On Trails Read Free Page A

would emerge from their nest and dutifully line up to spell out each letter of his name, like members of a marching band.
    Wilson’s party trick was, in fact, the result of a major scientific breakthrough. For centuries, scientists had suspected that ants left invisible trails for one another, but Wilson was the first to pinpoint the source: a tiny, finger-shaped organ called the Dufour’s gland. When he extracted the gland from the abdomen of a fire ant and smeared it across a plate of glass, other fire ants immediately swarmed to it. (“They tumbled over one another in their haste to follow the path I had blazed for them,” Wilson recalled.) He later synthesized this trail pheromone, a single gallon of which, he estimated, could summon one trillion fire ants.
    In 1968 a group of researchers in Gulfport, Mississippi, put a new twist on Wilson’s trick: They discovered that a certain species of termite will even follow a line drawn by a normal ballpoint pen, which contains glycol compounds that termites mistake for trail pheromones. (For some reason, termites prefer blue ink over black.) Eversince, science teachers have amused their students by drawing blue spirals on sheets of paper, while termites line up and confusedly circle toward nowhere.
    On my hike, when the trail veered hard to the east or west, I would often wonder whether I too wasn’t being led in cruel circles. Seen in a certain light, trails represent a particularly grim form of determinism. “Man may turn which way he please, and undertake any thing whatsoever,” wrote Goethe, “he will always return to the path which nature has prescribed for him.” On the AT, this was certainly the case. Though I explored the surrounding woods and hitchhiked into towns, in the end I always came back to the trail. If uncertainty is the heart of adventure, I thought to myself, what kind of adventure was this?
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    Northward I moved, through a gray southland spring. The trees were black scrags, the ground papered in old leaves. One morning in Tennessee, I awoke to find my hiking shoes bronzed in ice. In North Carolina, I hiked through knee-deep snow, then ankle-deep slush. The walking was hard, but then every few days, regardless of the terrain or the weather, I would experience the joy of slipping from the dark woods and ascending into the air and light.
    In my second week on the trail I fell in with a tight little group of fellow thru-hikers. We happily traveled together for a few weeks. But upon reaching Virginia, I quickened my pace and lost them. Weeks or months later, whenever I slowed down or they sped up, I would bump into these friends again, as if by some miraculous coincidence. The miracle, of course, was the trail itself, which held us together in space like so many beads on a string.
    Each of us adopted new trail names. Most people were given their names by fellow thru-hikers because of something they had said or done; my friend Snuggles, for example, had a habit of snuggling upagainst other hikers in the lean-tos at night to keep herself warm. Others picked names in an attempt to shape new, aspirational identities for themselves. A tense silver-haired woman renamed herself Serenity, while a timid young man called himself Joe Kickass; sure enough, over time, she seemed to grow incrementally calmer, and he more audacious.
    A group of jolly older women christened me Spaceman, in reference to the astral appearance of my shiny, ultralight hiking gear. The name clicked. In the trail registers—notebooks located at regular intervals along the trail, meant for recordkeeping and note sharing—I began drawing a series of comic strips. The protagonist was a spaceman who had come down to Earth and somehow found himself navigating the strange customs, odd characters, and pseudo-wildernesses of the Appalachian Trail.
    Once a week or so, a group of us thru-hikers would hitchhike into town together, find a cheap motel (sometimes piling