The obvious question – ‘Why would one want to undertake the Appalachian Trail hike?’

I’ll avoid the trite/clichéd answer, as the George Mallory quote goes, “because it is there!”

Instead, I will lean on my own academic of choice and quote Carl Jung, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”

This quote comes much closer, I think, to how I experienced making the choice to walk the trail. I watched some videos. I watch a lot of videos about a lot of things, but the videos on the trail spoke to me, the idea captured me. This was about five years ago, and ever since then, the question has not been whether I will walk to Appalachian Trail, but when.

I recently read ‘The Poetics of Space’ by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard; it prompted me to view the trail through a different lens.

Bachelard’s book is a poetic reflection on spaces, primarily those spaces we find within the home; he considers such spaces as reservoirs of memory and dreams, shaping our sense of self, our thoughts, and our creative self. The idea is that the specific aesthetic quality of certain spaces holds for us certain ideas and associations; some explicitly, easily brought to mind and articulatable, but others less so, often existing behind language, to be sensed and intuited. In other words, our relationship with certain spaces is not purely rational or functional but is deeply interwoven with our unconscious and imagination.

In this same way, we can imagine constellations of ideas being akin to conceptual spaces, which in turn have their own aesthetic quality. I’ve not read about this idea directly. But I think it follows that most of us are probably drawn to the aesthetic quality of certain conceptual spaces over and above any sort of reasoned process of induction. I tend to think that the norm is to intuit our beliefs (or likes) first, and then subsequently reason our way to those beliefs.

This all relates to the fact that we do not choose our ideas, but rather our ideas choose us. There’s a kind of aesthetic resonance to ideas which makes them particularly sticky to who we are, or who we imagine ourselves to be, or who we want ourselves to be perceived to be, something like that.

I think there is a much broader point here which I’m only highlighting in passing. We are on the whole mindless automatons which glom onto ideas purely because they tick some aesthetic boxes in our mind, and as such, the amount of pure inductive reasoning taking place is far less than we might suppose. For the most part we are following after ideas because they “feel” right, which is another way of saying, you don’t have a clue, you are, as the idiom goes, being lead by the blind. You are being led by some seemingly arbitrary aesthetic preference which is not chosen, at least it is by no means obvious that it is chosen, it is just there, passively and in all respects, shaping our all.

But that is not my focus here. The Appalachian Trail should be thought of as an idea, an idea which can be considered in Bachelardian manner. The Appalachian Trail is not really a singular thing, it is part of a narrative, it is what it is because we collectively tell ourselves a story about it being such as it is. A path running 2190 miles from Springer to Katahdin, from the state of Georgia to Maine. So, what is the story?

I think it obviously contains the stories of every individual hiker who has walked that path since it opened in 1937, but more than that, it is the story of everyone who has inhabited the spaces through which the path passes. They are all part of the story. There’s the geography itself, as it has contoured its way into its present form, there are its pre-European inhabitants, the lives of its early settlers, and everyone who today lives across the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains, across her endless vistas, her secluded valleys, and her quiet forests.

Considering the conceptual space which is the Appalachian Trail I’ll play the word association game:

Adventure
Americana
Gear / the hiker aesthetic
By visiting hiking websites you can gage the color profile: dark greens, dark blues, white, greys, and black
Hiker poles
Comradery
Relationships
Harmony
Beauty
Endurance
Challenge
Resilience
Discovery
Simplicity
Exploration
Transformation
Solitude

I have spent a lot of time, as I imagine most potential thru-hikers do, watching gear videos, considering carefully each LB I will be carrying, my sleep system, my shelter, my preferred food prep method, etc. I think this is a large part of the appeal: there is a technical dimension, but it’s not merely theoretical, it has to be implemented, and doing so poorly can have dire consequences. It’s unlikely, but people do die on the trail, people slip, people are killed by other hikers. It’s by no means a purely academic exercise. If you’re shit you might die. That somewhat grounds the whole thing.

The Henry David Thoreau quote comes to mind… “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…”

I think in this synthetic and digital world, the contrast between our everyday and the woods is far starker than it was when Thoreau wrote this with one of his pencils in the 1840s. I personally believe we are on the cuspy-cuff of an artificial intelligence inflection point, a shift from one epoch to the next, and as such going for a long walk seems even more appropriate.

Doing it for the adventure, it maps on pretty obviously to the archetypal hero’s journey motif, the epic quest, the trek towards Mount Doom.

So, here is the conceptual space, it has chosen me. It is my strong desire to indulge it, it is my hope that I can do it justice. Most do not get such an opportunity. I may never again. As such, here we go.

The Aesthetic of the Hike