Robert Moor, describes one such Trail Walk, he had undertaken, with a lot of literary allusions, when he left home in Spring 2009, looking for a grand adventure and had spent five months staring at mud!
In his novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac refers to this kind of walking as “the meditation of the trail.”
Japhy Ryder, a character modeled after the Zen poet Gary Snyder, advises his friend to “walk along looking at the trail at your feet and look at it intently” (with Talmudic intensity, as he puts it!).
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. Siddhārtha Gautama preached the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Tao literally means “the path.”
The Hebrew word for Jewish law, halakhah, means “the walking”;
the Arabic word for Islamic law, shariah, translates to “the path to the watering hole.””
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!
The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti stands out in this regard. “Truth has no path,” he wrote.
Emerson believed that the entire Boston roads were laid out by cows’ trails.
“We say the cows laid out Boston,” he had written, in reference to the belief that the city’s crooked grid was the result of paving old cow paths.
More than a hundred years later, a study from the University of Oregon has lent credence to Emerson’s claim: forty cattle were pitted against a sophisticated computer program and tasked to find the most efficient path across a field.
In the end, the cows outperformed the computer by more than ten percent!
Before colonization, many North American tribes followed deer and bison trails, which found the lowest passes across mountain ranges and the shallowest fords across rivers.
Elephants, too, are thought to have cleared the most expedient roads through many parts of India and Africa.
Nonhuman animals achieve this efficient design not through superhuman intelligence, but through sheer persistence.
They continually search for better routes, and once one is found, they adopt it. In this manner, trail networks of incredible efficiency can arise simply, organically, iteratively, without any forethought necessary.
Paths, in their very structure, foster this way of thinking.
They blear the divide between wilderness and civilization, leaders and followers, self and other, old and new, natural and artificial.
It is fitting that in Mahayana Buddhism, the image of the Middle Path —and not some other metaphor—is used as a symbol of dissolving all dualities.
The only binary that ultimately matters to a trail is the one between use and disuse—the continual, communal process of making sense, and the slow entropic process by which it is unmade.
On August 15, almost five months to the day after I had started out from Springer Mountain, I reached the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine.
And yet, when I moved back to New York City, I found that I continued to look at the world with the eyes of a thru-hiker. After almost half a year spent in mountainous wilderness, the city seemed at once a marvel and a monstrosity. It was hard to imagine a space more thoroughly transformed by human hands.
Reading omnivorously, I discovered trails running thick through works of literature, history, ecology, biology, psychology, and philosophy. Then I put the books down and walked some more, seeking out fellow travelers—trail-walkers and trail-builders, hunters and herders, entomologists and ichnologists, geologists and geographers, historians and systems theorists—in the hopes of gleaning some common truths from their diverse fields of expertise.
Trails can be found in virtually every part of this vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours.
Throughout the history of life on Earth, we have created pathways to guide our journeys, transmit messages, refine complexity, and preserve wisdom.
At the same time, trails have shaped our bodies, sculpted our landscapes, and transformed our cultures. In the maze of the modern world, the wisdom of trails is as essential as ever, and with the growth of ever-more labyrinthine technological networks, it will only become more so.
To deftly navigate this world, we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us, observes Moor.
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