Hiking is one of life’s great joys. Turning off the screens and stepping out into nature for an extended period of time, perhaps even several days, is rejuvenating. Unfortunately, as someone with two young kids and a bad back, I’m not really able to go backpacking anymore. So I often find myself trying to live vicariously through others who write about their lengthy travails along the Appalachian or the PCT. That’s what I thought I was signing up for when I picked up On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor. But it turned out to be so much more.
The prologue starts with Moor talking about his decision to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. And chapter one doesn’t stray too far from the expected subject matter either. It focuses primarily on Moor’s trip to Western Brook Pond in Newfoundland and broadly discusses the concept of wilderness.
His talents as a writer are apparent from moment one. A storm pins Moor down on a ridge:
For the better part of an hour, awash in mounting waves of tympanic rumble, I had time to reconsider the merits of hiking. Stripped of its Romantic finery, the wild ceased to inspire; only a gauzy scrim separated sublimity and horror.
This is perhaps the first hint that what you’re in for is not some travelogue or a simple memoir that uses the trail as a narrative device. Chapter two immediately solidifies this, launching a discussion of ant trails and the fine distinctions of various English words for lines of movement.
On Trails bounces around gleefully from topic to topic: Game trails, fiber optic wires, Moor’s stint as a shepherd. And all throughout, Moor seamlessly navigates shifting tones. One moment, he’s waxing poetic about the power of nature, the next, he’s spinning an anecdote about misplacing an entire flock of sheep with a comic’s sense of pacing, then turning philosophical about the damage done by colonialism.
It’s a testament to Moor’s skill that the book not only manages to be compulsively readable, but never feels disjointed as he swings wildly from exploring a proto-internet envisioned by engineer Vannevar Bush in 1945, to quoting poet Gary Snyder.
On Trails starts with a simple idea: how did the Appalachian Trail, or any hiking trail for that matter, form? And from there it branches off endlessly into a thousand different tributaries, exploring how the very concept of trails can help us understand the world.