamsoult,

Tagmout,

Imamarn,

Tazoudout,

Talakjout,

Larba,

Tizi-N-Al Cadi . . .

At the time, I had known too little about where Hammou had come from—and too little about where
I
had come from—to fully grasp the nature of our disagreement. Wild landscapes inspire awe in Euro-Americans—the descendants of ruthless conquerors, raised on a continent rich with natural resources—because for generations we have used our wealth and technology to insulate ourselves from the land's harshest elements. The Berbers, meanwhile, having avoided the worst ravages of industrialism but having suffered the inequities
of colonial rule, never rebounded into a romantic love of wild nature. “They don't see it as a recreational area,” I was told by Michael Peyron, a visiting professor at Al Akhawayn University and an expert in Berber poetry. “They see it as a place where they live, they see it as a challenge, and now, of course, they see it as a place of earning money.” Peyron added that many Berbers also visit mountaintops to make sacrificial offerings or to visit the tombs of Muslim saints. I recalled that Hammou had mentioned that when he was feeling especially distraught, he would climb a high peak so that the immensity of Allah's creation would help put his problems in perspective. There are many ways to love a landscape.

What Hammou and I were ultimately lacking, it seems, was not sufficient contact, but sufficient context. The rifts between two people can easily appear unbridgeable at first, like the void between two peaks. But when we peer deeper into the chasm—down through the complex strata of culture, technology, and happenstance—we often find a shared point from which one could start scaling either summit. As the old judge had said, “Long ago, we all came from the same place.” From these common origins, humans have branched out across the planet, adapting in multifarious ways to the land and to one another, diverging and converging, disconnecting and reconnecting, growing foreign and getting reacquainted.

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When I think back on that trip now, years later, there is a moment that stands out from the others. It was our last day, during the long march across the Souss valley toward Taroudant. We were following a wide dirt trail that ran through sparsely planted groves of fruit trees. I was walking behind Hammou, and Asselouf was walking behind me. I was lost in some dark thicket of my own thoughts, when Asselouf called out in surprise. Hammou and I stopped and turned around. She called out again, pointing off into the scraggly orchard. Our eyes
followed her index finger to discover what the two of us had blindly walked past: a goat, perched impossibly in the upper branches of an Argan tree, some fifteen feet in the air, straining its lips toward the highest branch to reach a cluster of olive-shaped fruit.

Asselouf told me that goats all throughout the region had learned to climb these trees. Once the goats had digested the Argan fruit, farmers collected the seeds from their droppings, which they then pressed to extract the oil. They sold this oil for astronomical prices to foreign countries, where it was rumored to reverse the skin's natural aging process.

The goat nibbled at the hard green fruit. As we stood there gazing up at it, a slow joy welled in me. There was something familiar about the taut tendons of its neck, the nervous adjustments of its little hooves on the narrow branches. I suddenly felt a deep kinship with it—and with all the rest of us restless creatures, forever striving toward something just beyond our grasp.

I will never know precisely what Asselouf and Hammou were feeling at that moment, but when I looked over at them, I noticed they were smiling too. Asselouf took a photo of the goat in the tree. She promised to send me a copy. Then we shouldered our packs, turned our eyes back to the trail ahead, and began, once again, to walk.

EPILOGUE

W
E MOVE
through this world on paths laid down long before we are born. From our first breath, there is a vast array of structures already in place—“spiritual paths,” “career paths,” “philosophical paths,” “artistic paths,” “paths to wellness,” “paths to virtue”—which our family, society, and species have provided for us. In all these cases, the word
path
is not applied haphazardly. Just like physical paths, these abstract paths both guide and constrain our actions—they lead us along a sequence of steps, progressing toward our desired ends. Without these paths, each of us would be forced to thrash our way through the wilderness of life, scrabbling for survival, repeating the same basic mistakes, and reinventing the same solutions.