On Trails
An Exploration
-
-
5.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A strikingly original debut from a tremendous new talent, Robert Moor explores how trails help us understand the world, from the biological phenomenon of how ant trails are formed to hiking paths that span continents and oceans, from migration routes to the Internet.
In 2009, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet: 'How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others devolve? What makes us follow or strike off on our own?' Over the course of the next seven years, Moor travelled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing.
This deep search for meaning introduces the reader to experts who work with trails of all kind, outrageous anecdotes from his own experiences and spectacular descriptions of landscapes and animal behavior. On Trails gives an eye-opening tour, leaving us with a much richer, prismatic take on what we constantly take for granted: how we get where we're going.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engrossing meditation on trails in animal and human societies, journalist Moor surveys the natural and social histories of trail-making, from the half-billion-year-old fossilized trails of Ediacaran blobs to the pheromone trails of ants, the well-judged and emotionally meaningful trails of elephants (they may carve routes to the graves of relatives), and the ancient Native American trails that underlie much of the modern U.S. road network. He styles these disparate trails as a kind of "external memory" whereby, as one individual follows in the tracks of another for prosaic reasons, a larger template for collective movement is unwittingly constructed. In fine participant-journalist fashion, the author dives into the trail-blazing himself, doing a stint as a shepherd trying to guide wayward sheep and goats through the countryside; mapping out hiking trails in Morocco, where the locals are baffled by the notion of foreigners traipsing around on barren mountainsides; and walking the Appalachian Trail, where exhaustion and rain are leavened by intense camaraderie. Moor combines vivid reportage told in supple prose with lucid explorations of science and history in an absorbing account of how travelers shape and are shaped by the land they pass through.
