Footpaths

First writing is done by feet. When we walk, we make marks and we make meaning. A path is deep writing. It is a material surface that over time becomes worn and accommodating, but it is also indexical, pointing out a direction–actually two. In addition, paths are communal: formed and maintained by community while at the same time forming and maintaining those very communities. They enable movement and embody memory. For children, at least those who are able to experience childhood outdoors (not on flooring, pavement or artificial turf), paths are possibility. Each day they start yet another adventure. Their windings are a wild writing, leading not to places of labor or commerce, but instead to the hidden which is also the imaginative.

Writing takes many forms, but the classic scene is a steel-nibbed pen scratching the surface of thick paper with the ink leaving a dark line modulated by the faintest lateral threads, liquid drawn out infinitesimally by capillary action of the paper’s fibers. The direction of the mark is, at a glance, obvious, but the possibilities of divergence are framed by those faint lateral marks. Drawn lines and footpaths–diagrams–have direction, but like their childlike wild counterparts also signal other possibilities.

Footpaths and words can take you places or get you lost, which is just a word for a place unknown. Through use, paths enforce a certain directionality. They are habituated to the feet that speak their direction, discourage divergence, dampen wildness. Even walking in blankness is all about making and possibly following marks. Ninety Mile Beach is flat, often 30+ meters wide, and can be walked comfortably anywhere in a wide section, but I still found myself following paths defined by earlier walkers or car tracks. On other beaches (I’ve followed many a beach track on the Te Araroa which is Maori for “The Long Path”) where the sand is often too soft to walk, my feet seek out a thin trace of shells that form a tide line and mark out firm footing. But paths are not just directors, they can be aesthetic, as in Richard Long’s famous 1967 “Line Made by Walking.” They remember passersby, and, for example, express grief as in Rider’s walk down his dead wife Mannie’s weekly pathway in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black,” or they express and embody love, lovingly demonstrated in Eudora Welty’s “Worn Path” or the footpath of my own youth which led through an orchard to a girlfriend’s house.

On the other hand, a long-distance footpath must be precisely legible, so they tend to be multimediated. There is, of course the path itself, the reminder of where to step, step by step. Long-distance trails are, almost by definition, unfamiliar. The childlike pleasure of the wild path is, in long-distance hiking, overwhelmed by uncertainty and the physically high stakes of mistakes. A wrong turn can take the trekker many miles from intention. When crossed by another path, the trail needs further indication, often supplied by signs (made of wood or other ponderous material, but which can still be taken as wonders). Theirs is a writing that supplements the first pathwriting. Trail anxiety is also alleviated by other visual marks, usually some form of blazing. On the Appalachian Trail, these are white vertical rectangles (approximately 2 1/2″ x 6″) painted on a tree or rock, usually at eye height. Change in direction is signaled by the turn of the path itself, and reinforced by double blazes, often slightly staggered to indicate direction. In addition, the AT has blue blazes which point out secondary or supplementary trails, usually those which cannot be recognized by the differential width and wear of the path itself.

The Te Araroa is blazed by orange plastic triangles nailed to trees and posts at something that approaches eye height. Change in direction is indicated by doubling the blazes but also by tipping the triangle in that direction. Such indices are important on the TA, not just to alleviate anxiety, but also to embody the path which often, particularly in the Northland, can be more-or-less non-existent. In steep areas of, for example, the Herekino Forest, the slope can be completely washed out, giving no indication from the ground where to put feet. There the orange triangles become the path. But blazes also transform the experience of the pathway, moving it from feet and downcast eyes to scanning vision at human height, something that seems unimportant but is nevertheless phenomenologically significant.

Even with paths and blazes, it is still easy to lose trail direction. Often in the deep bush there is that heartsinking moment when you realize you have lost the trail. Usually, rather than returning to the last meaningful place (obvious path or blaze), a slight change in perspective, a simple shifting of head and eyes, reveals the obvious–Oh, there it is! Further mediation often takes the form of maps, usually topographical but also terrain profiles. I found that the Appalachian Trail itself was so well-worn and well-blazed that traditional topo maps were not necessary, though profile maps were useful in gauging the overall difficulty of the day. The most recent media form to layer over these others is GPS, which on smart phones takes the form of many useful apps that can obviate the need for all other writing except the path itself, which remains, as always, the first writing.

In a somewhat neglected essay, “The Biology of Cognition,” Humberto Maturana makes a distinction between connotative and denotative language. He does not appeal to traditional definitions of these terms, instead using “denotative” to mean the careful representation of concepts or ideas (in spoken or written language) to another person– almost like tokens passed from one person to another. In his schema, “connotative” then means the use of language to orient interlocutors to each other. When I ask someone how they are, I really do not expect bits of information about their health or financial status, nor am I directly interested in their mood. Rather, I am initiating an interaction where our mutual interests and concerns might in some way become aligned.

Maturana goes on to imply (as I recall) that a majority of language use is connotative, seeking orientation. Humans and other animals, fish, birds, insects, and microbes all orient themselves to each other through pathwriting. It is impossible not to marvel at the subtle communication within a formation of birds whose wings write currents in the air, leading those who follow to shift ever so slightly direction and speed. In Moby-Dick, Melville describes with fascination the watery paths leviathans follow in their migrations. Paths may not be denotative unless they are part of a highly ritualized set of symbolic gestures (e.g., The Stations of the Cross), but without doubt, they are connotative, serving to orient all motile beings to each other, their umwelt, livelihood, and selves. The hills of New Zealand are an intricate patterning of lines, a corduroy of paths and ledges made by generations of cattle and sheep, all finding a home in a steep and difficult place.

Footpaths and writing often come together (witness Wordsworth), and paths can be a model for thought, from Gerald Edelman’s notion of neural pathways to Martin Heidegger’s holzwege. The latter saw the path as thinking itself. One was never in a particular place or thought, but instead was always on the way toward it. To write is first and foremost to experience the open. To be on a footpath is never to arrive.

T. Hugh Crawford

Hiking Time

Portions of the Te Araroa require hitching a ride on a boat. Opua to Waikare is an extra 25km if you don’t go by water. I opted for the boat not just out of laziness, but also because I wanted a different view– oyster beds, derelict boats, grand waterfront houses, and old shanties–but I had to wait in the harbor all day for high tide. Needing to rest tired bones, the waiting part was easy. I was living hiking time, in this case time determined by the moon, a natural phenomenon generally ignored by everyone except fishermen, yacht people, and surfers.

Te Araroa is translated “the long walk,” but it is unclear if the adjective refers to time or distance. Perhaps they are the same. You can plan a walk, determine distances, make reservations, anticipate arrivals. Within the day itself, you can follow a watch and a map, but hiking time subverts all. You can cover 10 km on a forest road in the same time it takes to slog your way up 3km of a stream. You can (and will) make navigational errors that require recalibration of goals. Indeed, goals themselves are often abandoned as any day wears on, which is one reason for carrying a tent: ten square feet of level ground is a home for the night.

While waiting in Opua, I talked with a boating couple, one commented on the lengthening days (we will soon have equinox), and the other noted about how it will also be better with the coming of daylight savings time. I could only smile. The lengthening of the days with the spring is a significant change, enabling longer, warmer walks. I well remember hiking the Maine section of Appalachian Trail in August when it seemed the sun rose at 4:00 and did not set until after 10:00. That made for difficult sleeping as, on the AT, “hiker’s midnight” is 9:00 pm. Regarding daylight savings time, for those living industrial time, it means a day with more usable light. For someone living in the big outside, the day is as long as it is, regardless of time measurement devices or legislation.

Hiking time is also seasonal, not just shortened or lengthened days, but also weather patterns and temperature differentials. The ideal time to hike the TA is November –March. Then the Northland is warm and has, at least in most places, dried out from the spring rains. And the TA’s terminus–Bluff– is approached in the lingering days of summer. My calendar dictated a September start with an early January end. This meant starting out in the rain with still-cold evenings, and, on the South Island, will include wading rivers swollen by the spring thaw. Earl Shaffer, the first Appalachian Trail thru-hiker chronicled his experiences in a book entitled North with the Spring. Most AT thru-hikers still follow that pattern, commencing from Springer Mountain in March or early April in order to summit Katahdin by September. Being in the weather (significantly in French, temps is both weather and time) all day and night, raises the stakes on seasonal difference. My hike on the TA is South with the Remnants of Winter.

Spending the days walking the big outside makes for other ways to measure time–walking pace, a measure closer to poetry than to clocks. Wordsworth famously walked many thousand miles in his lifetime, and composed poetry while hiking on paths near Grasmere or pacing in his own garden. Each two steps an iamb (with old knees, steps are never spondee, the pattern of my trekking poles is definitely anapaestic). Hiking rhythm is hypnotic, soothing, or sheer brutality. Pace shifts across the day according to many variables: trail surface, nutrition, blisters, elevation change, sheer exhaustion, or inexplicable shifts in mood. With that comes a dilation of traditional time or the production of time as difference.

Hiking time is also geological. Surface, strata, upthrusts, bogs, all insist on acknowledgment. The old lava flow stretching across a beach must be crossed carefully–a surface both slippery and sharp. Volcanic peaks are steep and often lack soil to cushion feet, or when they do, it is a hopeless mucky mess. New Zealand seems a young place geologically speaking. The terrain is in ferment, constantly rearranging itself. Roads and trails are all subverted by slips and landslides, the streams seem to be newly gouging their own paths. And so many hillsides, volcanic in origin, are stark, nearly naked rock were it not for the exuberance of plant life, clinging wildly to their sides. There is something here of the forever new, a sense that things are just getting started.

If, as I imagine, the geology is young, the botany is ancient. I once wrote an essay about time and trees (here), but I didn’t talk about Kauri trees, those long-lived giants that proliferated in the Jurassic period but now are confined to the wet forests of the New Zealand northlands. Walking through a mature Kauri forest is something akin to walking amongst redwoods. The diameter of the trunks is unimaginable. There is a store near Awanui built around the upright trunk of an ancient Kauri that has been hollowed out to form a spiral staircase. But, unlike redwoods, Kauri’s have smooth, grey peeling bark, and they do not attain such heights, growing at most about 50 meters with large branching limbs forming an incredible canopy. Standing at the base, you feel as if you are looking at the world’s best climbing tree (if you were also a giant). Nested in its arms are epiphytes– rushes that look as if they should be growing around a bog. The TA goes through a number of Kauri forests, including a visit to one of the best loved of the trees, Tane Moana, thousands of years old. I reach down and touch eternity. At home, I have tongs made of Kauri wood. They are beautiful, rich, and red, somewhat resembling teak. With them I toss salad leaves hours old.

T. Hugh Crawford

Solitude

On the second day out from Cape Reinga, the trail led up from Twilight Beach over Scott Point and down to Ninety Mile Beach, named not because it is ninety miles long (more like eighty couple kilometers), but because Captain Cook, on his circumnavigation of the island named it the Ninety Mile Desert. Hiking it calls up cinematic deserts– flat sand, no landmarks to measure progress, heat puddles distort the distance. It is vast, open, and finally, even with the ocean and the dunes, blank. What the distance tells is absence– complete solitude. I walked most of the day without seeing a trace of humans. Not until late afternoon did the tour buses roar past, all the passengers waving. In New Zealand, the beach is part of the public right of way (at low tide) so the tour buses take their load to Cape Reinga, then to the dunes to sand surf, and end the day barreling down the beach on their way home.

Apart from those rushing vehicles, I was alone in the open. Solitude, like being, is spatial and temporal. It is easy to spend time in a closed, familiar space without feeling alone. People do it in offices every day, but hours in a vast open space produce an uncanny sense of solitude. The OED definition of alone includes: a combination of “all” plus “one,” emphasizing oneness essential or temporary…wholly one, one without any companions, one by himself. How strange that solitude–the “all-one”– begins as a multiplicity. “All” is more than one, and the non-distracted experience of solitude can be a multiplication of being.

One writer who comes to mind in understanding what it means to be alone is Thoreau, whose experiment at Walden Pond was a two-year exercise in solitude. Of course he was only a mile or so from town and did not lack for companionship when desired, but he also found himself isolated for stretches of time that exceed most people’s experience. In Walden, he regularly imagines people posing questions he just happens to be happy to answer. When queried about solitude, he responds: “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” There is a strange doubling here. He first claims to love being alone, but then immediately marks being alone with a companion–his own solitude. He goes on to detail a range of nonhuman companions that keep him both alone and accompanied.

Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and mentor, saw the ability to experience solitude as an important positive virtue, a way of avoiding falling into the unquestioned values of society. He notes, though, that it is easy to experience solitude in empty places. It is more difficult, and by implication, more profound, to be truly alone in the midst of society. I find myself at conceptual loggerheads here: solitude as a way of experiencing a profound sense of oneness (Emerson), and solitude as a way of living human multiplicity (Thoreau). That day, on ninety mile beach, Thoreau was the more felicitous guide. It was a drama of contending selves asserting and receding with the waves and tides.

T. Hugh Crawford

Commencement

Cape Reinga, the northernmost point in New Zealand, is the Springer Mountain of the Te Araroa trail, the place of commencement. There is no public transport there, so you have to rely on hitchhiking, book private transportation, or get a ride on one of the tour buses that take tourists to various sites (Kauri tree emporia, gumdigger museums) on the way up to the cape. They then take their passengers sand surfing and finish with a fast, long drive on the sand down 90 mile beach. The cape itself is on Maori sacred land, a place to visit but not for lunch or other recreation. At the lighthouse, you can see clearly the meeting point of two seas–the Tasman and the Pacific–whose battling currents form a line pointing directly toward where you stand.

Beginning and ends are marked literally or symbolically, but are lived differently. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, most people commence from Springer, but after a mile or two, all thoughts turn to the end: Katadhin, that cloud machine in the middle of Maine that Thoreau attempted to climb so many years ago and which now is the site of thru-hiker jubilation. The first is passed and nearly forgotten, and the second becomes obsession.

On finishing school, people both commence and graduate. Graduation is a marking off, but has a sense of finality, of reaching a specific point, while commencing is an opening out. Days are commenced with anticipation, sometimes even joy, but soon are governed by ends, reduce to the tasks that need accomplishing or the miles that need walking. Many thinkers celebrate the ideal of the in-between, cautioning disciples to not focus on the goal, but instead the journey. What then becomes of the commencement?

Living for beginnings can produce nostalgia, a yearning for an irretrievable moment of of pure plenitude. It degrades the present by its shining ephemerality, and is rightly criticized as reactionary if not absurdly mythical. Raymond Williams coined the term “the nostalgia escalator” to describe the infinite regress nostalgia produces, the constant pushing back in time of that moment when the world was not part of a degraded present.

But perhaps nostalgia not the only way to think commencement. Embracing the journey has the virtue of evading teleological totalization, but holding onto the moment of commencement– just a bit longer– is a way to reframe the triad, to turn back non-nostalgically to a different plenitude, to a moment of pure possibility. Surely a time worth re-living even as it is irrevocable.

T. Hugh Crawford

Animals
Pacific Crest Trail, August 2015

One of the first things to strike you on the northernmost part of the PCT is a pervasive silence. The forests breathes, but the birds and squirrels generally don’t chatter (except in Canada; Canadian squirrels make a racket!). It’s like being in a pre-Internet library. Not to say there is no sound, just that it is generally a quiet rustle, definitely not a roar. One exception: an unidentified bird whose call exactly duplicates the single note sounded by the emergency whistle on the sternum strap of a backpack.

It’s never clear whether it’s movement or sound that signal snakes. Snake awareness is always synaesthetic– a full-body response. We only encountered the occasional garden variety, never hearing the electric rattle that stops all movement including the human heart. More often the rustle is a bird pecking at the ground, innumerable chipmunks, and the occasional sharp call of a pika (small round mammals related to rabbits who sound a sharp alarm before diving into their burrow).

Movement on the trail usually means marmots or grouse. Many hikers regard marmots and cute, almost cuddly animals, who fearlessly perch atop hills, surveying the slopes and the hikers passing by. To me, they are slightly cute grey groundhogs. Back home, I remember kids with 22 rifles going out to hunt groundhogs, and farmers who carried a 22 or a 310 shotgun on their tractors to eliminate the critters who were digging up their fields. Guess it’s an east coast/west coast thing. Other fearless beings on the trail are grouse–the size of chickens (well, almost). Most hikers know the rush of adrenaline when they scare up a covey — the sudden burst and beat of wings brings the unsuspecting hiker to a shocked, heart-pounding standstill (or the hunter to a frenzy of shotgun blasts). These grouse rarely flee, and barely make the effort to run away. Sometimes they just head down the trail in front of you, barely outpacing boots and trekking poles.

Bears lurk but do not often appear. Parks may require food canisters in parts of California, but the hikers on the Washington PCT don’t use them, nor do they hang. They just curl up in their tent, food bags and all. So the largest non-human creatures to grace the trail are deer. Also fearless and also desperate for salt, they act offended when you invade their area, particularly if it is a campsite. And if you are foolish enough to piss anywhere near camp, you can expect multiple loud visits in the night, with the deer munching carefully the moss, humus, and soil you recently marked.

By far, the most frequently encountered animals are human, falling into several categories: day hikers, trail runners, short section or weekend hikers, lashers (long ass section hikers), and the occasional thru hiker (in the case of the PCT, that would mean hiking from Mexico to Canada). Each species exhibit different behaviors. Short timers tend to be louder and overburdened with shiny new equipment (most of which they will not use). Long timers smell, travel light and fast, and demonstrate remarkable efficiency in setting up or breaking camp, eating lunch on the trail, or crapping in the woods. A typical PCT thru-hike is over five months, usually commencing around May 1, so we were in front of the main bubble, only meeting a few hardy, fast souls.

True long-distance hikes are not just weather but also seasonally dependent, which is why most people hike both the PCT and the Appalachian Trail northbound. As the title of his book indicates, Earl Shaffer (the first AT thru-hiker) hiked north “With the Spring.” But the PCT presents other obstacles to the would-be thru hiker as the mountain passes in California can still be snowed in well into the summer, and Washington can ice up even in September. And, as we learned, other unanticipated obstacles present including trail closures or rerouting because of fire. All that makes a pure thru hike of the PCT, what would be called a “white blaze” hike on the AT, difficult to accomplish. All but one of the thru hikers we met who finished in Canada, still planned to return south to finish miles skipped for any number of reasons.

The PCT hikers tend to be different from their AT cousins in some fundamental respects (even though there are clear exceptions). Perhaps because of the prior planning the great re-supply distances the PCT necessitates, most hikers are decidedly middle class, and tend to be well-outiftted. Benton Mackaye’s original proposal for the Appalachian Trail opens discussing labor, and quickly turns to the needs of all people for fresh air and some time away from urban factories. His was a decidedly egalitarian vision, turning the great outdoors into a place for all to use. The difficulty of access and resupply on the PCT creates an environmental niche that limits thru-hikers to the well- supplied, the well-heeled in all senses of the term.

T. Hugh Crawford

Foliage
(Pacific Crest Trail, August, 2015)

Starting out, the plants are two–Douglas Fir and blueberries. The ancient trees loom. They have dominion. But the blueberries proliferate, and they are flavor. Their bushes vary in size and color, as do the berries. The ones with red leaves growing close to the ground seem always to give a tart jolt, while the slightly taller ones hold the round blushing blues you’d expect on a label. Others are tall with shiny black skins and a thin sweetness. Not just taste and sweetness, they also give moisture. One year, hiking from Vanderventer Shelter on the Appalachian Trail to Damascus Virginia, Bennett and I found ourselves in the middle of a 33 mile day with almost no water. The path was covered with blackberries which carried us down the mountain.

As the miles unfold on the PCT, the foliage differentiates. I now find Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock (a welcome sight after witnessing the die-off of eastern Appalachian hemlocks), Lodgepole Pine. There must be more I will see when my eyes and feet focus. I kept imagining balsam fir because the smell is penetrating, reminding me of the stories about tuberculosis sanitaria in the south Georgia Long-Leaf pine forests trying to exploit the healing power of the chemicals drifting through those evergreen stands. The Long-Leaf disappeared beneath the axe and turpentine bucket years ago, but here in the Cascades, apart from fire and chainsaws, these big trees just stand–hundreds of years. We came across one sawed log which was marked with a sharpie as 658 years–a testament to human insignificance.

At the burn-overs, the duality shifts. The silver-grey burnt trees shed all needles and bark, each species becoming synonymous. The blueberries are replaced in the first year with fireweed, in the second with what looks like coppiced beech. At lower elevations a few maples might mix in, but up high, the beech seem the only broadleaf to take hold, at least until the the evergreens re-establish their dominance.

Down close to the ground, tiny hemlock sprouts compete with club mosses. Both plants look like miniatures of the giants around them, but the club mosses, for all their tiny imposing stature, will never break for the sky, and must be content with the spots of light that filter through the canopy. Occasionally a tall yew or maybe a larch drift down short needles with the sound of rain as they cushion the path with litter. Near Canada a new bush appears looking very much like a wild American boxwood. The combination of yew and box take me back to the front yard of the house where I grew up, a domesticated version of the wild that confronts daily the walker of these Cascades paths.

But what arrests is reverence. The trees make quiet spaces through sheer brooding presence. A tall smooth-barked pine (Lodgepole?) grows straight, tall, fast, and the thin lower branches lose their needles and slowly drift into a semicircle, like arms lowered with hands about to clasp. Those branches are covered with an epiphyte a brighter green than what in the American south is called Spanish moss. When it dies, it turns black and looks like a bear’s fur on the ground, but in the air, it is a shaggy spectre, delineating a path, pointing on.

T. Hugh Crawford

Surface

The Pacific Crest Trail in the Northern Cascades of Washington has a surface that, when not scree, is soft, springy soil composed of fresh and decaying needles, cones, and wood from the giant trees that dominate this world. Dig down a few inches and you will find grey sand– fine particles of granite, the result of eons of erosion. It’s a beautiful but fragile surface to walk on. The high-traffic areas near entry points or where pack horses work quickly turn to dust or deep loose sand that slips under foot and settles into every crevice of your footwear, painting your calves to the knee. Still, a forgiving surface which reminds us that we may experience the great outside through our eyes, ears, and nose, but we come to know it through our feet.

Preparing to navigate a trail, hikers first think about distance, then elevation change. Those factors are well-represented by maps, particularly in profile, but there are few sources for an understanding of the third important factor: surface. Mileage/Elevation/Surface. The PCT is 2,650 miles long–a brutal distance made tolerable by it being more often than not “pack-grade” (no more than 6%). This accounts for its incredible length, as it takes lots of switchbacks to keep that grade (the trail’s distance as the crow flies is just over 1000 miles), but it also keeps the trail generally perpendicular to the direction of water run-off, making the surface much more stable. In comparison, the Vermont Long Trail seems to have been laid out by hiking next to or directly up stream beds, almost as if the designers had decided to use dry creeks as the base of their trail and which results in a washed out path–hard hiking over exposed rocks, more like climbing uneven stairs than hiking a trail.

Most of the trails in the various parks and wilderness areas across the USA are well-designed and maintained near their entry-points–because they get more traffic but also it is is easier to bring in crews and tools at those points. This is particularly true along the Appalachian Trail which is maintained by volunteer clubs. So, for example, a walker can leave Stevens Pass in the Cascades heading north and walk for miles along an old railroad grade wondering why anyone would think hiking is hard. Of course the deeper they plunge into the wilderness, the rougher it gets, but also more interesting.

These forests burn. Often a distance hiker will find a path through standing silver trunks, no bark, no needles, swaying gently but ominously, with an understory of shrub-like beech and a waving field of fireweed. One day, in a deep green growing forest I found on the path a cone with edges burnt. Puzzled, I thought back on tree stories I had read, concluding that this might be a cone from a tree that only opens in a burn, and, with the magic of ecological cooperation, some squirrel had dragged the now-open cone here for a meal and perhaps dispersal of the species. Across the Cascades, the trail is littered with strange white blossoms. Squirrels cut green Douglas Fir cones–tight cones with a thick green sap-like covering–then peel them, scale by scale, leaving neat piles of bleached white tinged with pink.

The thin soil of the Cascades supports trees of fantastic size and age– Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Mountain Hemlock. Their roots spread out, sometimes covering boulders and, after centuries, they pitch over, heaving roots high, revealing eternity. Stones suspended high in the air, and surface rock, now exposed, reacting reacting to light it has not reflected for millennia.

T. Hugh Crawford