Date: 2014-03-12
To: Appalachian Perspectives
Miles today: 0.0

I have been reading all I can on the AT, naturally, but have yet to find any single work that can properly frame its scale and significance for my feeble mind.* Bill Bryson¢s book is a great start of the sort of comprehensive account of the AT that I have in mind, as he blends natural history with folktales into his journal, but he definitely needs to finish¢¦(that is an inside joke). David Miller¢s popular diary is definitely the most useful account of thru-hiking. (I just met him at Amicolola, btw., where he gave a talk and autographed, unsolicited, my 2014 Southbound edition of his AT Guide. ) Read as I may, however, I can¢t yet get my head around the fact that there is a single and continuous corridor--it¢s more than a footpath--set aside (and maintained) by us in order for us to simply walk from one end of the country to the next, along some of the oldest rocks and most resilient environments on the planet. I desperately want to experience not only the length, but the depth, of this natural and cultural phenom¢. (What of its width? I overheard a fellow tourist at Clingman¢s Dome joke to his kids that they, having crossed a white-blazed trail, can now claim to have ¢walked the AT¢¢¦as in its breadth, lol.) I need someone to compose an antropogeographenomenology of the AT, in other words. What does this approximately (!?) 2,185.9-mile trail, sanctuary, escape, window, migration-route really mean? Most of us are aware of the historical significance of the AT¢s corridor; The Mohawk Trail, the Delaware Water Gap, and Harper¢s Ferry are part and parcel of US history. But history is more than the monumented past. It continues past us, and today¢s AT, with its ¢trail towns¢ and ¢trail days¢ is just the latest chapter in this social and natural symbiosis.Similarly, but on an even grander scale, a casual observer of my Northwest Florida Gulf coast hometown¢s main attraction, its snow-white beaches, will soon learn of its origins in the quartz deposits of the mountain chain named after its pre-historic residents, the Appalachee. But the ancient Dalradian rocks, which bridge me here and now to the Ireland outcrop of my birth, continue to dictate the course of the AT. Finally, we should think about the symbiosis of nature and culture which the Appalachian Mountains and its users represent. Consider, for a minute, our species¢ relations with the landforms I am soon to thread upon, and the resulting image they represent. Donald E Davis¢s "Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians" (U of Georgia Press, 2000) explains how the Mississippian culture, including the Appalachee, was largely eradicated by Hernando De Soto and his brave soldiers¢ immune systems, to be replaced by the Cherokee (who he credits as the dominant ethnic force in the area) who in turn were used by the French against the English settlers, whose settlement patterns made imprints still seen today, such as Ulster farmers burning off mountaintop flora to create the balds of Georgia and NC. Finally, American industry began to mine and timber the region to the extent that presently, less than 3 percent of the entire southern Appalachians can be considered old-growth or potential old-growth. And of these trees only an extremely small portion would be considered virgin, showing no signs of past human presence (Davis, p. 212).I only wish Davis had finished his eye-opening account with a mention of the AT, and how it represents the latest transformation of what the Appalachians mean. Nevertheless, I owe him my eyes. I am walking southbound, after all, and it is the southern parts of my walk that are most foreign to me, despite my having lived here for the latter third of my life. ¢Human history is natural history,¢ is how he expresses the point that I am trying to make (p. 201). This reality needs to inform my walk into the woods. I am not leaving civilization and entering ¢the environment¢; they are one and the same, when seen from the proper perspective. The kind of bird¢s-eye perspective I seek isn¢t fully available to use mere mortals, of course. But Spinoza seemed to think it was. He said that we were capable of seeing everything ¢sub speciae aeternitatis¢ or from an eternal point of view. I find comfort in this, the most provocative idea of his entire philosophy. Here¢s how the noted Spinoza scholar Stephen Nadler puts it:"Spinoza's fundamental insight is that Nature is an indivisible, uncaused, substantial whole¢in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by ¢God¢."Seeing the natural world as an active, dynamic and ongoing force, as opposed to a static and created ¢thing¢ sounds at first like a new-age perversion of X-ian dogma, but I take it to mean that the more we understand of any particular aspect of the world, the deeper our understanding of all of it becomes. That is, if we fully understood the nature of a blade of grass, or what brought about a rustle of leaves, or the course of a stream, we could comprehend more fully the more significant parts of the whole of creation, such as the ecological, historical, and geological questions we can now inquire about. *I would recommend, in addition to those mentioned above: Backpacker Magazine's "Guide to the AT" by Jim Chase, (2nd Ed., Stackpole Press, 2005) if only for its general history, biology, and geology of the trail as it crosses thru each state, and not for its "current" conditions or info on the trail."Appalachian Trials: A Psychological and Emotional Guide To Thru-Hike the Appalachian Trail" (Volume 1), 2012 by Zach Davis. (It looks like I will be contributing to the next volume, for free!) "Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild" Chip Brown's elegiac account of Guy Waterman's mountaineering in The White Mtns, though it's much more than that: http://www.chipbrown.net/midnight/index.html"The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature" by David George Haskell, (Penguin, 2012), an Appalachian State biologist's close examination of a "mandala's" worth of forest in Tennessee.The USFS, ATC, and of course whiteblaze.net are terrific online resources.