Ode to Trails
Not quite nature, not quite manmade.
Can you write a love letter to a trail? A paean to a path? A sonnet to a switchback?
I don’t know because what, exactly, are you? Not natural, certainly—carved as you are from the forest floor. Picks and spades carved you from this canyon. Hands tended your edges. Arms laid your steps upon steep sections.
Yet you are not quite manmade either. Your path was set by infinite biological interactions across an ecosystem. Your route reflects eons of geology.
You are manifesting, emergent, evolving. A line carved by intention, but shaped by time. You are artifice, but not artificial.
For all that I love you. I love how near you are to the city, yet how far you feel. I love the dust that clings to my legs. I love the sticky touch of the leaves along your sides.
I love that when I move down your narrow track, gear in my hands, I can lay down my burdens and breathe in your green wildness.
You don’t care about the mundane cares of the office, the worries of the city. All that hustle-bustle, all those silly plans of men—they will fade, as they always have, leaving only faint scratches on the world. What is any of that to you?
Yet you are one of those marks. Etched, quite literally, into the land. Sustained through mundane things like sales taxes and bonds. Tended by volunteers who care and maintain you. Made by people and yet more than human.
Could you be art?
On the one hand, trails are utilitarian—a path from A to B. On the other, to build a trail is always an act of creation. Park rangers cut through rock with pick and vision. Pilgrimage routes wear reverence into the ground. Desire paths show where human feet draw lines across the skin of the earth.
Trails reconstruct the natural—hopefully with care, but always with intention.
And so I run along your contours, placed upon the hillside. The sun shines through the leaves, chlorophyll-fused light glowing verdant. Down we go together; and I stop caring what you are, only grateful that you’re there.
This ode was originally written at the Write Now workshop at Sea Ranch, California. Special thanks to Mark Sanford Gross for leading the workshop and providing feedback on this ode.
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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.
love this
Gorgeous, Sam!