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Traveling is one of the most exciting things in life. Turning off the screens and getting out into nature for a long time, maybe even a few days, is refreshing. Unfortunately, as someone with two small children and a bad back, I can’t go carrying a bag again. So I often find myself trying to be at peace through others who write about their long agony near the Appalachians or PCT. That’s what I thought I was signing up for when I took it On the Way: Research in Robert Moore. But it turned out to be more.
The prologue begins with Moor talking about his idea of hiking the Appalachian trail. And the first chapter does not deviate from the expected topic. It focuses on Moor’s journey to Western Brook Pond in Newfoundland and explores the concept of wilderness.
His skills as a writer are evident from minute one. A storm blows over the Moor:
For the better part of an hour, filled with waves of tympanic blasts, I had time to reconsider the direction of travel. Stripped of her ornaments Love, the wild ceased to inspire; only a small look separated humility from fear.
This is probably the first clue that what you have is not a travelogue or a simple memoir that uses the method as a narrative. Chapter 2 immediately reinforces this, introducing a discussion of ants’ routes and a fine distinction between different English words for lines of motion.
On the Way he happily jumps from topic to topic: Sports trails, fiber optic cables, the Moor’s life as a shepherd. And throughout, the Moors move freely with a flexible voice. One minute, he is writing poems about the power of nature, the next, he spins a story about the loss of a whole flock of sheep with travel jokes, and then he turns to the philosophy of colonialism.
It is a testament to Moor’s skill that the book is not only a compelling read, but he doesn’t feel disjointed as he struggles to walk away from the internet that engineer Vannevar Bush saw in 1945, to quote poet Gary Snyder.
On the Way it starts with a simple idea: How was the Appalachian Trail, or any hiking trail for that matter, created? And from there it settles endlessly in a thousand different streams, exploring how the very concept of movement can help us understand the world.
