Trail edges and edgelessness Nov 19, 2018
Arriving at the realization that beings are a composite of relationships, I find myself edgeless. It’s a fascinating place to be, unintentionally merging with the ‘other side’ of the edge and losing my alone self in oneness. One October day hiking the Crawford Path on New Hampshire’s Presidential southern range, I lost my edges in 50 mile per hour winds, knee deep snow, curled lichen gripping mute and stubborn to buffered rocks. A few weeks later, after preparing a mug of tea and trying to explain to myself and my roommate the notion that we are only relationships and nothing more, for a moment my entire being became the relationship, the space, the give and take, between myself and the steaming liquid before me. Sound, heartbeats, words, and sight merged and edges dissolved. Just for a moment.
It is easier to become edgeless in the vast, rugged terrain and raging winds of mountaintops than the quiet one-foot space between my body and a 12-ounce vessel. Yet, in both instances, the “notion of separate, skin-encapsulated beings” (Evernden,1985) dissolved and I mingled in the between, edgeless, light, unconstrained.
In the first case I experienced a within-ness, in the “unitary and all-encompassing nature” as Ian McHarg writes. I was “[wo]man in nature” (1963). The idea that I could achieve this “sense”, that I could possibly tap into an “interdependence with the microorganisms of the soil, the diatoms in the sea, the whooping crane, the grizzly bear, sand, rocks, grass, trees, sun, rain, moon, and stars” thrills me. I want to be that person.
In the second, by merging into the space between my skin encapsulated self and the mug of tea, I realized this relationship is one small part of who I am. My interaction with this innocuous hot liquid defines me, if just for the moment. Will I now approach my mugs of tea more deferentially, noticing and curious before I have even grasped the mug in my hands and taken the first sip? I hope so. It made me yearn for more edgelessness.
Yet, there is a place for edges. It feels redundant to proclaim yet again that we humans rely on the natural environment for our lives while we destroy it daily, but it is one very good argument to elicit a response of care. Human survival need not be the only reason; the natural environment has intrinsic value without humans defining its services. Finally, without the full sensory experience of the natural environment—towering trees and the earthy smells of forest soils, bleak mountain ridges and high winds that sandpaper your face, tiny flowers bursting forth intrepidly through sidewalk cracks that call us down for closer observation—we might not experience oneness.
Edges live next to the lines between things, the boundaries. They might be measured in feet or miles. They might delineate the boundary with a physical reminder, such as the deep cut I make into the earth around my raspberry bed to keep back root competition in the hopes of plump berries or the verdant greenery surrounding the drought stricken Tsavo Park in Kenya inside which the elephants died from starvation (Botkin, 1990). Edges expose the boundary and nudge up against borders which deter or contain. Edges alert us to change and to the possibility of crossing into a different state of being, of place, of mind—for better or worse.
Struggling with my Western dualism and immersed in the writings of Donna Haraway (2016), Isabelle Stengers (2018). and Joanna Macy (1991), I desire to be unbounded. In those edgeless moments, there is a lightness and floating, a non-state of mind and within-ness which results, for me, in a state of bliss, contentment, and compassion.
Yet, my hegemonic human will to be boundless, to dissolve edges, does not make my trampling on others right. Quite literally, it’s not OK to cross over the trail’s edges and walk unconstrained as Thoreau did (1914). “Stay on the trail because my footprints will destroy life on the other side. They already have. Enough is enough,” I council myself. “Experience edgeless-ness within the edges.”
Plants and creatures are skilled at living within edges while intermingling with beings and planets over and beyond. The nautilus, a seemingly edgeless mollusk living 1000 feet down in the ocean exemplifies this paradoxical coexistence. It is a creature of both boundaries and relationships at the proximal and universal scales. Choosing a deep ocean species in thinking about mountaintop trails is purposeful; we need to acknowledge the specificity and boundaries of our places and our beings and, concurrently, our interconnections with the rest of this planet and others. When we understand this, mountaintops and oceans are intimate neighbors.
Daniel Botkin, paleontologist Peter Ward, and many other researchers including the work of underwater cameramen, tell the story of how the chambered nautilus records the cycles of the moon (Botkin, 2012, Ward, 1980, 1988). Each 30 days with the phase of the moon, the tiger-striped mollusk builds a wall enclosing empty space behind it for buoyancy as the nautilus animal moves forward into the outermost chamber. Does the moon 238,900 miles awayremind the nautilus to build walls to stay afloat? Busy encapsulating pockets of air, the nautilus simultaneously builds a chamber-crossing duct called a siphuncle, to flood and drain water in each chamber so that it might regulate its altitude, and to suck in and expel water to create jet propulsion for movement (Ward, 1980, 1988, NOAA, 2015). The movement of the moon is marked by the nautilus’ walls; the plankton and microbial-filled ocean water penetrates through the fortifications. The nautilus survives due to both its boundaries and its inter- and intra- connectivity. (Interestingly, the nautilus’ rounded shell seems edgeless until a human slices its shell in half for the sake of curiosity and collection. And then all you can see are edges. As of September 27, 2018, the National Marine Fisheries Service gave the nautilus Endangered Species Act protection due to overharvesting for the international shell trade. A result of humans simultaneously neither respecting the edge nor understanding their with-ness with the nautilus (Center for biological diversity, 2018).
The nautilus will become my reference of living both with boundaries and edges and without them. It is, as Macy writes, an “organized whole found in nature” which “is not only a system but an open system.” (Macy, 1991). Despite its shell encapsulated self, it subversively challenges the sharp boundaries in its intermingling with the planetary and the microscopic (Evernden, 1985).
Edges contain a spatial and biotic thickness. In reference to the title of the University of Wisconsin Madison online magazine “Edge Effects”, William Cronon describes edges as “places where very different kinds of creatures (and people) come together, mingle, and change” (Cronon, 2014).The magazine is homage to Aldo Leopold who hypothesized that the biodiversity and resource richness at edges may be due to the “desirability of simultaneous access to more than one environmental type, or the greater richness of border vegetation, or both” (Leopold, 1933). At Leopold’s edge— he liked hedgerows—a being may find both shelter in the bushes and fence-line, and food source in the field.
The edges of a trail, though, often don’t provide the bounty of hedgerows because the trail, unlike a field, is almost as barren of life as the droughty Tsavo preserve. The intrusion of humans on foot takes its toll, as I witnessed on an earlier fall hike up The Crawford Path when the trees were still green, ground vegetation yet to be covered with snow, and water ran freely. Trails, including Crawford, are slashmarks of trampled and compacted soils and foot-trafficked rock, hostile to fragile mountain plant roots and rock loving lichen. With compaction, the soil’s water-absorbing capacity plummets; water coursing downhill chooses the ready-made trail as its route, erodes the earth, exposes rock, and cuts under trees at the trail’s edge upending them, leaving them roots in the air (Jagerbrand, 2015, Ballantyne et al, 2015 b).
Trails benefit and distress wildlife also. A global study revealed that some birds such as crows, choughs, robins and thrushes, and a few rodents including squirrels and marmots take advantage of the open space and can still find cover in the trailside nooks and crannies of roots and vegetation (Larsen, 2016). But, in most cases, diversity declines. The survival, reproduction, and abundance of reptiles, amphibians, and invertebratessuch as turtles, lizards, snails, slugs and spiders and big mammals such as bison, big horned sheep, deer, moose, prong horn and wild boar diminish significantly in the seemingly innocent intrusion of humanity on foot. The trail also causes these creatures to experience behavioral or physiological changes, such as decreased foraging or increased stress (Larsen, 2016). Hiking on a trail wreaks havoc to the ecosystem. Even more so at the edges of seasons
During the entrance and exit of winter, hikers on the trail stir up a muddy porridge of melting snow and thawing earth. In winter, when the edges blur into white continuity, damage to other species increases.Humans are less careful or can’t see where they’re stepping, each footprint off the trail compacting soil and crushing the slowly regenerating alpine and sub-alpine plant life underneath a pile of snow. In the cold, mammals have to spend more energy moving away from humans. Lower food availability and quality makes it harder for them to find nourishment in human-free habitat (Larsen, 2016).
The ramifications of the trail extend beyond its immediately visible edge. This spatial gradient from trailside to un-trail-impacted territory could be considered an expanded edge. However, it is not the same band of Leopold’s abundant “edge effect.” Here the trailaffects the edge, not the edge its surroundings. Unfortunately, the trail effectis destructive not generative.
Within a meter of the trail, vegetation and species richness and abundance decreases due to trail compaction (Ballantyne and Pickering, 2015 b). Roots need to spread under soil topped richly in organic matter. Like most plants, a plant at the edge hopes to spread its roots in all directions, into the trail as much as anywhere else. The roots of shallow mountain species depend on fungi and microbes which also need a healthy ratio of air, water, carbon, minerals, and nutrients. The compacted, rocky, eroded, and overly wet trail soils don’t provide root loving habitat. This is particularly troubling for mountain ecosystems, where there are often only few species which dominate and provide habitat and shelter to a community of beneficiary species. If these trailside “keystone” species are irreparably damaged, a cascade of harm ensues (Ballantyne and Pickering, 2015). Lichens, a mini, heavy metal absorbing, ecosystem of algae, fungi, and microbes, also decrease beyond the trail’s edge (Jagerbrand, 2015). The trail effect extends up to 20 meters off the trail, where decreases in microbial biomass are still evident (Ballantyne and Pickering, 2015 b). Curiously, and as I have witnessed while crossing the southern Presidential range, the graminoid family of grasses, sedges, and rushes fare better in this expanded edge of trail effect, as do forbs (small, non-grass flowering plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants including mosses and liverworts) (Jagerbrand, 2015).
While staying on the trail is injurious, stepping into or across the edge expands the range of injury. Where humans have done so, the edge becomes the expanded trail—muddy, life diminished errant pathways in an otherwise verdant ecosystem.
Can we be, then, more like the nautilus and live within the edges while intermingling and merging energetically, metaphysically, and harmlessly to what is beyond? In places where we trample, can we at least limit our physical damage to the space between the edges, and use our transcendent abilities to merge within and beyond them?
There is another mountaintop edge that demands our notice urgently. For biotic mountaintop communities, global warming creates a devastating precipice beyond which is nothing. Steven Handel writes:
“For communities on mountainsides, the migration is often upslope, not towards the pole, as propagules and animal disperses find cooler microsites at higher elevations. As species on mountains march toward the summit, they may reach the end of migratory hope when the top is reached and no cooler microsites exist above. The cold adapted species decline and those adapted to warmth increase, a process that has been called ‘thermophilization’… These high mountain habitats and their species have literally no place to go and will disappear from the local biodiversity. No restoration plan or action can make a favorable habitat above the mountain’s summit and our Alpine and subalpine floras will have run out of sustainable room. The constraint for restoration will be thin air, the converse of substrate”(Handel, 2018).
With this end in sight, walking a trail for a day damaging though it may be, seems the better alternative than taking the day to burn fossil fuels, whether in cars or overly heated, overly spacious houses, all of our devices on. By hiking on the trail and minding the edges, at least our damage might be curbed and localized. We can visit by foot and practice deference.
“Visiting is not an easy practice,” Haraway writes. “It demands the ability…to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond—and to do all this politely!” (Haraway, 2016). We can let the edges constrain us, while peering into and imagining beyond them, and merge into the eco-scapes where we walk. We can remain physically edged and still discover an edgeless-ness.
The fragile edge of the trail is sharply delineated in the woods each time I ascend the first mountain. In September the edge is certain. Even in October the canopy of trees protects the trail from deep snow. I pay homage to the edge as I climb, noticing the soft bright mosses, the pale green lichen, the occasional flower and deep red berry that emerge within and beyond it. But by mid-fall, along the alpine ridge, drifts of snow and expanses of rock blur the edges. Cairns and diminutive rock walls remind me to stay on the path even if I’ll sink into water pooling on the trail. My wet feet are hardly a comparable expense to the damage I could cause. I have to take more care to heed the edge. I pay closer attention to the cairns, the subtle difference in soils when they are visible, and the clumps of twisted alpine spruce that delineate path from non-path. The alpine edge is delicate and porous. By mid-fall it is almost invisible, obscured by swaths of snow. I step carefully, bounded and edged, but my mind and body drifts into and with the sweep of high mountain. I am boundless. Edgeless.
References
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