Story of a Trail

A path's life, death, and everything in between.

Oct 30, 2023

Welcome back to Breakfast Club, stories about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world.

Stumblings

On a muggy summer morning, a few months before the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was clearing brush with my brother.

It was finicky work. Using hand clippers, we chomped at scrub, a tangle of ivies and kudzu catching at our feet. Part of a project to carve a trail around our North Carolina high school, we stumbled along. Cumbrous labor—wobbly under foot, sticky with humidity, sweaty of t-shirt and cargo short.

Why build a trail?

The impetus was a child hit by a car; struck out running the roads of some southron city. In a republic not known for taking action in the face of dead children, the bureaucrats moved surprisingly quick...to restrain the runners of course, not the cars.

And so by early 2001, prep-school athletes were barred from running off campus during practices. And just like that, my cross country team was stuck jogging laps around school parking lots.

Thus the desire to build a running path around the school.

Into the woods

Being a runner, I was down for the cause. My brother, a football player and wrestler, was less interested, but conscripted by my parents into labor.

And so we found ourselves that morning, bushwhacking through the woods on the lower slopes of campus.

Ahead of us, my father wielded a chainsaw, cutting trees to open a path. The descendant of English colonials, my dad grew up in the woods of rural Connecticut. He has never seen a tree without sizing up its potential as firewood. He buzzed forward, ripping through eastern chaparral in the throaty sing-song of motorized chain passing through timber.

Spiders webbed across the path, birds swooped through clearings, banter from soccer practices floated through the trees in adolescent staccato.

My brother and I followed, working alongside John, an adult volunteer. John sold furniture downtown. His daughter ran on the cross country team. The three of us clomped along the hillside, clipping bushes too pliable to be chainsawed, heaving branches and chunks of tree to a pickup truck.

As we approached a thicket, John called out, “Woah, there! Woah, there!” his voice punching through the chainsaw’s gasoline growl. My brother and I looked back. He waved at the ground. “Poison ivy! That there is poison ivy,” gesturing at tendrils of plant all around us.

John grew up in Louisiana, his accent spiced with a Cajun patois that blurred his v’s and t’s in our carpetbagger ears: “Dat dare’s boison iby!” It took us several more beats tromping through the vine before we understood: we were covered in the plant; an itchy week lay ahead.

And so the trail was built: in a whirl of chainsaw whine and Louisiana consonants.

“The Trail”

That’s how we referred to it—a short trail that ringed the school, which itself sat on a small plateau above a sloping ridge rising from Threemile Branch Creek.

Topographic map of Concord High School with trail outlined in red. Courtesy USGS.

The trail’s surface was a carpet of pebble-sized gravel, a beige aggregate from a regional quarry. Laid down with shovels and a Bobcat front loader, it circumscribes the school’s southern half—a vanilla belt transplanted from afar that may puzzle geologists centuries from now.

This 1.5-mile loop became my running palace. I’d run laps every weekday and most weekends. Unlike the tarmac, it was car-free and calm. Spiders webbed across the path, birds swooped through clearings, banter from soccer practices floated through the trees in adolescent staccato.

The trail shifted with the seasons. In the long, merciless summer, its tree groves were a shady respite. During winter, the lower sections grew damp, flooding with rain. On wet weeks, running the lower path meant taking gigantic, sock-saving leaps through the soupy mess.

Loop after loop after loop, we learned every bump, curve, and undulation. Each footstrike a celery crunch upon gravel. Bodies tuned to the gradients of hills. Legs adjusting to dips and rises.

In medieval Britain, clergy and lay folk would “beat the bounds” in a ceremonial walk of church parish boundaries. Every year priests and local notables walked their parish edges, tapping sticks against landmarks, trees, and boundary markers.

Maps being rare, the ritual provided a collective mental map of parish territory and generational transfer of knowledge. This learning was visceral, pain used to aid memory. Children might be whipped near a marker tree or have their heads knocked against a boundary stone. In a land dispute, one older man testified he knew the exact eastern boundary for his parish because he had been thrown into a heap of nearby nettles when he was a boy. Pain imbued knowledge into the minds and bodies of the perambulators.

So too does a trail engrain into those moving upon it. Uneven ground wobbles the legs, switchbacks pivot the hips, rocks announce themselves beneath feet. The body keeps the score of a million tiny collisions of sinew into soil.

Intelligible lines

What makes a trail? Is it the path that’s carved by shovels? That’s long been my understanding—trails as an intervention upon the land. Cut a few trees, hack away the brush, throw down some erosion-resistant dirt and voila, a trail.

Or is a trail the remnant of footsteps since past? This is the word’s derivation, the remnant left behind, that which literally trails behind as we stomp our meaty selves through the world.

In his thoughtful book On Trails, Robert Moor asks us to reconsider both definitions, to view trails as ways of making sense of the world:

There are infinite ways to create a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.

A trail rationalizes terrain, demonstrates that of all the possible pathways that might have been, this one was chosen.

But for a path, it is the follower, not the trailblazer, who plays the vital role of improving, adapting, and maintaining this intelligible line. “Use creates trails,” Moor observes, “Long-lasting trails, then, must be of use.” If the collective desire to use a trail fades, so too does the trail.

And that is what happened to the Concord High School cross country trail: it stopped being used. The alumni who built it moved away. The track and cross teams languished. The shrubs, brush, and ivies began to reclaim the path.

One winter, home for the holidays, I jogged out for a lap of the trail. I managed to follow the old path’s clearing through the upper slopes. But reaching the lower section, I was blocked by a brushy thicket. A few more half-hearted steps into the high grass revealed scrub had consumed all. Grass and bushes grew over the gravel; water flooded the clearings. Forgotten, unused—the trail was gone.

Has it been rebuilt since I last saw it? Not to my knowledge. Its paths are only clear now in memory, a lesson of a trail’s liveliness. Trails grow, evolve, change, and pass away with our collective needs and interests. Without that group effort, the teeming chaos returns.

Thanks for reading.

Weekly run

Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:

When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
For updates, email Katie Klymko at katieklymko at gmail.com to join Breakfast Club’s WhatsApp chat. More info

For more local events, join our Strava club, East Bay Strava Runners