On Trails (32 page)

MacKaye's thoughts on how to transform our society were strongly shaped by a five-hundred-page philosophical treatise called
The Economy of Happiness
,
authored by his brother James. Drawing on the works of Bentham, Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx, James MacKaye sought to devise a rigorous response to the ugliest aspects of industrialism. Rather than a society of independent actors each seeking to maximize profit—which unintentionally resulted in a “vast and increasing surplus of misery”—he envisioned a steady-state economy managed by a technocratic elite, who strove to maximize the “output of happiness.” Anticipating the inevitable question of how a government could possibly measure a nation's happiness, the book was littered with equations and graphs attempting to quantify well-being. (The biographer Larry Anderson quipped that it was, ironically, “possibly the most humorless and austere tract ever devoted to the subject of happiness.”)

Most significantly, MacKaye's brother taught him that the key to solving societal problems was to change systems, not human nature. As MacKaye became an increasingly prominent voice in the conservation movement, he seldom wrote about greed or excess. He chose instead to focus on environments—how they can weaken us, or how they can be altered to strengthen us. Having spent much of his childhood in New York City (which he loathed), he chose to attack
the ills of modernity through its most obvious manifestation: the de-natured, overpopulated, hyper-competitive metropolis.

From the outset, the overarching goal of Benton's work was to circumvent the sense of alienation that had been growing among Euro-­Americans for centuries. The crucial first step, he concluded, was to secure a space outside the reach of the metropolis—“a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life”—in which people could learn to live anew. He applauded the rise of the national parks, but lamented the fact that they were all so far away; at the time, of the seventeen national parks, only one was east of the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, he wrote, a continuous green belt of wild land, the Appalachian range, lay “within a day's ride from centers containing more than half the population of the United States.”

Along the trail, MacKaye wanted to build not just a string of rustic shelters, but also nonprofit wilderness camps, collective farms, and health retreats where the citizens of America's industrial centers could escape for fresh air.
V
The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get “back to the land,” MacKaye wrote.

Some elements of the proposal eventually proved surprisingly prescient. As he had envisioned, a series of rustic shelters were built along its full length, each no more than a day's hike apart. He insisted that the trail should be maintained by volunteers, not paid workers, because for volunteers “ ‘work' is really ‘play.' ” And, as he astutely argued, constructing a two-thousand-mile trail was less daunting than one might think, because it need not be constructed ex nihilo. Instead, trail-builders could simply stitch together a string of existing trails, including the Long Trail, one hundred fifty miles of which would later be folded into the Appalachian Trail.

In 1927, MacKaye was invited to articulate his vision to the New England Trail Conference. The paper he delivered, entitled “Outdoor Culture: The Philosophy of Through Trails,” was not quite what they had anticipated. In fiery tones, MacKaye laid out the full breadth of his plan for a connected corridor of wilderness work camps. Drawing from the example of ancient Rome, his dialectic positioned the decadent metropolis against the barbarian hinterlands. He railed against the “lollipopedness” of jazz-loving, picnic-eating city dwellers, and he contrasted these human “jellyfish” with the strong, tough, wilderness-­savvy proletariat his trail would attract.

“And now I come straight to the point of the philosophy of through trails,” MacKaye concluded. “
It is to organize a Barbarian invasion.
It is a counter movement to the Metropolitan invasion . . . As the Civilizees are working outward from the urban centers, we Barbarians must be working downward from the mountain tops.”

In the end, the genteel East Coast trail-building community blanched at the more utopian elements of MacKaye's vision. But work on the trail itself began in earnest. The task of actually constructing the trail, which MacKaye showed little interest in, fell largely on the shoulders of a Maine native named Myron Avery, a husky, weather-­beaten pragmatist with the bearing of a football halfback. Under
his leadership, the trail was completed in 1937, by linking together a chain of logging roads, old hiking paths, and hundreds of miles of fresh-cut trail. But the bulk of MacKaye's vision had been pared away. Gone were the camps, the farms, and the sanitariums. The many-limbed idea streamlined, until it emerged as a single, sinuous trail through the woods.

MacKaye eventually grew to accept the trail's new, narrower mission: to provide a “path of endless expeditions” through the wilderness. By 1971, when an interviewer asked him to state the Appalachian Trail's “ultimate purpose,” MacKaye, then ninety-two and nearly blind, had whittled down his answer to Zen simplicity:

1. to walk;

2. to see; and

3. to
see
what you see!

Nevertheless, intentions have echoes. The trail's radical origins began to manifest themselves in unforeseen ways in the decades that followed, most notably in the community of hikers who, in ever-­increasing waves since the end of the Second World War, undertook pilgrimages from one end to the other in search of their own answers to the problem of living. Nomadic, hirsute, and reeking, they were, and remain, the very image of MacKaye's barbarians. Come July, one can spot them lining a highway in southern New Hampshire, thumbing rides in the rain; roaming like wolves through the mammoth, icily lit grocery stores of Virginia; and shacking up, three to a bed, in a motel in Pennsylvania. Once in a while, one might even catch them in Times Square, having ridden the afternoon train in from Bear Mountain, looking at once shell-shocked and childishly delighted at the flood of light and sound. As one former thru-hiker told me, “Most people live in civilization and visit the woods. But when you're thru-hiking, you're living out in the woods and visiting civilization.”

+

Snug and dry in the lean-to, Team Osda Nigada nestled down to sleep. I plugged my ears with wax to keep out the sound of snoring and the pock of the rain on the tin roof. Around ten
P.M
., long after sunset, the bright star of a headlamp appeared inside the lean-to. It hovered insistently above me. I unplugged my ears. “Hey,” a voice said. “Sorry. Can you please move over? I don't have a tent.” Grumpily, we rearranged our things to accommodate the dripping newcomer, until we were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder.

Just after sunrise, people began rustling around. Nothing had dried out overnight, despite being hung up on a clothesline. When the thru-hikers wrung out their wool socks, they produced something resembling milk coffee. Nobody took the time to cook breakfast; an energy bar, a few handfuls of trail mix, or a heaping scoop of peanut butter sufficed.

The daylight revealed the late-night arrival to be a south bounder (or a SoBo, in trail parlance)—one who was hiking south from Katahdin to Springer Mountain. In the Northern states, the SoBos were easy to spot, since unlike NoBos, they hadn't had time to grow a long beard, and because they tended to be loners. This one was no exception. He told us he had started only thirteen days ago from Katahdin. (The night before, Tree Frog had calculated that it would take them at least twenty-four days to reach Katahdin.)

Doyi did some quick mental math. “You hiked four hundred thirty miles in thirteen days?”

“Yep,” was all the SoBo said, before he lightly lifted his backpack and stepped out of the shelter.

The other thru-hikers were quiet for a little while.

“He's
scootin'
,”
Doyi said.

“Doing thirty-mile days through Maine and New Hampshire?” Tree Frog said. “Wow.”

One by one, the thru-hikers put on their wet boots and, with a sharp breath, as if plunging into cold water, stepped out of the shelter and into the clouds. I was the last one to depart. There was no sun. Plants drooped, as if hungover from the night before; a pink orchid wept.

Eager to catch up, I raced over the mountain and down the other side. At the bottom I crossed a road and entered a field of high grass, where I was startled to find a pink plastic flamingo and a handmade sign depicting a cheerful old man holding a pink ice-cream cone. The sign read: “
BILL ACKERLY / HIS ICECREAM BRINGS ALL THE HIKERS TO THE
YARD / HIS WATER TASTES BETTER THAN YOURS / DAMN RIGHT, HIS
CROQUET GAME IS BETTER THAN YOURS / IT'S ALL FREE, YEAH THERE IS NO CHARGE!!
” I followed a little side trail to find a blue house with white trim, festooned with Tibetan prayer flags. In the backyard, a pristine croquet court had been hacked out of the high grass. Doyi sat on the porch, talking with Ackerly, who got up to shake my hand. Ackerly had a long face topped with vanishing gray hair, large glasses, and a moony smile.

He asked my name. I told him.

“Spaceman?” he said, dreamily. “Like all of this beautiful space . . .”

We sat for a long while on Ackerly's porch, talking about Tibet (where he had visited), the works of Homer (which he had studied), and other thru-hikers (whom he had been feeding, for free, every summer for over a decade—a practice hikers call “trail magic”).

Somehow, our conversation turned to Doyi and his Cherokee heritage.

“We need to honor this man here,” Ackerly said, gesturing to Doyi. “He is our ancestor. His people were here first. You know, people always say Christopher Columbus was here first, but he wasn't.”

“He was
lost
,”
Doyi said.

“That's right. Columbus was a terrible man.”

Doyi nodded, gravely.

“Well, anyway,” Ackerly added, “in the grand scheme of things, we're all children.”

As we hoisted our packs and prepared to leave, Ackerly gave each of us a hug. Back on the trail, I asked Doyi if he found it odd that Ackerly had referred to him as “our ancestor.” He brushed it off. “There are a lot of good people on this earth,” he said. “What I've enjoyed most about this hike is meeting people like Bill.” He was continually awestruck by the goodness the trail brought out in people. One day, when his knee was really hurting, a fellow thru-hiker had offered to carry his pack for him. Doyi passed on the offer, but he was moved nonetheless—a stranger was willing to practically double his own suffering to alleviate Doyi's. “That's the real trail magic, to me,” he said. “People helping people.”

+

A trail that is never used fades from existence. But in the postwar era, as hiking became increasingly popular among Americans, a new danger emerged: trails were suddenly in danger of
over
-use. By the 1970s, it was often said they were being “loved to death.” Unprecedented numbers of hikers were storming the mountains wearing heavy lug-soled boots nicknamed “waffle stompers,” churning up soil, which then eroded or turned to mud. The most popular trails suffered the worst damage, since more than half of all hikers used only ten percent of the trails. In the Smokies, where trails were also open to horse traffic, some of the trails were worn down chest-deep, whereas up north, where the soil is rockier, others widened to forty feet.

In response, trail-builders had started designing so-called sustainable trails, which carefully minimized erosion, avoided sensitive plant life, and prevented the contamination of nearby water sources. By the 1990s, modern hiking trails—which had already contorted themselves to reach places no other trail in history would have previously bothered going—began to take on a whole new shape and
internal logic. They could no longer simply focus on reaching wild spaces; they now needed to ensure that they didn't snuff out that wild quality for future walkers.

Managing people and managing water, it turns out, are the twin challenges of designing a sustainable trail. Unfortunately for trail-builders, those two needs are not always aligned. For example, trail-builders like to install stone steps leading up steep hillsides, because steps provide a durable walking surface for hikers and break up the flow of water, which slows erosion. However, hikers tend to dislike steps, because they look unnatural and often require more work to climb. So hikers will often try to climb up the hillside bordering the staircases, which gutters rainwater and worsens erosion. This forces trail-builders to install menacingly jagged rocks, called gargoyles, on either side of the staircase.

Something similar happens on switchbacks, the long curvy turns that trail-builders create to lessen the trail's incline and slow erosion. If hikers can see from one turn to the next, they will almost inevitably create a shortcut. Among trail-builders, it is axiomatic that when hikers get tired, hikers get selfish. Many trail-builders find this tendency immensely frustrating. “I always say that this whole ‘hiker management' thing would be a lot easier if we just got rid of the hikers,” joked Morgan Sommerville, a former trail crew leader.

When a shortcut forms, the trail-builder's first impulse is typically to simply block it off, but that doesn't always work. In this regard, hikers behave remarkably like water; eventually, they will drip through almost any obstacle to follow the line of least resistance. Recently, Sommerville told me, to deter hikers from taking an old, degraded fall-line trail up to a mountain bald called Max Patch, a team of trail-builders had installed a large sign in the middle of the old trail pointing hikers in the direction of the new one. For good measure, on either side of the sign, they planted a row of rhododendrons. “That lasted about two or three months,” Sommerville chuckled. “People
just picked the most vulnerable-looking rhododendron, eliminated it, and kept going up there. I went there in October, and there was just a constant line of people walking straight up the hill. At that point, the signs asking people not to go that way had
also
been removed by . . . whomever.”