come a climax, high-canopy forest, not a home to lowly bunnies and ’coons.
Meanwhile, and curiously, the service had a predator preoccupation be-
fore the failed wolf episode. This was, of all things, feral hogs. Back about
, before the park was created, a number of European ‘‘wild’’ boars es-
caped a private hunting preserve and adapted themselves to the cut-over
mountains, multiplying rapidly as hogs are prone to do. Half a century
later, a young park superintendent devoted himself to getting rid of the
beasts. Their rooting snouts had ‘‘strip-mined’’ forest floors, he declared,
and worse, the hogs were rapidly devouring wildflower bulbs. Local hunters
relished chasing the boars, but the superintendent decided studies should
be conducted; then he called in contract hunters. Protests stopped the
slaughter, in favor of live trapping and deportation. Essentially, though, the
superintendent was checkmated by organized hunters in at least two states.
The interest of the episode—the significance—is that a struggle over hogs
could happen at all, in a place once part of Hog Heaven and in a park pre-
sented as wilderness.^22
tIn all the East, arguably the closest thing to a real wilderness experience
is not the ‘‘windshield’’ one in parks but the autoless serenity of hiking and
camping along the Appalachian Trail. The trail was the brainchild of Ben-
ton MacKaye (–), a politically left visionary, big-scale landscape
planner, and early champion of wilderness refuges from noisy cities and
congested, smoke-befouled roadways. MacKaye began to conceptualize a
hiking trail that linked the Appalachian chain from Maine to Georgia as
early as the late s; then he published a brilliantly realized plan in an
architectural journal in . The West had its refuges. Ordinary people in
the more populous East and Midwest were not yet able to reach the high
plains and Sierras. So a protected forest corridor, arching from Ktaadn to-
ward Atlanta, with cooperatively maintained rest stops and camps along
the way, might simultaneously interrupt automobility’s propensity toward
sprawl and provide blessed peace to ordinary folks in the eastern third of
the United States.^23
MacKaye’s disdain for ‘‘motor slums’’ in part propelled his thinking and
planning about human development within well-planned landscapes. Con-
temporary outdoor recreation had its benefits but was merely escapist and
discouraged reflection. MacKaye wished to promote an ‘‘outdoorculture’’
that raised consciousness. Successive articles he published on these sub-
jects and the prospective trail drew him into welcome contact with hiking
clubs from New England and New York to Tennessee—and also with conge-