The Martians(40)

Off we went, kids first. We couldn't keep up with them. It was easy as could be to follow the trail, which was mostly a full staircase, set into the wall for flight after flight. But it was also obvious that it hadn't been walked on much in many years. One traverse section had lost its underpinnings and ten or twelve blocks had slid downslope, forming a loop of stone we had to negotiate. In another place a thick-trunked birch had fallen across the trail and we had to work around the roots. These digressions made us realize how hard the slope would have been without a trail. But with it: sidewalks and staircases.

And then, looking ahead, we saw the trail cutting up and across a big shadowed talus slope, under a curved section of the wall. All the great shatter of rock was light pink granite, and all the lichen growing on it was a pale green. Pale green circles mottling pale pink shatter—pale green carpet on pale pink stairs—it looked like something the Incas had built, or visitors from Atlantis. Even the kids stopped to look.

4. The Natural Genius

Dorr obviously explored the eastern crater wall thoroughly, and then designed his trails to take advantage of features already there, leading travelers under overhangs, behind drop blocks, up cracks, and through tunnels. One section of the wall has a big steep concave bulge of granite, an exposed pluton, kind of unusual, with a vertical fissure running all the way up it, waist or chest deep all the way. Naturally Dorr put a trail right up that crack, filling its bottom with a steep narrow staircase, each granite block stacked on the back part of the one below it, in a flight that was hundreds of stones long.

I was hiking up this beautiful trail one dawn patrol in the rain, everything gray and misty so that I only saw a bit above and below me, and by the time I got to this section of the trail, the fissure had become a streambed. White water dropped down it step by step, as in fish ladders you see by dams. White water clattering stepwise down a granite slope, out of the mist—it was surreal.

To continue upward meant soaking my boots, as each step would submerge me in water to the ankle, if not the knee. Out in the backcountry that would be a problem. But I knew I would be at the house twenty minutes after the end of my hike, and there take a shower, and put my boots by the fire. It wouldn't be that good for the boots, but so what. Worth it for the joy of hiking up that staircase waterfall. Step after step, splash, splash, white water, the noise of it, the rain and the wind. Every step placed securely, hands using the granite walls to both sides as railings. A beautiful ascent; something I never expect to see again.

Then at the top of the staircase, the trail stopped. For some reason Dorr never connected this trail to his others, and it ends on the top of that granite bulge, still only halfway up the crater wall. To get over to the nearest of Dorr's other staircase trails you have to traverse a broad tilted bench, thick with birch and dead logs. And currently soaked and obscured by mist.

I whacked on, enjoying the new nature of the problem. Here all the trail phantoms together make the trail, I thought, and looked for sign. I was not overly concerned when I didn't see any. Trail comes and goes depending on how much you need it. Where many ways will go, people disperse and take them all, and so the trail fades and disappears. You don't need it. When the way gets hard the trail becomes clear again—there are only a few ways to go, and people find those over and over. This happens everywhere, wherever people walk the land. Most trails were never planned, you see, but were made by a collective of people spread through time, all evaluating the slope on their own, and very often coming to the same conclusions. So when I lose the trail and then come back on it again I am always pleased to see that I have made the same judgment as others before me. I say, Hey, the natural genius here once again, inside all of us. How nice.

So I crashed across this wet bench, content to wander; it was fun. I would hit Dorr's next trail eventually.

Then I saw on a tree trunk ahead of me one of the rectangular gray paint spots I had seen on a previous rainy dawn patrol. Hey! I said, thinking I had confirmation. But then I noticed that there were more gray spots on the tree trunks around the first one, and in fact there were gray spots on every tree trunk I could see at that moment, in every direction. I realized that the rainy trail I had found on the other side of the crater must have been only a figment of my imagination, seeing something in the landscape that hadn't been there.

Only it had been there, I swear. There is something out there. This is why I don't think we can so easily dismiss some sort of teleology in history. The landscape itself seems to call forth the trail. It imposes on us the best way forward. And it could be that the human landscape, or even the continuum in which time unfolds, has invisible ramps and battlements that shape our course. Of course we still have choices, but there is a certain terrain to be crossed. So I suspect that seeing trails that are not there is actually an everyday activity of the human mind. When the going is hard people come together. And the trails appear out of nowhere.