nial intellectuals who fed and expanded his own thinking. These included
Aldo Leopold, the forester, game manager, and elegiac nature writer, and
Bob Marshall of Johns Hopkins University, the already legendary climber
and hiker with firsthand mastery of every truly wild place left in America.
During the three, along with Robert Sterling Yard, founded the Wilder-
ness Society.
MacKaye lived long enough to inhabit the Appalachian Trail. Slight of
build, graying, bespectacled, and pipe-smoking, the elderly MacKaye be-
came iconic and beloved in his slouch hat and gaiters, resting on a ridge
or telling stories in camp. He is remembered, too, by hikers born since his
death. Among these are a succession of my former students, children of
prosperous midwestern suburbs who have traversed substantial segments
of the trail, all in the South, and all in the MacKayeian spirit of outdoor
culture as opposed to braggardly athleticism. They had all read Thoreau’s
Maine Woods, too, most eagerly the ‘‘Ktaadn’’ section, which has the best
climbing tale and some of the more fascinating observations on interior
Maine’s native remnants. Several of the students were eager to write eth-
nographies of the trail’s Virginia or Tennessee segments.
But from these and casual conversations about their trail experiences,
I learned something disturbing. Hikers were warned of hazards beyond
the ‘‘natural,’’ namely, the danger of fishhooks suspended over trails from
tree limbs overhead, intended to snare hikers’ eyes. Here was a scenario
of hostility better associated with the Mekong Delta of the s and early
s. But according to trail advisories, southern Appalachia of the s
and s had its own Viet Cong, youths from nearby who resented the
presence of the hikers from the suburbs, who were perceived as privileged
interlopers. One student told me he encountered a suspended fishhook in
Tennessee. The others had not, but they related the warning stories.
Dirty tricks on the Appalachian Trail may be only another urban legend.
Dismiss it we might. But I think that the legend’s persistence relates at least
two important things: First, upper-middle-class hikers, however humble
and sweaty on the trail, are well aware that they move through a corridor
of persistent poverty, where foreigners and Yankees extracted timber, coal,
and other minerals and departed with nature’s bounty. Second, there is the
irony of creating a new commons, a fine one in the MacKayeian ideal, where
once there was a commons of a different sort.