Dick Anderson has been a lot of things in his 71 years: fisheries biologist, conservation commissioner, television host, and director of the Maine Audubon Society. Long-distance hiker was never one of them. Instead, he has developed a different kind of endurance. In little more than a decade, Anderson has learned more about the IAT than if he’d walked every one of its 1,300 miles. He knows when the caribou are rutting in Quebec and where the salmon are running in New Brunswick; where to find the best piece of homemade pie in Mars Hill and the best pint of beer in Newfoundland. “Exuberance personified,” as one of his friends put it. Those who know him describe him as endlessly optimistic, a cigar-smoking rainmaker and political animal with a talent for getting distant parties to see eye-to-eye. He doesn’t take no for an answer, but makes you feel like he did. This, more than anything else, seems to be the secret to his trail’s success. “He can go into a room with someone dead against something and they will leave it with their arms around each other saying, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do it,’ ” says Melville. “A lot of people may have looked at the landowner challenges and thrown in the towel,” adds the ATC’s Horn. “I get the sense Dick is a can-do person and I believe that’s what it takes.”

It’s two weeks before our border hike and I’m sitting at the kitchen table of Anderson’s Freeport, Maine home, a modest blue-gray New Englander located a mile-and-a-half from the outlet town’s busy shopping district. “Building a trail is a cultural exercise as well as a philosophical one,” says Anderson, biting into one of the moose burgers he’s prepared us for lunch. For a footpath like the IAT to work, he tells me, someone occasionally needs to walk from one end to the other. He spends a few hours here each day making sure that happens, staying in touch with IAT thru-hikers by email, tracking their progress, and informing border patrol when they reach the international boundary. He also maintains a list of local residents along the route and lets them know when a thru-hiker is passing through. “We’ve had 86 people [hike the trail] and I work hard to make sure that there are five or six or 10 people who walk from Katahdin to Cape Gaspe or Belle Isle each year,” he says. “You need to continue to build the cultural part of the trail.” Managing a long-distance trail that travels through two federal jurisdictions, three time zones, three provinces, and one state is nothing if not complex, but the IAT takes a decentralized approach. Along with the homespun headquarters in Anderson’s kitchen, the IAT committee has no bank account, no trail guide, and the kind of lean membership numbers you’d expect of a trail traveling through some of the most sparsley populated areas in North America. Chapters in each jurisdiction manage their own sections, with a common blaze (blue) and bilingual signage providing continuity. Annual meetings are tipsy, laid-back affairs. So laid back, in fact, Anderson only found out about this year’s change-of-venue to Cow Head, Newfoundland, after someone sent him a newspaper clipping from the St. Anthony Bee. “We mix business with pleasure,” says Joanne Farrell, the IAT’s Newfoundland coordinator. “That’s our motto.”

“We had no idea where this was going to go,” Anderson explains. “It was expanding on something that we already knew was a good idea.The only question was whether it would sell as well in Canada as in Tennessee or Pennsylvania.” It did. Quebec stepped in with $4 million in provincial funding to develop its portion of the trail. The IAT’s foray into New Brunswick, where hiking has never been a mainstream activity, coincided with the creation of the New Brunswick Trails Council, a non-profit designed to raise the profile of trails in the province. Both provinces were also open to reassigning established trail systems in Parc de la Gaspesie in Quebec and New Brunswick’s Mount Carleton Provincial Park as sections of the IAT. In Newfoundland meanwhile, most of the trail travels over provincially-owned Crown land, which has let Anderson sidestep the kind of landowner challenges that have slowed efforts in Maine. “One of the big differences between Canada and the United States is that people in Canada don’t see themselves financing things,” says Anderson. “People are much more inclined to try to find a way for the government to help them. It’s not good or bad, it’s just the way they do it.”

But the IAT’s ambitions reach far beyond North America. Anderson and his colleagues hope to extend their footpath overseas by chasing remnants of the Appalachians dispersed by continental drift. “I would say we have an expansionist mentality. As soon as things get done on this side of the Atlantic, we’ll want to go somewhere else,” Anderson says. Think he’s bluffing? The trail’s northern terminus has moved three times since 1994-from Mount Jacques Cartier in Quebec’s Chic-Choc range to Cap Gaspe to the island of Belle Isle off the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. Anderson took another step toward moving the finish line again in early February, successfully lobbying for an IAT extension in the Cape Breton Highlands of Nova Scotia. “They asked us where we thought the trail should go. We told them it would be really nice if the trail ends at the ferry terminal in North Sydney,” says Anderson, who sees this latest section as the perfect segue to Newfoundland. “That is the only thing I can see as being fixed.”

Anderson has a way of making a pan-continental hiking trail seem entirely reasonable-inevitable even-and after spending a few days with him, the question isn’t whether the International Appalachian Trail will someday reach across the Atlantic to Great Britain’s Caledonian Mountains, but whether it will end there. Anderson already has plans to take his IAT road show to Scotland in 2008. “Maybe someday we’ll find a way to have a trail in Scandinavia,” he says. “Maybe in a hundred years, someone will figure out how to have a section of trail in Spitsbergen.”

He sifts through a pile of newspaper clippings scattered across the kitchen table and pulls out a copy of the British hiking journal The Great Outdoors. Along with a feature on his trail is an illustration of a hiker beneath a trail sign that reads “Georgia to Algiers.” Anderson clearly gets a kick out of this but I can’t help but wonder if it hasn’t been his intention all along. “Years before that article, we actually put a list together of all 23 countries that the Appalachian Mountains go through,” says Anderson. “We got into this whole thing of when to say the trail is finished,” he continues. “But it doesn’t work that way. So we just announced it was finished in 2000. I don’t think the word ‘complete’ works with trails. Trails are always a work in progress.”

The longer I listen to Anderson talk about his trail, the more I realize just how small a role hiking plays in all of this for him. By running 12 miles of trail along the international boundary, Anderson is challenging people to see the border for what it really is: a line on a map. It is a theme that runs through much of Anderson’s work as Maine’s conservation commissioner, from his quixotic attempt to reintroduce caribou from herds in Newfoundland to Baxter State Park to successfully brokering the first international river planning authority between Canada and the United States. For Anderson, the IAT isn’t about Pangea, or continental drift, or even connecting the Northern Forest bioregion on two sides of the border. It’s about connecting people. “The border is not a dangerous thing,” Anderson says. “It is just a line that some human drew through the forest.”

Back on the international boundary, that line is suddenly feeling very long. After two lazy miles, we reach a granite boundary marker poking through the snow. Anderson suggests we turn around here. It’s lunchtime and he wants to take me to a restaurant on the outskirts of Mars Hill that’s become a popular fueling station for IAT thru-hikers. “What do you say?” he asks. “Seen enough?” A small part of me wants to keep hiking, to continue on this runway-straight corridor into Canada, to where the ancient Appalachians plunge into the sea. But I don’t put up a fight. It’s cold and the winds are picking up. I’ve seen all I needed to see. If there’s anything I’ve missed, I’m sure Anderson will tell me about it.

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