On  a warm morning last August, three conservationists set out for a walk in the woods in Queens. The conservationists—Sarah Charlop-Powers, Jennifer Greenfeld, and Kristie King—work for the Parks Department and the Natural Areas Conservancy. Shod in hiking shoes and carrying reusable water bottles, they crossed a series of playing fields near the entrance to Alley Pond Park, where children in matching T-shirts were spidering about on a ropes course. Following a wide mulched path, the conservationists stepped into the forest. The atmosphere changed abruptly: the familiar clamor of an American summer morning—cars whooshing, kids chirping—fell away; the air became cool, dark, faintly damp; the sky overhead was embroidered with bright threads of birdsong. All these are signs of a healthy forest. The conservationists’ job was to somehow keep it that way, while also persuading more people to visit it. King, the department’s director of forest restoration, stopped to inspect a map of the park’s trail network—a loose tangle of Crayola-hued lines representing the six official paths, and a ghostly network of dotted white lines signifying the informal paths, called desire lines.

Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the words of one academic journal, they “record collective disobedience.” Others believe that they reveal the inherent flaws in a city’s design—the places where paths ought to have been built, rather than where they were built. For this reason, desire lines infuriate some landscape architects and enrapture others. They also fascinate scholars, inspire artists, and enchant poets. There is a fifty-five-thousand-member-strong Reddit thread dedicated to them, in which new posts appear daily with impassioned titles like “Desire never ends” and “Don’t tell me where to go.” People seem to relish discovering odd new desire lines, the more illogical the better, and theorizing about what desire they express.

For members of the Parks Department, desire lines pose a riddle. “The desire lines, while they’re expressive of people’s interest in being in the woods, they also damage the ecology,” Greenfeld, the assistant commissioner for forestry, horticulture, and natural resources, told me. As a result, whenever it is worth the effort, the city tries to close them down. 

....