On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #20 of 2020. Read April 4, 2020.

This book is a dive into the history of trails: all the way from the first trails made by prehistoric Ediacarans 565 million years ago, to the Appalachian Trail and the attempt to extend it from Florida to Newfoundland and then from upper Europe down to Morocco.

Robert moves on to insect trails after looking at the ancient origins. He walks through insect trails, including ants and others, looking at how they leave pheromones to find food and create trails. He does an interesting job showing how even simple creatures can use the collective intelligence of many of its kind to make incredible trails and thrive in their environment.

After insects, he moved into mammals and other large animals. Here, he looks at the three main ways that people interacted with animals before full domestication: watching, herding, and hunting. He follows current-day people who still practice these ancient traditions to learn more about the ways humans have used animal trails.

Finally, Robert follows hiking trails (as he was a thru-hiker) and looks at the ways people use and have used trails both for commerce, but also as a way to escape from today’s overconnected, but often lonely, world. As Robert asks: “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.” 

This was a decent book, but unless you are super interested in trails or hiking, you can probably leave this one at the bookstore.

Quotes:

“There are moments when you cannot help but feel that your life is being controlled by some not-entirely-benevolent god. You skirt down a ridge only to climb it again; you climb a steep peak when there is an obvious route around it; you cross the same stream three times in the course of an hour, for no apparent reason, soaking your feet in the process. You do these things because someone, somewhere, decided that that’s where the trail must go.”

“Lost in the howling landscapes of life, most people will choose the confinement of a path to the dizzying freedom of an unmarked wilderness.”

“When we take a step back, we find that the key difference between a trail and a path is directional: paths extend forward, whereas trails extend backward.”

“Nevertheless, even in the Internet era, we still romanticize the lone genius. Most of us – especially us Americans – like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments.”

“Souman concluded that on average people who are lost, without external cues, will typically not travel farther than one hundred meters from their starting point, regardless of how long they walk.”

“I guess people leave the most obvious trails. Like this damn interstate highway here. Shit, if people cease to exist, somebody could come back here ten thousand years later and probably find remnants of this concrete bridge. So we leave the most destructive trails, I think, of any group of animals.”

“‘Conservation,’ he like to say, ‘is conservative.’”

“‘You go on down to Alabama, and people don’t give a damn about endangered squirrels or whatever,’ he told me. ‘But if you go up there and want to mess with that hill where they killed their first deer, boy they’ll kill you. Everything has to be framed in personal language. The more educated people are about their roots, the more connected they’re going to feel to their land. And then they’re going to stand up and fight for their land.’”

“From the very beginning, Europeans exploited Native wisdom, Native kindness, and Native infrastructure.”

“Thoreau, writing to a friend who had recently climbed [Mount Washington], wrote, ‘You must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. I suppose that I feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church.’”

“This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the un-handselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland…Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world!”

“Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that ‘a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons.’”

“The conservationist movement began to reach a new peak in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, assumed the presidency. His first address to Congress called for the creation of a series of national forests. By the end of his presidency in 1909, he would set aside one hundred fifty national forests, fifty-one federal bird reserves, and five national parks. All told, he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land.”

“The source of modern malaise, [MacKaye] believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get ‘back to the land,’ MacKaye wrote.”

“By 1971, when an interviewer asked him to state the Appalachian Trail’s ‘ultimate purpose,’ MacKaye, then ninety-two and nearly blind, had whittled his answer to Zen simplicity: 1. to walk; 2. to see; and 3. to see what you see!”

“‘Real travel,’ wrote Robyn Davidson, ‘would be to see the world for even an instant, with another’s eyes.’”

“The rifts between two people can easily appear unbridgeable at first, like the void between two peaks. But when we peer deeper into the chasm – down through the complex strata of culture, technology, and happenstance – we often find a shared point from which one could start scaling either summit. As the old judge had said, ‘Long ago, we all came from the same place.’ From these common origins, humans have branched out across the planet, adapting in multifarious ways to the land and to one another, diverging and converging, disconnecting and reconnecting, growing foreign and getting reacquainted.”

“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?” – James Fitzjames Stephen

“‘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!’”

“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.”

“‘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.’”

“‘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.’”

“‘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.’”

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