Maybe all trails are loop trails.
Shay Rabineau
Where I live, and in many places around the world, gravestones are marked with the dates of a person’s birth and death. We sum up a person’s life by noting the time period during which the person walked the earth. But there are other possible ways to do it. We could choose to remember where a person lived, and not just when. What if a person’s gravestone was marked by a line: the shape of that person’s movement through the world?
Recently I was thinking about what such a line might look like. I imagined it as a long, squiggling line on the map of a country, or perhaps of the world. But when I thought more deeply about it, just reconstructing what my own movements look like during the course of a day, a week, a month, I realized that the shape of the journey would be strange. It wouldn’t be a long, meandering line at all. It wouldn’t look like an end-to-end trail. It would be a messy squiggle, looping back on itself constantly. Loops and loops and loops and loops.
My colleague Sarah Nance thinks about loops a lot. She is an artist who teaches at Binghamton University and has been a part of our Trailology Collective conversations. We both tend to walk in circles – she walks around buried meteor craters and I walk around disappearing lakes. But she takes loops to whole new levels: much of her fiber art involves weaving, knitting, tying, and other loop-forming activities. And she has walked three-dimensional loops through the earth, recording her routes as she enters and exits cave systems.
Sarah and I were talking recently about lines and loops and nets and how they relate to trails. In that conversation, we started questioning whether there’s really any such thing as an end-to-end route. We might plot them on maps and say, OK, the trail begins here and ends here. But in terms of a person’s actual movement, the journey doesn’t end when the hike or bike ride is finished; the person always returns home or to some other familiar place. The end-to-end line only exists in the way we choose to mark beginnings and ends. Those choices aren’t meaningless, but they obscure the fact that our lives are round-and-round, looping journeys.
Imagine what it would be like for a person to live life without making a single loop. It would mean the end of the familiar and of the known. Every movement would be through a new place. Once having visited a place, there would be no return. Practically, it would mean the end of most in-person human relationships. There would be no such thing as home. One might sow seeds, but would never tend a garden; one could begin all kinds of things, but could never see them through to their end. One could never even turn around to pick something up; anything dropped would be gone forever. It would be a rootless and tragic existence, if it were even possible.
And so, at the end, if we were to look down on the long line of our lives, it would be a tangled scribble, with wild scribbles around the places where we lived, and punctuated, perhaps, by longer loops shooting out to the places where we traveled farther afield. Some of our life-lines would have lots of scribbles in different places around the world.
And so there are no end-to-end journeys, right? The line of life always loops back on itself.
Except I can’t help but think now of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who famously said that one can never cross the same river twice. The river might mostly look the same, but of course the river is always flowing, always moving, always changing. It’s not just true of rivers; everything around us is in a constant state of flux. Plotting our lives on a two-dimensional map doesn’t tell the whole story; the idea of “looping back” assumes that there is a static place to loop back to. This is not to say that there’s no such thing as “home”; it just means that even something as stable as “home” is a thing that is always changing, in big ways and small.
Maybe instead of looking down at the lines of our lives on a flat map, we could plot it all out three-dimensionally, with the third dimension being the dimension of time. In that case, a person walking in circles wouldn’t really be making circles at all: the route would be spiraling upward, staying in the same physical space, but ascending (or descending, if we want, but I prefer to think of my journey as an upward climb!) from the past to the future. Envisioned that way, a life would look like a spark from a fire, blazing forth and flying upward and tracing a wild helix from the earth toward the sky, finally winking out among the stars.
But in the life of an individual, there would be no loops. So what does this mean? Are we back to the thought that human existence is once again summed up by the solitary journey of a particle through the universe? Are we just flung out toward the void, ultimately groundless and destined for nothingness? I suppose we could think that, if we insisted on looking at life as a solitary endeavor.
But the world is a roaring bonfire, blasting sparks upward in amazing profusion, flinging us all upward, yes, but never alone. On the two-dimensional map, it would be impossible to differentiate all the journeys of all of the people in the world over time; the whole world would be covered in their scribbles, and we would never know if the crisscrossing happened at the same time. But on the three-dimensional map, we would see the first sparks rising at the time living creatures began moving on the earth, and any time two of them met, their lines would twist with each other before flying out and crisscrossing with other lines.
And so there would be loops: there would be twists and tangles of all sorts; the world would be a vast loom, constantly generating new threads as old ones ended, and all of them being woven together into meshes and nets and webs, with all of those forming into something bigger and more beautiful than some mere flat tapestry, but rather something much more like a tree or a mushroom, starting small with the first beings but widening and expanding over time, with all of its tissues held together by the interactions and relationships of everything that lives and breathes and moves.
This is trailology, I think: a conception of movement that does not begin or end at trailheads, but which considers every trail as a record of desires pursued, decisions made, roads taken and not taken. The sum of all of the lines of movement in the world is something that sketches the shape of the world itself, not just in the spatial realm but in realms of relationship and meaning. And the great line of the world’s life is no mere line, but a growing thing whose future course of life – or death – we can play a role in shaping.