We glorify trailblazers, but followers play an equally important role: shave off bends unnecessary, brush away obstructions, improve the trail with each trip

“path” in religions: reduces “teeming chaos” to intelligible line; helps people navigate the world

Paths/trails ≠ complete freedom; are a “tactful reduction of options” (riverine, not oceanic)

Paths are “made in the walking”

Desire → use → trails → repeat

Trails are communal creations, like folktales, jokes, work songs, memes

Desire lines in dictatorships signify authoritarian failure to predict and police desires

“bewilderment”: old term for shock of being lost in woods

Path vs. Trail: dignified/unplanned, august/unkempt, tame/unruly, extends forward/backward

“Every trail is, in essence, a best guess” which prompts better guesses, which creates a chorus

Buffalo and elephants made paths that humans turn into trails and roads

Stephen Blake: elephants use trails as “a form of societal, spatial memory” and “a collective, externalized mnemonic system”

Trails as external memory, collective intelligence

Stories “take place” grounded in real settings

Apaches view the past as a well-worn trail, once traveled by their ancestors and still being traveled today

Topogeny: the practice of place-listing; “the summoning in the mind’s eye of a mental landscape of constructed lines”

Trail = connection

Huxley: we miss something by not being in non-human world: “By failing to be, vicariously, the NOT-SELF, he fails to be completely himself.”

Driving is a series of freeze-frames and blurred pans, like a wave-particle duality

Telegraph split dual functions of trails/roads: transport matter, transmit info

Internet = memex (trails) writ global

Wisdom: “a time-tested means of choosing how to live”