All Paths Considered
By Dianne Timblin
The humble trail is all too easy to follow without giving its existence a second thought. In his book On Trails, Robert Moor aims to alter our view of the paths that crisscross our planet, to widen and sharpen our perspective on them.
May 5, 2017
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ON TRAILS: An Exploration. Robert Moor. 341 pp. Simon and Schuster, 2016. $25.
As a metaphor, the trail is well-worn. See what I mean? We can hardly help ourselves: The language of paths is idiomatically entrenched, both highly useful and ubiquitous to the point of being beyond notice.
As a figure of speech, then, the trail shares a key trait with its physical counterpart: Both realize a certain kind of invisibility. In his book On Trails, environmental journalist Robert Moor describes a characteristic view of hikers:
Ideally, a trail should function like a discreet aide, gracefully ushering us through the world while still preserving our sense of agency and independence. Perhaps this is why, for virtually all of literary history, trails have remained in the periphery of our gaze, down at the bottommost edge of the frame: They have been, quite literally, beneath our concern.
Moor aims to alter this perspective, to widen and sharpen it to include not only the trail and its surrounding landscape but also the trail’s own trail. In other words, he tells the story of trails as geographical and cultural artifacts and as mutable entities bearing evidence of constant alteration. And through Moor’s lens, the trajectory of this story extends behind us into the depths of prehistory, as well as before us into a future in which digital trails increasingly wend their way through mountains of data, in some ways mirroring the evolution of analog trails.
Moor’s fascination with his subject began while he was through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Through-hikers traverse the trail’s full distance in a single months-long trek. Hiking 2,200 miles, from the southern trailhead at Springer Mountain in Georgia to its conclusion at Maine’s Mount Katahdin, gives a person plenty of time to think. Moor spent much of that time thinking about the ribbon of soil beneath his feet, wondering how such a trail had come to exist and, indeed, how any trail comes into being and why it remains. On Trails is the culmination of years of pondering these questions.
Moor opens the book by examining the first known trails on the planet: fossilized tracks made in the seafloor by Ediacaran biota—simple, soft-bodied creatures categorized as the earliest known complex multicellular organisms. They shuffled along, traveling very short distances on a single foot, and are believed to be the first creatures capable of locomotion. A sequence of chapters then focus on trails made by six-legged fauna, four-legged fauna, and two-legged fauna; in each case, Moor considers how these trails are made, how they function and evolve, and how they affect interactions within and among species. In the case of human-made trails, he also discusses how the purposes and priorities of trail makers result in different kinds of trails. For example, a fascinating section about Lamar Marshall, a historian who locates and maps old Cherokee trails and works to protect them, reveals that these trails generally didn’t evolve into hiking trails. The Cherokee trails “reach their destinations as quickly as possible, sticking to ridgelines while avoiding peaks and gullies.” “In contrast,” Moor continues, “recreational trails, which are a relatively modern European invention, dawdle along, gravitating to sites of maximal scenic beauty—mountaintops, waterfalls, overlooks, and vast bodies of water.” European settlers, he notes, were often frustrated by Cherokee trails, which were as physically demanding as they were efficient. Moor then turns back to the topic of the Appalachian Trail and similar paths before concluding with a discussion of the International Appalachian Trail. Considered the longest trail in the world, it connects the Appalachians on the American continent with mountains that were once part of the Appalachian range and are now (thanks to the breakup of supercontinent Pangea) located in Europe and northern Africa.
Although Moor remains scrupulously focused on his subject, On Trails is nonetheless steeped in philosophy, literature, and, notably, the sciences. Readers who expect geography, geology, sociology, anthropology, and the natural sciences to feature prominently in this volume won’t be disappointed. Yet that’s only the beginning. As they accompany Moor on his productive meanderings, readers encounter a sweeping panorama of topics—among them, etymology, swarm robotics, conservation history, veterinary medicine, paleontology, city planning, computing science, cartography, archaeology, myrmecology, crowd theory, animal husbandry, teleology, epistemology, semiotics, and linguistics. Although the book occasionally bogs down in overthinking, the narrative overall is remarkable for its fluidity. In any given chapter, Moor guides the reader through anecdotes, analysis, and literary and philosophical references that might be stultifying in lesser narrative hands.
Happily, the sureness of Moor’s narrative voice pieces these disparate elements together with apparent ease. For example, throughout a tense passage that builds toward the fate of a flock of sheep (one that Moor persuades me to care enormously about), he persists in repeatedly guiding the reader first toward and then away from the outcome. He takes the scenic route, so to speak. Yet somehow, when, over the course of a single page, he diverges away from the strictures of pure sequential narrative—dipping into quotes from John Muir, unpacking the etymology of panic, and relaying closely observed details (a coyote “glided over the sand with the cool certainty of a missile”; “in my mouth had grown a cat’s dry tongue”)—this path of approach-avoidance comes across as seamless, and exactly the way the story should be told. Still, as effortless as his prose appears, as a reader I can’t help marveling at all the work that underlies it. I found myself imagining Moor at his writing desk, surrounded by catalog boxes holding thousands of notecards he had accumulated and carefully filed away. (In truth, Evernote is more likely to be his cataloging method, although it’s one I find far less interesting to picture.) In my mind’s eye, he taps his pencil decisively, opens a box—18C perhaps—and fetches a note jotted down years earlier detailing Richard Feynman’s household experiment analyzing ant trails, and proceeds, satisfied in the knowledge that he has found the perfect moment to use it.
On Trails is Moor’s first book, and it displays a quality I find essential to exemplary writing: obsession. The subject of trails has long had him in its grip, and his enthusiasm for it is both palpable and contagious. Long after finishing the book, I continued to see literal and figurative manifestations of trails in just about everything around me, a circumstance that deepened and refreshed my own modes of thinking. Early on, Moor notes, “The only binary that ultimately matters to a trail is the one between use and disuse—the continual, communal process of making sense, and the slow entropic process by which it is unmade.” The same may be said of books, and for me On Trails is one that will be in use for a long time to come.
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