On Trails

CHAPTER 1

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to fully appreciate the value of a trail until you have been forced to walk through the wilderness without one. There is a practical reason why, for more than a thousand years, after the fall of Rome and before the rise of Romanticism, little was more abhorrent to the European mind than the prospect of a “pathless” or “tangled” wilderness. Dante famously described the feeling of finding oneself in a “wild, harsh and impenetrable” forest without a path as “scarcely less bitter than death.”

Five hundred years later, a Romantic like Lord Byron could proclaim that there is “a pleasure in the pathless woods,” but only once the wilds of Western Europe had been tamed and caged. By that point, the true “pathless wilderness” was believed to exist only on other continents, like North America, where the phrase was still being used well into the nineteenth century.I The American wilderness came to symbolize an inhospitable and far-off land, cold, cruel, and uncivilized. At the Boston Railroad Jubilee in 1851, the politician Edward Everett described the land between Boston and Canada as a “horrible wilderness, rivers and lakes unspanned by human art, pathless swamps, dismal forests that it made the flesh creep to enter . . .”

Pathless wildernesses still exist in the modern world, and at least some have retained their power to elicit dread. I have visited one such place. It lay on the northern rim of a glacial fjord called Western Brook Pond, on the island of Newfoundland, in Canada’s easternmost province. If you want to be taught (however harshly) the blessing of a well-marked trail, go there.

To cross the fjord’s stygian waters, I had to hire a ferryboat. Aboard the ferry, the captain explained that the water below the boat was so pure (in a hydrologist’s terms, so ultraoligotrophic) that it bordered on nonexistence; he said it played havoc with the sensors in modern water pumps because the water couldn’t even carry an electrical current.

On the far side of the fjord, the captain dropped me and four other hikers off at the base of a long ravine, where a series of animal trails led through a dense fern jungle and up a granite cliff face bisected by a waterfall. This was my first hiking trip since returning home from the Appalachian Trail. I felt strong; my pack was light. Weaving through the tall ferns, I quickly passed the other hikers. At the top of the ravine I found a vast green tableland. The trail I had been following vanished altogether. Soaked in sweat from the hike up, I took a moment to rest, my feet dangling over the cliff’s edge. At the ragged western edge of the tableland, it abruptly dropped hundreds of feet to the fjord’s indigo water.

I sat and watched as the other hikers wound their way up the ravine. Once they had reached the top, the other four hikers all headed south, along a more scenic route. Watching them go, laboring beneath their heavy packs, I felt a swell of confidence. I rose, map and compass in hand, and headed north. This shouldn’t be too tough, I thought. After all, it’s only sixteen miles.

As I began hiking, however, that confidence soon withered. One might suppose that, after a lifetime of walking within the rigid confines of trails and pathways—from wilderness footpaths to the moving walkways in airports—it would come as a relief to roam free in any direction. But this was not the case. A low bass beat of terror throbbed behind my every decision. I was alone, and without any means of communication save a small, park-issued radio locator beacon, which resembled a large plastic pill with a wire hanging out of it. It could be used, I had been assured, to track me down if the park ranger’s office hadn’t heard from me for more than twenty-four hours after my scheduled return. It seemed a wonderful device for recovering corpses.

More bedeviling though, was the sheer number of minuscule choices I was forced to make at each turn. Even with a rough idea of where I was meant to go, there were still countless decisions to make at any one moment: whether to slant uphill or down; whether this tuft of grass or that would support my weight as I tiptoed across a bog; whether to hop along the rocks on a lakeshore’s edge or bash my way through the bush. In every landscape, as in every mathematical proof, there are countless routes one can take to the solution, but some are elegant and others are not.

My navigational woes were compounded tenfold by the problem of what Newfoundlanders call “Tuckamore”—groves of spruce and fir that have been dwarfed by strong winds. From afar, the trees resemble a scrum of fairy-tale hags, all hunches and claws. Like most elfinwood trees, they can grow for centuries without ever reaching any higher than one’s chin. What they lack in height, they gain in hardiness.

Countless times on my hike, I would reach a section where a small grove of Tuckamore stood between me and where I needed to be. I would glance at my watch to mark the time, estimating it should take no more than ten minutes to cross. Then I would take a deep breath and enter the low green copse. It was like dipping into a nightmare. Suddenly the air was dark, and the space apportioned chaotically. As I fought to take each step, branches clawed red gashes into my skin and pulled the water bottles from the pockets of my backpack. Out of frustration, I tried stomping on the trees, to break them, or at least to punish them, but to no avail; they sprang back, unharmed. Here and there a set of moose or caribou prints would form a narrow, muddy game trail, but after a short while it would dwindle or veer astray. Off to the left, a pocket of sunlight would appear, and I would follow it, only to find a pool of mud. It was like moving through a labyrinth that left you no choice but to, from time to time, lower your shoulder and charge your way through the walls.

At last, exhausted and bleeding, I would emerge. My watch would reveal that an hour had passed, and I had covered no more than fifty yards.

Eventually, I learned to pick my way through these mazes by watching the movements of the moose. One trick moose use is to follow waterways, which, though muddy, often find the most expedient path through a thicket. They also walk with high, arching steps to flatten the branches underfoot. It was in perfecting this technique that I came to my greatest revelation: at one point near the end of the hike, I found that by counterintuitively selecting the densest bunches of Tuckamore, I could actually lift myself up and walk along the tops of the trees like a wuxia warrior.

By nightfall on the second day, I was at least two miles off course. It had already taken me a day longer than I had expected to hike the mere sixteen miles, and not once had I spent the night on level ground or near fresh water.

All night a light rain fell. Around dawn, I awoke from my bivouac high atop a ridge to observe a wide band of hyacinth sky moving toward me. At first I perceived this lovely sight as a break in the clouds and lay back down to sleep. But as I turned back to my sleeping bag, I noticed the purple stripe was finely veined with lightning. It was not clear sky, I realized, but a massive storm cloud stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. It let out a soft digestive growl.

Within the space of a half hour, the storm cloud rushed overhead. The air was crazed with rain. Fearing a lightning strike, I scrambled out of my sleeping bag, out from under my tarp, and down to the lowest point I could find. There I crouched on my sleeping mat on the balls of my feet, hands over my head, shaking and drenched, as delicate strings of light detonated all around me.

For the better part of an hour, awash in mounting waves of tympanic rumble, I had time to reconsider the merits of hiking. Stripped of its Romantic finery, the wild ceased to inspire; only a gauzy scrim separated sublimity and horror. Jacques Cartier, upon visiting this island in 1534, declared that he was “inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain.” He was right. It was a dark and pestilential place. The apparent beauty was only a ruse to lure you into its flytrap maw. I vowed to myself that if I made it out of this alive, I would never hike again.

Upon seeing the Earth’s true brutality unmasked, authors throughout history have expressed a similar sense of disillusionment, even betrayal. In his semiautobiographical short story “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane captured the chilling moment when a shipwreck victim realizes that nature is “indifferent, flatly indifferent.” Annie Dillard—after watching a giant water bug gruesomely devour a frog—grapples with the possibility that “the universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die.” Goethe went one step further, calling the universe “a fearful monster, forever devouring its own offspring.” Kant, Nietzsche, and Thoreau all describe nature not as a mother, but as a “stepmother”—a winking reference to the wicked villainesses of German lore.

The English writer Aldous Huxley came to this realization while walking through the wilds of Borneo. Being fussy about his lodgings and terrified of cannibals, Huxley preferred to stick to “the Beaten Track.” But one day eleven miles outside of Sandakan, the paved road he was traveling along abruptly ended, and he was forced to trek through the jungle. “The inside of Jonah’s whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker or damper,” he wrote. Lost in that mute, hot twilight, even the cries of birds startled him, which he imagined to be the whistles of devilish natives. “It was with a feeling of the profoundest relief that I emerged again from the green gullet of the jungle and climbed into the waiting car. . . . I thanked God for steam-rollers and Henry Ford.”

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is “a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds.” Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been “enslaved to man.” In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn’t. “Nature,” Huxley wrote, “is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic.” And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.

Once the rain had ceased, I shook the water from my tarp, packed my things, and began walking to get warm. I found myself looking with new admiration upon the Tuckamore, which looked unfazed by the storm—nourished, even. Those rugged little trees were perfectly fitted to their niche, sculpted by the wind, deeply rooted to their land. I, meanwhile, was a perpetual wanderer, ill-equipped, maladapted, and lost.

Three hours later, after a few more harrowing misadventures (ravines descended in vain; waterfalls tenuously traversed), I found my way to the endpoint of the unmarked wilderness, where a large pyr­amidal pile of rocks marked the beginning of the trail back down to Snug Harbour. I whooped and hollered, awash in the same relief Huxley felt upon spotting his chauffeur. The trail, however rough, would return me to the human realm. Delivered from chaos, I promptly forgot my former terror, fell in love with the earth anew, and once again desired to walk every inch of it.

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I had not traveled to Newfoundland to be mauled by trees. The hike was a mere diversion, a side trip. My ultimate destination was a yet more baffling and inaccessible wilderness: the distant past. I was making my way to a rocky outcropping on the island’s southeast corner, where I hoped to find the oldest trails on earth.

These fossil trails, which are roughly 565 million years old, date back to the dimmest dawn of animal life. Now fossilized and faint, each one is roughly a centimeter wide, like a fingertip’s errant brush across the surface of a drying clay pot. I had read all about them, but I wanted to touch them, to trace their runnels like a blind man. I hoped that encountering them up close would resolve a question I’ve long harbored, like an old thorn: Why do we, as animals, uproot ourselves rather than maintaining the stately fixity of trees? Why do we venture into places where we were not born and do not belong? Why do we press forward into the unknown?

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The world’s oldest trails were discovered one afternoon in 2008 by an Oxford researcher named Alex Liu. He and his research assistant were scouting for new fossil sites out on a rocky promontory called Mistaken Point, where a series of well-known fossil beds overlook the North Atlantic. Bordering one surface, Liu noticed, was a small shelf of mudstone that bore a red patina. The red was rust—an oxidized form of iron pyrite, which commonly appears in local Precambrian fossil beds. They scrambled down the bluff to inspect it. There, Liu spotted what many other paleontologists before him had somehow missed: a series of sinuous traces thought to be left behind by organisms of the Ediacaran biota, the planet’s earliest known forms of animal life.

The ancient Ediacarans, which likely went extinct around 541 million years ago, were exceedingly odd creatures. Soft-bodied and largely immobile, mouth-less and anus-less, some were shaped like discs, others like quilted mattresses, others like fronds. One unfortunate type is often described as looking like a bag of mud.

We can envision them only dimly. Paleontologists don’t know what color they were, how long they lived, what they ate, or how they reproduced. We do not know why they began to crawl—­perhaps they were hunting for food, fleeing a mysterious predator, or doing something else entirely. Despite all these uncertainties, what Liu’s trails undoubtedly suggest is that 565 million years ago, a living thing did something virtually unprecedented on this planet—it shivered, swelled, reached forth, scrunched up, and in doing so, at an imperceptibly slow pace, began to move across the sea floor, leaving a trail behind it.

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To reach the fossil trails at Mistaken Point, I flew to the town of Deer Lake and hitchhiked some seven hundred miles, taking a slow circuitous route that touched almost every corner of the island. Along the way I hiked mountains, swam in rivers, tasted icebergs, camped out, and slept on strangers’ couches. Newfoundland is ideal for bumming around; it has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, the people are generally congenial, and everyone seems to own a big automobile. Car ride by car ride, I made my way down to the island’s southeastern tip.

However, when I finally arrived at the park entrance, I was turned away. A vigilant park ranger forbid me to see the trails because I had failed to acquire the proper permits. Their location, I learned, was a matter of great secrecy due to the rise of so-called “paleo-pirates,” who had been known to carve out the more notable fossils and sell them to collectors.

Undeterred, I returned the following year—armed, this time, with the proper clearance. A saintly couple I had met the year before graciously offered to pick me up at the airport and give me a ride down to Trepassey, a town nicknamed the “Harbor of the Dead,” because its foggy waters had been the site of many shipwrecks. There, at an unprepossessing restaurant in the Trepassey Motel, I finally met with Alex Liu.

Having only read about him in press clippings, I imagined Liu as I did all paleontologists: gray at the temples, a pair of Savile Row spectacles perched on his nose, and behind them, the deep-creased eyes of a man who spends his days peering at small things lit by a harsh sun. But when Liu appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, I was surprised to discover a fresh-faced, raven-haired young man, not yet thirty, with a shy smile. Beside him were his two research assistants: Joe Stewart, who had the shorn head and handsomely punched-up physiognomy of a rugby player, and Jack Matthews, the youngest member of the group, whom I seemed to have caught in a brief hiatus in his metamorphosis from a mischievous boy into a kooky, brilliant, snowy-haired professor.

We shook hands, sat down, and ordered a round of beer and plates of fried fish. They ate heartily. Because money was tight, the team spent two out of every three nights in tents set up in an abandoned trailer park and the third night here at the motel to shower up and wash their clothes. Journalism, they assured me, was not the only field with dwindling resources. Each year, said Liu, university and government budgets for the dusty science of paleontology grew stingier. He smiled with resignation. “What I do is immensely important for understanding where we came from, but it has little wider social impact,” he said. “It’s not going to solve climate change. It’s not going to boost the economy.”

As a boy, Liu had loved dinosaurs, particularly those in Jurassic Park. The romance of those craning beasts, which he never fully outgrew, coupled with his love of fieldwork and knack for geology, drew him to fossil hunting. When he was pursuing his master’s degree at Oxford, he had planned to study ancient mammals, but he found the field crowded; his thesis project was spent studying the teeth of Eocene-era elephants in Egypt. For his PhD work, he turned to the much older and largely unstudied Ediacarans. “If I had taken on a mammal project, then I’d have been trying to answer questions that people have looked at for hundreds of years,” he said. “Whereas I knew that Ediacaran stuff was new, uncertain. And that was more enticing, really, because the questions are bigger.”

Of all the manifold questions surrounding these elusive, soft-­bodied animals, the biggest of all might concern the origins of animal movement. Some paleontologists theorize that the first Ediacaran trail-maker may have set off a series of morphological changes leading, in fits and starts, from a serene garden of swaying anemone-like creatures to today’s violent, skeletonized kingdom of sprinters, jumpers, flyers, swimmers, diggers, and walkers. It is rare in science to run across a big new question, and harder still to answer it, but Liu seemed to have this one by the scruff of its neck.

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For a respectable scientist, wading into the murky world of the Ediacarans is a treacherous endeavor. Information about that distant era is extremely limited, and even the most basic assumptions often prove unreliable. For instance, we still do not know for certain which kingdom of life the Ediacarans belonged to. At various times, it has been proposed that they could have been plants, fungi, colonies of single-celled organisms, or, according to the trace fossil expert Adolf Seilacher, a “lost kingdom” called Vendobionta. While most Ediacaran researchers tentatively agree that they were animals, recently, some have begun arguing that lumping all the known Ediacaran species into one kingdom or another may be too reductive, and each fossil must instead be re-taxonomized one by one.

Sitting next to him at dinner that night, it seemed odd to me that Liu, a soft-spoken and exceptionally careful researcher, was drawn to such a field. Liu told me he first became interested in Ediacarans during a class in his second year at Oxford with a professor named Martin Brasier, who spoke inspiringly about the mysteries of Precambrian fossils. Brasier—who died in a car accident in 2014, at the age of sixty-seven—was a Shiva-like figure among Ediacaran paleontologists, slashing down flimsy theories and widening the domain of that which cannot be definitively stated. In his 2009 book Darwin’s Lost World, Brasier briskly disassembled the principle of uniformity, which decrees that, natural laws being uniform, fossils can be better understood by studying living animals. Uniformitarianism has proved a powerful tool in many fields, Brasier admitted, but it ignores an organism’s profound interdependence with its environment. The theory’s efficacy therefore begins to break down in the Precambrian era, when there existed a radically altered oceanic ecosystem. “The world before the Cambrian was, arguably, more like a distant planet,” wrote Brasier.

To us land-dwellers, even the present-day deep sea is foreign, a crushing black space haunted by spectral oddities: glass squids, carnivorous jellyfish, a fever dream of fluorescence. But in the time when the Ediacarans thrived, the oceans were stranger still. The first Ediacaran to begin crawling around would have discovered a world devoid of predatory animals, with a seafloor covered either in thick bacterial mats or toxic sediment, and, possibly, a climate thawing from a worldwide glaciation event known as “Snowball Earth” (or, more recently, “Slushball Earth”). If that pioneering Ediacaran could see, it would have discovered an underwater desert patchily carpeted with gelatin. Here and there it may have spotted other, nonmobile Ediacarans, which resembled fleshy leaves, many-tendriled sea anemones, or low, round blobs: a whole world populated by brainless, jelly-quivering do-nothings.

The mystery Liu was trying to unravel—regarding the origins of animal movement—is central to solving the larger mystery of how that alien planet transformed into the natural world we all know. Muscular locomotion could have allowed animals to graze on the beefsteak-like bacterial mats and to attack other stationary organisms. The invention of violence might then have kicked off a biological arms race, prompting organisms to evolve hard shells and sharp teeth, the shields and swords that characterize the Cambrian fossil record. This hardening of animal bodies eventually led to the rise of trilobites and tyrannosaurs and Eocene-era Egyptian elephants—and us.

Before the discovery of Ediacaran fossils, and even for a while afterward, many prominent scientists argued that complex life began at the dawn of the Cambrian era. Looked at from a certain angle, the fossil record seemed to support this theory. Around 530 million years ago, like a symphony warming up, the fossil record began teeming with a cacophony of different fossil types. Further back than that was nothing: silence. Some scientists, like Roderick Murchison, a geologist and devout Christian, believed that this lack of evidence was geologic proof of a biblical genesis. (“And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures . . .’ ”)

Charles Darwin cautioned against this interpretation, writing in On the Origin of Species that, “We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.” He saw the entire geologic record as a history book stretching across multiple volumes. “Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries,” he wrote. “Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”

The truth, it now seems clear, is that Precambrian animals had existed in great numbers, but, being soft-bodied, had not lent themselves to fossilization. They crop up exceedingly rarely, in places like Mistaken Point, where the geologic conditions were just right.

After our dinner at the Trepassey Motel, once our plates had been taken away and dessert politely declined, Liu mentioned that another big question he has yet to answer is why the Ediacaran fossils of Newfoundland are so unusually well preserved. He suspected the Mistaken Point assemblage was smothered in a Pompeii-like flow of volcanic ash and impressed into the bacterial mats on the seafloor. He would have liked to test this hypothesis in a lab, but it had proved tricky, because he would need fresh volcanic ash.

Fortunately, Liu’s girlfriend, Emma, was a volcanologist.

“Have you got Emma running around with a bucket to collect you some ash?” Stewart asked, grinning.

“I’ve asked her if she would,” Liu nodded, sincerely. “She was in Montserrat, in the Caribbean, last summer, and that’s exactly the right type of ash. But it didn’t erupt.”

Stewart laughed. “You may be the only man on the planet,” he said, “who, when his girlfriend goes to the Caribbean, hopes the volcanoes will erupt.”

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Around our second round of beers, the scientists’ conversation turned to the topic of humans. They noted that research into the origins of life provokes an irrational vitriol in many people. Liu mentioned that one of his supervisors, upon publishing a paper about a fifty-­million-year-old monkey fossil he had discovered, soon began receiving death threats from creationists. I was reminded of a similar story I’d heard from a former tour guide in New Hampshire. During one of her bus tours, she had mentioned to a group of children that the granite cliffs visible through their windows were some two hundred million years old. The students’ chaperone jumped up and wrenched the microphone from the guide’s hand to assure the children that what she’d meant to say was that the rocks were two thousand years old. Covering the microphone, the chaperone explained to the tour guide that it was their church’s teaching that the universe was created by God only six thousand years ago. She asked the tour guide to, in the future, please be a bit more respectful of people’s differing belief systems.

Liu wryly remarked that he would have little trouble disproving such an assertion.

“But you can’t,” Stewart said. “Because whatever evidence you put in front of them, they’re going to say it’s the devil deceiving you.”

These words pinged around in my head as I bid them goodnight and started off down the darkened road to the town’s beach, where I planned to camp for the night. A deceitful demon: the very same one Descartes summoned in 1641. How, the great cogitator had asked, do we know that what we see is not a pure hallucination, perpetrated upon us by a malignant, godlike figure? How do we know that what we perceive is really the world?

Aldous Huxley, having never forgotten the horror of his “stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster” in Borneo, went on to expand his prickly view of the wilderness into a kind of broad Kantian skepticism about the capacity of humans to ever directly experience reality. He cast the world-in-itself as a place of “labyrinthine flux and complexity,” which we are able to navigate only through imagination and invention. “The human mind cannot deal with the universe directly,” he wrote, “nor even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of thinking about the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic plan of the universe, only a simplified, two-dimensional map of things abstracted by the mind out of the complex and multifarious reality of immediate intuition.”

Huxley believed that knowledge, even when empirically proven, is only ever a map, never a view of the territory itself. But perhaps it is not so stark as that: perhaps knowledge is more like a trail—a hybrid of map and territory, artifice and nature—wending through a vast landscape. While science may provide a more reliable route to certain answers than, say, a creation myth, it remains narrow; it can reduce the environment to a navigable line, but it cannot encompass it. To a fervent believer in the scientific method, this thought can be unsettling. Great mysteries surround us all, like beasts slinking silently through the night—their presence can be intuited, or imagined, but never fully illuminated.

Paranoia blew gently on my neck as I combed the beach for a suitable place to set up my tent that night. I became convinced that wherever I chose to sleep, local troublemakers would decide to harass me during the night. I feared that in the town’s eyes I was seen as a homeless person, a foreign body to be expunged.

I erected the tent on a flat spot close to the road, but the headlights of each passing car swept over the tent, setting it aglow like a paper lantern. I could hear the cars’ passengers speaking in parabolas of intelligibility as they bent past. A few remarked on the oddity of my impromptu campsite, so I picked up the tent and moved it farther down the beach, where it was darker. In the long headlights of those cars, my shadow resembled that of a giant carrying an igloo.

At first I selected the flattest spot I could find, but I realized that I was squarely in the path of a set of 4x4 tracks coming from a nearby house. Later in the night, I would hear drunk teenagers speeding down that same path where I might have slept. Beer bottles tinkled onto the sand. At least one rider, a girl, spotted my encampment and said, “Oh, weird, there’s a tent down there.” I envisioned these antibodies gathering unseen around the tent, smiling, fingers to their lips.

As I lay awake, listening for the faint crunch of approaching footsteps, I thought back to something mentioned by one of the drivers I’d met while hitchhiking down to Mistaken Point. As she drove south along the coast, she had pointed to the hills to the west and told me that, not long ago, the countryside of Newfoundland was believed to be crisscrossed with “fairy paths.” Even now, she said, people occasionally reported seeing small blobs of light floating down these trails.

A fear of fairies traditionally prevented Newfoundlanders from building their houses over old paths. According to Barbara Gaye Rieti’s exhaustive folk history Newfoundland Fairy Traditions, those who obstructed fairy paths often heard strange sounds in the night, which, in at least one documented case, induced a nervous breakdown. Worse horrors still were visited upon their children; parents would return from some chore to find their baby missing, or lying paralyzed in its crib, or sitting open-mouthed with pain, its head grotesquely enlarged. Sometimes, instead of a baby, they would find a very small, very old person sitting upright in the bassinet, its hair whitened and its fingernails grown long and curled. In one especially nasty tale, a girl in St. John’s made the mistake of walking across a lane that ghosts frequented at night. As she crossed, she felt something smack the side of her head, which left a bruise. Back home, the bruise worsened and became infected. “A few days later,” Rieti wrote, “the infection broke and pieces of old cloth, rusty nails, needles, and bits of rock and clay were all taken from her face.”

As we had cruised south, the driver recounted stories of her family’s encounters with ghosts, fairies, white ladies, goblins, gypsies, and angels. She described in detail a time when a ghost or an angel—she and her husband quibbled over which it was—enveloped her in its arms and prevented her from being struck by a car while she was walking down a snowy road at night. Afterward, she sensed that the angel was following her home. When her dog rushed out of the house to greet her, it trotted right past her and stood at the end of the driveway with its snout angled upward, as if it were being petted by an invisible hand.

These stories unnerved me, because many of the details were so utterly mundane. The world looks clear and rigid in the bright light of the metropolis, but out here on the edge of the continent, in the murky night and gray fog, anything seemed possible.

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I awoke to a glassine dawn. Overnight the wind had gusted so hard it had ripped out two of the tent stakes. The beach was empty, blown clean. I groggily squirmed out of my sleeping bag, flattened the tent, and packed my things.

The night before I had agreed to meet Liu’s team at the motel for an early breakfast so we could spend the day fossil hunting. After breakfast, Stewart and I pillaged the local grocery store for picnic supplies—white bread, industrial chocolate chip cookies, hickory-­flavored potato sticks, and icy plums (“to keep away the scurvy,” he joked)—and then piled into the research team’s rental car, a Japanese SUV. The synthetic interior bore that rental car smell, the odor not of something new, but of something smudgily erased. The cargo area was packed with climbing ropes, a coil of metal wire, a yellow hard hat, blue aluminum camping bowls, a huge bag of Doritos, sleeping bags, a tent pole held together with electrical tape, a rock hammer, an inflatable raft, and tubs of platinum silicone rubber called Dragon Skin, which was used to make flexible casts of the fossil beds. If only its next renter could know what strange sights that vehicle had seen.

Liu’s plan for the day was to begin our tour at a prominent fossil site called Pigeon Cove, and then work our way forward in time, covering about ten miles on foot and by car. We would visit each of the area’s most impressive fossil beds, culminating at the surface where Liu had discovered the fossil trails.

Windows open to the hard sea wind, we raced across a landscape of stooped trees and yellowing grass to Pigeon Cove, where we got out and hiked down a dirt path to the seaside. There lay a flat slab of rock, the size and texture of three cracked concrete tennis courts, which sloped down into the sea. Its surface was a swirl of gray, chalkboard green, and dusty eggplant. Impressed into it were faint but distinct symbols. One looked like a fleshy frond. Another looked like an arrowhead, but in life probably resembled one of those conical corn snacks sold at gas stations, with its narrow end stuck into the ground. A third, which paleontologists call a “pizza disc,” was just a big, bubbly mess.

The team split up and set to their work. Liu pulled out a small black notebook and began making notes about the fossil surface in a neat semi-cursive, complete with illustrations and GPS coordinates. Stewart got down on his knees and began using a clinometer to measure the angle of the rock surface, in order to hunt for other surfaces of a similar age nearby. Matthews, dressed in a matronly white sun hat, used what looked like a jeweler’s loupe to search for evidence of zircon crystals, which could be used to radiometrically date the rock. Few of these surfaces had ever been systematically dated, in part because the zircon extraction process is extremely tedious and costly. Matthews tried to explain the process to me in terms I could understand.

“First I take the rock and I break it into tiny little bite-sized pieces, then I mill them down to powder. Then I sieve the powder. Then I mix that powder with water and put that over what’s called the Roger’s Table, which works on the same principle as panning for gold. I just sit there for hours with a big bucketful, spooning one tablespoonful at a time. The table jiggles, and all the dense minerals go to the very end of the table and all the light clays go to the side. Then I do that all over again. That takes a day in itself. Then there’s a technique called Frantzing, where you slowly crank up the strength of a magnet and slide the minerals down tiny little chutes. Different minerals are magnetically attracted at different strengths, so some of them get picked up. In the last stage, you use a horrible, nasty chemical called methylene iodide, which is a ‘heavy liquid,’ in that it’s a lot denser than water but has the same viscosity, which means that things that would normally sink in water float in it. And because zircon is particularly dense, it sinks while everything else floats up. Then I pipe that up and squirt it onto a piece of filter paper. You dry this piece of paper out, after spending three days bashing this rock to buggery, and then you put it under the microscope and you pray that there’s something under there.”

He sighed like a man playing a game with terrible odds, but one he nevertheless enjoyed. “So I might start with a rock sample half as big as my backpack and end up with maybe forty zircon crystals so small that you can’t see them.” The crystals would then be worn down with a strong acid, then measured to determine how much of the zircon’s uranium had decayed into lead, which would give an indication of its age, give or take a few hundred thousand years.

A few hours later we made our way over to the area’s most famous fossil bed, the blandly named D Surface, which cantilevers out high over the ocean. Before we stepped out onto the bedding plane, we removed our shoes and put on polyester booties to protect the fossils from erosion. It felt like a ritual act, as if we were stepping into a temple.

The rock was huge and flat and intricately patterned, like the floor of a mosque. After visiting a lesser bedding plane, in which I often had to squint and tilt my head to make out what was fossil and what was figment, the profusion and sharpness of the fossils on D Surface was astounding. The Pigeon Cove surface had held about fifty fossils; this one held 1,500. They were everywhere, a vast fossilized garden of fronds and blobs and spirals, some larger than a large hand.

Of course, it was not an actual garden; plants would not appear in the fossil record for another two hundred million years. For some reason I was stuck on this point. They looked like plants, I kept saying. Matthews explained that this was because, this far in the past, the lines between the kingdoms grow fuzzy. We, and every organism currently living on earth, he said, are at the crown of the tree of life. Down at the base of the tree lie the very first single-celled organisms, from which everything else sprang. So the further down the trunk of the evolutionary tree you look, the more organisms resemble one another. “That’s when you get into the nitty-gritty definitions of what defines, say, an animal and a fungus,” he said. “They’re actually biologically really close, but they just ‘decide’ to stick their cells together slightly differently. And just because one evolved to stick its cells together differently than another, one mainly just grows on dead trees, and the other has conquered the earth.”

What, then, makes a conqueror? We have sex. We eat life, not sunlight. We contain multiple cells, which in turn contain nuclei, but lack rigid walls. And, in almost every case, we grow muscles.

Muscles, I learned, are a crucial component of Liu’s big question. While many kinds of organisms (even single-celled ones) can swim, reach, float, squirm, and even roll, only animals have developed muscle fiber, which has allowed us to move in a wider variety of ways and heave around vastly more weight. Liu’s trails, then, could help unravel the question of when animal life began. Because if something was big and strong enough to create those trails 565 million years ago, it must have had muscles, which means it must have been an animal.

In a neat coincidence, the same summer Liu discovered the fossil trails, he also unearthed a brand-new Ediacaran species with noticeable muscle fibers—at 560 million years old, by far the earliest muscles in the fossil record. While he doesn’t believe it was responsible for making the trails, it does provide evidence that musculature was developed earlier than anyone had previously thought. The new species was a ghastly-looking thing, a webbed, cupped hand reaching up from a slender stalk, as if waiting to trap a passing foot. Liu named it Haootia quadriformis, drawing from the language of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, the Beothuk. Haoot means, simply, “demon.”

+

Just as life on Earth requires both reproduction and death for it to evolve, the growth of science requires not just the birth of new discoveries, but the death of old ones. Any new scientific discovery is open to attack—the bigger the finding, typically, the fiercer the attack. Shortly after Liu published the paper outlining his discovery of the world’s oldest fossil trails in 2010, Greg Retallack, a professor specializing in paleopedology (the study of fossil soils), attempted to debunk Liu’s findings. Retallack claimed that the trails were not the result of animals, but rather “tilting traces,” the marks of pebbles being washed about by the tide. Liu published a swift response addressing each of Retallack’s points. Then he invited Andreas Wetzel, the German ichnologist who first introduced the notion of a “tilting trace,” to view the fossil trails in person. Wetzel assured Liu they were not tilting traces.

Around the same time another paper emerged, from a University of Alberta team working in Uruguay, that claimed to have found trails that were twenty million years older than Liu’s. This paper was challenged by a team of Uruguayan geologists who argued that the rocks had been dated incorrectly, and that similar fossils had only been found in much younger, Permian rocks. Casting further doubt on their discovery was the fact that the trails were significantly older than Liu’s yet relied on a trail-maker with a vastly more advanced body structure. This discrepancy is akin to an automotive historian claiming to have uncovered a flying car from the nineteenth century. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. (But then, Liu charitably pointed out to me, his discovery had also once seemed unlikely.)

Such is the gladiatorial, or perhaps more accurately, Darwinian, nature of research science. The goal, as famously explicated by the philosopher Karl Popper, is that in the competition for funding and fame, any false research will be falsified, and only the strongest theories will survive. However, an unfortunate side effect of this dynamic is what Martin Brasier called the MOFAOTYOF (“My Oldest Fossils Are Older Than Your Oldest Fossils”) principle: “The tendency among all scientists, and certainly among all journalists, is to make their scientific claims as strong as they possibly can from the limited amount of material available.” Bold conjectures are an integral part of healthy science, just as one initially underbids when negotiating at a flea market so as to eventually reach a fair price. But this tendency to exaggerate can prove dangerous, especially when the results trickle out to the general public, who, not understanding that falsification is a necessary part of the game, can develop a jaundiced view of any and all new scientific claims.

When I spoke to Brasier over the phone in 2013, he told me that the uncertainty inherent in this field of research was its appeal: He believed pure science is to be found on the edge of the darkness. “Karl Popper would have said that astrophysics and paleontology are not real science because you can’t go out and sample it,” he told me. “I think absolutely the opposite. I think this is actually where science is. It’s trying to guess what lies over the hill and map terra incognita. When people come in and colonize, that’s just technology.” Brasier believed a scientist was, at heart, an explorer.

One of the strange side effects of working at the edge of the known universe, as Liu does, is that the more you learn, the more uncertain things become. As I talked with Liu and his team, I was constantly unlearning old assumptions I had held; even basic, bedrock knowledge began to disintegrate. What, for example, is the definition of movement? (Does floating count, or must one propel oneself? If so, with what kinds of tissues?) Is “animal” a clear-cut category, or a fuzzy-edged one? What, moreover, does it mean to be a living thing at all?

Life, according to Mikhail A. Fedonkin’s The Rise of the Animals, a touchstone text among Ediacaran researchers, is defined merely as “a self-perpetuating chemical reaction” or “a self-assembling dynamic system.” The fundamental element of this system is the membrane. Without membranes, there are no cells, and without cells there is no discrete space for chemical reactions to perpetuate. “The cell membrane also allows communication with the outside world, but regulates what comes in and what goes out,” wrote Fedonkin. The communication is imperfect, but that imperfection is what defines one cell from another.

For billions of years, these single cells were the only living things on Earth. However, a cell benefits from better communication and cooperation with other cells. So some cells may have formed symbiotic relationships with others, then gathered into colonies, and, eventually, bound together into tissues. Interdependence both shackles and strengthens. Despite the restriction of freedom, tissues allow a much greater range of body types, including bilateral symmetry (a distinct front end and back end), which is the structural basis for the wild array of beasts that now stalks the earth and sea and sky. Matthews cheekily summed up this billion-year-long process of evolution from cells to bilaterians thus: “Tissues developed because it’s nice to have muscles and an ass. It’s not good to shit out of your face. It’s just not a very good idea.”

We tissuey beings define our individual selves as enclosed, tight-knit systems. (“Otherwise,” Matthews said, “your arm would run away.”) But here too our assumptions begin to break down. As we sat eating our picnic lunches on a flat rock overlooking the sea, Stewart mentioned that he had recently been reading an article in a science magazine that asked what truly defines a human being, since our bodies are dependent on an unseen universe of microorganisms to survive. There are, for example, at least as many bacterial cells as human cells in the human body—possibly many more.

“There are more cells in you that aren’t you,” Matthews said.

“Yeah,” said Stewart. “Which sort of brings you to a point of ‘What is you? What am I?’ I had an existential crisis while I was reading it.”

As I chewed my plum down to its wet-furred pit, a druggy feeling overtook me. I suddenly became aware of my own complexity: a riverine inner landscape swimming with cells both native and foreign; varied tissues clinging to and pulling against an architecture of bone; a digestive tract breaking down a bolus of plant material; two feet pressed against the earth; two nostrils sucking and spouting air; and in between, a branching network of nerves flickering with electricity in a furious effort to make sense of it all. Inside the human body lies a realm of perpetual darkness and riotous life, much of it still unexplored. We are, each of us, wild to our marrow.

+

After lunch, we headed east along the shoreline, ascending through geologic time over younger and younger rocks. We were following a stratigraphic chart of Liu’s, which looked like a multi-tiered ice-cream sandwich. Each layer depicted a stratum of rock; embedded in some, like a sprinkling of chocolate chips, were known fossils. We paused on one surface where the chart indicated there should be an array of disc-shaped fossils, but we couldn’t see them. The angle of the light wasn’t right; certain layers reveal their fossils only when the sun is low and shadows become pronounced. Liu got down on his haunches, his eyes scanning the rock. Then they clicked into focus. “Ooh,” he said, pointing. “There’s one.” I followed his finger. The lines of an ovoid fossil emerged from the pixelated background, like in those Magic Eye books I used to go cross-eyed over as a child.

“There are loads of them, actually!” Liu said, his hand sweeping across the marbled surface. As his finger passed over them, the outline of a half-dozen other discs rose from the rock.

I was baffled. When I looked at these rocks, I saw a jumbled code:

But when Liu looked, a clear picture arose:

When I asked him how exactly he managed to zero in on the relevant bits of visual information, Liu said that the secret was training your eye. Stewart disagreed. He thought that Liu was born with better eyes than most—not just the physical eye, but the whole perceptual apparatus. “This guy does it to me all the time,” Stewart said. “We’ll go fossil hunting in England, and he’s like ‘There’s one. There’s one.’ I get so frustrated. But there’s a reason he’s doing this for a living.”

Later, Liu obliged to describe the process in greater detail. The key, he said, lay in “trying to cut out all the noise”—recognizing and eliminating any nonbiological features that might resemble fossils to the untrained eye. Once de-cluttered, the pattern can emerge. You also need a “search image,” he added. “If you know to look for something, you’ll see it. But if you don’t, you can miss it.”

It struck me that a similar problem plagues all branches of science. Scientists looking for new discoveries appear to be trapped in a logical bind: it is exceedingly difficult to find something when you don’t even know what it is you are looking for. Here is where the imaginative work of hypothesizing enters into play. By extrapolating from known patterns, we can make predictions and envision new phenomena, which we can then begin looking for in the world.

Hypothesizing is such a powerful tool that it can bear fruit even when the things we think we are looking for are not, in fact, there. Huxley, foreshadowing Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts by some fifty years, argued that this speculative process guides all scientific inquiry:

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. Confronted by the strange complexity of things, he invents, quite arbitrarily, a simple hypothesis to explain and justify the world. Having invented, he proceeds to act and think in terms of this hypothesis, as though it were correct. Experience gradually shows him where his hypothesis is unsatisfactory and how it should be modified. Thus, great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. The discoveries have necessitated a modification of the original hypotheses, and further discoveries have been made in the effort to verify the modifications—­discoveries which, in their turn, have led to yet further modifications. And so on, indefinitely.

The open-ended nature of science is either its greatest asset or its fatal weakness, depending on one’s outlook. Those of a mystical or skeptical cast of mind cite its mutability as proof that all scientific knowledge is ultimately shallow and illusory, while a believer in the scientific method finds comfort in the fact that it continually evolves to more tightly fit the contours of the universe’s dark terrain.

+

Our rise through geologic time ended at the bedding plane that bore Liu’s fossil trails. On a rock wall facing the sea there protruded a waist-high shelf. We hovered over the shelf, looking down. Once again, I saw only a flat expanse of stone until Liu pointed out the trails subtly etched into the rock.

Here, finally, was what I had come to see: the world’s oldest trails. They were easy to miss; it looked as if someone had lightly dragged a pencil eraser through drying concrete. Matthews opened his canteen and poured some water over the rock, so the trails would stand out in starker relief. Even still, I came to understand how dozens of other paleontologists had failed to notice them. All around were large, distinct body fossils impressed into grand sweeping surfaces. Liu’s trails were like a poem carved onto a handrail in a stairway of the Louvre.

We worked our way along the shelf, inspecting yet more trails. Some were larger than others, but none were wider than a thumbprint. Most were relatively straight, but one peculiar trail looped back on itself, like a snake in agony. Liu believed that it provided further evidence that the marks were not, as Retallack had argued, produced by a rock or shell being dragged by a current along the seafloor.

I lightly ran my fingers over the trails. They bore the distinct texture of life. Their surface was patterned with a series of nesting arcs: (((((((. Liu thinks each arc was made by the creature’s circular foot as it inflated with water and extended forward, smearing the front edge of the previous impression. At the end of some of the trails was a small dimple—((((((()—called a “terminal impression,” which might indicate the organism’s final resting place.

Modern sea anemones creep along the seafloor using a similar system of hydrostatic inflation. And this, Liu thought, could provide a clue as to why the first animals made trails. Many of the Ediacarans found on Mistaken Point were believed to have lived their lives secured to the ground by suction cup–like feet, with their fleshy bodies extending out into the water column to gather food. Modern animals with similar body types typically prefer to latch on to a hard substrate, like stone or, when available, glass. In his lab, Liu had observed that when sea anemones were forcefully pried loose from the aquarium’s glass, they would creep across the tank’s sandy bottom until they encountered another hard, flat surface.

Liu’s best guess was that his fossil trails were similarly formed: an Ediacaran was washed from its rock and, mired in loose sediment, it struggled through the muck to regain its perch.

I had come to Mistaken Point hoping to gain some understanding of why the first animals began to roam. I would have assumed the ur-trail-maker was propelled by either food, sex, or imminent danger. I hadn’t accounted for this counterintuitive but perhaps equally primal need: the desire for stability.

I thought back to my experience of being lost amid the Tuckamore, how intensely I had yearned for the comfort of a building, or even just a trail—something solid and familiar to which I could cling. Huxley had felt that yearning too; I suspect most people have. There is no sure way of knowing what the ancient Ediacarans felt, or if they even could feel. But here, written in stone, was a clue. In the end—or rather, in the beginning—the first animals to summon the strength to venture forth may simply have wanted to go back home.

I. This, despite the fact that the land had been webbed with native footpaths since long before white people arrived.