It was a cloudy May morning and I had to figure out what to do about the fence. Three strands of smooth wire, spanning the width of the meadow. Easy enough to slip under, but was it electrified? Did the eight head of cattle, black and white, lazing in the grass, need that level of deterrent? Or was the mere fact of fencing enough?

I don’t know shit about animal agriculture. I took a few paces this direction, a few the other direction. There was no way around the fence. Beyond it, the pasture continued. About eight miles in the distance was home.

Should I cross the fence?

Aside from the cattle it was just me and my German shepherd, Hertha. But were there eyes on me? I turned around: spanning over the long shape of the meadow was the overpass where my wife had dropped me off, about 500 feet away. A horse-and-buggy clippity-clopped left to right as the cars zipped by it in both directions. Under the overpass: utility sheds, a portapotty, a road maintenance truck loaded with traffic control cones in the bed. Beyond them, a bulldozer. The sheds and equipment, and the meadow upon which I stood, all belong to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. You see, once upon a time—in the roaring 1960s, close to the peak REM cycle of the American Dream—this meadow, it was decided, was to be paved over and made into a highway. It would be called “PA Route 23.” It’d be great, they said.

Planning took a long time and construction didn’t begin until the mid-1970s. With their bulldozers, crews scooped and graded eight miles of this staggeringly beautiful Amish country farmland into the shape of a four-lane highway. Two lanes would travel west into Lancaster, two lanes east to the small town of Leola and then beyond, eventually connecting drivers to Philadelphia. The new road would pull traffic off of Route 30 and its outlet malls, hotels, Golden Corral-type chains, and the amusement park Dutch Wonderland, all flush with tourists from the New York megalopolis looking to drink deeply of wet-bottom shoofly pie and other simulacra of the simple life.

Suddenly, one day in 1977, the work stopped. The money dried up, story goes.

The crews and machines, unable to bear the sight of the scraped void they’d created, pulled eight inches of earth back over the road bed.

And upon it the grass grew green. And the state leased the green land to the farmers. And the farmers put up fences. And the farmers sent their animals out to pasture. And so it is, and so it has been, for more than four decades. But the sword of Damocles remained. At any time, the state can choose to reclaim it and pave it as originally intended. And try they have. But opposition killed PA Route 23, forever, now that a different spirit has become dominant.

They call it the Goat Path. It’s unclear where the name comes from but it makes as much sense as anything else. As local news puts it, “Advocates and critics of the failed expressway began to refer to the project as the goat path.” Simple as that. Likewise, After the Fire: The Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish (1992), by in Randy-Michael Testa, “the unfinished stretch became known laughably among farmers as the ‘goat path.’”

“Goat path” or “goat track” turn up in Wikipedia as alternatives, along with “game trail” and “elephant path,” to the phrase “desire path,” a British term that refers to the sometimes almost imperceptible trails that animals make through woods, fields, and suburban yards to link their needs. “Paved roads show us where we ought to go,” says the Scottish writer David Farrier in Emergence, “but desire paths are made when we step off the road and let our hearts decide the way. They seek out the most direct connection between where we are and where we wish to be. Worn by the pressure of passing feet, they’re declarations of a kind: there is another way.”

Taking that, Lancaster’s Goat Path does exactly what its name says it will do: It declares there is another way. Sometimes hard and frustrating, but a fun experience.

“All right, buddy,” I said to Hertha, “under you go.” In case the fence was hot, I had him lay on his side, and then I slid him under the lowest wire, pushing him by his hip. I tossed my daypack over the top of the fence then belly-crawled.

We were in. The overpass: behind me. Sonja and the car: halfway back to town with the kids. The lazy cows: unable to get to us.

I was hiking the whole way back to the city and I only had to follow my heart. That and the telltale flatness of what was supposed to be a highway.

Meadow plants with fleshy heads knocked into my knees and soaked Hertha’s fur all along his flanks so that it stuck in clumps. My shoes were soaked. My leg hairs stuck to my legs. The grass forced my feet to trudge.

Number of goats: 0.

The Goat Path, I was finding out, was not a “path” in any sense of the word. There were more pasture fences. Lots more.

With all of the fences, I was feeling cheated out of a proper hike. The newspaper article that had inspired me hadn’t mentioned them. Still, owing to doing trespassing, and to the novelty of hiking on a highway-looking meadow through the heart of Amish country, I found myself lost in the spell of adventure.

The more I trespass—and I have been trespassing lo these many years, ever since my friends in high school and college and I would wander the southwestern Ohio fields at night—the more at ease I am with it, and the more I enjoy it and think other people should get comfortable with it, too. As Nick Slater wrote in a brilliant essay in Current Affairs, “In today’s increasingly lock- and camera-infested world, trespassing is a courageous demand for freedom, and it also happens to be fun as hell.” As long as it’s daytime and you have a dog with you, I’ve found, there’s little to fear when you cross the threshold between Definitely Public into 100 Percent-Private-but-Still-Institutional-So-It-Should-Be-Considered-Public, Really. It’s one of life’s little thrills, seeing firsthand the landscapes that our modern god—the Economy—has forgotten in its profits-and-losses sheets.

My solitude with the trail was not to last. A big farmhouse sat on a cliff. Should PA 23 have been completed, it would have run directly below the house.

A metallic creaking sound drew my attention away from the house. In the distance to my right, a man in a flat-brimmed straw hat riding some open-air vehicle behind two huge horses inched in my direction. Had he seen me and come out to intercept?

I took the only option left: Act like I had every right to be where I was. Ye olde rambler’s rights. I would meet my interlocutor as a fellow gentleman of the land.

The creaking grew louder as I stomped through more meadow. If not for the chariot’s motion, I might have been frozen in a Renaissance landscape painting. (I wish I knew more about Renaissance art.)

I came to a rutted dirt path that slashed across the pasture. I waited while the man and his team stamped and rolled nearer. He gave a drawn-out “Whoa” and pulled on the reins. The horses stopped. One of the huge beasts snorted. Hertha strained at his harness. I could feel him vibrating through the leash.

In addition to the man’s wide-brimmed, black hat, I observed his chinstrap beard and his black suspenders over a blue shirt. I searched his face for signs of emotion—surprise or anger—but found none. He was going to state the obvious, that I was trespassing, I was sure of it.

From his low perch, the Amish rider regarded us. I must have appeared as alien to him as he did to me: a 37-year-old city slicker wearing technical sportswear and a daypack, soaked from the knees down, hanging on to his grinning fool of a dog. Or he was adding up in his head how many fences we must have crossed to reach that point. Maybe he wondered if I was on an anthropological pilgrimage to interrogate how the Amish lived so purely and “simply,” like others before me (ahem, Testa). Or maybe he intuited the truth—a rambler who’d heard the magic words, Goat Path, and let them go to his head.

“Can I pass?” he said at last.

A beat went by in silence. It was as though I had found myself on a Tolkien road, and who among us hasn’t wanted to be on a Tolkien road since they were 13? Someplace where maps aren’t much help and the world is more forest than pavement and it hasn’t all been carved up, purchased, and enclosed. A world full of taverns and sooty oil lamps and dirty hooves, and quaint old customary sayings like “Can I pass?”

“Of course,” I said, elated at what I took to be tacit acceptance of my presence on the land. “Please!”

After a command to his horses and a shake of the reins, the man and his team resumed their progress. The front shield of the chariot-vehicle was solid metal, though maybe it was tin or aluminum rather than steel, and it came up to the driver’s chest. The two wheels were no more than eight inches in diameter, and the width of them looked to be about four or five inches—steel or iron all the way through. Altogether, the simple vehicle looked like something that would survive World War III. (I wanted to take a picture, but knowing the Amish aversion to being photographed, I, perhaps regrettably, let the chance go by.)

“That’s a nice dog you got there,” he said. 

“Thanks!”

Gaining elevation, he traveled toward the house on the cliff.

I took a drink from my water bottle. Crossing the path, I slithered under the fence, pulling Hertha after me, to continue my hike.

I went a bit farther over ground beaten by hooves, sporting yellow pops of buttercup blossoms, before stopping at a boulder studding the north bank. The sun had come out, and I felt almost overwhelmed, in a good way. I sensed the ghost of the aborted highway. The wind from all the semi trucks that could have been, whizzing by me. More and more cars. Four decades of drives never driven. Roadkill never killed, road rage never vented, carbon never emitted. Hertha lay down on his side panting with his tongue out.

It is partly thanks to the Amish showing up to public meetings from the 1980s on that the highway was never completed. At a public hearing in 1987, a thousand Amish crowded into the auditorium of Pequea Valley High School. As one, under the attention of the national media, they rose from their seats to signal their opposition to the highway. The highway instantly became a PR contest between those who wished not to build and those who wished to build. But victory had already been handed to the Amish as soon as they stood up for themselves and the quality of their land. Then-Governor Robert Casey Sr. (the current Pennsylvania senator’s father) later announced through a spokesman “that we will not build a new highway . . . that will bisect the Amish farming community or cause a major disruption to the Amish lifestyle.”

The odds have been on the landscape’s side ever since. In fact, the fate of the Goat Path has recently been assured: no highway ever. Instead, a multi-modal leisure path, suitable for hiking, bicycling, and, yes, horse-and-buggy jaunts. (More on this in Part II.)

And good timing, too. With climate change requiring action, the age of automobile supremacy may be sunsetting while we watch history unfold.

Maybe the Amish were right all along about cars.

Even at the very birth of the automobile era, the Amish saw that “Cars would speed things up dramatically and disrupt the slow pace of Amish rhythms,” Donald B. Kraybill writes in The Riddle of Amish Culture (Johns Hopkins UP 2001). “Drivers would be out of control, mobile, independent, and free floating. The car contradicted the very core of Amish life.” Horse travel, on the other hand, “intensifies face-to-face interaction” and “builds social capital by keeping people together.” Sprawl, social disintegration, and individualism aren’t so easy to adopt when everyone’s max speed is around 25 miles—per day.

Not that I believe that all travel should be limited to the range of a day’s horse-drawn reach. On the contrary, in my view, American can’t build a high-speed rail network soon enough. I can’t wait to take the next flight, and I’m always game for a family road trip. But as for cars and car culture and the built environment that cars demand of us, it’s long past time to look at “un-speeding” our modern world. Even the ability to walk between a small city like Lancaster and one of its outlying small towns, as I was discovering, could offer great gifts. Not to mention: the countryside was just damn beautiful. It’s a shame to see more of it paved.

The best kind of road is one never built.

Rising to my feet, I looked with pleasure at the shape of the field curving away from me. It was surreal—the land cut out and graded flat, hiding a buried highway. The Goat Path shows how the earth can sometimes give second chances. It invites us to dream of utopian futures, of walking, of spontaneous encounters, of wet shoes. “Come on, Hertha,” I said, pulling my pack on. “Lots of miles to go.”