You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you go for a bit of a stroll and might turn here or might turn there, but specifically trails, where you can only follow one route. He likes them because ‘they are a rigidly bounded experience. Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit.’ And yet the book itself operates by exploring tangents, lots of subjects related to trails but which aren’t themselves trails.
Not that the contradiction matters; Moor goes down some pretty interesting tangents. While visiting Newfoundland to examine the oldest trails ever discovered — left 565 million years ago by tiny creatures on what was then the seabed, though we don’t know why — he examines the question of what makes us human.
Nature, as you’d expect, is a constant theme. We learn that zebras and giraffes often herd together, possibly because the former possess excellent hearing and the latter excellent long-range vision, making for a crack lion-spotting team. We read about an elephant walking carefully over two sleeping rangers in Zimbabwe: ‘Its footprint was stamped into the groundsheet between where they lay.’ And we discover that ‘desire lines’ — trails that are there simply because they form the easiest route between two points — are known in Japan as kemonomichi (‘beast trails’) and in France as chemins de l’âne (‘donkey paths’). In fact the University of Oregon once pitted 40 cows against a sophisticated computer program at finding the most efficient path across a field. The cows won.
On a smaller scale, fire ants mark the trail back from a food source by releasing a stream of pheromone — the more food there is, the more pheromone they leave.
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