On Trails Read Free Page B

six or eight people into a single room), and spend the day showering, washing our filthy clothes, drinking beer, eating impossible quantities of greasy food, and watching bad TV—glutting ourselves, like barbarians, on the meretricious pleasures of civilization. By the next morning we would be eager to get back on the trail, where we could sweat out the gunk and savor the clean air.
    I had expected the trail to be a refuge for loners like me; the sense of community that formed among us scattered thru-hikers took me by surprise, and then grew to be one of the hike’s nectarine joys. We were bonded by common experience. Each of us knew how it felt to walk for weeks through hail and snow and rain. We starved; we gorged. We drank from waterfalls. In the Grayson Highlands, wild ponies licked the sweat from our legs. In the Smokies, black bears haunted our sleep. We had each faced down the same Cerberus of loneliness, boredom, and self-doubt, and we had learned that the only solution was to out-walk it.
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    As I got to know my fellow thru-hikers—a motley pack of freedom seekers and nature worshipers and outright kooks—it struck me as odd that all of us had willingly confined ourselves to a single path. Most of us saw this hike as an interlude of wild freedom before we reentered the ever-tightening hedge maze of adult life. But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what a trail offers. Quite the opposite—a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic.
    To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line. The ancient prophets and sages—most of whom lived in an era when footpaths provided the primary mode of transport—understood this fact intimately, which is why the foundational texts of nearly every major religion invoke the metaphor of the path. Zoroaster spoke often of the “paths” of enhancement, of enablement, and of enlightenment. The ancient Hindus too prescribed three margas , or paths, to attain spiritual liberation. Siddh ā rtha Gautama preached the āry ās t ān gamārga , or the Noble Eightfold Path. The Tao literally means “the path.” In Islam, the teachings of Muhammad are called the sunnah (again, “the path”). The Bible, too, is crisscrossed with trails: “Ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it, and you shall find rest for your souls,” commanded the Lord to the idolaters. (Responded the idolaters: “We will not walk therein.”)
    There are, it is often said by the more ecumenical prophets, many paths up the mountain. So long as it helps a person navigate the world and seek out what is good, a path, by definition, has value. It is rare to run across a spiritual leader preaching that there are no paths to enlightenment. Some of the Zen masters came close, though eventhe great D ō gen stated that meditation “is the straight path of the Buddha way.” The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti stands out in this regard. “Truth has no path,” he wrote. “All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing.” Unsurprisingly, his path of pathlessness attracted fewer adherents than the reassuringly detailed instructions of Muhammad or Confucius. Lost in the howling landscapes of life, most people will choose the confinement of a path to the dizzying freedom of an unmarked wilderness.
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    My spiritual path, to the extent that I had one, was the trail itself. I regarded long-distance hiking as an earthy, stripped down, American form of walking meditation. The chief virtue of the trail’s confining structure is that it frees the mind up for more contemplative pursuits. The