On Trails (2 page)

These two lineages of outdoor writers were roughly divided between those who were deeply rooted to a piece of land and those who were proudly untethered. I preferred the drifters. I held no profound connection to my land, my ancestors, my culture, my community, my gender, or my race. I was raised without religion, and without hatred of religion. My family was diffuse: my parents, two Texans living in the frigid North, were already divorced by the time I was in the first grade; not long after, my two older sisters went away to college and never moved back. A vague restlessness seemed to run in our blood.

Nine months out of every year I drifted through the halls of one academic institution after another, changing costumes, learning new dialects, faking fluency. It was only during the summers, on a series of ever-lengthening sojourns in the wilderness, that I felt wholly natural. I worked my way up from the Appalachians to the mighty Rockies, then to the Beartooths, the Winds, the snowy behemoths of the Alaska Range, and, later, high-altitude peaks ranging from Mexico to Argentina. Up there, far from etiquette or ritual, I could walk unscrutinized, unbound.

For two summers in college I took a job back at Pine Island leading kids on short hikes through the Appalachians. On trips along the AT I would occasionally bump into hikers who were attempting to walk the trail's full length in a single, mammoth, months-long effort. These “thru-hikers” were easy to spot: They introduced themselves with odd “trail names,” ate ravenously, and walked with a light, lupine gait. I was intimidated by them, but also envious. They resembled the rock musicians of an idealized past—the same long hair, the same
wild beards, the same wasted physiques, the same esoteric argot, the same peripatetic lifestyle, the same faint, vain awareness of being, in a way, heroic.

I sometimes talked with these thru-hikers, plying them with chunks of cheese or handfuls of candy. I remember one old man who had hiked the whole trail in a Scottish kilt and sandals, and a young man who carried no tent, but a full feather pillow. A few of them proselytized zealously for one church or another, while others spoke of preparing for a looming ecological apocalypse. Many of the people I talked to were between jobs, between schools, or between marriages. I met soldiers returning from war and people recovering from a death in the family. Certain stock phrases were repeated. “I needed some time to clear my head,” they said, or “I knew this might be my last chance.” One summer during college, I told a young thru-­hiker that I hoped to make an attempt someday. “Drop out,” he told me flatly. “Do it now.”

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I did not drop out. I was too careful for that. In 2008 I moved to New York, where I worked a series of low-paying jobs. In my free time I planned my thru-hike. I read guidebooks and online message boards, drew up tentative itineraries. Less than a year later I was ready to embark.

Unlike many people, I had no clear impetus for going on a long hike, no inciting incident. I wasn't grieving a death or recovering from drug addiction. I wasn't fleeing anything. I had never been to war. I wasn't depressed. I was maybe only a little insane. My thru-hike was not an attempt to find myself, find peace, or find God.

Perhaps, as they say, I simply needed some time to clear my head; perhaps I knew this might be my last chance. Both were mostly true, as clichés often are. I also wanted to find out what it would be like to spend months on end in the wilderness, to live in a prolonged state of
freedom. But more than that, I think I wanted to answer a challenge that had loomed over me since childhood. When I was small and frail, hiking the whole trail had seemed a herculean task. As I grew, its impossibility became precisely its appeal.

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Over the years, I had picked up some useful tips from the thru-hikers I'd met. Above all, I knew that weight was the enemy of a successful thru-hike, so I retired my trusty old pack and invested in a new ultralight one. Then I traded in my bulky tent for a hammock, bought an airy goose-down sleeping bag, and exchanged my leather boots for a pair of trail running shoes. I pared my medkit down to a few anti-­diarrheal pills, some iodine swabs, a thumb-sized roll of duct tape, and a safety pin. I replaced my white gas stove with one made out of two aluminum Coke cans, which weighed practically nothing. When I crammed all of my gear into my new pack and lifted it for the first time, I was amazed and slightly terrified. It seemed too insubstantial to house, clothe, and feed a human for five months.

So I wouldn't be forced to live off an anemic diet of instant ramen and freeze-dried mashed potatoes, I began cooking heaping piles of nutritious slop (beans and brown rice, quinoa, couscous, whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce) and dehydrating them. I poured sparing amounts of olive oil and hot sauce into small plastic bottles. I filled plastic baggies with baking soda, Gold Bond, vitamins, and painkillers. I divided all of the supplies up into roughly five-day increments and packed them into fourteen cardboard boxes. Into each box, I also placed a chapbook of poetry or a heftier paperback novel that I had cut into slimmer volumes using a straight razor and packing tape.

I addressed these boxes to post offices along the trail—towns with names like Erwin, Hiawassee, Damascus, Caratunk, and (my
favorite) Bland—and left them with my roommate to mail on specified dates. I quit my job. I sublet my apartment. I sold or gave away everything I could spare. Then, on a cold day in March, I flew down to Georgia.

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On the summit of Springer Mountain, the trail's southern terminus, I was greeted by an old man who called himself Many Sleeps, a moniker he had reportedly earned while completing one of the slowest thru-hikes ever recorded. With his droopy eyes and long white beard, he looked like a nylon-clad Rip Van Winkle.

In his hand he held a clipboard. His job was to collect information from all the passing thru-hikers. He told me it had been a busy year: twelve thru-hikers had registered with him that day, and thirty-seven the day before. In total that spring, almost fifteen hundred people would set out from Springer aiming for Maine, though scarcely a quarter of them would make it.

There on the mountaintop, before starting my long-awaited hike, I paused to admire the land below: swells of frost-burned earth, fading from brown to gray to blue as they hazed out toward the horizon. The mountains dipped and heaved, jostled and collided. No towns or roads were in sight. It occurred to me that I would never be able to find my way to Maine without the trail. In this foreign, involuted terrain, I would have struggled to even make it to the next ridge. For the next five months, the trail would be my lifeline.

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On a trail, to walk is to follow. Like prostration or apprenticeship, trail walking both requires and instills a certain measure of humility. To keep my pack light, I had brought along no maps, no satellite assistance, only a thin guidebook and a cheap compass for emergencies.
The trail was my only real source of navigation. So I clung to it, like Theseus tracing Ariadne's unspooling ball of twine.

In my journal one night I wrote: “There are moments when you cannot help but feel that your life is being controlled by some not-­entirely-benevolent god. You skirt down a ridge only to climb it again; you climb a steep peak when there is an obvious route around it; you cross the same stream three times in the course of an hour, for no apparent reason, soaking your feet in the process. You do these things because someone, somewhere, decided that that's where the trail must go.”

It was a creepy feeling, knowing that my decisions were not my own. In the first few weeks I often thought back to an anecdote I'd once heard about E. O. Wilson, the famed entomologist. In the late 1950s, to entertain visitors, Wilson used to write his name on a piece of paper with a special chemical liquid. Afterward, a swarm of fire ants would emerge from their nest and dutifully line up to spell out each letter of his name, like members of a marching band.

Wilson's party trick was, in fact, the result of a major scientific breakthrough. For centuries, scientists had suspected that ants left invisible trails for one another, but Wilson was the first to pinpoint the source: a tiny, finger-shaped organ called the Dufour's gland. When he extracted the gland from the abdomen of a fire ant and smeared it across a plate of glass, other fire ants immediately swarmed to it. (“They tumbled over one another in their haste to follow the path I had blazed for them,” Wilson recalled.) He later synthesized this trail pheromone, a single gallon of which, he estimated, could summon one trillion fire ants.

In 1968 a group of researchers in Gulfport, Mississippi, put a new twist on Wilson's trick: They discovered that a certain species of termite will even follow a line drawn by a normal ballpoint pen, which contains glycol compounds that termites mistake for trail pheromones. (For some reason, termites prefer blue ink over black.) Ever
since, science teachers have amused their students by drawing blue spirals on sheets of paper, while termites line up and confusedly circle toward nowhere.

On my hike, when the trail veered hard to the east or west, I would often wonder whether I too wasn't being led in cruel circles. Seen in a certain light, trails represent a particularly grim form of determinism. “Man may turn which way he please, and undertake any thing whatsoever,” wrote Goethe, “he will always return to the path which nature has prescribed for him.” On the AT, this was certainly the case. Though I explored the surrounding woods and hitchhiked into towns, in the end I always came back to the trail. If uncertainty is the heart of adventure, I thought to myself, what kind of adventure was this?

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Northward I moved, through a gray southland spring. The trees were black scrags, the ground papered in old leaves. One morning in Tennessee, I awoke to find my hiking shoes bronzed in ice. In North Carolina, I hiked through knee-deep snow, then ankle-deep slush. The walking was hard, but then every few days, regardless of the terrain or the weather, I would experience the joy of slipping from the dark woods and ascending into the air and light.

In my second week on the trail I fell in with a tight little group of fellow thru-hikers. We happily traveled together for a few weeks. But upon reaching Virginia, I quickened my pace and lost them. Weeks or months later, whenever I slowed down or they sped up, I would bump into these friends again, as if by some miraculous coincidence. The miracle, of course, was the trail itself, which held us together in space like so many beads on a string.

Each of us adopted new trail names. Most people were given their names by fellow thru-hikers because of something they had said or done; my friend Snuggles, for example, had a habit of snuggling up
against other hikers in the lean-tos at night to keep herself warm. Others picked names in an attempt to shape new, aspirational identities for themselves. A tense silver-haired woman renamed herself Serenity, while a timid young man called himself Joe Kickass; sure enough, over time, she seemed to grow incrementally calmer, and he more audacious.

A group of jolly older women christened me Spaceman, in reference to the astral appearance of my shiny, ultralight hiking gear. The name clicked. In the trail registers—notebooks located at regular intervals along the trail, meant for recordkeeping and note sharing—I began drawing a series of comic strips. The protagonist was a spaceman who had come down to Earth and somehow found himself navigating the strange customs, odd characters, and pseudo-wildernesses of the Appalachian Trail.

Once a week or so, a group of us thru-hikers would hitchhike into town together, find a cheap motel (sometimes piling six or eight people into a single room), and spend the day showering, washing our filthy clothes, drinking beer, eating impossible quantities of greasy food, and watching bad TV—glutting ourselves, like barbarians, on the meretricious pleasures of civilization. By the next morning we would be eager to get back on the trail, where we could sweat out the gunk and savor the clean air.

I had expected the trail to be a refuge for loners like me; the sense of community that formed among us scattered thru-hikers took me by surprise, and then grew to be one of the hike's nectarine joys. We were bonded by common experience. Each of us knew how it felt to walk for weeks through hail and snow and rain. We starved; we gorged. We drank from waterfalls. In the Grayson Highlands, wild ponies licked the sweat from our legs. In the Smokies, black bears haunted our sleep. We had each faced down the same Cerberus of loneliness, boredom, and self-doubt, and we had learned that the only solution was to out-walk it.

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As I got to know my fellow thru-hikers—a motley pack of freedom seekers and nature worshipers and outright kooks—it struck me as odd that all of us had willingly confined ourselves to a single path. Most of us saw this hike as an interlude of wild freedom before we reentered the ever-tightening hedge maze of adult life. But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what a trail offers. Quite the opposite—a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic.

To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line. The ancient prophets and sages—most of whom lived in an era when footpaths provided the primary mode of transport—understood this fact intimately, which is why the foundational texts of nearly every major religion invoke the metaphor of the path. Zoroaster spoke often of the “paths” of enhancement, of enablement, and of enlightenment. The ancient Hindus too prescribed three
margas
, or paths, to attain spiritual liberation. Siddh
ā
rtha Gautama preached the
āry
ās
t
ān
gamārga
, or the Noble Eightfold Path. The Tao literally means “the path.” In Islam, the teachings of Muhammad are called the
sunnah
(again, “the path”). The Bible, too, is crisscrossed with trails: “Ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it, and you shall find rest for your souls,” commanded the Lord to the idolaters. (Responded the idolaters: “We will not walk therein.”)