On Trails Read Free

leather boots for a pair of trail running shoes. I pared my medkit down to a few anti-­diarrheal pills, some iodine swabs, a thumb-sized roll of duct tape, and a safety pin. I replaced my white gas stove with one made out of two aluminum Coke cans, which weighed practically nothing. When I crammed all of my gear into my new pack and lifted it for the first time, I was amazed and slightly terrified. It seemed too insubstantial to house, clothe, and feed a human for five months.
    So I wouldn’t be forced to live off an anemic diet of instant ramen and freeze-dried mashed potatoes, I began cooking heaping piles of nutritious slop (beans and brown rice, quinoa, couscous, whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce) and dehydrating them. I poured sparing amounts of olive oil and hot sauce into small plastic bottles. I filled plastic baggies with baking soda, Gold Bond, vitamins, and painkillers. I divided all of the supplies up into roughly five-day increments and packed them into fourteen cardboard boxes. Into each box, I also placed a chapbook of poetry or a heftier paperback novel that I had cut into slimmer volumes using a straight razor and packing tape.
    I addressed these boxes to post offices along the trail—towns with names like Erwin, Hiawassee, Damascus, Caratunk, and (myfavorite) Bland—and left them with my roommate to mail on specified dates. I quit my job. I sublet my apartment. I sold or gave away everything I could spare. Then, on a cold day in March, I flew down to Georgia.
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    On the summit of Springer Mountain, the trail’s southern terminus, I was greeted by an old man who called himself Many Sleeps, a moniker he had reportedly earned while completing one of the slowest thru-hikes ever recorded. With his droopy eyes and long white beard, he looked like a nylon-clad Rip Van Winkle.
    In his hand he held a clipboard. His job was to collect information from all the passing thru-hikers. He told me it had been a busy year: twelve thru-hikers had registered with him that day, and thirty-seven the day before. In total that spring, almost fifteen hundred people would set out from Springer aiming for Maine, though scarcely a quarter of them would make it.
    There on the mountaintop, before starting my long-awaited hike, I paused to admire the land below: swells of frost-burned earth, fading from brown to gray to blue as they hazed out toward the horizon. The mountains dipped and heaved, jostled and collided. No towns or roads were in sight. It occurred to me that I would never be able to find my way to Maine without the trail. In this foreign, involuted terrain, I would have struggled to even make it to the next ridge. For the next five months, the trail would be my lifeline.
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    On a trail, to walk is to follow. Like prostration or apprenticeship, trail walking both requires and instills a certain measure of humility. To keep my pack light, I had brought along no maps, no satellite assistance, only a thin guidebook and a cheap compass for emergencies.The trail was my only real source of navigation. So I clung to it, like Theseus tracing Ariadne’s unspooling ball of twine.
    In my journal one night I wrote: “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.”
    It was a creepy feeling, knowing that my decisions were not my own. In the first few weeks I often thought back to an anecdote I’d once heard about E. O. Wilson, the famed entomologist. In the late 1950s, to entertain visitors, Wilson used to write his name on a piece of paper with a special chemical liquid. Afterward, a swarm of fire ants