On Trails

EPILOGUE

WE MOVE through this world on paths laid down long before we are born. From our first breath, there is a vast array of structures already in place—“spiritual paths,” “career paths,” “philosophical paths,” “artistic paths,” “paths to wellness,” “paths to virtue”—which our family, society, and species have provided for us. In all these cases, the word path is not applied haphazardly. Just like physical paths, these abstract paths both guide and constrain our actions—they lead us along a sequence of steps, progressing toward our desired ends. Without these paths, each of us would be forced to thrash our way through the wilderness of life, scrabbling for survival, repeating the same basic mistakes, and reinventing the same solutions.

There is a catch, however: How do we know which paths to choose? The essayist James Fitzjames Stephen vividly captured this dilemma: “We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do?”

Even a cursory reading of ancient philosophy reveals that it has never been easy to choose a path through life. But it is becoming ever more difficult. Rapid changes in technology, culture, education, politics, trade, and transportation have combined to allow people access to an array of lifestyles that was previously unthinkable. In the aggregate, this is a positive development, proof that our life’s paths are evolving to meet our varied desires. But a side effect of this shift—halting, gradual, and unevenly distributed as it may be—is that life’s options continue to abound until they overwhelm.

Take, for example, the commonplace question of what you are going to “do for a living.” In the earliest days of humankind, there was likely just one answer: gather plants and scavenged meat, an activity all people participated in equally. Later, new specializations emerged: first, the invention of hunting, then of medicine, shamanism, arts, and agriculture. According to the Standard List of Professions, a five-thousand-year-old catalog of occupations from ancient Mesopotamia—ranked in descending order from king down to some as-yet-untranslatable, but surely unpleasant, job—there were 120 separate professions on offer. Today, it is estimated there are anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand distinct occupations in the United States.

Our selection of religious and philosophical traditions is scarcely less varied. Due to the difficulty of defining what constitutes a proper religion, estimates differ, but most agree it is easily in the thousands. And this is merely a tally of the organized religions; the number of personal belief systems—cobbled together in private, one piece at a time, like the car in the old Johnny Cash song—is impossible to quantify.

In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us. I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand on the Appalachian Trail. The trail was modified with each step we hikers took, but ultimately, the trail steered our course. By following it, we streamlined to its conditions: we lost weight, shed possessions, and increased our pace week after week. The same rule applies to our life’s pathways: collectively we shape them, but individually they shape us. So we must choose our paths wisely.

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When I returned to New York City from the Appalachian Trail in 2009, the experience of thru-hiking lingered in my bones. The intricate machinery of my feet—the tarsals and phalanges, the cuboid and cuneiform bones, the ligaments and tendons, the muscles, arteries, and veins—ached for a month afterward. In the mornings I would rise from bed and hobble to the bathroom with cringing, nonagenarian steps.

Thru-hiking is metamorphosis: over five months, I had acquired a new name, a new body, a new set of priorities. By the trail’s end, I was as trim and clear-headed as a wild animal. But back home, over a matter of months, I gradually regressed into something resembling my old self. First, I shaved my scraggly, Mansonesque beard, which had begun to draw nervous stares from strangers; then, a few weeks later, I cut my hair. The weight I had shed slowly filled back in, layer by later, as if I were being dipped in paraffin. I went back to living in a box full of possessions and spending my days staring at glowing screens. The path of least resistance, that old rut, drew me inexorably back in. As the architect Neil Leach has noted, “The city modifies its occupants, no less than the occupants modify the city.”

I often thought about a very old poem I had once read, by a mountain hermit in ancient China named Han-shan.I

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,

The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain

The pine sings, but there’s no wind.

Who can leap the world’s ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

Han-shan was raised in a thriving metropolis and groomed for life as an imperial envoy, but at age thirty, he left home and traveled a thousand miles east to a cave on the slopes of Cold Mountain, where he remained for the rest of his life, writing poems and “wandering completely free.” Upon moving there, he took the mountain’s name as his own: Han-shan is a trail name of sorts, which means Cold Mountain. His needs were few; his pillow was a “boulder,” and his quilt was the “dark blue sky.” What he desired from this new life, he wrote, was to lie down in a cold clear stream and wash out his ears.

Han-shan would eventually become one of China’s most beloved poets, and a hero to seekers and vagabonds around the world. His poems often return to the dichotomy between the roads of town life, which he avoided, and narrow mountain trails, which he sought out. Buddhists and Taoists both, of course, had long employed the metaphor of the trail to describe their philosophies, but the Tao and the Dharma were portrayed as broad paths, for one and all. Han-shan broke from this tradition: He believed that a way of life could become too common, that a trail could be too crowded or too worn; he urged his readers to “leave the dusty rut behind” and seek out “paths of newly trampled grass.” A millennium later and half a planet away, Thoreau would make this same metaphorical connection: “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels,” he wrote. “How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

What these men were describing, I realized, was a phenomenon of path-breaking common to all living things: One caterpillar finds a new leaf, and ten more follow its trail. By the time the eleventh arrives, the leaf has been chewed down to its skeleton, and so the eleventh caterpillar grows hungry and sets off in a new direction. The same principle applies to foraging ants and grazing herds, to fashion trends and stock markets, to traffic-clogged roads and eroded hiking paths. By striking off into the “darkest wild” of the Tiantai Mountains, Han-shan found a space free from suffocating conventions, where he could live a refreshingly stripped-down existence.

In the years following my thru-hike, I began to realize that the Appalachian Trail had been my Cold Mountain—a wild space defined by simplicity and freedom, relatively untouched by violence or greed, with a clear goal and few distractions. But unlike Han-shan, I had left it and returned to the metropolis. That other life haunted me.

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It was possible, I gathered, to spend one’s life doing little else but walking. Life on the trail being exceedingly cheap, a handful of full-time hikers have managed to live for years or even decades off meager savings and seasonal work. These wanderers reminded me of mendicant monks, slipping free of the gravitational pull of society to live plainly, outdoors.

Over the years a curious name kept popping up, in the oddest places, as an example of a perpetual hiker, perhaps the perpetual hiker. This man called himself Nimblewill Nomad. Following the completion of his first thru-hike of the International Appalachian Trail in 1998, the Nomad had reportedly given away all his money and taken to hiking long trails more or less full-time. He proudly referred to himself as “hiker trash,” a modern update on the archetypal tramp. I’d heard he spent his winters living out of his pickup truck, sleeping in Walmart parking lots and national parks. As soon as the weather warmed, he walked.

His exploits tended to take on a mythic cast. I heard from more than one person that the Nomad had chosen to have all ten of his toenails surgically removed to avoid infections. Famously minimalist, he was said to never carry more than ten pounds on his back. People joked that his cook kit consisted of nothing more than a bent spoon and a cigarette lighter. Whenever possible, to avoid carrying food, he opted to eat at cheap roadside diners and gas stations.

This style of hiking was not universally admired. Lamar Marshall, who met the Nomad in 2001, told me he thought that hiking marathon distances to reach a restaurant each night “defeats the whole damn purpose of being in the woods.” But the Nomad, it seemed, had long ago moved beyond the woods. I was fascinated by his refusal to respect the boundary we have erected between the human world and the natural one. Each day, he somehow carved out a graceful path through the many-chambered heart of the behemoth—­wandering the postindustrial wilderness, from forest to forest, fryolator to fryolator, in what he called “a desperate search for peace.”

Over fifteen years, he had hiked some thirty-four thousand miles. First he completed the so-called Triple Crown: the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. Then he went on to complete all eleven National Scenic Trails, an achievement that has somewhat awkwardly been deemed the Undecuple Crown, in 2013. He finished that hike atop Mount Monadnock, where he was congratulated by Dick Anderson and a host of other friends. Triumphant, fulfilled, and nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, he vowed to hang up his hiking shoes. Then, the next spring, he was back. He announced he would complete a grueling road walk from New Mexico to Florida, in order to complete a route he had named The Great American Loop, which connected the four farthest corners of the continental United States. This, he claimed, would be his last long hike.

Without having met him, I had no way of knowing whether the Nomad was merely a bitter misanthrope or, in the words of Jack Kerouac, “a new kind of American saint.” I wanted to see what this lifestyle truly entailed, and what kind of man it shaped. So I wrote to him one afternoon to ask if I could join him for a few days on his final hike. After some delicate negotiation—he harbored a deep if not altogether ill-founded suspicion of journalists—he agreed to let me walk with him. He told me that he would be hiking east on TX-73 somewhere outside Winnie, Texas, on a certain day in early June. If I could find him, I was welcome to tag along, but he wasn’t slowing down for anybody.

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On the appointed day, my sister and I drove southeast from Houston, eyes peeled for a walker by the side of the road. As we passed a place on the map called Alligator Hole Marsh, we spotted him: a white apparition on the far side of the highway, walking upstream against the traffic. We circled around and parked on the shoulder some fifty yards up the road. He waved as he drew near. He carried a blue backpack no larger than a preschooler’s knapsack. A single plastic water bottle was tied to his belt with a piece of frayed blue string. His trekking poles were folded in the crook of his arm. In his hand, he carried a chipped Styrofoam coffee cup.

When he reached the car, I shook his hand, and he smiled. He had a wild head of white hair streaked with yellow, and a white beard threaded with black. Both reached down to his collar, where they whorled, oceanic. Atop his head he wore a white runner’s cap. He took his sunglasses off, and his eyes, arced against the sun, were fixed with deep, leathered creases, pale in their depths. His hands too were deeply tanned, but only up to around the base of his thumb; the rest, shaded by the cuffs of his shirt, was pink.

Any repeated action will create patterns, and after forty-six days on the road, he was embroidered with them. He showed off his beat-up black running shoes, with holes where his toes poked up, the soles slightly sloped from his tendency to pronate. His white button-down dress shirt, which he picked up for fifty cents at a secondhand shop, bore a dark stain from where his pack rode, like a burn shadow.

His real name was M. J. Eberhart. He said I could call him “Eb.”

Bright slabs of metal and glass roared past, summoning a hot wind. Eberhart sat down on the rear bumper of my sister’s station wagon. We had brought him an ice-cream cone and some cold water, which he accepted bashfully. “Oh, this is such a blessing,” he said. “Oh man.” A smile lingered on his lips as he slurped at the vanishing cone.

“I’ve always heard that it’s better to give than to receive, but someone has to receive, and I’ve learned to do it,” Eberhart wrote in his hiking memoir, Ten Million Steps. The book is filled with stories of people paying for his meals, taking him into their homes, and pressing wads of cash into his hands. He usually protested, and, ultimately, always relented. He received his first trekking poles, a pair of expensive titanium walking sticks from Germany, from a fellow hiker he had known for less than three hours. Both in person and in writing, Eberhart was unfailingly grateful. The words thank and thanks appear more than one hundred times in Ten Million Steps. (By way of comparison, the book contains only sixty-seven uses of the word trail.)

Finishing his ice cream and handing the wrapper back to my sister, Eberhart topped off his water bottle and filled the Styrofoam cup with ice. With that, he was ready to go. I hugged my sister good-bye. She got back in the car and drove off, leaving me and Eberhart alone with a million acres of green ranchland.

“Welcome to my backyard,” Eberhart said, waving at the vastness with his cup of ice. The land was flat (elevation: eleven feet), but the clouds above it were colossal—a white mountain range, severed and levitated.

As we walked, Eberhart recounted his travels thus far. He had begun forty-six days earlier at the southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail. From there, he headed east, through the blackened badlands of New Mexico, through the gateway city of El Paso, and onto an endless spread of dry dun plains haunted by dust devils. The traffic consisted almost entirely of semitrailer trucks, silvery leviathans that surged past every ten seconds at speeds of a hundred miles per hour. He learned to take shallow breaths through his nose, so as to not inhale their fumes. The sound was meteoric.

In West Texas, the highway stretched in a straight line to a vanishing point on the horizon. Space and time started to play tricks on him. He walked for hours each day and never seemed to progress, the distant mountains retreating faster than he could catch them. The highway was lined with mileage markers, and he checked each one to convince himself that the numbers were changing.

Always, there was the wind, which pushed against his forehead during the day and blew sand into his tent at night. In an effort to escape it, one night he set up camp inside an abandoned house in a ghost town, and punctured his inflatable sleeping pad on a shard of broken glass. Another night, he spent slumped over in a booth at a truck stop. The desert mornings were frigid. He began each day hunched over, the hood of his plastic rain poncho pulled up, hands in his pockets.

His plan was to walk from gas station to gas station, but buildings of any kind were sometimes dozens of miles apart. If people hadn’t stopped to give him water, he may well have died. When he emerged from the desert, vultures were circling ominously over his head.

Other than the vultures, almost all the wildlife he had seen was dead (most of it roadkill), including a crushed coral snake, two mule-deer, a raccoon, an armadillo, numerous birds, and a group of dead coyotes wired, inexplicably, to a fence.

This experience was not unique to West Texas. Since highways optimize to speed and steel, they have a tendency to kill the slow and soft. As we talked, in short succession, we passed: a turtle, a snake, an armadillo, a baby alligator, and an unidentifiable creature, perhaps a dog, whose fur and bones were fanned out in a radial pattern, as if it had fallen asleep in the shade of a rocket’s thrusters.

“We got all kind of roadkill here today,” Eberhart remarked.

I asked him if he didn’t find the highways an unwelcoming space for a hiker.

“I enjoy being out on the roads,” he replied. “You get to see the towns, you get to mingle with the locals. It’s a different experience entirely than the green tunnel.”

Roads have historically attracted a strange breed of walker—what might be called gregarious ascetics. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poet-vagrant Vachel Lindsay walked thousands of miles across America’s roads, having sworn a vow of poverty, celibacy, and sobriety, preaching what he called the “gospel of beauty.” Nearly half a century after he published A Handy Guide For Beggars, Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity, a woman named Mildred Norman decided to follow in his footsteps; she changed her name to Peace Pilgrim and began walking coast to coast across the country’s roadways promoting a philosophy of nonviolence.II Neither carried any more possessions than would fit in his or her pockets. Both were dependent on strangers for all their food and lodging.

After seven or eight miles, we ducked into a convenience store. The air inside was delicious. The whole room reverberated with a sound at once alien and deeply familiar, a chorus of humming compressors and shushing liquid, percussed sporadically with the clatter of ice cubes and cold coins.

An ancient woman with the face of a baby bird sat behind the counter, propped up in a wheelchair, her bony arms wrapped in blue veins. She greeted us in a hoarse whisper.

“Hey, how in the heck are you?” Eberhart joyfully called out to her. “Do you have a fountain? You do have a fountain! Doodah!”

He carried his chipped, dirtied Styrofoam cup over to the soda fountain, where he filled it to the brim with ice and then splashed in some clear liquid. He took a long sip then filled it again. Turning with a contrite expression, he shuffled over to the counter.

“I thought that was water, carbonated. Well, what I done was, I drank about half of it, and then I hit the Sprite button, so if I pay, that’s what I’m gonna be stuck with.”

“That’s okay,” the woman rasped. “I ain’t charging you.”

“It’s just getting awful hot out there,” he said, apologetically.

“I bet it is,” she said.

He thanked her sincerely, and we hiked on.

“See, that ain’t fair,” he later confessed to me. “You shouldn’t be able to pull people’s emotional cords like that. I take advantage of it so much.”

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Bit by bit as we walked I learned the full story of how M. J. Eberhart became Nimblewill Nomad. He was born Meredith Eberhart—which, he stressed, back then was “a boy’s name”—in a “sleepy” town in the Ozarks with a population of 336. He likened his childhood to that of Huck Finn: He spent his summers running barefoot, fishing, and riding horses. In the fall, he hunted quail with his father, a country doctor.

Eberhart later attended optometry school, got married, and helped raise two boys of his own. They lived in the town of Titusville, Florida (“Space City, USA”), where he was soon making a six-figure salary performing pre- and post-operative work on cataract patients, many of them NASA scientists. He enjoyed helping people restore their sight and he prided himself on being able to provide for his family, but his work still felt oddly hollow. (He was especially irritated by the endless amount of administrative and legal paperwork, which seemed to grow worse every year.)

He retired in 1993 and began spending more time living alone on a plot of land he was developing beside Nimblewill Creek in Georgia. He and his wife started to drift apart. There followed a dark period of about five years, about which he said he didn’t remember much. When I later called up his sons—neither of whom had spoken to him in years—they recalled him as a caring father and a dutiful provider, but also someone who was easily frustrated, prone to bouts of drunken brooding, and, occasionally, loud (but never violent) outbursts of rage.

His new house sat near the base of Springer Mountain, which he would regularly climb. His hikes gradually grew longer; he began systematically hiking the AT section by section, eventually reaching as far as Pennsylvania. Then in 1998, at age sixty, he decided to set out on his first “odyssey,” a 4,400-mile walk from Florida to Cap Gaspé in Quebec, along a sketchy agglomeration of trails, roads, and a few pathless wilderness areas. Not long before, he had been diagnosed with a heart block, but he declined the doctor’s admonitions to have a pacemaker installed. His sons assumed he would not make it home alive.

On the trail, Eberhart renamed himself after his adopted home, Nimblewill Creek. He began in the swamps of Florida and hiked north on flooded trails, where the dark, reptilian waters sometimes reached to his waist. When he emerged from the swamps, all ten of his toenails fell off. By the time he reached Quebec, it was already late October. Over the previous ten months, he had experienced a slow religious awakening, but his faith was shaken as he passed through those grim, freezing mountains. “Dear Lord, why have you forsaken me?” he asked, upon seeing the weather darken one day at the base of Mont Jacques-Cartier. However, a lucky break in the storm allowed him to reach the snowy mountaintop, where he sat in the sun, feeling “the warm presence of a forgiving God.” After reaching the trail’s end, he returned to the South (on the back of a friend’s motorcycle) and, in a blissful denouement, walked another 178 miles from a town near Miami down to the Florida Keys, where he settled into “a mood of total and absolute, perfect contentment, most-near nirvana.”

He returned home a different man. He stopped showering. He kept his hair long. He began ruthlessly shedding his possessions; over the course of three days, he burned most of the books he had collected over his lifetime, one by one, in a barrel in his front yard. In 2003, he and his wife divorced. He ceded the house and most of his assets to her, and signed over his other real estate holdings, including the land at Nimblewill Creek, to his two sons in an irrevocable trust. Since then, he has lived solely off his social security checks. If those funds ran out by the end of the month, he went hungry. But what he had gained was the freedom to walk full-time, which felt to him like freedom itself. “As if with each step,” he wrote, “these burdens were slowly but surely being drained from my body, down to the treadway beneath my feet and onto the path behind me.”

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Eberhart paused by the roadside to pull out a map, which he kept sealed in a plastic sleeve. The map covered no more than fifteen miles; it took one hundred seventy of these maps to cover the whole trip. He so dreaded the prospect of getting lost that he had begun carrying a little yellow GPS unit as backup, despite the added weight and cost.

I was surprised to find that in addition to the GPS, he also carried a small cell phone, a digital camera, and an iPod touch (which he used to log on to free wireless networks so he could check the weather, publish online journal entries, and answer the occasional email).

The cell phone he carried at the insistence of his girlfriend, Dwinda, an old high school sweetheart, who called twice during our trip to check in on him. Initially, he said, he had regarded it as unnecessary weight, until he broke his leg while hiking in the Ozarks and it ended up saving his life. “I don’t gripe about the phone anymore,” he said. “I enjoy having it and talking to her every day.” He told me that though nobody can “totally escape” the world of technology, you can still “keep it from totally overwhelming you and controlling your life.”

“I think I’ve been pretty successful in that regard,” he said.

Around our tenth mile together, Eberhart noticed that the shoulder of the road had begun to narrow. He predicted that we were nearing the city of Port Arthur. Sure enough, the city soon appeared: a jagged row of mechanical spires spouting white steam, which turned and dissipated hypnotically in the blue air.

Port Arthur was a petro-town, known for refining the oil pulled from deep beneath the gulf. (“Where oil and water mix, beautifully,” read the Chamber of Commerce’s motto.) We passed a series of barbed wire fences, behind which long white tubes shone like bones. The looming oil refineries recalled the Futurist architectural designs of Antonio Sant’Elia. This was where much of the nation’s gasoline came from, as well as its plastics and its petrochemicals. I had never seen anything like it before. It was as if we had wandered below the deck of a gleaming cruise ship and found ourselves in the engine room, amid the sooty machinery that kept the ship gliding along.

Cars were lined up, idling, in their rush to get home. The air was sickly with their exhaust. “How do they live like this?” Eberhart said, looking at the pinched faces behind the windshields. “They spend more time sitting around in their vehicles than they do at home!”

At a wide intersection in front of the Valero refinery, we stopped at the window of a squad car to ask for directions. A police officer with a buzzed scalp and two missing teeth sat at the wheel, with a woman in plain clothes sitting beside him.

“Hang a left in about four blocks,” he said. “Stay on the main road, though, because you’re heading into the worst part of town.”

We walked along the sidewalk—a luxury, after fifteen miles of highway shoulder—through a neighborhood of small, tidy houses. In the parking lot of the convenience store, a man sat on the tailgate of his truck drinking a tallboy of beer. Inside the store, it was again clean and cold. To Eberhart’s delight, this store had six varieties of frozen burrito. He had been living off of frozen burritos for weeks and had acquired a taste for them. (“If you didn’t eat them out west there, you didn’t eat, because that’s all they’ve got. Breakfast burritos, lunch burritos, I think they even had a dessert burrito.”) We sat near the back of the store, on crates of soda, eating our dinners in the cool air.

As Eberhart was moving on to his dessert course—a half-pint of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream—one of the store’s clerks asked him to move to the side so he could restock the refrigerator. Eberhart apologized.

“Everyone else who comes through here has a car to sit in, but we’re walking,” Eberhart explained.

The store clerk looked suspicious.

“Where you going?” the clerk asked, in the rapid, trilled patter of a native Hindi speaker. Eberhart had a thick, slow Missouri accent that bent “wash” into “warsh.” A certain amount of miscommunication ensued; I found myself playing translator between the two.

“Well,” Eberhart said, “we’re going to go across the bridge tomorrow and into Louisiana. I’m heading for Florida at the end of this month.”

“Are you going for a record?”

“No, just walking.”

“Just for fun?”

“Well, yeah . . .”

“Where are you living, nighttime?”

“I have a tent for camping.”

“You take a bath anywhere?”

“Not as often as you do . . .”

“How many days?”

“I started in New Mexico forty-six days ago.”

The man paused and cocked his head. “What is your reason?”

“Well, I’m a long-distance hiker, and I enjoy walking. Meet people. Have some ice cream,” Eberhart chuckled.

“Yes, yes.”

“It’s not a bad life. Sometimes when it storms real hard you get wet . . .”

Eberhart fished around in his wallet and pulled out a business card, on which a red line marked the entire route around the continent. The store owner still looked perplexed. “You should tell the media,” he said. “You could be in the local paper.”

Eberhart’s smile tightened.

Later, Eberhart told me that these questions were exceedingly common. He understood why people asked them; they saw him as “a total alien.” Naturally, they were curious. However, the one question he dreaded was the simplest: Why? “You can answer questions all day, but you just don’t want to answer that question,” he said. “You know why? Because you can’t answer the damn question.”

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Why do we hike? I have asked many hikers this same question, and I have never received a fully satisfying answer. It seems there are many overlapping reasons: to strengthen our bodies, to bond with friends, to submerge ourselves in the wild, to feel more alive, to conquer, to suffer, to repent, to reflect, to rejoice. More than anything, though, I believe what we hikers are seeking is simplicity—an escape from civilization’s garden of forking paths.

One of the chief pleasures of the trail is that it is a rigidly bounded experience. Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit. Once that decision is made, all the others (when to eat, where to sleep) begin to fall into place. For children of the Land of Opportunity—beset on all sides by what the psychologist Barry Schwartz has called “the paradox of choice”—the newfound freedom from choices comes as an enormous relief.

This form of freedom is a curious thing, at once an expansion and a constriction of one’s options. Ever since America declared its independence from England, it has framed itself as a home for lone, free actors. Walking has always symbolized and enacted this untethered state. Thoreau memorably wrote that only if “you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then, you are ready for a walk.” It’s this reduction that makes a walk feel so freeing. In walking, we acquire more of less.

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We slept that night on a grassy berm a few blocks from the convenience store. I strung up my hammock between an electrical pole and a chain-link fence bearing a sign that read: WARNING: LIGHT HYDROCARBON PIPELINE. As the sun set, orange and green balls of light appeared, floating, amid the dark refineries. Above one tower in the distance rose a pillar of flame.

We awoke the next morning to sirens and songbirds. A heavy dew coated the grass, my hammock, his tent. The air was aflame with mosquitoes. “All right new day, here we come,” Eberhart said, stretching out his arms. “This old buzzard’s upright one more day.”

Back on the road, he started off slowly. He said it took him at least a half hour to get the kinks out of his back. “Every morning, you think, oh man, this isn’t going to go away today,” he said. “But it does.”

As we passed the refinery again, he stopped to take a picture. “That feller over there makes its own clouds, doesn’t it?” he said. Among the hikers I had met, Eberhart showed a rare appreciation for human environments. When taking landscape photos, most hikers will go to great lengths to crop out any power lines. But Eberhart said that once you resign yourself to the fact that every photo is going to have power lines in it, you’ll find you can take much better pictures.

The problem, he said, was that hikers tended to divide their lives into compartments: wilderness over here, civilization over there. “The walls that exist between each of these compartments are not there naturally,” he said. “We create them. The guy that has to stand there and look at Mount Olympus to find peace and quiet and solitude and meaning—life has escaped him totally! Because it’s down there in Seattle, too, on a damn downtown street. I’ve tried to break those walls down and de-compartmentalize my life so that I can find just as much peace and joy in that damned homebound rush-hour traffic that we were walking through yesterday.”

As a proud traditionalist, Eberhart was startled when I told him that, in this regard, he was in the vanguard of environmental philosophy. In the last twenty years, postmodern environmental scholars like William Cronon have subverted the gospels of Muir and Thoreau by arguing that nature, as a world distinct from the realm of human culture, is an empty and ultimately unhelpful human construct. The concept of nature cleaves the planet in two: presuming that there is a natural world over here and a human world over there. Cronon argues that this division not only alienates us from our own planet, it also obscures our origins as animals, as collections of cells, as collaborative and intertwined living beings. All organisms are involved in a constant process of reshaping our world to better suit their needs, whether they are termites building mounds, elephants felling trees, kudzu vines colonizing an abandoned house, or shepherds and sheep working together to trample out a grassy turf. The thing we call nature is in large part the result of these minute changes and adaptations. There is no single entity or primal state one can point to and call “nature”: it is both everything and nothing.

There are many smart and conscientious people who argue that humans should resume living in a more natural way, which we have abandoned at some point in the past. But the problem with equating the natural with the good, Cronon argues, is not simply that the concept of nature is illusory—it is also counterproductive. “When we speak of ‘the natural way of doing things,’ we implicitly suggest that there can be no other way,” he observed. By arguing that something is natural—and thus “innate, essential, external, nonnegotiable”—we short-circuit any meaningful conversation about how the world should be.

At the eastern edge of Port Arthur, we crossed a bridge, which arched over the river to reach a green island. On the far side of the bridge stood a sign reading WELCOME TO PLEASURE ISLAND. There were sailboats, fishing piers, a golf course, a castle made of wood, and an RV park. We walked until we reached a bait shop, where we stopped for breakfast. Eberhart handed the perplexed cashier his business card. With her permission, we spread our wet rainflies out on the front yard. As they dried, we sat together at a picnic table in the shade. Eberhart ate a cheese danish and drank a cup of coffee. He looked deeply content.

“You know what, Rob?” he said, unprompted. “You can be a whole lot happier if it don’t take a whole lot to make you happy.”

He thought for a moment.

“You know when you see a child, and you see that innocence, that glow in a child’s face? It goes away when we grow out of childhood, and it doesn’t come back almost until you’re old and feeble. But you still occasionally see it in someone. They don’t even have to speak. You see it in their face; they have that inner joy, that inner peace. I hope you can see some glimmer of that in my face.”

His sunglasses were off, and he was staring me in the eye, earnestly. “So is it real or isn’t it, when you look at me?” he asked.

I looked at him closely, mildly unsettled by the directness of his question. There was indeed something radiant in him—his cheeks were glowingly pink, his eyes guileless and clear. But I also thought I detected something else, the faint smolder of an ancient anger, carefully suppressed. What peace there was seemed so fragile, so incipient, that I was wary of prodding it.

I dodged his question with another question: Was peace a lasting state of being, I asked, or was it something you had to continually work on?

“You work on it day to day,” he said. “It’s a daily pilgrimage, something that you renew. I would be miserable today if I let myself. And the peace that I’ve enjoyed these last number of years is fleeting. It could be gone in an instant.”

We packed up our rainflies, which had grown crisp in the sun. When we left, our packs felt lighter. The road entered a swampy marsh. Wind invisibly petted the wet green grass. Eberhart stopped and bowed his head to recite a prayer he had written. He adopted the cadence of an old cowboy poet, his voice misty with sincerity.

Lord, set me a path by the side of the road,

Pray this be a part of your plan.

Then heap on the burden and pile on the load,

and I’ll trek it the best that I can.

Please bless me with patience; touch strength to my back;

Then cut me loose and I’ll go.

Just like the burro toting his pack,

The oxen plowing his row.

And once on this journey, a witness for you,

Toward thy way, the truth, and the light.

Shine forth my countenance steady and true,

O’er the pathway to goodness and right.

And lest I should falter and lest I should fail,

Let all who know that I tried.

For I am a bungler, feeble and frail,

When you, dear Lord, I’ve denied.

So blessed be the day your judgment comes due,

And blessed be thy mercies bestowed.

And blessed be this journey, all praises to you,

O’er this path by the side of the road.

The prayer, he said, had come to him one day on his transcontinental hike from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Point Loma, California. He spoke it into a microcassette recorder that he used to carry, and transcribed it when he got home. He was fond of saying that he paused only to look up the words he didn’t know in the dictionary.

As we approached the Louisiana state line, the air began to prickle with heat. Eberhart’s shirt had turned a diaphanous shade of pink. At one of the convenience stores we passed, I filled up my water bottle with tap water. Outside, when I opened it to take a sip, I recoiled: it smelled like kerosene. Eberhart said that was common around here. “The last two or three places, they said, ‘Oh man, you don’t want to drink this stuff,’ ” he said. “In fact that one lady back there said, ‘Just go over there to the cooler and get yourself a bottle of water.’ Some of this stuff tastes pretty bad.”

Curiously, for a man who spent nearly all his waking hours outdoors, this pollution did not seem to greatly anger Eberhart. He wasn’t in support of pollution, of course, but he was skeptical of efforts to tighten environmental regulations any further. To him, personal freedom was sacrosanct, and anything that impinged on that freedom was dangerous.

“God put us here on this earth so that it can be productive and provide sustenance,” he explained. “Petroleum is a natural resource. So yeah, we’re going to use it up, eventually. Before that day comes, hopefully, they’ll bust the hydrogen molecule, and then, damn it, we’re going to the moon again! But until that day, what are we going to do? Go back and get the plow and the horse and build a cabin and burn firewood and fight off the Indians? What are we going to do? The Lord put these resources here for us.”

I was surprised, and I told him so. Based on his minimalist lifestyle, I’d assumed he would recommend a lighter footprint for other people as well.

“I’d be happy to talk to you about it, but I’m not going to force my lifestyle on you,” he replied. “That’s what’s happening. These things are being forced on me. I resent it. I absolutely resent it. If I want to buy an airplane and fill it full of a thousand gallons of fifty-dollar-a-gallon fuel, and I got the money to do it, goddamn it, leave me alone!”

A lengthy—at times, heated—discussion about the proper role of government regulation ensued. As we continued talking over this point, though, I discovered our disagreement was not so much political as epistemological; far from agreeing on the solution to pollution, we could not even agree on the existence of a problem. Environmental science, Eberhart believed, was “politicized and bastardized” by people with a dual agenda: to increase the government’s control over its citizens and the desire to put man above God. Darwinism, he argued, was also part of this ruse. He waved his hand at the land around us. “If you stand here and look out here across these fields, you can see that there is an order. You say that’s all just chaos, but it isn’t. There is an order. And that didn’t come from Darwin.”

I looked around. On either side of the road was tall marsh grass, which spilled lushly through a barbed wire fence, pushing the posts askew. That grass housed countless insects and reptiles and birds. When Eberhart looked out over those fields, he saw a divine creation, infused with purpose, perfectly designed and lovingly tended. Whereas when I looked at the same field, I saw the miracle of evolution—an infinitely complex constellation of particles, cells, bodies, and systems competing and cooperating, reproducing and dying off, self-­perpetuating and yet always in flux. I tried hard to imagine the field from his perspective, and then again from mine. Both were beautiful—even awe-inspiring—in their own ways.

“I believe in the Maker, I believe in the hereafter, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in these things as deep in my heart as anyone could,” he said. “Now, in all this discourse, I haven’t told you that you’re wrong. You can believe what you want, but I have the right to believe what I want. What do you expect from an old man who was raised in a church-based community, where right was right and wrong was wrong?”

By this point the afternoon heat had closed in around us like a bad hug. Sweat flies tangled, vibrating, in Eberhart’s beard. It grew too hot to argue, and we still had miles more to walk, so we fell into an uneasy silence. We were both relieved to reach the next stop, a truck-stop restaurant, where we sank into cool plastic chairs. A family of four gave us their leftover onion rings, fries, and a half-eaten burger. Five miles later, we stopped at another oasis of air conditioning. At the table next to us sat a mother with her two rambunctious young sons. The boys silently gaped at Eberhart as he walked past, then promptly forgot all about him and returned to torturing each other.

Their exhausted mother, who helped run the store, told us that this area had been hit by two hurricanes since 2005, and the store had been flooded both times. They weren’t able to get flood insurance anymore, so each time a hurricane approached, they simply packed all the merchandise into a U-Haul and tried to outrun it.

“But you keep coming back?” Eberhart said, wonderingly. “That is incredible.”

She explained that the hurricanes were unpredictable: “They hit and miss.” The last hurricane had left her bicycle right where she had left it on the lawn, but had hurled an old washing machine into the marsh behind her house. Sitting there, I pondered how it must feel to live in the shadow of such roiling, ravening complexity. I wondered if it would make me believe in a vengeful and capricious God, or no God at all.

I once read a study that found that in this very parish of Louisiana—­which is predicted by scientists to be severely damaged by rising sea levels and increased storms—more than half the population disagreed with the scientific consensus that human activity was altering the climate. Eberhart too was skeptical. (“It’s one hell of a leap of faith,” he’d said.) Indeed, when I considered it here, where the hurricanes raged worst, I was momentarily amazed by the idea that we tiny humans are capable of radically altering the planet, when for our whole existence it has tossed us around like so many ants. It was as if we had wounded one of the gods.

We are all children of landscapes. We first learn about the world in the place where we grow up; it shapes our language, our beliefs, and our expectations. I was raised on the shores of Lake Michigan, among plunging ravines and manicured lawns, where human ingenuity reversed the flow of the Chicago River and converted the prairies into corn and concrete. Eberhart was from the northeastern Ozarks, a hard land, trod by Meriwether Lewis and terrorized by Jesse James, where lead ore was once pulled from the ground and hauled off by oxen until it ran out, leaving the people to scrape out a living from the acidic soil. This woman and her children were from a place where, any summer or fall, with little warning, a cloud could erase their lives.

The sun was setting by the time we left the store. We walked down the roadside searching for a dry place to sleep. First we looked behind a firehouse on stilts, then behind a cemetery named Head of the Hollow. On the far side of the graves, Eberhart spotted a motte of live oaks. He hopped nimbly over the barbed wire fence and ducked beneath their gnarled branches. “Beautiful!” he called out.

Inside was a shady grove, carpeted with slender, rippling leaves. We hurriedly set up camp and crawled into our nylon cocoons as mosquitoes descended like mist. I thought back to what Lamar Marshall had said, that Eberhart’s way of walking “defeats the whole damn purpose of being in the woods.” Here we had discovered a corner of wilderness that few people ever slept in, and it was truly lovely. “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth,” the poet Gary Snyder once said. “The planet is a wild place and always will be.”

+

Wilderness, according to William Cronon, is as illusory a concept as nature. He writes that wilderness is too often seen as an Edenic escape from the modern world—“the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.” It is both our fantasy and our fallback plan; we forgive the poisoning of our local waterways so long as Yellowstone remains pristine. “By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness,” he writes, “we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.”

But Cronon argues that unlike the concept of nature, which tends to narrow our thinking, wilderness can broaden it. In the wild, we witness firsthand that there is a world of stunning complexity that existed prior to us and will always stubbornly resist our attempts to simplify it. “In reminding us of the world we did not make,” Cronon writes, “wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself.” (This lesson, Cronon writes, “applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things.” So his “wilderness” and Scheler’s “fellow feeling” are, oddly enough, kindred concepts.)

On a farm, the land is narrowly defined by how it profits the farmer—he sees little more than crops, soil, storm clouds, pests, debt. But the defining feature of wilderness is its unruly condition: it is the land we leave to grow wild. The wilderness has always been defined as the land out there, beyond the fence, not-self, not-home. It is open land, which no one owns, and no one can claim to fully know. Throughout history it has offered a home to all manner of prophets, explorers, ascetics, outcasts, rebels, fugitives, and freaks. Some, like Muir, found it holy; others, like the Puritans, found it horrible. None, however, could hope to fully grasp it; it is forever beyond us. Perhaps this is why the wilderness, as sung into being by Thoreau—“this vast, savage, howling Mother”—has managed to retain its transcendent power in our increasingly secularized and post-natural society. Whether it be a snowy mountaintop or a shady grove, the wild is a place where both Eberhart and I, different as we may be, could feel bathed in the same cosmic light.

On wild land, wild thoughts can flourish. There, we can feel all the ragged edges of what we do not know, and we make room for other living things to live differently. Cronon boldly concludes his essay on wilderness by asserting that we must learn to reinfuse this sense of the wild back into the human landscape—for instance, to see even the trees in our backyards as wild things—and to reframe our understanding of the wilderness so that it can contain us within it. The next great leap in our ecological consciousness, he argues, would be to “discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.’ ”

+

The following day was my last with Eberhart. A little after dawn we snuck back to the road and resumed walking eastward. Hot gray skies pressed earthward. Somewhere, a marsh was burning. To our left were vast ranchlands. A helicopter hovered low over them, releasing a fine chemical mist. Off to the right, bulbous storm clouds floated in from the gulf, trailing gray tentacles.

In ten miles, at the storm-ravaged town of Holly Beach, I would hitch a ride back to Houston with a group of touring Danes, rewinding, in an hour, all the progress we had made in three days. But that morning, the end still seemed a long way off, and my legs had already begun to ache. Walking on the uniform surface of a road for days wears on the body in the same way working in a factory does. The same motion is repeated, with very little variance, thousands of times each day. Odd body parts grow sore: the backs of the knees, the bottoms of the feet.

Eberhart, meanwhile, seemed fine. His posture was hunched, and he had a slight hitch in his right step, but his stride, from the outset, was remarkably steady: three miles an hour, on the tick. From time to time he stopped, leaned forward on his trekking poles, and swung first one leg backward, then the other, to loosen them up. Throughout the day, to ease his pains, he swallowed handfuls of aspirin and joint supplements.

At his age, after all he had experienced, it was amazing he could hike at all. On his journeys, he had broken four ribs, his shinbone, and his ankle. He had suffered from excruciating bouts with shingles and an abscessed tooth. He had visited unspeakable horrors upon his feet. Once, up in Canada, he had been struck by lightning. To help me understand the sensation, he asked me to imagine being soaked in gasoline and then touched by a lit match. “It goes VOOSH,” he said. “There’s no vibration or nothing. It just passes through you.”

He told me that when he was a young man, he had been taller than me, standing almost six feet tall, but over the years his spine had compressed. “I’m shrinking,” he said. “My body is shrinking, my mind is shrinking, my vocabulary is shrinking. My ability to maintain a thought sequence, it’s not gone, but it’s not like it was ten years ago. Part of the thing is . . .” he paused. “Look at that flatware!” he exclaimed as he bent down to pick up a crippled fork. “Look at that! Is that beautiful?”

One of his hobbies, he told me, was to collect discarded silverware along the side of the road. He said he hoped to one day put together a full “flatware set” of flattened utensils, eight of each.

All along our hike, he had picked up other shiny objects as well: coins, keys, marbles, car wash medallions, hearing aid batteries. When he reached the next post office, he would mail all that he had collected back to his sister’s house, where he stored his findings in two Mason jars.

This habit of picking up jetsam on the side of the road fascinated me. It was perhaps the starkest of his many ironies. In virtually all other respects, he was a fanatical minimalist. Even at home, he saw these, the last years of his life, as a process of winnowing. He owned scarcely more than he could fit in his truck. In his sister’s basement was also a cardboard box full of mementos, photographs, a few sentimental objects that had belonged to his parents. He said he was struggling to work up the nerve to get rid of those as well, but shedding childhood attachments was “a tough, tough process.”

“I tell my friends: Every year I’ve got less and less, and every year I’m a happier man. I just wonder what it’s going to be like when I don’t have anything. That’s the way we come, and that’s the way we go. I’m just preparing for that a little in advance, I guess.”

A few minutes later, Eberhart paused at the intersection of a gravel road to show me the contents of his pack. He spread out his things in the dust. There was a tarp tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, the small bag of electronics, a hint of a medical kit, a plastic poncho, his maps, a pair of ultralight wind pants, and the pile of metal junk. All the fabrics had the wispiness of gossamer; a strong wind could have taken most of his earthly possessions away.

To cook his meals, he used to rely on a tiny wood-fired stove of his own invention, but he had since ditched that. He listed some of the other things he had brought on his first thru-hike but later discarded. He had traded his heavy leather boots for trail running shoes. He exchanged a three-pound internal frame pack for an eight-ounce frameless one, and a three-pound synthetic sleeping bag for a one-pound down bag (with the zippers trimmed off). Instead of a toothbrush, he carried a wooden toothpick. He did not carry a spare change of socks, a spare set of shoes, or any spare clothes. He did not carry any reading material, or even a notebook. He did not carry toilet paper. (Instead, he used the subcontinental rinse-and-rub method. When water was scarce, he rinsed with his own urine, which he then cleaned off with a careful splash of water.) His medkit contained little more than a few Band-Aids, a pile of aspirin, and a sliver of a surgical blade.

Shaving down one’s pack weight, he said, was a process of sloughing off one’s fears. Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. The “last vestige” of fear that even the most minimalist hikers have trouble shedding, he said, was starvation. As a result, most people ended up carrying “way the hell too much food.” He did not even carry so much as an emergency candy bar.

Earlier, I had asked him if he was afraid to die. He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. He told me his grandfather had died in the woods (of a heart attack while hunting), his father died in the woods (of a chainsaw accident while gathering firewood), and he was “working on it.”

“I threw my fears and worries away a long, long time ago about being out in the wild,” he said. “I’ve been out there so long and so far, by myself, and never felt more at peace and more secure and more in my element. It’s not an adrenaline pump or anything like that. It’s a resignation just to let it be the way it’s going to be.”

As I picked over his gear, one question kept nagging at me. Feeling sheepish, I asked if the rumor I’d heard was true: Did he have all his toenails surgically removed?

He smiled. “Oh, sure,” he said.

He sat down and pulled off his tattered sneakers, and then peeled off his socks. His ankles were a shocked shade of pale below the sock line. His pink toes, rimmed with yellow calluses, were long and knobby. When I looked closer, I saw that it was true: They had no nails, except for a few whiskery fibers that were trying to grow back.

He said that whenever people questioned his dedication to the life he had chosen, or tried to downplay his journeys as a mere lark, he would pull off his shoes and show them his feet.

“Can you imagine what it’s like to have all your damn toenails ripped out at the roots and then have acid poured on them so they won’t grow back?” he said. “Do you have any idea what that feels like? You think that’s a lark?”

+

Back home, I tracked Eberhart’s progress from the journal entries he periodically posted on his website. He reached the end of his walk one night in Florida, where he knelt beneath a streetlight and said a prayer of thanks. He had told me that this would be his last thru-hike. But the following summer, he was back on the road, walking the full length of the Oregon Trail, followed, in subsequent years, by the California Trail and the Mormon Pioneer Trail. The last time we spoke, he said he was planning to finish hiking the Pony Express Trail, from Missouri to California. On and on he’ll go, as long as his feet will carry him.

As one of Eberhart’s favorite poets, Robert Service, once wrote:

The trails of the world be countless, and most of the trails be tried;

You tread on the heels of the many, till you come where the ways divide;

And one lies safe in the sunlight, and the other is dreary and wan,

Yet you look aslant at the Lone Trail, and the Lone Trail lures you on.

And somehow you’re sick of the highway, with its noise and its easy needs,

And you seek the risk of the by-way, and you reck not where it leads . . .

Often it leads to the dead-pit; always it leads to pain;

By the bones of your brothers ye know it, but oh, to follow you’re fain.

By your bones they will follow behind you, till the ways of the world are made plain.

Bid good-by to sweetheart, bid good-by to friend;

The Lone Trail, the Lone Trail follow to the end.

Han-shan too wrote honestly about not only the glories of the simple life, but its hardships as well. He bemoaned his crippled body, salivated over the lavish food he had renounced (roast duck, fried pork cheek, steamed baby pig in garlic), and wept over dead friends. Like Eberhart, he left his wife and son so he could roam freely. The ramifications of that decision reverberate throughout his writing; he fondly recalls the sound as his infant son “gurgles and coos”; he has haunting dreams where he returns to his wife, only to find she no longer recognizes him. A chilly sense of regret creeps into even his sunniest remembrances. “How could I know beneath the pines / I would hug my knees in a frigid wind?” he asks.

Reading these lines, I can’t help but think of Eberhart, nearing his eighth decade on this planet, sleeping on the hard ground. (“Oh, my arthritic, bony old body,” he wrote in his journal one cold desert night in West Texas. “I’ll be listening to it complain, for sure.”) This is what is left when the haze of romance has burned away. This is the cost of freedom. Every year, the lone, lean life grows harder. “Up high,” Han-shan wrote, “the trail turns steep.” And yet he went on climbing.

I had gone in search of Eberhart, the modern nomad, to see what my life might have looked like if I had chosen to pursue the life of simplicity a long trail affords. Walking with him, I witnessed both the advantages and disadvantages of a life honed down to a single point: the finer the edge, the more brittle the blade. Eberhart had opted for the path toward maximal freedom, which meant shunning comfort, companionship, and security: he may have to sleep on the ground, but he can sleep anywhere he likes. If he gets sick or injured, he may well die, but, he figures, at least he’ll die outdoors.

“It is pleasant to be free,” wrote Aldous Huxley, who, like Eberhart, for years owned little more than an automobile and a few books. “But occasionally, I must confess, I regret the chains with which I have not loaded myself. In these moods I desire a house full of stuff, a plot of land with things growing on it; I feel that I should like to know one small place and its people intimately, that I should like to have known them for years, all my life. But one cannot be two incompatible things at the same time. If one desires freedom, one must sacrifice the advantages of being bound.”

Freedom, in other words, has its own constraints. Snipping what Han-shan called “the world’s ties” can come as a relief—from the demands of a job, the constant upkeep of a house, even the obligations of friends or family—but those same ties are often what give our lives meaning and provide a buffer against calamity. Sacrifice is unavoidable.

Whether or not we agree with their choices, the dedication these men have to living a free life presents us with an unsettling question: What do we value above all? Is there anything we hold as dear as Eberhart and Han-shan hold their freedom? And to gain it, what would we be willing to lose? What wouldn’t we? And then what does that tell us about what we really value above all?

+

Old age brings with it another kind of liberation: freedom from the doubt, angst, and restlessness of youth. The old can look back and see their decisions as a single concatenation, sheared of all the ghostly, untaken routes. Heidegger, a forest-dwelling philosopher enchanted with the earthy wisdom of the Feldweg (field path) and the Holzweg (wood path), discussed his life in this manner. Three years before his death, he wrote to his friend Hannah Arendt: “Looking back over the whole path, it becomes possible to see that the walk through the field of paths is guided by an invisible hand, and that essentially one adds little to it.” But he was able to make that judgment only with the benefit of hindsight. Fate is an optical illusion. From the vantage of a thirty-year-old like me, life’s path still bristles with spur trails and possible dead ends.

And so we return, once again, to the essential question: How do we select a path through life? Which turns should we take? To what end?

To be able to answer these questions, deftly and with foresight, is what we mean when we say someone is wise. Wisdom—not intelligence, not cleverness, not even moral goodness, but wisdom—is what guides us through the unknown. Perhaps the word wisdom sounds hoary to your ear. (Indeed, it does to mine.) As the philosopher Jim Holt has written, it has fallen out of vogue with philosophers in recent decades; the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “wisdom has come to vanish almost entirely from the philosophical map.” Ancient philosophers defined wisdom as a way to “maximize the good.” However, contemporary philosophers have shied away from discussing wisdom, because they view it as an overly “value-­saturated concept.” “It is not that philosophers are daunted or bored by wisdom,” Holt writes. “Rather, they have concluded that there is no single right balance of elements that constitutes ‘the good life for man,’ and hence no unitary value that wisdom can help us maximize.”

He goes on:

Suppose you are torn between dedicating your life to art (say, by becoming a concert pianist) or to helping others (say, by going to medical school and joining Doctors Without Borders). How do you decide? There is no common currency in which artistic creation and moral goodness might be compared; these are but two of a plurality of incommensurable values that can be realized in a human life. Do you then ask yourself which choice will bring you greater future happiness? That’s no good either, for the path you choose will shape the very person you become, along with the preferences you develop; so to base your decision on the satisfaction of those preferences would be circular.

It is time, I believe, to return to the question of wisdom, but to approach it from a new angle. As Holt points out, wisdom is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but I think we can safely describe it as a time-tested means of choosing how to live. The element of time is essential. There is a valid reason that, across millennia and across cultures, wisdom has always been considered the province of old people and old books. Likewise, it is no coincidence that many of the transcultural markers of human wisdom (patience, equanimity, foresight, compassion, impulse control, an ability to reside in uncertainty) are exactly those qualities which children notably lack. Wisdom is a rarified form of intelligence born of experience, the result of carefully testing your beliefs against reality. You make an attempt at solving a problem, and sometimes you stumble upon success; other times you make mistakes, and then you correct them. Over time you learn, you adapt, you grow. In other words, wisdom is a form of judgment that evolves.

The notion that wisdom must contain subjective values (must prize, for example, moral purity over artistic virtue, or vice versa) is a specious one. Wisdom is the means by which entities reach their varied ends—by which they gain power or create beauty or help others. Wisdom is structural, not ethical. (Machiavelli, for example, was one very wise, very unethical figlio di puttana.) In fact, I would argue that all very old things attain a certain kind of wisdom. There is, if we were to look closely enough, a wisdom of trees and a wisdom of seagrass, a wisdom of mountains and a wisdom of rivers, a wisdom of planets and a wisdom of stars. This book, in its admittedly oblique and winding way, has been a search for the wisdom of trails. It is the wisdom required to reach one’s ends while making one’s way across an unknown landscape, whether it be a sandy seafloor, a new field of knowledge, or the full expanse of a human life. It is deeply human, this wisdom, deeply animal—and it has tremendous bearing on our personal and collective future.

Wisdom is measured by function. Trails that fulfill the needs of their walkers get used, and used trails persist. Those qualities that lead to greater use, and greater longevity, naturally become the essence of a trail’s wisdom. One of the reasons that trails are so relevant to the modern human condition is that they are fervently open-minded: a wise trail can go anywhere and carry anyone. However, every trail is not as wise as every other trail; nondiscrimination is not the same thing as radical relativism. Any forest walker can tell you this—some trails simply work better. We can then wonder: Are there some qualities that wise trails—the trails that get better with time—hold in common?

I will venture a guess, which I hope will be improved by others in the future. What unites the wisest trails, I have found, is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, and flexibility. If a trail has only one of these qualities it will not persist for long: a trail that is too durable will be too fixed, and will fail when conditions change; a trail that is too flexible will be too flimsy, and will erode; and a trail that is too efficient will be too parsimonious, and so will lack resilience. The pheromone trails that ants make, for example, brilliantly balance durability and flexibility: they last long enough to lead other ants to a food source but fade quickly enough to allow new paths to form. And ants invariably find the most efficient route, but then wisely temper that route with redundant detours, ensuring a backup plan in case the best route suddenly fails. The result is a trail that is not just time-tested, as we often say, but world-tested. Or perhaps even more precisely, the trail is in a constant state of world-testing, adapting to the world even as its conditions change.

Without ever naming it as such, humans have been putting the wisdom of trails to great use since our inception as a species. Science, technology, storytelling: all masterfully exploit the supple wisdom of trails. Our many forms of understanding the world resemble nothing so much as the trail-wise problem-solving of ants: We test multiple theories against the complexity of the world, and then pursue those that work. The better routes last, the worse ones erode, and little by little those that work improve.

It is in this trail-wise manner that we most effectively navigate a world of forking paths. Holt’s hypothetical person, for instance, could conceivably research both paths before making a fateful decision. She could pursue both ideals, making forays into each field (long hours spent at the piano; introductory classes in medicine), to suss out which better suits her abilities and proclivities. Holt astutely points out that her goals and values will shift depending on which path she takes. So let her explore both, and see how each begins to shape her. In case she fails at one pursuit or finds it unsatisfying, she can leave herself open to pursuing the other, or some new offshoot she may have never otherwise discovered. Wisdom often wanders: St. Augustine, Siddhārtha, Li Po, Thomas Merton, Maya Angelou—the insight of each was deepened by a wild and meandering youth. “Seeking and blundering are good,” wrote Goethe, “for it is only by seeking and blundering we learn.”

Indeed, some blundering is good. But a lifetime of blundering—to be condemned to a pathless wilderness—would be a nightmare. Fortunately, we do not wander alone. This is where the other half of a trail-wise way of life comes to the fore: The brilliance of trails stems from the fact that they can preserve the most fruitful of our own wanderings, as well as the wanderings of others; then, as those paths are followed, their wisdom further improves and spreads. Likewise, through collaboration and communication, personal wisdom is transformed into collective wisdom.

As the author and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1904, the thrust of human history thus far has been to develop “lines of connection,” which ultimately add up to what she called the “social organism”:

Watch the lines of connection form and grow, ever thicker and faster as the Society progresses. The trail, the path, the road, the railroad, the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural delivery; thus Society is held together. Save for the wilful hermit losing himself in the wilderness, every man has his lines of connection with the others; the psychic connection, such as “family ties,” “the bonds of affection,” and physical connection in the path from his doorstep to the Capital city.

The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social stimulus and impulse.

More than a hundred years later, these words have proven surprisingly prescient. Gradually, our collective intelligence has grown—­beyond communities, beyond countries, beyond even our own species. Every day, humans carry on conversations across oceans and intuit the intentions of other organisms, weaving a diverse array of needs into a broader plan of action; in this way, we are slowly transcending ourselves. At the same time, our ability to alter the environment—to change the chemical makeup of the sea and sky, to snuff out whole ecosystems—is growing radically as well. The question remains whether the growth of our collective wisdom can keep pace with our capacity for destruction, whether all of us—“walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together”—can cooperate to reach our mutual aims.

Over the course of millennia, our first tentative trails have sprawled into a global network, allowing individuals to reach their ends faster than ever before. But one unintended consequence of this shift has been that many of us now spend much of our lives within a world made up of little more than connectors and nodes, desire lines and objects of desire. The danger of such a blinkered existence is that the more effectively these trails deliver us to our ends, the more they can insulate us from the world’s complexity and flux, which results in structures that are dangerously fragile, fixed, or myopic. No matter how vast our collective wisdom grows, we would also be wise not to forget how small it is in comparison to the broader universe. “The attempt to make order out of disorder and chaos, tohu va vohu, is the essence of every human life,” a wise old man named Baruch Marzel once told the essayist David Samuels. “But stories are never the truth. The truth is chaos.”

The old man is right, but this is only half the story. The ontological truth—the deep reality of the world—is chaos. But the pragmatic truth—the truth we can actually use, the truth that leads us somewhere—is chaos refined. The former is a wilderness, the latter is a path. Both are essential; both are true.

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Han-shan died more than a thousand years ago, yet we know what little we do about him because, throughout the seven decades of his hermitage, he wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poems. Forgoing paper, he scribbled his thoughts on trees and rocks and cliffs and the walls of buildings, sometimes, one imagines, graffitiing descriptions of the landscape directly onto the landscape itself. (Some three hundred of these poems were ultimately transcribed and preserved by imperial officials.) In a poem written late in his life, Han-shan recalled visiting a village he’d once lived in seventy years prior. All the people he’d known were now dead and buried. Only he was left. The poem concludes with a proclamation:

here’s a message for those to come

why not read some old lines

I like to imagine this maxim scrawled onto the wall of an abandoned hut in the village. How baffling it must have seemed to passersby. On the one hand, the words are slightly absurd: writing that people should read more is like using your one magical wish to wish for more wishes. But in the end he’s right: What else do we have to guide us through this life but—in Han-shan’s perfect phrase—these “old lines”?

As Nietzsche once wrote: “The happiest fate is that of the author who, as an old man, is able to say that all there was in him of life-­inspiring, strengthening, exalting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings, and that he himself now only represents the gray ashes, whilst the fire has been kept alive and spread out. And if we consider that every human action, not only a book, is in some way or other the cause of other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that everything that happens is inseparably connected with everything that is going to happen, we recognize the real immortality, that of movement—­that which has once moved is enclosed and immortalized in the general union of all existence, like an insect within a piece of amber.”

We are born to wander through a chaos field. And yet we do not become hopelessly lost, because each walker who comes before us leaves behind a trace for us to follow. The full span of trail-making on earth, in its broadest sense—all the walks, all the stories, all the experiments, all the networks—can be seen as part of a great communal yearning to find better, longer-lasting, more supple ways of sharing wisdom and preserving it for the future. Ultimately, Han-shan’s genius, born from a life spent wandering and pondering trails, was to realize that inherited wisdom can take us far, but only so far. After that, we must explore all on our own.

When I started this book, I wanted to know what hand was guiding me along the Appalachian Trail. The answer, like the trail itself, expanded to planetary proportions and stretched back to earliest prehistory. I came to realize that I was being guided not by an invisible hand, but by a visible line: a path inscribed by trillions of living things, all setting forth, leading, following, veering off, connecting, finding shortcuts, and leaving their marks. The history of life on this planet can be seen as a single path made in the walking of it. We are all the inheritors of that line, but also its pioneers. Every step, we push forward into the unknown, following the path, and leaving a trail.

An old legend, passed down through the centuries, tells that Han-shan was last seen stepping into a crack in the face of Cold Mountain, which miraculously sealed shut behind him. At last, he had become one with the mountain he called home. All that remained of him were the lines he left behind.

I. This translation comes from Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems. The other translations in this chapter have all been taken from Red Pine’s The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Both are excellent; Snyder’s is more lyrical, while Red Pine’s is more academically precise and exhaustively complete.

II. Incidentally, Norman was also the first woman to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail (albeit in discontinuous fashion). On her hike, she subsisted off of uncooked oatmeal, brown sugar, dried milk, and whatever wild foods she could gather along the trail. She described her thru-hike as a “toughening process” that prepared her for her lifelong pilgrimage.