[This week, I’ll
be camping with family up in Maine’s
beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts
for this longstanding
form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in
comments, please!]
Three men who
helped blaze the nation’s (and one
of the world’s) premiere hiking
trail.
1)
Benton MacKaye: It
stands to reason that the idea for the Appalachian Trail was first developed,
in the 1921 article “An
Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” by a Forestry professor
and civil servant. But what is perhaps more surprising, and very important, is
MacKaye’s lifelong emphasis on such wilderness exploration as an integral part
of human society, rather than in any sense separate from it; he called this
connection of nature to society both “Regional
Planning” and “Geotechnics,”
and dedicated his career to arguing for and enacting it. As other posts this
week have illustrated, many of our narratives of camping and the wilderness
define them as distinctly outside from (and contrasted with) our more “settled”
social spaces and communities—but that’s not the narrative or understanding
with which the Appalachian Trail began, and remembering MacKaye’s vision is a
vital part of celebrating the Trail.
2)
Myron Avery: The
building of the Trail required not only a visionary creator from within the
forestry world, but also dedicated laymen
advocates and leaders from outside it, and it found two such champions in
retired Judge Arthur Perkins and his lawyer protégé Myron Avery. Throughout the
1920s and 30s, Perkins and Avery worked to make MacKaye’s vision a reality;
Perkins passed away in 1932, but Avery continued the work, serving as chairman
of the
Appalachian Trail Conference from 1931 until his own death in 1952 (the
wonderful 75th anniversary article at that hyperlink includes a
great deal of info on all of the subjects of today’s post). MacKaye and Avery did have
their conflicts, most especially over the relationship between outside
influences (both governmental and business) and the trail; as you might expect,
the lawyer Avery was more open to such connections than the forester MacKaye.
Yet the simple truth is that the creation, development, and maintenance of the
Trail depended on both men and perspectives, and still does as we near the
Trail’s 100th anniversary.
3)
Earl
Shaffer: Yet for the Trail to grow and prosper and endure, it needed more
than creators and leaders—it also, and most crucially, needed hikers. No AT
hiker was more famous or influential than Earl Shaffer, the outdoorsman and
World War II veteran whose 1948
through-hike was the first documented journey of the whole Trail (and
earned him the
nickname The Crazy One). Shaffer’s associated with the Trail continued for
the rest of his life, most especially in his 1998
anniversary through-hike (at the age of 79!), which provided the material
for his book The Appalachian Trail: Calling
Me Back to the Hills. While of course Shaffer was singular in many
ways, I would argue that he was also and most saliently deeply representative—not
only of those intrepid souls who have completed the whole of the Appalachian
Trail, but of all for whom it has become a meaningful journey and space. Shaffer
once said that he completed the 1948 hike in order to “walk the war out of
my system,” and who among us doesn’t have such life experiences and motivations
for a
walk in the woods?
Last camping
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment