On Trails by Robert Moor

On Trails is just a stunning, vivid, compelling piece of work by an accomplished hiker, wanderer, and writer. Mr. Moor digs deep into the history of trails of all sorts of different species — human, mammal, animal, insect, and even ancient Precambria — and he does this mainly out of sincere curiosity of how trails form, why some improve over time while others fade, and what makes us follow (or not follow) a trail set by others. This is really an outdoors book for outdoor lovers, but I am not an avid outdoorsman or hiker, and I found his insights to be fascinating, especially as he interweaves between his own experiences hiking all over the world, and the history of how many of these famous trails (the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine being perhaps the most well-known to amateur/novice hikers) came to be. There was really a ton to take in with this one — hence my extensive notes below — but this is definitely one of those books that, someday, I would like to re-read just to experience his travels once more, because the essence of a great writer is one that can describe the environment and surroundings so that you feel like you are actually there with him or her on the ground. Mr. Moor does that, and more, and he concludes with some thoughts not only on the wisdom and beauty of the trails that surround us, but also with a deep appreciation for the paths taken (and made) by those that have wandered the Earth before us, and how important it is for us to be stewards of those trails for future generations. Again, I’m not much of a hiker, but a portion of the Appalachian Trail might be calling my name sometime soon — just to get a little taste of what Mr. Moor writes about in this wonderful book.

• on every scale of life, creatures can be found relying on trails to reduce an overwhelming array of options to a single expeditious route
• without trails, we would be lost
• in ants, there is a tiny, finger shaped organ called the Durfour’s gland
• when extracted from the abdomen of a fire and and smeared across a plate of glass, other fire ants immediately swarm to it
• a path is a way of making sense of the world
• foundational texts of nearly every major religion invoke the metaphor of the path
• Hebrew word for Jewish law, halakhah, means “the walking”
• hikers typically seek the path of least resistance across the landscape
• trail designers, attempt to build trails that will resist erosion, spare sensitive plant life, and avoid private property lines
• use creates trails; long lasting trails, then, must be of use
• new trails soon appeared exactly where the old ones had been, in experiments
• impromptu trails are called “desire lines”
• traditional Jewish jokes evolve along common “pathways” — reframing, tweaking logic, swapping out characters and settings, adding more surprising punch lines — all in search of a better way of fulfilling the stories comic potential
• like a good trail, a good joke is the result of an untold number of nameless authors and editors
• even the dumbest animals are experts at finding the most efficient routes across a landscape
• Darwin showed, even errors are essential; if some ants weren’t error prone, the ant trail would never straighten out
• good designs are trail wise; the fulfill a common need by balancing efficiency, flexibility, and durability
• streamline, reinforce, bend but do not break
• trails have shaped our bodies, sculpted our landscapes, transformed our cultures
• wisdom of trails is as essential as ever
• world’s oldest trails were discovered in 2008
• ancient Edicarans, 565M years ago, began to move across the sea floor, leaving a trail behind it
• Precambrian animals had existed in great numbers, but, being soft bodies, had not lent themselves to fossilization
• science can reduce the environment to a navigable line, but it cannot encompass it
• only animals have developed muscle fiber, which has allowed us to move in a wider variety of ways and heave around vastly more weight
• growth of science requires not just the birth of new discoveries, but the death of old ones
• bold conjectures are an integral part of healthy science
• Life, is a self perpetuating chemical reaction, or a self assembling dynamic system
• some cells may have formed symbiotic relationships with others, then gathered into colonies, and, eventually, bound together into tissues
• scientists find it exceedingly difficult to find something when you don’t even know what it is you are looking for
• 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
• first animals began to roam with a primal need for the desire for stability
• first animals to summon the strength to venture forth may simply have wanted to go back home
• Edicaran trails were traces; ant trails is left behind by one ant and then followed by another
• paths extend forward, whereas trails extend backward
• lying down in the path of an elephant, versus lying down in its trail
• trails are simply that which can be trailed
• trail provides one of the animal kingdom’s most elegant ways to share information
• complex behavior of ants arises not from smart individuals, but from smart systems
• Bonnet theorized that ants ordinarily follow trails that lead to their homes and to food sources
• some ants wander off track, and if that rogue ant finds food, it will leave a new trail on its return to the next, and other ants will follow
• ants sniff their way through the world
• gland in fire ants that secretes trail pheromones: chemical triggers or signals
• Stigmergy is a form of indirect communication and leaderless cooperation, using signals deposited in the environment
• with a combination of pheromones and stigmergy, even the simplest insects could build labyrinthine trail systems
• Bonnet was blind, suffered from visual hallucinations, Charles Bonnet syndrome
• today, that syndrome is primarily what he is remembered for, if he is remembered at all
• feedback loops, known as a virtuous circle, such as when ants leave stronger and stronger tails to a food source
• an undesirable kind, called a vicious circle, like when a microphone is placed too close to an amplifier
• thought for centuries that humans have a natural tendency to walk in circles
• average people who are lost will typically not travel farther than one hundred meters from their starting point
• using computers, we began to understand that simple machines following a simple set of rules can ultimately make highly intelligent decisions
• cybernetics — study of automated systems
• ants may be individually stupid, but a high level of collective intelligence
• ant colony algo’s, used to improve British telecommunications networks, more efficient shipping routes, sort financial data
• ants are constantly tweaking their designs and probing for new solutions, have a slew of effective backup plans
• ant lanes remain in a constant, orderly, steady flow
• moving with the flow, rather than racing through it, gets everyone in the swarm to their various destinations more quickly
• ants never get stuck in a traffic jam
• cars could effectively coordinate themselves without a godlike hand steering them, coordination can arise from the bottom up, through individual machines following simple rules
• among humans, the most confident, talkative members of a group often become the group’s leader — “babble effect”
• among crowds, sharing more pieces of random information is generally unhelpful
• more reliable information kicks off a process of fine tuning, until the answer is revealed
• humans only once an initial best guess is made, and others follow it, that a trace begins to evolve into a trail
• same pattern underlies all scientific progress
• animals are all intertwined, interdependent, flocking and stalking, they follow one another across landscapes
• and in those places where their most vital where their most vital needs overlap, trails inevitably appear
• many eyes theory: more eyes a herd has, more likely it is to detect a predator or a new source of food
• many scientists now believe that elephants understand the concept of death; have even been seen grieving over the gravesites of family members
• foot problems were the leading cause of death among captive elephants
• whole of an elephant’s body is perfectly engineered for creating trails
• powerful sense of smell and hearing, elephants can detect food, water, and other elephants from many miles away
• all elephant paths tend to lead to something that elephants want to get to
• trails serve as a form of societal spatial memory, a collective externalized mnemonic system
• memory can serve as a trail guide
• neat, easily recognizable lines, like the color coded lines of a subway system
• once a trail system or a learned migration route is severed, population suffers crippling losses
• we agro pastoralists, our livestock, and our crops reshaped ourselves to suit one another’s needs
• in doing so, we evolved into an indomitable ecological system that has reshaped the earth
• many of the world’s most impressive trails therefore come from herds of big mammals — elephants, bison
• flock and the shepherd are engaged in a continuous negotiation, in turns pushing against each other and pulling together, harmonious one moment and fractious the next
• essence of herding is not domination, but dance
• when domestic sheep are brought to a new area, they immediately begin to establish a habitat for themselves by creating trails
• trails function as a form of external memory
• castrated ram = a wether
• shepherds tend to put a bell on this sheep, a practice that furnished us with the term bellwether
• since the trajectory of their first hundred steps tended to dictate the following thousand, a phenomenon social scientists called path dependence
• earth as a collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small
• each of us alters the world in our passage
• when allowed to breed unchecked, sheep sometimes “irruptive oscillation”, which can permanently degrade the landscape
• “ovine desertification” — grass normally serves to both shade the soil and retain the rainfall, so when grass is cropped too low, the soil desiccates
• though a wise shepherd can bend the flock’s trajectory, the shepherd must ultimately conform to the needs of the flock, not the other way around
• Aboriginal Australians, who are considered by many to be the finest trackers in thee world, begin teaching their children to track almost from birth
• tracking is science; the art of tracking is a science that requires fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and math
• development of tracking skills delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage
• destruction of buffalo removed a nuisance (roads, rails) while weakening another (depriving plains Indians of food, forcing them to end roaming)
• for most animals, the ability to make and follow trails provides an evolutionary advantage, until a predator evolves to wield their own trails against them
• though recreational hunting existed in numerous ancient empires, the sport as we know it was only codified by European royalty in the last thousand years
• deer meat was also the single most important meat resource for the European aristocracy
• venison was a marker of status, a sign of virility, and an indication of geographic power
• for many indigenous people, trails were not just a means of travel, they were the veins and arteries of culture
• native trails reach their destinations as quickly as possible
• recreational trails gravitate to sites of maximal scenic beauty
• native trails follow the fall line — the path water would take while flowing downhill
• native inhabitants of North America thoroughly altered the landscape, patiently molding it
• Alabamians, birthplace, staging ground, repository for area’s deepest traditions
• more educated people are about their roots, the more connected they’re going to feel to their land, and then they’re going to sand up and fight for their land
• to Euro Americans, places are most often regarded as sites of residence or economic activity, essentially blank backdrops for human enterprise
• Cherokee conception of a place is fixed, specified, external
• for indigenous cultures, stories don’t unfold abstractly, they take place, always specify a real setting where the story unfolds
• what matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when
• Apache culture, places are linked together in a spatial and conceptual matrix, flowing one to the next
• place listing: topogeny
• summoning of a mental landscape constructed of lines
• over the course of thousands of years, Native Americans devised a beautifully functional network of paths
• Europeans exploited Native wisdom, kindness, and infrastructure
• when colonists spurned the advice of Native’s their trails ended up tangled in brambles and mired in swamps
• whereas those who co opted Native wisdom moved smoothly
• some hunter gatherers chose to abandon a lifestyle of sedentary farming and return to hunting and gathering
• path of modern consumer, wondrous medicine and magical tech, constantly beckons to hunting and gathering societies
• loss of threads that hold together culture, language, lore, religious practices, familial obligations, relationship to place
• culture is gradually forgotten
• Cherokee founded a slew of language immersion in schools
• Indigenous cultures need both language and land to survive
• walking creates trails, trails shape landscapes, landscapes come to serve as archives of communal knowledge, symbolic meaning
• trail walking cultures vs. road driving cultures
• we have lost the elemental bond between foot and earth
• trails became cultural through lines, connecting people and places and stories — linking the trail walkers world into a coherent, if fragile, whole
• hiking was invented by nature starved urbanites in the last 300 years, trails have sprouted new shapes to fulfill their hunger
• a true hike requires wilderness, land outside of one’s land
• to walk for pleasure in open country dates back just 200 years, hiking only appeared in the 20th century
• myth of wilderness as “virgin” uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home
• Europeans colonized America to send over large numbers of people, extract and ship home wealth, tame a land they perceived as wild, wicked, wasteful
• first English colonizers to reach continent behaved like teenagers wandering into a quiet mansion
• recognized the land’s bounty and grandeur, largely ignored the work the indigenous people had put into making it that way
• “enclosure”: fencing off of once commonly held farm and grazing lands
• colonizers brought with them a complex form of trade = capitalism
• land was a commodity, slowly, the Native’s land ethic began to fade
• economic and ecological imperialism
• Penobscot name for Katahdin means “the greatest mountain”
• wilderness is a human creation
• we delineate the place by defining its boundaries, its meaning
• history of Katahdin is emblematic of the wilderness as a whole, which has always been the direct result of human ingenuity, foresight, and restraint
• industrialism, wilderness came to represent cleanliness and health
• definition of the wilderness: the not self
• Appalachian Trail was the dream of Benton MacKaye
• Manhattan in 1900 housed more people than it does today
• time spent outdoors, in fresh air, newly popular phrase, was seen as curative for society’s ills
• Yosemite Grant Act, Lincoln set a key precedent for the creation of the national park system
• Roosevelt created a series of national forests
• protected nearly 230M acres of public land
• through trail — trail that would keep going
• Appalachian Trail as a remedy for the worst ills of urbanization, capitalism, militarism, industrialism
• change systems, not human nature; back to the land
• by the 1990s, modern hiking rails began to take on a whole new shape and internal logic
• needed to ensure that they didn’t snuff out that wild quality for future walkers
• among trail builders, it is axiomatic that when hikers get tired, they get selfish
• central task of a trail builder is to convince people to do what they should do, rather than what their basest instincts tell them to do
• hiking trail shares more in common with a modern highway
• artificially create something natural
• meticulous construction, artfully concealed
• capture a sense of the wild, to bring order to an experience that is by definition disordered
• 80’s and 90’s = supertrails, hiking paths measuring more than 1K miles, started being built in Russia
• core function of any trail is to connect
• connectere, means to “bind together” or to “unite”
• what set humans apart from our animal brethren is that we’ve learned to optimize beyond the shape of the trail and the limits of our anatomy
• a trail, when transformed by technology, becomes a road, highway, flight path, cable, radio wave, digital network
• we increasingly experience the world as as network of nodes and connectors
• one of the ways humans adapt to environments is by creating technology
• once an innovation is widely adopted, it effectively becomes part of the landscape, another feature to which our lives adapt
• until an entirely new landscape, a techscape, emerges, like a city built on the ruins of past empires
• American interstate highway system was first envisioned by the App Trail founder, MacKaye
• history of the highway stretches back thousands of years
• artificially hardening the road’s surface and raising it above the surrounding land so it could shed water (hence the name highway)
• earliest highways serves as the tentacles of grand empires — royal information, royal armies, royal personages
• colonial America, often deviate from the path of least resistance in order to accommodate a large town or city = population gravity
• “capital gravity” = service the largest sources of funding
• where roads go tells you where the power is at any given time
• highways effectively become part of the landscape, which people must then adapt to
• Internet has always been an expansion upon one of the functions of trails — transmitting information quickly across long distances
• 1945, Vannevar Bush
• insight was to realize that computers needed to evolve to fit the contours of the human brain
• thoughts are not grouped into categories; they are connected via trails of association
• current estimate of total web pages is almost 50B
• Internet is a network of trails so vast it has become its own wilderness
• boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable
• unheimlich: comfortable with the familiar, comfortable with the wholly familiar, but when the two are combined, we begin to feel unstable
• fellow feeling: sense of deep, mutual understanding
• type of connection requires us to recognize that the minds of other people have a reality equal to our own
• connection without fellow feeling invariably leads to conflict
• when Europeans first crossed the ocean and encountered Native Americans, they became fixated on their differing religious and cultural values and overlooked their commonalities
• life’s options continue to abound until they overwhelm
• today, it is estimated there are anywhere from 20K to 40K distinct occupations in the U.S.
• 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
• hikers are seeking simplicity, an escape from civilization’s garden of forking paths
• in walking, we acquire more of less
• there is no single entity or primal state one can point to and call “nature”, it is both everything and nothing
• by arguing that something is natural — and thus innate, essential, external, nonnegotiable — we short circuit any meaningful conversation about how the world should be
• 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
• wisdom, not intelligence, not cleverness, not even moral goodness, but wisdom, is what guides us to the unknown
• wisdom is a time tested means of choosing how to live
• wisdom is a form of judgment that evolves
• a wise trail can go anywhere and carry anyone
• every trail is not as wise as every other trail
• some trails simply work better
• what unites the wisest trails is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, flexibility
• science, tech, storytelling, all masterfully exploit the supple wisdom of trails
• 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
• 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
• wisdom further improves and spreads
• personal wisdom is transformed into collective wisdom
• 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 history of life on this planet can be seen as a simple 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