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traced the ant’s return path along the bathtub. The resulting trail was “quite wiggly,” full of errors.
    Another ant emerged, followed the first ant’s trail, and located the sugar. As it plodded back to the nest, Feynman marked its trail with a different color of pencil. But in its haste to return with its bounty, the second ant repeatedly lost the first ant’s trail, cutting off many of the unnecessary curves: The second line was noticeably straighter than the first. The third line, Feynman noted, was even straighter than the second. He ultimately followed as many as ten ants with his pencils, and, as he’d expected, the last few trails he traced formed a neat line along the bathtub’s edge. “It’s something like sketching,” he observed. “You draw a lousy line at first; then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice line after a while.”
    I later learned that this streamlining process extended beyond ants, or even animals. “All things optimize in nature, to some degree,” an entomologist named James Danoff-Burg told me.
    Intrigued, I asked him if there was a good book I could read on optimization.
    â€œSure,” he said. “It’s called The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.”
    Evolution, he explained, is a form of long-term, genetic optimization; the same process of trial and error takes place. And, as Darwin showed, in the great universal act of streamlining, even the errors are essential. If some ants weren’t error-prone, the ant trail would never straighten out. The scouts may be the genius architects who blaze the trails, but any rogue worker can be the one who stumbles upon a shortcut. Everyone optimizes, whether we are pioneering or perpetuating, making rules or breaking them, succeeding or screwing up.
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    After three and a half months I reached the base of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I climbed it via the Crawford Path, the same trail I had hiked when I was ten. In rapid succession I pieced together a half-dozen peaks that I’d climbed at different times in the past decade: the Presidentials, Old Speck, Sugarloaf, Baldpate, the Bigelows. The order of the mountains sometimes surprised me; it was as if someone had opened my childhood photo album and rearranged my memories. The mountains also seemed smaller than I remembered. Hikes that had taken days when I was a kid now took only hours. It was an eerie sensation—that same uncanny, gargantuan feeling you get from revisiting your old kindergarten.
    Any feeling of mastery I harbored was mingled with feelings of humility. I had hiked two thousand miles, but I could never have gotten there on my own. My route had been carved out by scores of volunteer trail-builders and a continuous flow of prior walkers.
    I often felt this way on the trail: I was able to hold both onenotion and its direct opposite in my mind at the same time. Paths, in their very structure, foster this way of thinking. They blear the divide between wilderness and civilization, leaders and followers, self and other, old and new, natural and artificial. It is fitting that in Mahayana Buddhism, the image of theMiddle Path —and not some other metaphor—is used as a symbol of dissolving all dualities. The only binary that ultimately matters to a trail is the one between use and disuse—the continual, communal process of making sense, and the slow entropic process by which it is unmade.
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    On August 15, almost five months to the day after I had started out from Springer Mountain, I reached the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine. Far below, in every direction, were green forests and blue lakes and islands of green forest within the blue of the lakes. After what felt like months of steady rain, the skies had finally cleared. I could feel the dampness baking from my bones. I had at last reached the trail’s end.
    In the center of the peak was an iconic wooden sign announcing the trail’s