Hiking is one of life’s greatest joys. It’s refreshing to turn off the screens and get out into nature for an extended period of time, perhaps several days. Unfortunately, as someone with two small children 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 long hikes along the Appalachians or the PCT. When I chose this I thought I was signing up for On the Trail: An Exploration By Robert Moore. But it turned out to be much more than that.
The prologue begins with Moore talking about his decision to hike the Appalachian Trail. And Chapter One doesn’t stray too far from the expected subject matter. It focuses primarily on Moore’s visit to Western Brook Pond in Newfoundland and broadly discusses the concept of wilderness.
His talent as a writer is evident from the first moment. A storm casts the Moor upon a hill:
For the better part of an hour, immersed in the rising waves of ear-thumping noise, I had time to reconsider the merits of hiking. Deprived of its romantic trappings, the wild ceases to inspire; Only a thin layer of light separated the sublime and the macabre.
This is probably the first indication that what you’re looking for is not a travelogue or a simple memoir that uses the path as a narrative device. Chapter Two immediately solidifies this, beginning a discussion of the nuanced differences of the various English words for ant tracks and lines of motion.
on the trails Bounces cheerfully from one topic to the next: game trails, fiber optic wires, Moore’s tenure as a cowboy. And overall, Moore navigates the shifting tones with ease. One moment, he’s waxing poetic about the power of nature, the next, he’s narrating an anecdote about losing an entire flock of sheep with comedic pace, then turning philosophical about the damage done by colonialism.
It’s a testament to Moore’s skill that the book is not only compulsively readable, but never feels disjointed as he wanders wildly from inventing the proto-Internet envisioned by engineer Vannevar Bush in 1945 to quoting the poet Gary Snyder.
on the trails Starts with a simple idea: How did the Appalachian Trail, or any hiking trail for that matter, come to be? And from there it flows endlessly into a thousand different tributaries, exploring how the concept of trails can help us understand the world.
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