The Art of Meeting Strangers: The Pacific Crest Trail
So far, our course has emphasized the way that our networks are connected, and how these connections, when displayed graphically, can allow us to see distinct groups of people and the abundance (or absence) of connections. One aspect of the social relationships I have been curious about is the connections found between those who are relative strangers, or weak ties.
Enter the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), a 2,650 mile long expanse from Mexico to Canada. People sometimes spend 4-6 months on the trail trying to traverse the West Coast. I have chosen to analyze some of the trail diaries featured on the official PCT website. One blog in particular, “Trail Traveler” is the story of a young twenty-something who embarks on the trail and meets her husband (whom she marries on the trail). While this is surely remarkable, what is more interesting are the entries which catalog her reputation and the other people she encounters on the trail that know of her and her husband’s story (they dubbed the pair the “Honeyspooners”).
The way I like to see it is that these two people act as the two central nodes in this pseudo-sub-network. In a sense, it’s almost as if this couple has built up a social network within the PCT-hiker community by indirect oral communication. These relationships, of course, start out as weak ties. Of course, when they actually meet these people they then become a part of a more solidified network. One example of this transformation from weak tie to strong tie is the woman that agreed to drive the pair from trail sites to gather their marriage licenses and to the church where they married itself. Having actually spent several days with this woman, the author of the blog notes that she considers this woman a friend, something that would not have been possible without the word-of-mouth spread of information.
This is also the sort of network that can only spring up in relatively small communities- I’m sure the same effect wouldn’t be seen with someone interacting with a famous movie star they admire. The PCT seems to be a location that fosters, or attracts, the sort of personalities than are especially prone to forming this kind of friendly and on-the-fly interaction.
Trail Traveler Blog:
https://trailtraveler.wordpress.com/
General PCT Blog List:
http://www.pcta.org/discover-the-trail/trail-journals/