On Trails

CHAPTER 6

THE IDEA to radically lengthen the Appalachian Trail occurred to Dick Anderson one afternoon in the fall of 1993. He was driving north through Maine on Interstate 95, a major highway that runs the length of the East Coast and dead-ends at the border of Canada. As his eye followed that north-south line, his mind made a parallel hop. Anderson knew that the Appalachian mountain range continued north past Katahdin and ran up along Canada’s east coast, before slumping into the ice-clotted North Atlantic. Why, then, he wondered, couldn’t someone extend the trail into Canada?

He had no idea where the idea came from—he had never hiked a single mile of the Appalachian Trail. It was, he later recounted, as if his mind’s antenna accidentally intercepted a message intended for someone else. Holy shit! he thought. How come no one ever thought of this? This is a wicked idea! He pulled over to get gas, and, impatient to share his plan, he began explaining it to a man at an adjacent pump. “Of course, he’s over there looking at me like I’m freaking nuts,” Anderson recalled.

Anderson, a former commissioner of the state’s Department of Conservation, went home that night and unfurled a regional geophysical map—one virtually devoid of towns, roads, or borders—and began laying a line of little blue sticky dots along the ridge of the Appalachian range, linking the highest peaks in Maine, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec. Furtively at first, he began showing the map around and gauging his friends’ and colleagues’ reactions.

When he finally made his proposal for the International Appalachian Trail public, on Earth Day 1994, representatives from New Brunswick and Quebec quickly agreed to the extension. Over the next few years, he began receiving calls from representatives of the Atlantic islands of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland—places that also possessed Appalachian geology—urging him to lengthen the trail even farther. He eagerly said yes to each. Of course, hikers would have to ride on a ferry or an airplane to reach these islands, but, Anderson thought, so what?

Shortly after the International Appalachian Trail committee approved the Newfoundland extension in 2004, one of Dick Anderson’s friends, Walter Anderson (no relation), a former director of the Geological Society of Maine, began circulating a map showing that, in fact, the geological Appalachians continued on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, in a more or less mirror image of the North American range. Some four hundred million years ago, he explained, the continental plates began to collide, forming the Pangaea supercontinent. That slow-motion crash lifted up the ancient Appalachians to heights rivaling those of the modern Himalayas. But when Pangaea broke apart two hundred million years later, the continents that would become North America, Europe, and Africa split along that raised seam, like a piece of paper folded and torn. For this reason, Appalachian rocks can be found scattered throughout the soil of Western Europe and North Africa.

Dick Anderson was smitten with this notion. If the Appalachians continued all the way to Morocco, why stop in Canada? What was holding the trail back? A few (admittedly, sizable) bodies of water? A few (okay, most) people’s antiquated notions of what a trail should look like?

At the time, the full reality of what he was proposing—the daunting task of blazing and maintaining the world’s longest hiking trail—was still far off. But Anderson, like Benton MacKaye, intuitively understood that the task of creating a super-long trail principally consisted not of trail-building but trail-linking. The artistry lay in the elegance of the connections, the tightness of the joints, the sinuosity of the curves, and, more than anything, the strength of the idea that would hold them all together—what Anderson referred to as the trail’s “philosophy.” In those years between 1993 and 2004—the brightening dawn of the Internet Age—it was only natural that the big idea undergirding Anderson’s trail, when it came to him, was connection: of people, of ecosystems, of countries, of continents, and of geologic epochs.

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Certain trails are so elegant that they seem to lie sleeping just beneath the surface of the earth. Rather than being created by us, it is as if these trails unveil themselves through us. When humans, bison, deer, and other woodland animals go in search of the shallowest pass in a mountain chain, they tend to decide on the same route. Who, then, invented the trail? The humans? The bison? The deer? The answer, it seems, is that no one can claim full credit, because an essential trail—a path of least resistance—is predetermined by the shape of the topography and the needs of its walkers. Just as biologists sometimes say that “function precedes structure,” in some sense, a trail precedes the trail-maker, waiting there for someone to come along and brush it off.

Brilliant technological innovations, according to the tech philosopher Kevin Kelly, are created in the same seemingly inevitable way. For instance, once humans had invented the road network, the horse-drawn carriage, the internal combustion engine, and a fuel like gasoline, it was only a matter of time before someone synthesized them into an automobile. It is no coincidence that Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler independently created the modern automobile within a year of each other (and that several other inventors created their own variations within a few short years). Once there is a use for a technology and the right components exist, inventors simply need to make the right connections. This rule applied in turn to each of the technologies that made up the automobile: the engine, the metallurgy, the wheels. Each was, in retrospect, an inevitable shortcut across the intellectual landscape, which then allowed for future shortcuts.

Viewed in hindsight, it can appear that great trails and great inventions are both preordained. But Kelly is careful to point out that while various forces can create the right conditions for a given technological breakthrough, the final form that technology will take is not predestined; any new invention is still profoundly shaped by its inventor. The incandescent lightbulb, for example, was invented by twenty-three separate men, each of whom imbued the same basic mechanism with his own unique shape and design. Kelly likened this interplay between inevitability and serendipity to the formation of snowflakes, which unfurl into unique existence when a seed (usually a mote of dust) encounters the right environmental conditions (a supersaturated, supercooled cloud). “The path of freezing water is predetermined,” Kelly wrote, “but there is great leeway, freedom, and beauty in the individual expression of its predestined state.”

When Benton MacKaye first proposed the Appalachian Trail, the conditions were in place for the birth of a new kind of hiking path: hikers were walking farther; trails were growing longer; and planners were thinking on a grander scale. In fact, by the time the AT was first proposed, there had already been numerous proposals for long trails to stretch the extent of the Appalachian range. “The one big supertrail,” wrote Guy and Laura Waterman, “was inevitable.” However, Benton MacKaye’s proposal, with its inspiring rhetoric about wilderness preservation and the plight of the working class, was the formulation that ignited the public’s imagination. Once MacKaye proposed it, the trail burst into being.

In 1993 Dick Anderson seemed to have also stumbled on that golden thing—an unrealized inevitability. At that precise moment, a hunger was growing in the world for longer and longer trails. The shift toward monumentalism had begun with the Appalachian Trail; then, in the 1980s and ’90s, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail sprang up and outgrew it. Supertrails—hiking paths measuring more than a thousand miles—started being built in Russia, New Zealand, Nepal, Japan, Australia, Italy, Chile, and Canada. Much of Western Europe was also webbed with supertrails, like the famed Grande Randonnée network of walking paths. In part, this growth was fueled by the availability of ever lighter hiking gear, which allowed people to walk greater distances. As long-distance hiking grew in popularity, long trails became more crowded. By the turn of the twenty-first century, some thru-hikers had begun to complain that supertrails like the AT had lost the lonely, wild quality that originally made them alluring. The conditions were ideal for a radically longer long-distance trail to be born.

Virtually as soon as Anderson proposed extending the IAT overseas, the proposal took hold, with Scotland and Spain both expressing interest in 2009, and most of the other countries following close behind. Much of its route already contained trails that were simply waiting to be stitched together. Where the IAT crossed over from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, Anderson encountered contiguous trails that were managed by different (and mutually unfriendly) trail groups. Connecting them required no work at all—only a paradigm shift. When I first met Anderson, in Portland, Maine, in the spring of 2011, he had just learned that the maintainers of the North Sea Trail, which passes through seven countries in Northern Europe, had voted to join the IAT. “That’s six thousand miles right there!” he said. “Schwoop! Cross that off the list.”

When this idea first occurred to him back in 1993, Anderson had no way of knowing that it would grow so smoothly or so far. In fact, early on it had looked like the plan might face fierce opposition. Not long after his great brainstorm, he had showed the map covered in blue dots to his friend Don Hudson. “Dick, this is a great idea,” Hudson had replied. “And they’re going to hate it.” Hudson was referring to members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the managers of Baxter State Park, both of which resisted the idea of extending the AT into Canada, because that would entail blurring out the near-sacred terminus of Katahdin. (Even two decades later, the word extension remained so taboo that Don Hudson referred to it as “the e-word.”) The AT and IAT factions eventually reached a fortuitous compromise: instead of an “extension,” Anderson opted to instead call the IAT a “connector trail.” The IAT would connect to the AT, and in turn connect the AT to the world.

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The core function of any trail is to connect. The root of that word, from the Latin connectere, means to “bind together” or to “unite.” In this sense, a trail strings a line between a walker and her destination, uniting the two in an uninterrupted corridor so that the walker can reach her end swiftly and smoothly. Since the rise of electrical engineering in the nineteenth century, a second sense of the word has gained widespread use. When two things remain distant, to connect them means to create a conduit through which matter or information can flow. Here again, trails act as connectors: when a trail is blazed between two towns, a line of communication is established; people can travel back and forth, goods can be exchanged, and information can spread.

Humans and other animals have long used trails to link the essential loci of our environments. The brilliance of trails is that, over time, they naturally streamline to reach their goals faster or with less effort. Like elephant trails, humanity’s footpaths eventually grew taut along the landscape’s paths of least resistance. However, efficient as these connections may have been, even the best trails had a speed limit: walkers could only reach the trail’s end as fast as their legs could carry them. So our next impulse would have been to train ourselves to run faster. Larger societies—dating back at least to the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk—designated a specialized class of running messengers, who could transmit our messages even faster across long distances.I In many empires, new kinds of paths were built to accelerate the flow of messengers. These advanced footpaths reached their apogee in the Inca Empire, where trails were paved with flat stones and equipped with staircases, shade trees, bridges, rest huts, and watering holes. Along these paths, imperial messengers ran relay-style, six miles at a time, while passing along knotted strings called quipus, which bore simple (often numeric) messages. In this manner, information could move about one hundred fifty miles a day.

Everywhere that people wanted to go faster, our trails grew straighter, flatter, and harder than ever before. What set humans apart from our animal brethren is that we learned to optimize beyond the shape of the trail and the limits of our anatomy; technology, in a sense, provided an entirely new dimension in which trails could streamline. To travel and transport goods faster, people in Eurasia discovered that they could ride atop animals and hitch them to carts. (Domesticated animals, in this way, became a kind of living technology.) Roads adapted in new ways to the technology of wheeled transport; in ancient Babylon, they built “rutways,” stone roads bearing parallel grooves to guide the wheels of bulky carts, which were an early precursor to wooden and then metal railways. Generation after generation, Eurasians continued to improve their vehicles and roads, until they invented the automobile, or “horseless carriage,” and the locomotive, or “steam horse.” Soon, using these machines, humans were racing across the land faster than any animal on any trail. But even that was not fast enough. So next, like Daedalus, we fabricated wings and taught ourselves to fly.

As we discovered new ways to make our bodies travel faster, we also learned to send information at even more astonishing speeds. Early communication technologies like smoke signals and drums encoded simple messages in visible and audible forms, allowing people to transmit information across long distances nearly instantaneously. The invention of electricity allowed for yet more complex messages to be sent even farther. That shift began with the invention of the telegraph, which was followed by the telephone, the radio, the television, the fax machine, and eventually the computer network. Today, information constantly spirits past us, a ghostly chatter between billions of people and machines; our connections have sleekened so drastically and spread so far that they’ve effectively vanished from sight.

A trace, when followed, becomes a trail. Likewise a trail, when transformed by technology, becomes a road, a highway, a flight path; a copper cable, a radio wave, a digital network. With each innovation, we’re able to get where we want to go faster and more directly—yet each new gain comes with a feeling of loss.

From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows. In the same vein, many people currently worry that digital technology is making us less connected to the people and things in our immediate environment. It is easy to dismiss these responses as overreactions, the curmudgeonly groans of the progress-averse. Yet in all these cases, a faster connection palpably diminishes our ability to experience the richness of the physical world: A person texting with her friends or riding on a bullet train is connecting very quickly to her ends, but in doing so, she skips over the immensely complex terrain that lies between those two points. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, instead of being immersed in an endless continuum of landscapes, we increasingly experience the world as a network of “nodes and connectors”: homes and highways, airports and flight routes, websites and links.

The importance of place and context—those two words whose meanings twine in the word environment—necessarily wanes as we transition to a world of nodes and connectors. The fact that trails enable just this kind of reduction in complexity has always been one of their chief appeals. But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse. And so, beginning roughly with the advent of locomotives, new trails were built for the very purpose of reconnecting us back to (and, later, preserving) the environment. These trails webbed together, and lengthened, until one could walk from one end of the country to the other, remaining almost always within a wild landscape, where (in the memorable language of the 1964 Wilderness Act) “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

It can be hard to see exactly where the IAT—the great connector—­fits into the grand history of trails. Is it the continuation of a trend? A return to a prior mode? Something wholly novel? To answer this question, it helps to first ask: What desire is this trail fulfilling? As I traced the IAT from Maine to Newfoundland to Iceland to Morocco, I began to realize that the IAT seeks to resolve our confused feelings about scale and interconnection. The trail itself is a surreal project: standing on a mountaintop in Scotland, you somehow understand that this is the same mountain chain you once climbed, years earlier and an ocean away, in Georgia. In an era when we are able to travel through the air with godlike nonchalance and send information to other continents at the speed of light, a truly global footpath confirms our belief in how connected, how small, the world has become, and yet it also reminds us how unfathomably—how unwalkably—huge the planet remains.

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In the fall of 2012, I traveled back to the summit of Katahdin and began walking north toward the border. I was equipped with a set of instructions and a map I had printed out from the IAT website, which gave me turn-by-turn instructions to lead me through the concatenation of forest paths and roads that made up the trail. I knew it would take me roughly a week to reach the border, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me. When you set out to hike the AT, you carry with you some sense of what the storied Long Green Tunnel will entail. I bore no such preconceptions about the IAT. It was terra incognita.

I tiptoed along the Knife’s Edge, over Pamola Peak, and then down the eastern flank. From the base of the mountain, I trudged down a wet gravel path and skated along algal-slick boardwalks. The cold air dripped. I wore three layers (merino, synth puff, rain shell) and a winter beanie, and still I shivered. It was October, and the leaves were in full death-bloom. A small frog, spotted like a leopard, flopped out of my path on drugged legs.

The route turned onto an old overgrown carriage path and continued until it reached a gate that led to a wide logging road. On my left was a brown wooden sign indicating the “southern terminus” of the International Appalachian Trail, painted in the same white-lettered, hand-carved style of those on the AT. Below it was the IAT blaze: a white metal rectangle, about the size of a dollar bill, surrounded by a blue border. Printed onto the white background were the cruciform letters:

S I A

A

T

I was officially on the IAT; this was the first of hundreds of thousands of blazes that would one day mark the trail from here to Morocco.II At around twelve thousand miles, it was a project on a truly planetary scale: if a hole were dug from Hawaii to Botswana through the Earth’s core, one would have to walk all the way to the end of that Hadean tunnel and halfway back in order to travel an equivalent distance. The length is so staggering, and the climates so punishing, that most people doubt any person will ever walk its full extent in one continuous trip. Anderson told me he was doubtful as well, but he invited people to try. After all, he pointed out, people once thought the Appalachian Trail was too long to thru-hike. In 1922 Walter Prichard Eaton, an early architect of the trail, predicted that “The Appalachian Trail would exist in its entirety chiefly for a symbol—that is, nobody, or practically nobody, would ever tramp more than a fraction of its length.” When Earl Shaffer completed the first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1948, the ATC initially greeted his announcement with skepticism. “But the fact is that he made the Appalachian Trail work,” Anderson said. “You only have to have a few people walk from one end to the other to express the purpose of your trail.”

Back when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail, I had met a rusty-bearded fanatic named Obi who told me that once he had reached Katahdin, if all went according to plan, he would continue hiking an additional eighteen hundred miles on the IAT up through eastern Canada to the northern tip of Newfoundland. He had gotten the idea from a famous thru-hiker named Nimblewill Nomad, who, in 2001, became the first person to hike from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of Newfoundland, covering some five thousand miles. I looked upon these fanatics with mingled reverence and suspicion, as I would a gourmand who had decided to top off an enormous steak dinner by slurping down three dozen oysters. (Wasn’t the Appalachian Trail long enough? I thought. Why keep going?) But out here, all alone, I caught a glimmer of the feeling these super-thru-hikers were chasing. It was the same feeling the early AT thru-hikers must have experienced: lonesome, uncertain, faintly electric. It felt like adventure.

Northern Maine, late fall: even the sunlight has a dark, ice-­whetted edge. The trail followed a wide logging road for five miles, which undulated through stands of Jupiter-toned second-growth forest. Over the next few days, the logging road turned into a vanishingly faint dirt trail, which then turned into a riverside tow-path, then a dirt road, and then—with the exception of a maddeningly straight stretch of bike path, a set of ski runs, and a surreal section in which, for a distance of eight miles, it became the US-Canadian borderIII—the trail ran along paved roads until it crossed into Canada.

Once it hopped the border, the IAT became stranger still, jumping from one Maritime island to another, brazenly flaunting the notion of contiguity. Farther north, in Newfoundland, the trail sometimes split into multiple routes, or it disappeared altogether, forcing hikers to navigate with a map and compass, such as in the Tuckamore-choked section I would hike on the west coast of Newfoundland. A trail is traditionally defined as a single, walkable line. But this new, slippery, sprawling, leviathanic thing—which swallowed roads, leaped seas, and vanished from sight—was quietly redefining the term.

I dislike walking on roads, so whenever I encountered concrete, I stopped and stuck out my thumb. Sometimes I had to wait for an hour or two, but a car would inevitably pull over and pick me up. Then we zoomed away down the long, straight farm roads, covering days of walking in an hour. I must confess: it felt like magic. But I did miss the views walking affords. Staring out through the windshield and the passenger-side window, I saw much of the Maine countryside in a series of freeze-frames and blurred pans, that weird wave-particle duality familiar to all car passengers. We passed maple syrup stores, potato farms, Amish men on bicycles, and old barns, hollowed and phantasmagorically warped, but still, somehow upright.

In the areas where the trail diverged from the road, I resumed walking. In the process of hopping in and out of cars, I was forced to pay new attention to the oddly cyborgic nature of travel in the industrialized world. On a vacation to a foreign country, a person might unthinkingly use a half-dozen different modes of transportation—we walk, we drive, we fly, we ride on trains or streetcars, we sail on ferries, and then we walk some more. On the IAT, I began to notice how many other machines quietly aided in my survival: not just the cars that carried me, but the heavy machinery that paved the roads and bike paths I walked on, the computers that printed out my map, and the factories that built my gear. I ate food cooked and dehydrated and packaged and rehydrated and recooked with the use of machines. At night I slept in strangers’ homes (machine-built, machine-warmed, and filled with smaller machines), or in a wooden lean-to (whose materials had been trucked or choppered in), or, one night, directly beneath the spinning white blades of a wind farm.

The oddest part, on further reflection, is that all this technology seemed utterly normal, even natural, to me. This deep and often unconscious reliance on technology has inspired the design theorist and engineer Adrian Bejan to dub us the “human and machine species.”

Humans adapt to their environments. One of the ways we adapt is by creating technology. Once an invention is widely adopted, it effectively becomes part of the landscape, another feature to which our lives adapt. We then create more technology to adapt to the existing technologies. A smartphone, for example, is adapted not just to human anatomy and the physical constraints of the earth, but also to a network of cellular towers, a constellation of satellites, a standardized system of electrical jacks, a wide variety of computers, and a telephone system stretching back to the middle of the nineteenth century, which was strung together with wires made from copper, a substance we have been manipulating for the past seven thousand years.

Our innovations pile up, one atop the other, each forming the foundation for the next, until an entirely new landscape, a techscape, emerges—like a city built on the ruins of past empires. Any person who tries to resist the adoption of a vital new technology begins to feel this transformation acutely; Luddites become, quite literally, maladapted to the modern world. For instance, I swore for years I would not buy a smartphone, because they seemed unnecessary and expensive. But then my friends started texting me videos or web links, which my cheap flip phone couldn’t open; and the fact that I would need to look up addresses and directions before leaving the house became a handicap, as GPS made it easy for others to make plans on the spot. Finally, half to keep from falling out of touch, half to keep from getting lost, I broke down and bought a smartphone too.

In this techscape, new values also emerge—often made up of old words with new connotations: automatic, digital, mobile, wireless, frictionless, smart—and new technology adapts to those values. The current meaning of the word wilderness, one could argue, emerged directly from the techscape of industrialism, just as the current meaning of the word network emerged from the world of telecommunications. With the advent of industrial technology we began to see wilderness less as a landscape devoid of agriculture and more as a landscape free from technology—and thus the wild went from being a wasteland to a refuge.

Much of our modern conception of wilderness was formulated in direct opposition to the technology of mechanical travel: William Wordsworth, Britain’s foremost nature poet, preceded the modern environmental movement by a century when he vociferously opposed the expansion of a proposed train line into the Lake District of Northern England. In the United States, both Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall defined wilderness as an area (in Marshall’s words) that “possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means.” Benton MacKaye agreed; much of his later life was dedicated to fighting the incursion of “skyline highways” into the Appalachians. Together, these three men, along with a handful of others, founded the Wilderness Society.

In large part, the continued interest in hiking seems to stem from a desire to cut through the techscape to get to some natural substratum: to borrow MacKaye’s phrase, to see the “primeval influence” beneath the “machine influence.” But ironically, the act of hiking is also dependent on technology. Many of the earliest hikers relied on trains and automobiles to reach the mountains. Today, some forms of technology (like cell phones or ATVs) are considered obnoxious, while others (like water purifiers, camp stoves, and GPS locators) are excused. In either case, technology inexorably trickles into the wild, allowing hikers to reach new lands, travel in new ways, think in new terms, and optimize to new values.

Wilderness looks different in the neon light of technology. In the traditional framework of wilderness preservation, a techscape is merely a despoiled wilderness landscape. But when viewed through the lens of technology, the wilderness can be seen as nothing more than an ultra-minimalist techscape designed to provide an escape from other, more baroque techscapes. Readers raised on the wild gospels of John Muir and Edward Abbey will likely cringe at this definition—as, indeed, I once did. Such is our aversion to mixing technology and wilderness, even in theory. But while walking the IAT, I came to appreciate the matter with a bit more nuance. While most trails try to hide their fraught relationship with technology—by banning motorized transport, avoiding roads, disguising their own construction, and in all other ways, aping primordial nature as best as possible—the IAT bears it unabashedly, like a smiling mouth full of gold teeth.

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Following the IAT north, I flew to Newfoundland and hitched more rides. For most of its length, the Newfoundland section follows a highway up the island’s west coast called Route 430, which an enterprising local tourism association had dubbed the “Viking Trail.” Beginning in Deer Lake, I hitched my way from small town to small town, stopping off here and there for scenic hikes. (This combination of long drives and short hikes is precisely how the trail’s architects had envisioned most people using it. Thru-hikers were manifestly not their primary concern.) Eventually, I made my way to the trail’s northernmost point, a place called Crow Head. There, I walked along a gravel footpath for less than three miles before I reached a bluff overlooking a wide expanse of ocean dolloped with icebergs. I found no sign marking the trail’s end. Or rather, there was a sign, but, as I would later learn, the sea winds had scoured it blank. I hung around on that bluff for a long time, trying to imagine how it would have felt to stand there, triumphant, after walking all the way from Georgia.

I felt no sense of triumph, not even secondhand. Instead, what I felt was something like guilt or loss. By having hitchhiked there, I had cheated myself of the slow engagement with the local landscape that thru-hiking provides. Hitching was too easy, too quick.

There was one upside to hitching, however: it was a wonderful way to get to know the local people. Snug in the confines of the car, staring ahead at the road, conversation naturally flows between drivers and passengers. In an amazingly short span of time, awkwardness, suspicion, and fears of impending murder give way to a form of intimacy resembling that of a second date. In Newfoundland, I caught rides with fishermen, miners, carpenters, and, once, a trucker hauling a load of recyclables whose eighteen-wheeler had a pair of red-stained moose antlers bolted to the grille. (He told me that on average he inadvertently ran over about twenty moose a year.) The drivers were exceptionally generous. They were constantly offering me beer and drugs—a welcome inversion of the traditional ass-gas-or-grass economics of hitchhiking. In return, all they wanted was someone to talk to.

At some point in our conversations, I managed to ask every one of these drivers if they had heard about the IAT, the trail they were driving on at that very moment, which would one day stretch all the way to Morocco. None had ever heard of it. A few of the drivers said they had noticed gaunt men and women carrying backpacks and “ski poles” along the side of the highway, though none knew where, or why, they were walking. On these long stretches of the IAT, drivers and thru-hikers shared the same route, but they were in two distinct landscapes—the land of the slow, and the land of the fast. It is strange, then, but also strangely appropriate, that Dick Anderson should have first dreamed up the IAT while driving along the highway. As I would later learn, hiking trails and highways, like the snakes on a caduceus, have always been both opposed and curiously entwined.

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Most people would be surprised to learn that the American interstate highway system, as it currently exists, was first envisioned by the AT’s founder, Benton MacKaye. In 1931, MacKaye (along with his friend, the forester Lewis Mumford) proposed the notion of what he called the “townless highway” to remedy the problem of high-speed traffic and congestion passing through downtown streets. The heart of the problem, as MacKaye saw it, was that the road network had evolved from ancient footpaths, which grew into bridle paths and wagon roads. Motorcars were a wholly different technology, with different abilities and limitations, and so deserved a fresh system suited specifically to them. He proposed that cars be given their own dedicated spaces in which they could reach maximum speed, just as trains had been.

Thanks in large part to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, major highways now regularly skirt cities, and many are bordered not by rows of tacky shops (what MacKaye called “motor slums”) but by strips of forest. Cars got faster, towns got quieter, and the circuitry of civilization reorganized itself around a new mode of transport. Quicker than a horse, more flexible than a railcar, the highway-bound automobile was ideally suited to a sprawling, mobile, individualistic nation like postwar America. Now, despite a growing awareness of the automobile’s many downsides—namely its inefficiency, pollution, and tendency to kill people—it remains our de facto mode of transportation, in part because everything else in the American landscape has hardened around it.

Though the modern interstate is a recent invention, the history of the highway stretches back thousands of years. When the earliest footpaths were widened into roads, the next logical step was to make those roads faster. Often this involved artificially hardening the road’s surface and raising it above the surrounding land so it could shed water (hence the name highway). Unlike trails, highways required a massive expenditure of labor to build, so they were only built when rulers were able to marshal the necessary labor force (usually made up of slaves and soldiers). As a result, the earliest highways served as the tentacles of grand empires. Through them principally flowed three things: royal information, royal armies, and royal personages. In imperial China, wide highways (chi dao) of finely tamped earth, lined with shady evergreens and paved with flat stones, were built with ruts conforming exactly to the axle length of the emperor’s carts and carriages; on each of these three-lane highways, the center lane was reserved for the exclusive use of the imperial family. Along the Roman via publicae were installed milestones, which regularly reminded one of the distance from—and thus, the reach of—imperial Rome. When the Assyrians conquered a new region, they built new roads to more quickly transport military dispatches and allow troops to quash local revolts. The Maya did the same. Incoming Inca emperors would sometimes command their conscripted laborers to build new paved roads even if passable stretches of road already existed, simply to signify their control of that land.

In colonial America, the evolution of the road system mirrored that of the nation. At first, new European settlements were relatively ungoverned, and paths were rough. Over time, when settlements became sufficiently populous, the government extended its reach, offering legal protection while extracting taxes. The tax system was designed to create more roads: by the 1740s in North Carolina, every taxable male was expected to perform as many as twelve days of roadwork each year, though wealthy people avoided this obligation by paying others to serve in their stead. Unpaid taxes could be recompensed by doing yet more roadwork.

The road network had to balance a need for expediency with a need to connect population centers, so it would often deviate from the path of least resistance in order to accommodate a large town or city. Geographers call this phenomenon “population gravity.” However, a more apt term might be “capital gravity,” in the sense that the roads, built with tax dollars, bent to service the largest sources of funding. As a general rule, in the colonial era, every publicly maintained road contained at least one large house alongside it, because that household had sufficient influence to sway the government into building a road there. In later years, this rule would hold true, but instead of big houses, the new roads led to big corporate interests, like Alaska’s Dalton Highway, which was built by the oil companies in just five months in 1974, with the help of government engineers and funding, to reach the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and service the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

“Where roads go tells you where the power is at any given time,” Tom Magnuson, an expert in the history of the colonial road network, once told me. We were driving around Hillsborough, North Carolina, and he was pointing out the spectral remnants of colonial roads in the nearby woods. The reason we could still locate bygone roads like these, Magnuson explained, was somewhat unintuitive: there are fewer official roads today than there were a hundred years ago. “It’s a result of the increased weight of our carriage,” he explained. “We’re carrying heavier cargo, so the road surface has to be better, more expensive. The more expensive the road, the fewer roads you build.” For example, he said, today truckers all take a single route from Raleigh to Atlanta: Interstate 85. It would be slow and costly to go any other way. However, back in 1950, there were about twelve different routes that trucks regularly used. Fifty years earlier, there were probably double that amount.

As they are woven into the fabric of civilization, highways effectively become part of the landscape, which people must then adapt to. Businesses and, in some cases, entire towns (once called “pike towns”) spring up to service the highways’ passengers. Magnuson had found thirteen hamlets in North Carolina alone that had disappeared after they were bypassed by highways. Other towns, like Timberlake, had migrated to be closer to a major thoroughfare, leaving behind the husks of abandoned neighborhoods. The same phenomenon takes place whenever a fixed structure becomes an essential part of peoples’ lives: even if it is initially built to serve us, we end up molding our behavior around it.

From a walker’s perspective, the brutal nature of modern highways stems from the ways they have adapted to the technology of the automobile. Because cars have trouble turning at high speeds, highways must seek the straightest line they can, even if that means blasting a tunnel through a mountainside. Because driving fast is much more dangerous than walking, highways inevitably require regulations and penalties—construction codes, speed limits, and, those most dreaded of all creatures, traffic cops. And because a speeding car will kill just about any living thing it runs into, highways marginalize and imperil any human being or animal walking along them.

In this way, highways have created a wholly new, highly technological landscape of movement. Optimized to the “human and machine species,” this landscape is maladapted to the naked human body, even though it is the full expression of a deeply human desire—to go farther, faster; to connect in heretofore impossible ways.

The decision to route a hiking path over a highway might seem a deeply counterintuitive one. It is not, however, uncommon. Before automobiles pushed hikers into the hills, walkers and wheeled vehicles shared the roads; in fact, road walking was a popular American pastime in the late nineteenth century. The public’s lingering fondness for the concept of road walking would prove crucial to the creation of the AT, which just like the IAT today, originally routed much of the trail over (dirt) roads. This tactic had a clear rationale: in the race for federal funding, the trick to building a long trail is to first create a walkable route and attract attention. Then, once the trail is well known and funding begins pouring in, one can worry about shifting it off roads and into wilder lands, mile by mile. “For example in Maine, the Appalachian Trail once made extensive use of logging roads,” Dave Startzell, the former director of the ATC, told me. “Over time we were able to relocate a lot of those sections. But you’re talking about a program that spanned more than thirty years, cost more than two hundred million dollars, and involved acquiring over three thousand parcels of land.”

There is a catch-22 inherent to this process, though. Trails need money to relocate away from roads. In order to raise money they need to attract hikers (and media coverage) to demonstrate that the trail is desired by the public. However, most hikers dislike walking on roads. A similar logical bind commonly arises with the creation and adoption of any new technology: With highways, for instance, if everyone in a given region were to pitch in (with their money or their labor), a new highway could be built very quickly; but it is very hard to prove that the highway is necessary or useful until it has been completed and people are already using it. In this regard, the hikers who had committed themselves to hiking the IAT now, when it is ugly and hard, were committing something akin to an act of faith. They were walking the trail into existence.

After returning home from Canada, I tracked down two such thru-hikers, Warren Renninger and Sterling Coleman. In 2012 they both successfully hiked from the southern tip of Florida up to the northern tip of Newfoundland along the IAT (a trip of some five thousand miles). Coleman told me he enjoyed how the road walks connected him to local people—he was often offered food, and on one occasion, a pack of boys chased him down to ask for his autograph—­but overall he found it an alienating experience. The long, straight stretches of road played tricks on both their minds. Renninger said that if he had it to do over again, he would have brought along a bike to make these sections go by quicker. Coleman said that, since many of the roads were never blazed, over time the trail seemed to dissolve before his eyes. “It started to feel more and more like I wasn’t actually on a trail,” he said. “It just felt kind of arbitrary that I had a piece of paper that said I had to go here, here, and here . . .”

+

Somewhere around Iceland, things began to fall apart. In the spring of 2012 I received word from Dick Anderson that the IAT would be holding its first overseas general assembly in Reykjavik, a historic event, designed to cement the ties between the scattered branches of the organization. He warmly invited me to attend, and so, using the remaining funds of a fellowship I’d been awarded, I booked a ticket.

I landed in Reykjavik at midnight, underneath an apricot sky. It was late June, close to the summer solstice, when the dark of night lasts just three hours. I slept restlessly, and then woke with a start at two P.M. the following day. Already late, I brushed my teeth and washed my face with the sulfurous tap water, then hastened to a reception that was being held for the IAT committee at the US embassy.

The inside of the ambassador’s home was awash in timeless sunlight. Gray-haired men and short-haired women held glasses of ice water and small plates ravaged of hors d’oeuvres. I greeted Dick Anderson, who wore a brown corduroy jacket and a tie. Don Hudson introduced me to the chairperson of the IAT, Paul Wylezol, a pale Newfoundlander with a dark Caesar haircut. Wylezol was a stern, saturnine presence, with an odd habit of referring to the IAT as a “brand”: at one point, he said that the routing of the IAT over preexisting trails, like the ancient Ulster Way in Ireland, wasn’t “rebranding,” but “another level of branding.” (I also overheard him compare the IAT to McDonalds.) In his spare time, Wylezol toiled over a dense tome of deductive logic, which he hoped to one day publish not on paper, but in a sprawling, nonlinear, hyperlinked electronic document. I had long wondered who had given the IAT its curiously postmodern flavor—surely it wasn’t Dick Anderson, the septuagenarian Maine woodsman. Upon meeting Wylezol, I understood.

Before coming to Iceland, Wylezol had visited Greenland, which he assured me would be unlike any other section of the trail. Since there was no physical trail, hikers would be obliged to carry a map, compass, and (ideally) a GPS; since there were wide, frigid river crossings, they were advised to carry a small inflatable raft and telescoping paddle; and since there were polar bears, they were encouraged to carry a rifle.

That summer, René Kristensen, the director of the trail’s Greenland chapter, and five native Greenlandic boys flew to Maine to see the beginning of the trail. The trip was an example of exactly the kind of cross-cultural interaction Anderson was hoping to foster. Though they were walking over roughly the same rocks as back home, the flora and fauna were totally alien; the only place they felt at home, Kristensen said, was the barren summit of Katahdin. One night, a brief thunderstorm rolled through. The boys, for whom the Northern Lights are as common as clouds, were mesmerized. (“I’ve been in north Greenland for twelve years, and I have never, ever seen lightning,” Kristensen said. “People don’t know what it is.”)

Outside the ambassador’s house, I sat down on a couch next to Walter Anderson, the geologist. I asked him how Iceland fit into the larger picture of the Appalachian geology. “Oh, there are no Appalachian rocks in Iceland,” he replied, shrugging. “In that way, it is a little bit artificial. But the reason the trail is coming here is because this lies directly on the Mid-Atlantic rift, where the two plates are separating. The rift is the connection. So, you see, it’s part of the geologic story.”

A few days later, the IAT committee members would all drive out to see the rift. When we stepped off of the tour bus at the Thingvellir National Park, we found a landscape swept bare of trees. Erupting through the grassy fields were rows of steep, flat-topped stone dusted with a sugary green. The sun dipped behind a cloud, and we felt a faint, black presentiment of winter.

The park’s warden, Ólafur Örn Haraldsson, welcomed us with a short speech. Iceland, we were told, was born of division. Where the tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America pried apart, lava poured forth into the oceans, creating a submarine mountain chain. In one spot, an unusually active volcano continued to plume and pile up, rising tens of thousands of feet through the water column until it burst, black and steaming, above the waves. On the uppermost reaches of that peak, the nation of Iceland was built.

The two continental plates continued to widen at a rate of a few millimeters annually over the past ten thousand years, which, Haraldsson explained, had opened up the rift valley below. We wound our way down into the rift along a gravel path, the jumbled stone walls widening the deeper we went. Dick Anderson, gray-haired, slightly stooped in his blue rain shell, was lit up with childlike wonder.

“Oh my God, Don,” he said at one point, gesturing toward a bird with a long orange beak. “What is that thing? What is that?”

“An oystercatcher,” Hudson said.

“Wow,” Anderson said. “They have oystercatchers here?”

As we moved deeper into the rift, he pointed to the rock wall and asked Walter Anderson, “Is this all lava?”

“All lava,” Walter said.

“But some of it’s different colors . . .”

“Well, that’s bird shit.”

At the bottom of the rift, we all posed for a picture by joining hands and stretching from one side of the rift to the other. The symbolism was clear: Wylezol announced that the Atlantic had once divided us, but now “the IAT is bringing us back together.”

That sentiment also proved to be the refrain of the general assembly meeting, which had been held in a conference room at the office of the Iceland Touring Association the day before. Over the course of six hours, as committee members from around the world gave their presentations, an overhead projector cycled through photos and videos depicting the landscapes of Maine, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and Spain. When Don Hudson got up to speak, he pointed out that one of the original goals of the Appalachian Trail was to bring like-minded communities together. “Today, Benton MacKaye must be smiling on top of some ethereal mountain,” he said.

The presentations went smoothly, but as the day wore on, people began, tentatively at first, to raise objections. First, a woman from Denmark asked whether countries where French was not the official language could drop the “SIA” (Sentier International des Appalaches) in the IAT/SIA logo. “Is it possible to make it more . . . simple in the future?” she asked.

Wylezol explained that the logo had been added to appease the Quebecois, but mentioned that it also worked in France and Spain (where the s could stand for “sendero”). “People may not understand why it’s there,” he said. “But it’s like any logo, whether it be Mercedes Benz or whatever. It’s just an image.”

Don Hudson, who had invented the logo a decade earlier at his kitchen table, was less protective of it. “All these things are temporary and mutable, particularly when you think of geologic time,” he said.

In the end, it was loosely agreed that trail clubs could put whichever three letters they liked on their blazes, so long as they kept the general shape and color scheme.

A woman from the Faroe Islands voiced her concern that hikers would become lost on the Faroese trails, which were marked only with cairns, and had always been navigated using only traditional knowledge. There was a brief, inconclusive discussion of how technology like GPS and QR codes could be incorporated into the trail. Then Startzell, the former director of the ATC, raised his hand and asked what the guidelines were for deciding how closely the trail must adhere to the geology of the Appalachians. “For example, if somebody proposed a section of the trail in Barcelona, which is I believe pretty well removed from the Appalachians, would we say, ‘That’s great, but that’s not really part of what we’re striving for’? Or is this kind of a come-one-come-all kind of thing?”

Wylezol replied that, “to the greatest extent possible,” the trail should strive to adhere to the Appalachian geology. However, there were instances where that was not feasible. In Greenland, for example, the Appalachian chain ran up the east coast, but because the east was too difficult to access and navigate, the trail ran along the island’s western edge. “Conceivably we could have a trail in Western Sahara,” Wylezol added. “But right now I don’t think anyone expects to go there and return with their two arms attached. So we have to be flexible.”

Next, Wylezol asked those attending how linear they thought the trail should be. Before opening the topic up for discussion, Wylezol gave his opinion. His stance was decidedly nonlinear: He referred to the section he maintained in Newfoundland not as a trail but as a “route.” Wylezol urged the attendants to keep in mind that “thru-hikers—the rock stars of hiking—as important as they are as a symbol and so on, are very, very few in the overall scheme of things.” Most people would hike sections of the trail in (at most) one- or two-week stints, and for them, linearity was not such a pressing concern. In parts of the UK, the trail was split into spur trails in order to accommodate the most scenic areas of England, Scotland, and Ireland. “We don’t want to abandon that just for some theoretical position that we have to be linear,” he said.

Don Hudson again stressed the fact that connectivity, not linearity, was the trail’s defining ethos. However, he admitted, strangers often had trouble wrapping their minds around this concept. When the trail had been extended to Newfoundland, people had said to him, “You can’t walk to Newfoundland. How can that be part of the International Appalachian Trail?” His answer was that the trail existed “so long as we can describe to people how to get around the network.”

A woman from Ireland excitedly called out that perhaps the trail could be renamed the International Appalachian Trail Network. Hudson mentioned that they had initially called it the International Appalachian Trails, plural. “I don’t know why we dropped it,” he said.

Finally, Wylezol asked the audience if anyone would like to speak in defense of strict linearity.

No one did.

+

To a great extent, the IAT was the offspring, and embodiment, of a very recent invention: that global reticulum of cables and code we call the Internet. The language and ethos of the Internet—a decentralized network of networks, designed to connect far-flung but like-minded people—infused (and facilitated) the trail committee’s every discussion.

Fittingly enough, from its embryonic days, the Internet has always been an expansion upon one of the functions of trails (and, later, roads)—transmitting information quickly across long distances. Before roughly the nineteenth century, roads and pathways were the primary conduits of information in most countries. “Nobody lived more than a couple feet from the road until you got newspapers and telegraphs and internal combustion,” Tom Magnuson told me. “In the age of muscle power, people lived as close as they could to the road, because that was the Internet. Every bit of your information came down that road.”

With the advent of the telegraph, the dual function of trails (transporting matter; transmitting information) split. Matter followed one route, rolling along roads and railways (and water routes and air routes), whereas information was carried along wires, where it could travel far faster. And like trail networks, these wire networks created new ways of structuring the information they transmitted. As we saw in previous chapters, organisms as simple as slime molds use trails to externalize and organize information (food is here; food is not there), and indigenous human communities around the world have long used trails to make sense of landscapes, give shape to their stories (first this happened here, then that happened there), and to link together places of special (medicinal, spiritual, historical) interest. The dual invention of the computer and the Internet served as the latest breakthrough in our millennia-long search for better ways to transmit, store, sort, and process information.

In 1945 a prominent engineer named Vannevar Bush presciently anticipated the advent of the modern networked computer. That summer he published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly in which he envisioned a machine called the “memex” (memory+index). It would consist of a desk, two monitors, and a library of texts imprinted on microfiche—in addition to a great deal of technology that had yet to be invented, like touch-screens and modifiable print. Theoretically, wrote Bush, a memex user would be able to scroll through a series of linked documents while inserting his own links, comments, and edits. Looking back on this essay seventy years later, his device resembles nothing so much as a steampunk rendering of Wikipedia.

As a research scientist, Bush was acutely aware of the ever-­amassing ocean of texts that our culture generated. Though he tended to blame science for this superabundance, in truth, the problem had been worsening ever since the invention of writing. The technology of written language allowed people to store information externally, which shifted us away from our reliance on oral storytelling and landscape-based memory. The advantage of this shift, as Sequoyah and his fellow Cherokees learned, was that the information did not noticeably decay when its author died, and it could be easily transmitted. The downside (aside from our eventual alienation from the land) was that texts began to amass more quickly than any one person could read them. The fear of information overload had been felt since at least the times of ancient Rome. The piling up of written information accelerated with the invention of the printing press, which prompted Renaissance scholars to invent organizing structures like indexes and tables of contents. Even then, scholars felt a desire to be able to link together texts into new forms. One crude eighteenth-century progenitor of the memex was a device called a “note closet,” in which strips of cut-out text could be attached to slats and hung from hooks under various headings: information, made flexible.

In the emerging technology of microfilm, Bush saw the potential for information to be radically condensed and rearranged, allowing the Encyclopaedia Britannica to be “reduced to the volume of a matchbox.” (Before the advent of digital technology, Bush had no way of knowing that, thanks to microchips, the Encyclopaedia Britannica would soon be shrunk to the size of a pinhead.) However, a desk full of a million tiny books would not on its own solve the problem of information overload; if anything, it would exacerbate it. To remedy this problem, Bush envisioned that the texts could be strung together into “associative trails.” Largely, this task would fall to hardy souls “who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” It would be the job of these “trail blazers” to wade through the mass of information and connect them thematically, and then to share their trails, like guidebooks.

He gave the following example:

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

In this scenario, Bush imagined that the scholar might later have a conversation with a friend who mentions that he is interested in the ways certain people resist innovation. Remembering the case of the Turkish bow and the English archers who failed to adopt it, the scholar could summon his trail, copy it, and give it to his friend, “there to be linked into the more general trail.”

Bush’s key insight was to realize that computers needed to evolve to fit the contours of the human brain. At the time, the prevailing mode of organizing information (whether in a filing cabinet or a library) was rigidly categorical and hierarchical. For example, to find a copy of Borges’s Ficciones, one would begin by going to a library, traveling to the floor dedicated to literature, then to the section for Spanish-language literature, then to the row dedicated to authors whose names start with B, and so on. “Having found one item, [in order to find the next item] one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path,” Bush wrote. “The human mind does not work that way.” According to Bush, thoughts are not grouped into categories; they are connected via “trails of association.” By 1945 this was already a somewhat familiar notion, most famously elucidated in William James’s The Principles of Psychology, in which he introduced the concept of “stream of consciousness.” Bush believed that connecting the corpus of written texts in an associative manner would allow the human mind to make the most of what had always been writing’s strength (and the brain’s weakness): permanence of memory. “The personal machine,” he wrote, will deliver “a new form of inheritance, not merely of genes, but of intimate thought processes. The son will inherit from his father the trails his father followed as his thoughts matured, with his father’s comments and criticisms along the way. The son will select those that are fruitful, exchange with his colleagues and further refine for the next generation.” Every step in the research process would be preserved: the stream of consciousness, he believed, could finally be frozen, extracted, and handed down over time.

Bush’s essay was deeply influential on later generations of computer engineers, from Douglas Engelbart (an early visionary of personal computing) to Ted Nelson (the inventor of hypertext). The following decades saw the rise of two parallel but largely independent technologies: the invention of the personal computer, and the development of the Internet, which began by linking together various extant academic and military computer networks. The two paths fully converged with the invention of the World Wide Web and HyperText Markup Language by Tim Berners-Lee. The pairing allowed people around the world to communicate and share information through a meta-network of personal computers, forming what Berners-Lee called “a single information space.” Text, that hidebound technology, tendriled out into hypertext: documents were strung together into trails through hyperlinks; the trails sprouted side trails, which could loop back to the start; and a textual network emerged. The biographer Walter Isaacson has described this historic breakthrough as Bush’s memex “writ global.”

Like Bush, Berners-Lee also believed that texts should be malleable, so that readers could edit and improve texts as necessary. However, as the first successful web browsers, like Mosaic, began rolling out, Berners-Lee found, to his dismay, that they were composed of fixed columns of text surrounded by dazzling images, more like a magazine spread than a chalkboard—and, thus, more like a highway than a trail.

The Web has since sprawled, sending threads out across the globe, into each of our homes, our pockets, and almost inevitably, one day into our skulls. The current estimate of total web pages is almost fifty billion; if it were all bound into a single book, that tome would weigh over a billion pounds and would stand twice as tall as Mount Katahdin.

In recent years, people have begun to realize that the Web, which was designed as a tool to manage information overload, has ironically worsened it. A single trail reduces complexity and eases travel, but connect a thousand trails, and suddenly you have a maze that requires its own guide. Likewise, the Internet is a network of trails so vast it has become its own wilderness, “an uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost,” wrote Kevin Kelly. “Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle.”

In the beginning, there was chaos, blank fields. Out of them, meaning emerged: first one trail, then another. Then the trails branched and webbed together, until they reached a density and complexity that again resembled (but was not quite) chaos. And so the wheel turned over. Benton MacKaye put it succinctly: “Mankind,” he wrote, “has cleared the jungle and replaced it with a labyrinth.” In this maze, a higher order of path making emerges—written guides, signposts, maps—which are then linked together and require yet higher orders of exegetical path making: written guides to the maps, and then guides to the map-guides, guides to the map-guide guides, and so on. (At first glance this notion sounds somewhat absurd, but I was recently amused to run across a medical text entitled Guide to the Guides: Evaluator’s Resource Algorithm to the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, Fifth Ed.) On each successive level of path making, knowledge is accrued and the world becomes easier to navigate, but new paths must constantly be marked out to simplify the vast wilderness of older paths into something humans can manage.

The function of the IAT, I realized, was yet another of these paths: it layered a higher order of guidance over the existing transportation network (which was in turn layered upon the older footpath network). And yet, in its desire to visit every place and connect everyone, the IAT was in danger of sprawling into yet another network, yet another wilderness.

+

Last on the schedule that day in Reykjavik was printed my name, and beside it, the word Morocco. Rising to the podium, I tried to tamp down the audience’s expectations as I loaded up the photo slideshow of the scouting trip I had taken to the trail’s end. The committee members were expecting camels and deserts—Wylezol had said as much at least twice in the hours preceding—whereas my photos mostly contained stony hillsides, olive orchards, old televisions, and flat red fields haunted by dogs.

Many months earlier, back in Portland, when I had asked Dick Anderson where the trail would end, he told me they had agreed on a town called Taroudant in the Anti-Atlas Mountains. He said the word Taroudant slowly, with a faint smile, as if it held some exotic magic. He told me a former Peace Corps volunteer had mapped out the route from Marrakech to there. However, when I wrote to the volunteer, he told me that Anderson was mistaken. The final stretch of trail had yet to be mapped. If I wanted to see the trail’s end I had a choice to make: I could wait for someone else to map it out, and write about it while peering over her shoulder (in my usual, wraithlike way), or I could go there and map the thing myself.

I wrote to Anderson and told him to expect a mapped route to Taroudant by the end of the spring.

Initially, I imagined I would travel to Morocco and, map in hand, explore the desert wilderness between Marrakech and Taroudant. However, I soon scrapped that plan as fantasy. Between Marrakech and Taroudant lay not a wilderness, but a vast swath of hillside farms, pastures, and mountain hamlets. Since I spoke almost no French and absolutely no Berber, I would have been unable to converse with most of the people I met there. (Only fifteen percent of all Moroccans speak English, and even less in the remote mountains.) The topographic maps I had ordered of Taroudant, care of the Russian military, revealed a network of hundreds of spidery trails, marked with faint dotted lines, on which one could easily become lost. I knew I would need guidance through this network, so with Anderson’s help I hired a local guide named Latifa Asselouf. She promised to arrange everything, including meals and lodging.

When I arrived at the Marrakech airport, a driver was waiting for me with a sign. In lieu of a hello, he had handed me his cell phone. It was Asselouf.

“Hello, Robert? This is Latifa. The driver will take you to my home now.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

She hung up.

In an attempt to be friendly, I tried to ask the driver his name.

“Je ne parle pas l’Anglais,” he replied, apologetically.

“D’accord,” I said. I asked him again, this time in my halting French.

He handed his phone to me. It was Latifa again.

“Hello, Robert? The driver, he does not speak English.”

“Okay, thanks.” I said.

He led me to a battered white Mercedes. As our car slipped loose of the pink city of Marrakech, I looked out the window and took note of things—a horse cart hauling bags of grain, a herd of goats parting fluidly around our car, two women riding on a motorbike with a child sandwiched between them—and then I took note of the fact that I was only taking note of things that seemed “Moroccan,” as opposed to the things our two countries had in common: the garish advertisements, the electric wires zigging up the valleys, the paved roads swarming with cars, the red-and-white cell towers standing like the skeletons of decommissioned spaceships.

As we entered the town of Amizmiz, the air grew cool. Asselouf was standing outside her front door, smiling broadly and wiping her hands on a dish towel. She had the body of a walker, thin and long-limbed. Unlike her light-skinned neighbors, her skin was deeply tanned—a mark of her family’s Saharan ancestry. Her “crazy hair,” as she called it, was tied back with a violet headscarf.

She ushered me into her living room and set down a clay tagine filled with stewed lamb and prunes. A man wearing a red windbreaker and a small black watch cap walked in, sat down beside me, and shook my hand. He had a thin face, a prominent nose, and a small black mustache. His name, Asselouf informed me, was Mohamed Ait ­Hammou. He had been hired to serve as our pathfinder, while Asselouf would handle the logistics, accommodations, and my endless barrage of questions. He did not speak English, so, while Asselouf was busy in the kitchen, we ate in silence.

After lunch, we piled our things into a microbus and drove to a town about an hour up the road. As we rode, Asselouf pointed out the flora that grew on the terraced hillsides: groves of gray walnut trees and pink peach blossoms; gardens of mint, thyme, and tulips. The walls of the buildings were constructed out of flat stones, which had been piled like loaves of bread in a shop window, a snug jumble. From far off, the villages disappeared, camouflaged into the rocky hillsides, with the exception of the white mosques and perhaps a newer, concrete house painted Marrakech pink. The local men and boys mostly wore tan or brown djellabas, long robes with peaked hoods, which gave them the air of Franciscan monks.

These roads—unlike roads built in the United States and most of Europe—were mostly made by voluntary communal labor; villages came together to build and maintain them. A few days later, we would pass a group of eight smiling men who were constructing a crib wall to reinforce the road that connected their two villages. A ninth man crouched over a fire nearby, making tea.

At a certain point, the van stopped and Asselouf signaled for us to get out. We grabbed our backpacks from the roof and began walking down the road. It was now cold, and the sky was growing dim. We walked for about an hour. Then, as she did every night that week, Asselouf approached the nearest village and began asking around if any of the local residents would give us dinner and a place to sleep on their floor (for a reasonable fee). That night, we stayed in a small home overlooking a vast, vapor-capped valley. Before dinner, the men all sat together watching television with our legs under a single blanket in the living room.

The newscaster on TV was dressed in a black blouse; her hair fell to her shoulders in dark curls; she sat with her hands folded at a desk, with electronic graphics flashing in the background. In other words, she looked like a newscaster on any channel in America, except that the words she spoke meant nothing to me. Sitting there in my synthetic clothes, pantomiming comprehension, I felt oddly at home and yet profoundly out of place.

The Germans have a word for precisely this feeling: unheimlich (literally, “un-homelike”). According to the theorist Nicholas Royle, the unheimlich (often translated as “the uncanny”) is defined as “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar.” We are comfortable with the familiar, and we are comfortable with the wholly unfamiliar (which we perceive as exotic), but when the two are combined, we begin to feel unstable. The result, Royle writes, is “the experience of oneself as a foreign body.”

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The next morning, the three of us hiked up and over a ten-thousand-foot pass, following sheep trails. Before we departed, Asselouf had hired a local mule driver to carry our backpacks. As we neared the top of the pass, I learned why: one needed to move quickly through this cold and otherworldly place. Mist blew up from the valley below, cottoning us in. The downhill sides of every plant were shrink-wrapped in layers of ice: the tall grass became icy white feathers; shrubs resembled coral reefs. The mule driver blew into his hands, his curly hair collecting little nerds of ice. At one point he got spooked and tried to abandon us, pulling our packs off the mule and setting off in the wrong direction. In the end, Asselouf had to double his wage to lure him back.

On the other side of the ridge, in the lee of the wind, Hammou knocked some dry roots out of the ground with a sharp rock, built a small stone fire pit, and kindled a fire. Asselouf made grilled lamb kofta, with olives and fresh pita. It was, without question, the most delicious lunch I had ever eaten on the trail.

Afterward, we headed down the left-hand side of a rocky gorge. During our descent, ­Hammou took a shortcut that required us to scramble down a scree slope, which neither Asselouf nor the mule driver liked very much. Hammou, meanwhile, was as nimble as a goat. Near the bottom of the pass, he stopped and waited for us while pecking at his cell phone.

Over the coming days I would learn that Hammou had a tween-like obsession with his cell phone; he could walk for miles without looking up from it once. I asked Asselouf what he was always doing on it. She said he was probably texting one of his many sweethearts; he seemed to have one in each village (in addition to the wife he had at home). Later in the trip, he would often find an excuse to reroute us through the towns where they lived, so he could spend a few minutes (or, in one case, a few hours) flirting with them in their homes, while Asselouf and I waited outside. Afterward, Asselouf would chide him for wasting our time and being unfaithful to his wife. He would respond by scowling at his phone.

Hammou seemed to particularly resent the fact that his boss was a woman. Whenever one of his friends called to ask how Asselouf and I were faring, he would joke that Asselouf was crying. Once, Asselouf told me, he turned to her and asked, “Why don’t you go home and raise babies like a normal woman?” Asselouf shrugged off these provocations. She’d heard worse.

From the outset, Asselouf’s chosen line of work had been a struggle. Back when she was in her early twenties, she had told her mother she wanted to take a course in mountain guiding, but her mother forbade her. When Asselouf persisted, her mother slapped her face. Asselouf went anyway. She was now thirty-nine years old. She lived in the same home where she and her seven siblings had grown up. They all eventually moved out, leaving her to take care of her ailing mother, alone. Currently, she was one of only two female guides she knew of in all of Morocco.

In the Berber highlands, she stuck out. She dressed unconventionally, in gray yoga pants, a knee-length merino sweater, and a black rain shell. When we passed through villages, she was regarded as the oddity, not me. The children gathered behind her, speculating in whispers whether she was from France or America. When she turned on her heels and told them that she was a Berber too, they burst into fits of nervous laughter.

The three of us made for odd travel companions; though we were walking the same path, we each had different goals. It seemed Hammou simply wanted to get us to Taroudant as easily as possible, get paid, and go home. Asselouf was trying to expose me to the local culture and natural beauty, while also heading off any potential disaster. And I was here, above all, to chart a potential route for the IAT. Asselouf often tried to communicate my rationale to Hammou, but it was clearly a struggle. He’s here to map out a very long hiking trail that will one day stretch from North America and Europe to Morocco, I imagined her saying in Berber. I could tell by his reaction he found the whole idea a bit preposterous.

Indeed, I was beginning to have doubts of my own. Aside from Hammou and Asselouf, my interactions with Moroccans had mostly been fleeting—a smile, a wave, but little more. I realized hiking might be a deeply inappropriate means of connecting disparate cultures. To truly connect to the people living here, one would need to stop for a year (or ten), set down roots, and learn the language. Hiking is about movement, a continual sliding over the surface of things. What meaningful cross-cultural communication could possibly come of it?

On our second night, we stayed in a home where everything smelled of fresh paint; the walls of the main entry hall had been painted robin’s egg blue in preparation for an upcoming wedding. We sat in the kitchen as the matriarch of the household poured out glasses of milky Berber tea, redolent of thyme, and ordered around her five daughters and four granddaughters. Later, the patriarch ambled in, a ninety-two-year-old former judge with ears like giant moth wings. In a show of deference, everyone offered him their seat. Asselouf wisely intuited that the old man would like to rest his back against a hard surface, so she got up and moved a stool against the wall, where he gladly eased himself down. (Later, Hammou complained that Asselouf concerned herself too much with other people’s feelings. “That,” she replied, “is why I am the best guide in all of Morocco.”)

Once we had exchanged pleasantries, Asselouf began peppering the judge with questions about the local topography. As part of his job, he had traveled extensively throughout the mountainous countryside, settling cases and arbitrating disputes, so he knew the name of every village and the most efficient route over every mountain. (He praised the French for widening trails and cutting new roads, if nothing else.) After a while he pointed to me and asked Asselouf something. I watched her explain, over the course of many minutes, using vivid hand gestures, the story of the breakup of Pangaea, the cleaving of the Appalachian Mountains, and the proposed trail that would link them all together. I turned to watch their faces, expecting to see bewilderment or mockery. The old man nodded his head slowly and said something. “He says that was the will of Allah,” Asselouf said. “He says that long ago we all came from the same place, but just this”—she pinched her cheek—“became different. Beneath, bones, blood, it’s all the same. You understand what I am saying?”

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We hiked on, over snowy mountain passes, along dirt roads and sheep trails. We hired yet more mule drivers, including one young man who routinely beat his mule with a wooden club; every few minutes the mule would retaliate by lifting its tail and releasing a pneumatic stream of gas into his face. The hills varied between gray, taupe, and blood-black. When the continents were joined in the Pangaea supercontinent, parts of Morocco would have nestled up against northern Maine. But I had trouble seeing the kinship between these sandy mountains and my green-backed, granite-spined Appalachians. (In fact, I would later learn, we were still in the High Atlas, which was a much younger formation, geologically speaking. Only later would we reach the Appalachian geology of the Anti-Atlas.)

Two days later, we caught a microbus and skipped about fifty kilometers of the trail, so we could make it to Taroudant in time for me to catch my flight. Asselouf was careful to note the names of all the villages we would have passed through, so I could mark them down on my map later. On the bus, a young man with a round face offered to let us stay at his house. Asselouf eyed him suspiciously.

“Is your house clean?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he said.

“Do you wash your dishes?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

Before she could go on, he preempted her. “Please, stop asking questions. Do you want to stay or not?”

When we finally arrived at his house—which lay at the end of a long road cutting through farms and fruit orchards—he turned to Asselouf and said, “Now you see. Everything is dirty.”

Asselouf sighed. Without another word, she began rinsing out the unwashed tea glasses and sweeping the kitchen floors.

The house was little more than a concrete shanty. The layout was bisected. Two of its four rooms were for humans: a kitchen, with a dirt floor and benches made of cinder blocks and wood boards; and a bedroom, where blankets covered a hardwood pallet. The remaining two rooms were dedicated to housing a milk cow. In this small, disheveled space lived four cousins. The three oldest—ages twenty-­three, nineteen, and seventeen—worked on nearby watermelon farms and orange orchards. The youngest of them, who was only twelve, worked as a shepherd.

To illuminate the room, one of the boys lit a large, swan-necked propane lantern, which resembled something from a chemistry lab. We sat down on the bedroom floor, and Asselouf served a dinner of lamb stew in a tagine. The boys, who were used to simple bachelor fare like lentils and rice, devoured the stew, peeling off hunks of flatbread to sop up the juices. They were shy at first, especially the youngest, who hid behind his brothers and peered at us with suspicion. Before long, though, Asselouf was playing Wendy among the Lost Boys; she taught them phrases in Arabic and French, and teased them for their messiness. By the end of the night they were begging her to move in with them.

After dinner, the oldest of the boys, Abdul Wahid, challenged me to a game of checkers. The checkerboard was a piece of plywood where the squares had been drawn in by hand. For the pieces, we used small rocks he gathered from the yard. Checkers is a very old game—a three-thousand-year-old checkerboard was found in the biblical city of Ur—but its modern form was shaped by the French, who most likely introduced it to the Berbers. The French rules, which Abdul Wahid played by, were slightly different from those I had grown up with. (For example, when a piece was “kinged,” it could travel diagonally across the board, like a bishop in chess).

When our game was finished, the boys started playing with Latifa’s camera. The two younger boys took turns posing while wearing my glasses and pretending to read my copy of Waiting for the Barbarians. Then Abdul Wahid posed with my iPhone held to his ear. At first I thought they were poking fun at me, but as the boys gathered around Asselouf’s camera to inspect the pictures of themselves, I realized it was a kind of play-acting. They were imagining themselves into a different life.

“Real travel,” wrote Robyn Davidson, “would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another’s eyes.” However, I was discovering that this process works both ways: a journey is never simply the act of gaining a new perspective, but also the experience of being newly seen. Again, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of the unheimlich, but this time, surrounded by kind, curious faces, the feeling was warmer, more expansive. Boundaries were dissolving.

As the night wound down we cleared away the dishes and lay down together—Hammou, me, and Asselouf—on the wooden pallet in the living room. In the kitchen, the Lost Boys were bedded down on blue plastic bags of grain. A radio warbled gently in the background as they whispered themselves to sleep.

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In the morning, we set off for Taroudant. The land that lay ahead was a hard clay pan between two mountain ranges, known as the valley of Souss. We passed by watermelon farms, citrus orchards, wheat fields, and groves of Argan trees. Heat wavered up from the earth and was dispersed by the wind; it felt like walking across the scorched bottom of a tagine. At one point, we were chased by three scrawny, vicious dogs, which we had to fend off with rocks. When we asked their owner why he didn’t call off his dogs, he smiled and replied that we shouldn’t be walking across his land if we didn’t want to get chased.

In the mountains to the north of Taroudant, I had hoped to find a peak that would provide a suitable terminus to the trail, a Moroccan Katahdin. However, we were running behind schedule, and, without telling either me or Asselouf, Hammou began altering the plans to catch us up. It wasn’t until around midday that I realized we weren’t taking an indirect route to the mountains, as I had assumed, but were instead cutting a long hypotenuse across the flat farmlands directly to Taroudant. I turned to Asselouf and asked her what was going on. She asked Hammou, and then explained that he had taken this shortcut because it was faster and “closer to modern things.”

It was too late to change our route; we would never reach the mountains and make it back to Taroudant in time. I was disappointed, but not surprised. I had watched Asselouf attempt to explain the trip’s rationale to Hammou on multiple occasions, always to his utter bafflement. He seemed to have no sense of why anyone would voluntarily choose to hike through mountains. Over the course of our hike, he had often taken drastic shortcuts through less-than-scenic areas—on one memorable occasion, to save a few minutes, he had led us down a gulch snowed over with balled-up plastic diapers. Now, in one last shortcut, he had lopped off the journey’s last, most important segment.

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.

I. An ancient Sumerian poem tells that the very first text was written by the legendary King Enmerkar, who wanted to send a message across the mountains to a rival king, but found that “the messenger’s mouth was too heavy and he could not repeat it,” so he carved it onto a clay tablet. (The rival king, it’s said, could not interpret the message, but was so awed by the new technology that he was forced to surrender.)

II. SIA stands for “Sentier International des Appalaches,” a concession to the Quebecois, whose law mandates all signs must be displayed in French.

III. This trail, I was informed by a border patrol officer, was known as the “boundary vista”—a twenty-foot-wide swath of cleared land that constitutes a geopolitical gray area between the two nations. How fitting, I thought, that the International Appalachian Trail had co-opted a purely international space.