On Trails Read Online Free PDF Page B

trail of a galloping horse streamlines. It is that both the fast horse and the slow one seek the path of least resistance. When aims differ, trails do too. These overlapping and crisscrossing trails, created by countless living beings pursuing their own ends, form the planet’s warp and woof.
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    This book is the culmination of many years of research and many miles of walking. Throughout, I was fortunate to have been guided by experts in their fields, each illuminating a key element in the long history of trails, spanning from the Precambrian to the postmodern. In the first chapter, we take a close look at the world’s oldest fossil trails, and explore the question of why animals first began to move. The second chapter investigates how insect colonies create trail networks tomaximize their collective intelligence. In the third chapter, we follow the trails of four-legged mammals like elephants, sheep, deer, and gazelles, to learn how they manage to navigate immense territories, and how our efforts to hunt, herd, and study them have shaped our development as a species. Chapter four chronicles how ancient human societies stitched together their landscapes with networks of footpaths, which then became tightly interwoven with the vital cultural threads of language, lore, and memory. In the fifth chapter, we unearth the winding origins of the Appalachian Trail, and other modern hiking trails like it, which stretch back centuries to Europeans’ colonization of the Americas. In the sixth and final chapter, we trace the longest hiking trail in the world from Maine to Morocco, and we discuss how trails and technology—having combined to create our modern transportation system and communication network—connect us in previously unimaginable ways.
    As a writer and a walker, I am limited by my experience, my background, and my place in history. If this book strikes some readers as too Americentric, or too anthropocentric, I beg their forgiveness; I am, after all, just one American human, doing my best to make sense of a deceptively complex topic. It is also important to note that although the structure of this book is loosely spatial and chronological—moving from the tiny and ancient to the huge and futuristic—this book is not what philosophers call a teleology, a succession of rungs leading up to an ultimate goal. I am not so foolish as to believe that trails have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years only to culminate in the hiking paths of the twenty-first century. I urge readers to avoid interpreting this book’s structure as a ladder leading upward, but to instead regard it as a trail winding from the dim horizon of the past to the wide foreground of our present circumstances. Our history is one of many paths we might have taken, but it was the one we took.
    Trails can be found in virtually every part of this vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours. Throughout the history of life on Earth, we have created pathways to guide our journeys, transmit messages, refine complexity, and preserve wisdom. At the same time, trails have shaped our bodies, sculpted our landscapes, and transformed our cultures. In the maze of the modern world, the wisdom of trails is as essential as ever, and with the growth of ever-more labyrinthine technological networks, it will only become more so. To deftly navigate this world, we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us.

CHAPTER 1
    I T IS IMPOSSIBLE to fully appreciate the value of a trail until you have been forced to walk through the wilderness without one. There is a practical reason why, for more than a thousand years, after the fall of Rome and before the rise of Romanticism, little was more abhorrent to the European mind than the prospect of a “pathless” or “tangled” wilderness. Dante famously described the feeling of finding oneself in a “wild, harsh and