Border Crossings | Forthcoming Feb 2012

On February 24^th we will be releasing our first offering of 2012. Starting the year off strong, we will be bringing to you, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail by Ian Marshall.

Border Crossings cen­ters on a per­sonal nar­ra­tive of a hike on the recently devel­oped International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. It includes travel writing focused on a hike of the International Appalachian Trail, haiku that emerge from that journey, and crit­ical inquiry into the aes­thetics of haiku!

As our first pre­view, we thought we would give you an excerpt from the intro­duc­tion — let you start down the path of this journey a little early rather than make you wait until February. We hope you enjoy!

Introduction

Consulting the Map, Finding the Path

There comes a moment on a back­packing trip — not on the first day, but maybe on the second or third — when, for just a moment, the weight on your back dis­ap­pears. You start out walking fully aware of the pack at every step and your internal mono­logue fully pre­oc­cu­pied with it and other sim­i­larly weighty mat­ters. Geez, that’s heavy, you think — what do I have in there? Anything I don’t need? Ought to loosen the shoulder strap some, so it doesn’t pull so hard. How far have I gone? How much far­ther to go? Geez, that’s heavy. But even­tu­ally there comes that moment when you’ve found a rhythm beyond the litany of com­plaint, when you’ve been gliding along, taking in what­ever lies along the trail — a name­less flower blooming and not seeming to miss the name — the intri­cate pat­tern of bark on a pine — a cloud sliding out from behind a tree, as if the tree’s canopy had detached and drifted away — another one of those flowers — and you are caught up in the rhythm of the walk, unaware not only of the weight of the pack on your back or the thud of each step on the trail but of any con­scious thought at all. In that moment the bound­aries between self and world dis­solve. The cloud and the flower, and your move­ment and the cloud’s are all part of the same flow. We call it one­ness, but it could just as easily be called noth­ing­ness for there is sud­denly no you that exists sep­a­rate from the world around you. Maybe it’s every­thing­ness.

That is the moment of what I call “pack­less­ness.” Of course, as soon as you realize that it has arrived, as soon as you say to your­self, hey, for a moment there I forgot about the weight of the pack, I forgot about every­thing in fact, even about me, myself, and I . . . well, in that moment the weight is back.

And you walk on. You walk on thinking about the metaphoric impli­ca­tions of the pack, that it is all the things that weigh you down, an unfin­ished task at work, an unsat­is­fying exchange with a col­league, the things you should have said but didn’t, the things you did say but shouldn’t have. Deadlines. Things to do. And then in the middle of thinking of all that, there’s another one of those flowers, five petals, yellow, darker yellow in the middle, you’ll have to look it up later in the field guide, and then the weight is gone again, but then you realize it’s gone so it’s back.  And you walk on.

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In the spring of 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō set out, pack on his back, note­book in his pack, on a hike of Japan’s northern provinces. Starting from Edo (now Tokyo), he trav­eled for five months, cov­ering over twelve hun­dred miles. He crossed moun­tains, fol­lowed the northern coast­line, and vis­ited sites of lit­erary and his­tor­ical sig­nif­i­cance. Bashō’s account of the journey, Oku no Hosomichi, was pub­lished five years later, the year he died. Its var­ious titles in trans­la­tion—Narrow Road to Oku, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Narrow Road to the Interior—together sug­gest that his journey was to a place remote, wild, and little known, and at the same time was a spir­i­tual quest. Featuring fifty hokku, a term which usu­ally refers to the starting verse of a linked-​​poem form called renga, and written in a col­lo­quial style called haikai no renga (the term “haiku” would not exist for another two hun­dred years), Bashō’s Narrow Road has no nar­ra­tive center or uni­fying per­spec­tive or con­tin­uous plot line other than the journey itself. It remains one of the mas­ter­pieces of Japanese lit­er­a­ture, com­bining travel journal with haiku (as we now call the form), poetic and med­i­ta­tive prose, lit­erary crit­i­cism and cul­tural med­i­ta­tion all melded together in a blended form called haibun.

The journey I describe in the pages that follow is in part an imi­ta­tion of Bashō as I con­duct my own explo­ration into northern provinces. My path lies along the IAT, the International Appalachian Trail (or, en fran­cais, the SIA, Le Sentier Internationale des Appalaches), a newly devel­oped trail that picks up where the AT, the Appalachian Trail, leaves off, at the top of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin. The “long green tunnel” of the AT fol­lows the crest of the Appalachians some two thou­sand miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, and ends on Katahdin. But the Appalachians them­selves do not end there. The IAT con­tinues to follow the moun­tains north through Baxter State Park, east across Maine to the New Brunswick border, north along the border cut for a day’s walk, then heads north­east through New Brunswick along the Aroostook and Tobique Rivers, to Mts. Carleton, Head, and Sagamore, west to the town of Kedgwick River, then north­east again along (or on) the Restigouche River to Quebec. There the IAT runs north­ward through the Matapedia Valley and east into the rugged Chic-​​Choc Mountains, through the Matane Wildlife Reserve and Parc de la Gaspésie up to the coast, along the northern edge of the Gaspé Peninsula where it juts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and out to land’s end at Cap Gaspé. There the Appalachian Mountains, after their long north­east­erly rise, descend to sea level. The IAT is a spec­tac­ular trail, utterly gor­geous, and in places (the Chic-​​Chocs) offers more wild country than you are likely to find any­where else in eastern North America.

When Bashō set out on his journey to the north, he was already a vet­eran trav­eler of trips that had led to his books Travelogue of Weather-​​Beaten Bones, Sarashina Travelogue, and Knapsack Notes. I too have turned my travels into prose — my own set of foot prints of sorts, or at least a few lengthy foot notes. My first book, Story Line, fol­lowed the Appalachian Trail north to Katahdin, con­sid­ering what we can learn about places along the way from the lit­erary works set there — Henry Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn,” for instance. My second book, Peak Experiences, was about moun­tains, and how lit­er­a­ture can serve as guide­books to show us the way ups­lope to psy­cho­log­ical sat­is­fac­tion in the nat­ural world. My third book, Walden by Haiku, was my first ven­ture into learning how to haiku, as I con­verted some of Thoreau’s more imag­istic prose in Walden into haiku form and explored the par­al­lels between haiku aes­thetics and Thoreau’s writing and lifestyle.

On his travels, Bashō was accom­pa­nied by Sora, a friend and fellow poet and trav­eler. I too had a com­panion, M (the first letter of both her given name and Mooseless, her trail name), col­league, partner, fellow trav­eler, scholar, poet, and sig­nif­i­cant other. Bashō had to say goodbye to Sora partway through his journey, but M and I made it together all the way from Katahdin to Cap Gaspé. Our travels, though, unlike Bashō and Sora’s, were not con­tiguous. Given the demands of teaching and par­enting sched­ules, we were unable to get away for two or three months straight, and we had to con­tent our­selves with a series of two-​​week trips over the course of six sum­mers.

Bashō’s Narrow Road is orga­nized in journal form, in the Japanese tra­di­tion of lit­erary diaries known as nikki bun­gaku—a form not alto­gether alien to readers of the North American nature writing tra­di­tion, given the exam­ples of Thoreau’s jour­nals and nature writing clas­sics like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. I have fol­lowed suit, offering daily trail notes and con­tem­pla­tions, but I have broken the nar­ra­tive into six parts, reflecting the six dif­ferent trips we took. The piece­meal approach to the trail had its advan­tages, mainly that we could do a lot of reading between trips, and we could make the antic­i­pa­tion of plan­ning and the con­tent­ment of rem­i­nis­cence last that much longer. We also devi­ated from Bashō in our means of loco­mo­tion. Besides using a car to get to the trail­head each year, we didn’t always walk the trail. Since the IAT is new, there are stretches, mainly through eastern Maine and New Brunswick, that follow roads and rail trails. We didn’t look for­ward to lug­ging back­packs along road­sides, so we arranged to cover that part of the trail on bikes. In northern New Brunswick, we opted to canoe sixty miles on the Restigouche River, which is con­sid­ered a valid alter­nate route for the IAT. Our ver­sion of Bashō’s “Narrow Road,” then, was not always a hiking path.

Shared wan­dering aside, I am well aware that I am no Bashō. (My friends and col­leagues can attest that I don’t imagine that I’m another Bashō. Far from it — I think I’m Henry Thoreau!) But I turn to Bashō and the way of haiku because I believe we in our time and place, so far from Bashō’s, stand to learn some­thing from haiku and haibun. Something about those moments of pack­less­ness, per­haps, which are akin to haiku moments. Haiku is the attempt to hold on to those moments of ego­less belonging to the world, to catch part of the flow, and an attempt to describe those moments and make them avail­able for con­tem­pla­tion. We can learn from haiku some­thing about a right rela­tion­ship with the nat­ural world, about self­less­ness and the inte­gra­tion of self and world. And so I mean to pros­e­ly­tize here, helping to spread the word about haiku. (OK, it’ll be more than one word, but they’ll be simple ones, and mostly adding up to some­thing less than sev­en­teen syl­la­bles.) In haiku we find a lit­erary model for eco­cen­tric thought, moving beyond a solely human per­spec­tive in order to see clearly the “more-​​than-​​human world” (as David Abram calls it) on its own terms — but without erasing the human per­ceiver that is part of that world.