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the Earth’s true brutality unmasked, authors throughout history have expressed a similar sense of disillusionment, even betrayal. In his semiautobiographical short story “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane captured the chilling moment when a shipwreck victim realizes that nature is “indifferent, flatly indifferent.” Annie Dillard—after watching a giant water bug gruesomely devour a frog—grapples with the possibility that “the universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die.” Goethe went one step further, calling the universe “a fearful monster, forever devouring its own offspring.” Kant, Nietzsche, and Thoreau all describe nature not as a mother, but as a “stepmother”—a winking reference to the wicked villainesses of German lore.
    The English writer Aldous Huxley came to this realization whilewalking through the wilds of Borneo. Being fussy about his lodgings and terrified of cannibals, Huxley preferred to stick to “the Beaten Track.” But one day eleven miles outside of Sandakan, the paved road he was traveling along abruptly ended, and he was forced to trek through the jungle. “The inside of Jonah’s whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker or damper,” he wrote. Lost in that mute, hot twilight, even the cries of birds startled him, which he imagined to be the whistles of devilish natives. “It was with a feeling of the profoundest relief that I emerged again from the green gullet of the jungle and climbed into the waiting car. . . . I thanked God for steam-rollers and Henry Ford.”
    Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is “a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds.” Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been “enslaved to man.” In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn’t. “Nature,” Huxley wrote, “is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic.” And he meant always : Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.
    Once the rain had ceased, I shook the water from my tarp, packed my things, and began walking to get warm. I found myself looking with new admiration upon the Tuckamore, which looked unfazed by the storm—nourished, even. Those rugged little trees were perfectly fitted to their niche, sculpted by the wind, deeply rooted to their land. I, meanwhile, was a perpetual wanderer, ill-equipped, maladapted, and lost.
    Three hours later, after a few more harrowing misadventures (ravines descended in vain; waterfalls tenuously traversed), I found myway to the endpoint of the unmarked wilderness, where a large pyr­amidal pile of rocks marked the beginning of the trail back down to Snug Harbour. I whooped and hollered, awash in the same relief Huxley felt upon spotting his chauffeur. The trail, however rough, would return me to the human realm. Delivered from chaos, I promptly forgot my former terror, fell in love with the earth anew, and once again desired to walk every inch of it.
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    I had not traveled to Newfoundland to be mauled by trees. The hike was a mere diversion, a side trip. My ultimate destination was a yet more baffling and inaccessible wilderness: the distant past. I was making my way to a rocky outcropping on the island’s southeast corner, where I hoped to find the oldest trails on earth.
    These fossil trails, which are roughly 565 million years old, date