The Trail Record, Framed

A trail is the hardest kind of line to prove. A road leaves petitions, surveys, and tax duplicates; a building leaves deeds and photographs; a trail leaves, most often, nothing but the memory of a road that replaced it, a name that outlived the path, or a line a surveyor happened to write in his field notes while chaining somebody else's property. This section therefore works under a discipline the other passes do not need in the same degree: a trail's line is claimed only where a record draws it or walks it. Where the record gives a trail endpoints and a name but no course, the file prints the endpoints, the name, and the absence of the course. Where a trail is remembered but never recorded, it prints as remembered, at memory's strength, and never hardens into geography.

The division of ground is stated once. The peoples who made and used the first trails stand in the tribes file; this section takes the trails themselves as documents — where they ran, what succeeded them, and what of them can still be walked. The roads stand in the corridors file; the trails before the roads and beside them are this section's, and the moment of becoming — a trail taken up into a road — is shared ground, stated here at trail size and there at road size. The parks stand in the parks file; the trail system that runs through them, as a system with a course, a building history, and connections, is this section's. Three passes follow: the Native trails as documents, the succession that replaced or erased them, and the modern recreational trail system as a built thing.