Paths
One of the first things some landowners do on their property is create paths. It doesn’t matter that these may be only simple walking places through a field or small woods. People seem to want to celebrate their residency by being able to amble along a designated pathway.
But the prospect of such simple fun may not be the best guide in designing paths. We can get tired of walking the same way in the same direction pretty quickly, and the simple pleasure fades. So we climb aboard what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, looking to recreate the earlier pleasure by upping the intensity level. Benches! Cute signs! As the treadmill metaphor suggests, there’s no end to the upgrades needed to feel that original fun again.
A better guide is a path designed by function or destination. This reasoning sounds puritanical—work and purpose, not pleasure, should govern decision-making. But paths turn out to be most enjoyable when they lead somewhere or lead to doing something. You need a way to get to the chicken coop to get eggs. Your neighbor always goes down the same way to the edge of her lot to get at a ditch that needs clearing. There’s one place, and only one place, where your parents can see a winter sunset through the trees along their lot line, so they’ve worn a path to it.
You get the idea. It turns out we notice most about our world when we’re between necessary points in it. Needing to be somewhere pulls us out of the torpor of too much sitting, the national disease. Along the way, we see flickers feeding along the driveway or the overnight tracks of a coyote. Purpose focuses us.
Granted, rambling without reason sounds really appealing in a romantically American way. I got those walkin’ blues, so I’ll take the road less traveled because westward I go free—to mash together three iconic authors on the topic. There’s a fine American tradition of unencumbered travel in pursuit of unencumbered joy, but it invites questions. Joy for how long and over what distance? At what cost? Besides, do we sacrifice to have a place to live so we can leave it as soon and often as possible? The upshot of freedom might turn out to be restlessness. Talk about climbing aboard the hedonic treadmill.
Whatever your reason for cutting paths, whether puritanical or romantic, don’t overdo things. These aren’t trails in a national park, most of which seem overbuilt for over-use anyway. (The exception is trail work to accommodate those of all abilities.) Better is the simple trace through grass, brush, or woods that is more deer-path than garden allee (unless your path is, in fact, in a garden). Less work, too, in the long run.
