On Trails
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 9, 2017 5:05 PM | Last Updated: September 13, 2017
Robert Moor
In 2009, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet. How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others devolve? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Over the course of the next seven years, Moor travelled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails and traced the origins of our road networks and the internet.
In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy and nature writing — combining the nomadic joys of Peter Matthiessen with the eclectic wisdom of Lewis Hyde's The Gift. (From Simon & Schuster)
From the book
A few years ago, an ecologist named Hattie Bartlam-Brooks attached GPS collars to a group of zebras in Botswana's Okavango Delta to track their grazing patterns. At the time, it was widely believed that the zebras never left the delta, so when a large number of the zebras disappeared from sight at the onset of the rainy season, Bartlam-Brooks assumed they had been eaten by lions. Then, six months later, the tagged zebras reappeared. When Bartlam-Brooks recovered their collars and downloaded the data, she discovered that the zebras had somehow walked halfway across the country, to feed on the sprouting grasses of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pan.
By reading through old hunters' and explorers' records, she learned that a large zebra migration had once existed along that same route, but it had been severed when the Botswanan government installed hundreds of miles of veterinary cordon fences in 1968. One of these fences blocked the zebras' migratory route for decades before the government finally dismantled it in 2004. Since the fence stood for thirty-six years, and the average lifespan of a zebra is only twelve yeas, no living zebras could have possibly remembered making that trip. But then, I wondered, how could the zebras have known where to go?
From On Trails by Robert Moor ©2016. Published by Simon & Schuster.