On Footpaths

by George Jacobi

Well, this feels useless. I’m crouched on the trail instead of hiking, palms to the hard icy earth, trying in vain to absorb the essence of the now indiscernible human feet that once trod here. Joshua’s Trust’s Madeline Regan Preserve in Tolland includes a half mile of Mishimmayagat, the Old Connecticut Path. If you follow it today toward Boston, you’ll pass through Willington’s Fenton-Ruby Preserve and then JT’s Fliegel Farm Woods. I’m musing about the act of walking through history. Or maybe the acts of history through walking. But you can’t force this stuff.

Trails draw me like a magnet; setting out is a response to a stimulus. Am I getting away from everything, or moving toward something? Or both? Maybe I search for a path to somewhere, or for the way back to my true self. Does this sound like psychobabble? I usually hike just to see what’s there–it’s just the sort of unproductive activity I excel at. Now that hiking has become harder for me, openness to nature and instinct means even more than adventure. Still, a pilgrimage forward toward wildness, therefore mystery, seems to balance going back, as I am too often wont to do for security and stability.

I value increased awareness of my place in my local landscape. To traverse the wood between two known roads is to feel the distance and the environs more deeply every time you drive past again. Geographic knowledge. Eyes in your feet. A footpath is satisfyingly democratic. We are all equal simply as bipeds. A further premium: it’s not easy to sleepwalk in the forest the way we do on a sidewalk. Paying attention is a practice always in need of reinforcement.

How did we get here? On foot. We strode audaciously out of Africa’s Rift Valley, kept on rambling until we reached Tierra Del Fuego, and thus inhabited everywhere in between. Walking is arguably the first “human” activity. We first had to come down from the trees and evolve new feet. Our early primate feet became less flexible when no longer needed to grasp. Toes lined up better and the foot became sturdier, to push off and run, cover ground. We became the “walking apes”. Homo Erectus. Meant to walk.

Much later in North America, the Laurentide Ice Sheet receded, leaving a bounteous land for the humans who had settled here, and they traded among themselves along a network of trails that connected tribal cultures by trade. What we call the “Old Connecticut Path” was a major one. Then in 1636, Thomas Hooker led 100 people out of Cambridge, MA and followed that Indian route to found Hartford and in fact, Connecticut. “That path carried the first westward march of empire of the Anglo-American Race”: Ayres.

The state of Connecticut is back to being forest these days, 60% timberland. We are all forest dwellers. Our wooded ways, curved and gnarly, rutted and rooted, rocky or swampy, reflect my own interior landscape. I guess I’m fine with both as tangled as they are.

I like the sense of “getting somewhere”. A path visually directs and carries us along. Comforting. Bushwhacking is a more serious endeavor. Paths create relationships between places and thus maybe even people. Counterintuitively, I like it when the end, the horizon, is always out of sight. Retracing one’s steps detracts from my exploration experience; that’s why I prefer a loop trail (looping back is also suitable for an essay).

Time to get going again. To understand walkers, you must walk. The traces of footsteps and hoofprints remain here even if I can’t make them out. Other human echoes linger in the Himalaya, where human steps sometimes crush the snow into solid ice. When summer comes, you can find these ghost foot plinths enduring after warmth has melted the surrounding snow. There is a shoreline in Formby Point, England where, as the tide goes out, Neolithic foot tracks in the sedimentary rock appear. Follow in the steps of a person who traveled there, ages and ages ago. If you wish, contemplate anthropology, as I tried to do today on the Old Connecticut Path. And consider this: there is a jumble of footprints in a place called, wonderfully, the Sea of Tranquility. How fitting that we took a walk there.

Suggested: The Great Trail of New England, Harral Ayres, 1940

YouTube Great Trail video by Jason Newton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qLGQIy-UylY