Koerth: This ‘path of desire’ takes you to a magical place we aren’t supposed to be

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The coldest days of winter are sometimes the prettiest. Sunlight shatters the air like broken glass. Your breath builds a cave of crisp frost inside your nose. Every patch of frozen water clinging to the sidewalk is both a death trap and a sparkling prism. This is, obviously, the best kind of day to inch your way down several steep flights of ice-covered stairs and commit a petty crime.

A visit to Minnehaha Falls in winter is both an opportunity to enjoy the cold alien beauty of a frozen landscape and a moment of mutually agreed-upon public trespass. Together, we step over the warning chain at the top of the falls stairs, grip the railing, and (against our better judgments) step and slide to the bottom. Once there, we locate the fencing clearly marked with “No Trespassing” signs and cheerfully ignore them. On the other side lies a wonderland of ice. Some days, you’ll find dozens of people there, old and young, all technically breaking the law together.

So many Minnesotans do this, in fact, that there is a path, packed down in the snow and smoothed through the ice, leading from the fence to the falls. The official signage may tell you not to pass. But feet send a message as well, one that says: “Come on through.”

Urban planners call trails like this “paths of desire,” a term coined by French philosopher of science and poetry Gaston Bachelard. They’re the fastest way between two points … just not the way the people in charge wanted you to take. You’ve probably seen them more clearly in the summer — trammeled lines of impacted dirt where nothing grows, leading through the grass from one patch of sidewalk to another. (The corner cut from the southeast end of the Bde Maka Ska walking trail to the stoplight is a classic Minneapolis example, but I also saw a great one recently at Rosedale Center, shaving a nip off the walk from the mall parking lot to the crosswalk to Guitar Center.)

Paths of desire exist everywhere people want to go. We’ve used them as the basis of official roads. Broadway, the street in New York City, began as a Native American desire path, cutting a diagonal line across Manhattan that was so useful it survived the island’s grid-ification. When the Illinois Institute of Technology built a new campus center in the 1990s, the architecture team actually mapped the paths of desire used by students to cross the space where the center would go — and incorporated them into the building.

These paths of desire are about the efficiency of transportation, and usually that’s what the concept is all about. Researchers have even documented that people start to carve out desire paths when the official route is between 20% and 30% longer than we’d prefer.

But a destination is also a desire. And the path past the fence to Minnehaha Falls is also one the powers that be would prefer you didn’t take. Although the Minneapolis Park Board doesn’t keep a full accounting of injuries at the falls, spokesperson Robin Smothers told me the area beyond the fences is dangerous. Over the 13 years she’s worked with the Park Board, she remembers two concussions, one broken arm and a broken collarbone — all caused by ice. The park police can also issue citations for trespassing, but every year plenty of Minnesotans hop the barriers anyway. And when we do, it’s not to shorten a commute, but to create an opportunity.

This path of desire allows us to touch a place we can usually only admire from afar. Behind the fence, you can’t see that the mounds of ice at the base of the falls are patterned with ripples, like hard brains. You can’t elephant walk on hands and toes up the bubbly slope of the formation and skate-wobble your way into the cave behind the frozen falls. If we stay where we’re supposed to, we never get to see the eerie radioactive-blue light of sunshine filtering through minerals in the ice.

And, unlike traditional paths of desire, I’m not sure we’d be better off if the city adapted and paved the way to our goal. Part of what makes the frozen falls experience so magical is that it is a place we aren’t supposed to be. It’s an experience where we get to step outside the city for a moment and allow ourselves to be drawn into the wild. The inefficiency, in other words, is the point.

But the path to the falls and paths of desire still have one other thing in common: They’re lines people collectively draw for themselves. There’s no higher authority to tell us how to get there. There’s not even a committee to organize our steps. We all just see a place we want to go, a moment we need in our lives, and we make a beeline for it.