[at-l] Knowing that it's there.. and atml

[rafeb at speakeasy.net (Raphael Bustin)]

[rafe]
>If you think
>cell phones are more destructive to the AT
>than autos, highways and smog, you're not
>being rational.


[snodrog]
>Illustrated in Anderson's MacKaye biography are Ben's own hand drawn plans
>for roads to be built to access AT shelters. Thank goodness we have today 
>the AT
>Avery built and not the ridgeline carnival of resettled asylum and workcamp
>candidates MacKaye dreamed up during his depression over his wife's 
>suicide. As
>a proponant of bringing electricity and telephone to rural areas, there's no
>doubt MacKaye would've approved of cell towers and windmills as part of his
>"installed recreation lands".


Hmm.  You're twisting my point.  A road
leading to a mountaintop isn't the same
as a busy highway running alongside it.

Approaching NOBO, you walk most of the
ridgeline in the Presidentials before you
become aware of the Mt. Washington auto
road.  The road up Greylock is pretty innocuous.
We each can name many others, and I'm not
counting the thousands of USFS roads.

But it's hard to feel wilderness when the
echoes of traffic from an interstate come
wafting up the slopes to the trail -- and
stay with you for miles.  You know, like
the air brakes on an 18-wheeler barreling
down I-84 at 70 MPH.  Or just the general,
incessant, fast-tires-on-concrete noise.

Man, I'll tell you -- that's what **I** mean
to get away from, when I'm in the woods.
The speed, the frenzied, unthinking motion.
The thoughtless waste of energy.  The
thoughtless consumption that drives all of it.

MacKaye wasn't interested in making the
woods less accessible.  He wanted people
to go there, and stay for a while -- and be
content during their stay.  The trail was
just a path between the camps - only one
of four "bullets" on his list.

MacKaye's ideal still intrigues me.  He was
a creature of his time.  Electrification was
a classic CCC/WPA sort of project.  So
was the building of fire towers and those
beautiful cut-stone bridges on the Blue Ridge.

(We couldn't be having this discussion
without electricity.  Nuff said.)

What I suspect did not enter MacKaye's
mind that much (or anyone else's, at the
time) is the notion that hundreds, or thousands
of people would attempt to hike the entire trail
from end to end -- or that folks would then
compete for speed records of the journey.


rafe b
aka terrapin


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