On Trails (29 page)

After some searching, we found the trail, which led us around an athletic field and then drew us up into the darkened forest. Starting out, I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up with his pace. I was feeling out of shape, my feet city-soft, while Doyi had been averaging twenty miles a day, an impressive pace, especially for a man his age.

However, even before the first mile had passed, it became clear that the combination of prolonged malnutrition and overexertion had sapped Doyi of his former strength; he panted on the uphills and
cringed on the downhills, favoring his right knee. Walking behind him, I stared at his calves, which were hairless and lean. His body was visibly consuming itself. At one point, while climbing a moderately steep rise, he turned back to look at me and asked, between huffs, “How come you're not breathing hard?”

After an hour, a group of other thru-hikers caught up and trotted past us with the light gait of spooked deer. Each of them was white and young, with a long brown beard, thin legs, and a tidy backpack protected by a raincover: the prototypical American thru-hiker. Among their ranks, Doyi stood out; he had darker skin, had no beard, was older by decades, and was carrying a great deal more stuff.

The clouds soon ceased raining on the canopy above, but that did not stop the canopy from raining on us. It grew quiet and warm. The ground, carpeted with brown leaves and orange pine needles, released a comforting aroma. Above, thrushes sang. A barred owl said, “oo—oo—oo-ooo.”

Beside the trail ran an old gray stone fence and above it lurked a pair of obese white pines, their branches weirdly splayed. Both the fence and the trees were easily overlooked, but they were clues pointing to a former era of near-total deforestation. While clearing the forest, New England farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often spared a handful of large trees on the periphery of their property to provide shade for their livestock. As lone survivors, the spared trees luxuriated in sunlight and spread their crowns broadly. Some, like these two, were then infested with weevils, which deformed their limbs. (Trees like these were nicknamed ‘wolf trees,' apparently because they greedily consumed sunlight that might benefit younger trees, as wolves devour livestock.)

Stone fences, too, were a sign that this forest had once been farmland. Large flat stones, turned up by the plow, provided a cheap, plentiful, and long-lasting building material. However, since they were painstaking to construct, stone fences only gained widespread
popularity in the nineteenth century, when most of the durable hardwoods had already become prohibitively expensive. In New Hampshire—for a long time the most heavily lumbered state in the country—miles of stone fences rose as the trees fell.

Beginning in the 1920s, though, with the decline of small-scale farms and the continued rise of industrialism (and, subsequently, conservationism), much of the forest began to grow back; today, ninety percent of New Hampshire is again covered by trees. Those forests remain haunted by stone fences and wolf trees, reminders of an era when wilderness almost vanished from the region altogether.

Some hikers feel that these remnants of agriculture diminish our experience of the wild; they would prefer to walk through an old-growth forest, the older the better. But while little can surpass the grandeur and ecological complexity of a primordial forest, there is also something undeniably exhilarating about the sight of a sapling sending its shoots through the cracks in an old stone fence. It offers proof that a wild space can claw its way back against the seemingly inevitable flow of agro-industrial progress. “The creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible,” declared Aldo Leopold in 1949. But the forests of New England prove this is not always so. Walking through them—wolf trees, walls, and all—one starts to realize that the only thing more beautiful than an ancient wilderness is a new one.

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To understand how the Appalachian Trail came to exist, it is impor-­tant to know the origin of that stone fence and those deformed trees. Somewhat paradoxically, clearing fields was the first step to preserving forests. This strange transformation—from struggling to conquer the wilderness to fighting to preserve it—began before European settlers even arrived in North America.

Europeans colonized the Americas for three interlocking rea
sons: to send over large numbers of people, thus easing the pressures of their own overcrowded and polluted homelands; to extract and ship home previously unimagined amounts of wealth; and to tame a land they perceived as wild, wicked, and wasteful. One of their chief justifications for seizing ever-larger tracts of Native land was, somewhat ironically, that the indigenous population had failed to “improve” the land through agriculture, thereby forfeiting their rights to ownership—an argument that conveniently overlooked the fact that Native Americans had been meticulously optimizing the land to their needs for millennia.

Archaeological research suggests that the first human inhabitants of North America, including the ancestors of the Cherokee, arrived by foot, likely crossing a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait more than twenty thousand years ago. They traveled south through cool grasslands (skirting a massive glacial ice sheet, which covered most of modern-day Canada), moving from encampment to encampment, hunting gargantuan, slow-moving herbivores—mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, bear-sized beavers—with relative ease. As they moved, they learned the landscape, memorizing its plants and animals, familiarizing themselves with its weather (not just the seasonal month-to-month cycles, but also year-to-year and decade-to-decade). They likely made some irreversible changes—some archaeological evidence suggests that the Paleo-Indians were partly responsible for the extinction of many species of megafauna—but they eventually found a lifestyle that fit the contours of the land, a mixture of hunting, gathering, and (increasingly, as they moved south) farming.

The tribes of the Northeast kept their population density low and roamed widely. Their lands were open, unfenced. They burned off the forest underbrush to provide habitat to deer, elk, and bison. They planted their corn with beans and squash to shade the soil and replenish its nutrients. Land and culture intermeshed; as opposed to following a calendar filled with the names of dead emperors (Julius,
Augustus), arcane rites (Februa), and superannuated gods (Janus, Mars), they named their months after ecological cycles: the time when salmon leap upstream, when geese molt, when eggs are laid, when bears hibernate, or when corn must be planted.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans arrived on this continent bearing a radically different land ethic. The first colonists to reach America stepped down from their ships like extraterrestrials upon a so-called “new world.” The god of these pale aliens had told them that life on earth was created for their use, and had instructed them to “fill the earth and subdue it.” A land that was not being aggressively farmed, grazed, logged, or mined was deemed a “waste.” Ownership was defined by transformation. The native people, with their shared land rights and their slow, subtle process of ecosystem engineering (too slow and subtle, it turned out, for Europeans to recognize), appeared to own no more land than any other woodland creature. “Their land is spacious and void,” commented one Puritan minister, “and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts.”

The first English colonizers to reach this continent behaved like teenagers wandering into a quiet mansion. After searching for any plunderable goods (gold, lumber, fur), they set about rearranging the place. They cleared forests and fenced fields for English-style farming, built English-style homes, mills, and churches, and they bestowed English place names (often harking back to English places, like Hampshire). They recognized the land's bounty and grandeur, but they largely ignored the work the indigenous people had put into making it that way; having come from a place where most of the large trees had been razed, they wondered at the towering forests, without realizing they were coaxed upward by Native hands; they exulted at the profusion of wild deer without realizing that they were the result of tactical brush fires and careful hunting. Unlike the Native Americans, British farmers quickly depleted the soil; then they began
hauling fish by the millions from the rivers and sea to use as fertilizer (which resulted in what one traveler called an “almost intolerable fetor”). With rifles, they hunted deer and elk almost to a vanishing point. Using iron saws, they cut down trees in enormous quantities, setting aside the larger pines to build the masts of their ships, which in turn allowed yet more people to cross the vast ocean.

Back home, England was in a dismal state. Ironically, it was the fence and the tree saw that had helped lead to this decline. During the late seventeenth century, at the same time that King Charles was selling off the royal forests to wealthy landowners, aristocrats began a process known as “enclosure”—the fencing off of once commonly held farm and grazing lands. Enclosure boosted agricultural yields but thrust thousands of peasants and laborers into a state of homelessness; in the century between 1530 and 1630, it is estimated that about half the rural peasantry were forced from their land. These new exiles flocked to cities, and then later, overseas, the ties to their ancestral land having been finally, fully severed.

At the same time, the cost of firewood in England skyrocketed, leading people to heat their homes with a cheap fuel known as sea coal. As a result, England's overcrowded cities became mired in what one writer at the time called a “Hellish and dismall Cloud.” Roger Williams, the founder of what would become the state of Rhode Island, recounted that “Natives” (likely either members of the Narragansett or Wampanoag tribes) often asked him, “Why come the Englishmen hither?” The theory the Native Americans put forward was that the English had burned up all the good firewood back home, and so had crossed the ocean in search of more. They weren't far off from the truth.

The colonizers brought with them a complex form of trade we now call capitalism—the creation, exchange, and accumulation of abstract monetary value. Things and actions could be converted into money, which could be traded for other things and actions—a felled forest could become a pouch full of coins, which could become a
year's supply of grain. This ingenious system allowed for near-global networks of trade. Ships were built, resources were gathered up and sold, and empires rose. People's perception of land began to subtly shift. The land was no longer merely a realm of habitation and a source of life. It was a
commodity
, whose value could and would be maximized.

The native population of North America was no stranger to trade. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the continent had been covered in vast networks of trading paths, through which flowed an enormous variety of earthly riches: salt, conch shells, feathers, flint, pigments, skins, furs, silver, copper, and pearls. With the invention of capital, though, vastly more objects could be traded in the virtual form of money—or more specifically, via strings of shells known as wampumpeag
,
which the colonizers popularized as a kind of universal currency. Suddenly, the continent's seemingly endless resources were opened up to the vast hunger of Europe. The foreigners' outsized craving for certain animal products—beaver pelts, deerskins, buffalo robes—drove up their price, spurring Native Americans (using European rifles and traps) to begin killing wildlife at an unprecedented rate. As the local ecosystem became less and less integral to their survival, Native peoples' impetus to carefully manage it lessened as well; if a tribe killed off all of the area's turkey or buffalo or deer, they could always buy chicken or beef from town. Some tribal communities abandoned the inland forests to reside full-time on the coast, where they stockpiled the shells necessary for making wampumpeag
.

Slowly, the Native American land ethic began to fade. At the same time, many tribes were converted to Christianity, which further erased their previously reciprocal relationship to plants and animals. This cultural shift, coupled with aggressive military campaigns, dishonest treaties, and an influx of virulent diseases, resulted in what the environmental historian William Cronon described as a catastrophic mix of “economic and ecological imperialism.” A vicious
cycle formed: as Native peoples' land base shrank and their traditional food sources became scarce, the pressure mounted to convert to a more European lifestyle, which in turn consumed more land and resources. At the same time, Europeans began to fetishize the vanishing Native population in uniquely European terms, framing them as “noble savages,” “children of Eden,” and, later, as what Shepard Krech III calls “ecological Indians”: perfectly harmonious inhabitants of the wilderness, physical and spiritual embodiments of everything many Europeans feared they were mowing over.

As more Native people were either killed off or assimilated, English people continued flooding in. The new world grew to resemble the old one; the countryside was increasingly covered with fenced-off fields of English crops and pastures of English grasses (as well as English weeds), which were populated with English cows, English sheep, and English pigs. The lowlands filled up with farms; the forests swarmed with lumberjacks; the oceans were raked with nets. Unprofitable spaces were converted into profitable ones: swamps were drained, drylands irrigated, predators exterminated. Farms became plantations. Workshops became factories. Metals were mined, oil drilled. Everywhere, wealth began to burst forth from the earth. From this systematic reaping of natural treasures—often harvested by slave labor—the colonies would grow into a nation of near-unrivaled wealth, the capital of the capitalist world.

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One place where economic value was not immediately found was in the remote mountain ranges. In fact, the history of mountain climbing in the United States can be told as the story of people seeking new and ever more rarified forms of value to extract from the mountains. First came the treasure-hunters, looking for precious jewels and metals. They came home empty-handed, and the mountains were again left alone. Next, in waves, came scientists in search of knowl
edge, artists and writers in pursuit of beauty, tourists seeking rough pleasures, pedestrians seeking glowing health, and finally, modern outdoor enthusiasts, in pursuit of some ineffable combination of all these things.