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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Official Guides to the Appalachian Trail) (Paperback)
by Bill Bryson
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Awe inspiring, light, and hilarious, this classic of modern travel literature is simply Bill Bryson at the top of his form. |
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Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Broadway; Reprint edition
Pub. in: May, 1999
ISBN: 0767902521
Pages: 304
Measurements: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00581
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- Awards & Credential -
A runaway New York Times Bestseller ranking # 513 in books on Amazon.com as of November 28, 2006. |
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Returning to the US after living in England for twenty years, Bill Bryson becomes intrigued with the idea of the hiking the Appalachian Trail, a portion of which is in his New Hampshire backyard. The 2100-mile trail from Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine winds through virgin forest and scenes of incredible natural beauty and provide an unparalleled opportunity to be alone and reflective.
Bryson's sense of adventure and his enthusiasm hold him in good stead as he sets off in Georgia, though he has little idea of how difficult it will be to hike 15 or more miles a day, up and down mountains with forty pounds of gear, including a tent, on his back. He is accompanied by Stephen Katz, an acquaintance from Iowa with whom he once traveled in Europe, who is even more out of shape than he is. The contrast between the attitudes of the two men - Bryson, enthusiastic, and Katz, grimly concerned (and complaining) about the difficulties - reflect, between them, the attitudes of virtually any reader of this amusing and thoughtful travelogue. Additional kooky characters appear throughout this account to add humor and complexity to the hike.
Bryson is a fine observer of nature, and as he and Katz travel for six weeks from Georgia through the Carolinas into the Shenandoah National Park, he includes much background about the trail and its history, and about the record of the National Forest Service and the National Parks Service, both of which he finds shocking. The National Forest Service is the largest builder of highways in the country, providing access for logging operations in the forests. The National Parks Service has a hands-off policy regarding the protection of endangered species of trees, which are dying due to global warming, diseases, and pollution.
At the end of six weeks, Bryson and Katz end the first phase of the hike and return to their homes. The book loses some of its narrative momentum and its humor when Bryson returns months later to continue part of the trail alone - the reader misses Katz and his complaints - and Bryson becomes more philosophical and more critical of governmental policy in the latter part of the book. Overall, however, this is a fascinating account of a trail that traverses a major part of the eastern landscape, and Bryson beautifully conveys his awe for its magnificent scenery. To the extent that its species are vanishing and its forests are dying, it is also a wake-up call to all concerned Americans. (From quoting Mary Whipple, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for The Times and The Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There, The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island), and books on language (The Mother Tongue, Made in America). He now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and four children.
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From the Publisher:
Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes - and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings.
For a start there's the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk. Despite Katz's overwhelming desire to find cozy restaurants, he and Bryson eventually settle into their stride, and while on the trail they meet a bizarre assortment of hilarious characters. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America's last great wilderness. An adventure, a comedy, and a celebration, A Walk in the Woods is destined to become a modern classic of travel literature.
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We hiked till five and camped beside a tranquil spring in a small, grassy clearing in the trees just off the trail. Because it was our first day back on the trail, we were flush for food, including perishables like cheese and bread that had to be eaten before they went off or were shaken to bits in our packs, so we rather gorged ourselves, then sat around smoking and chatting idly until persistent and numerous midgelike creatures (no-see-ums, as they are universally known along the trail) drove us into our tents. It was perfect sleeping weather, cool enough to need a bag but warm enough that you could sleep in your underwear, and I was looking forward to a long night's snooze - indeed was enjoying a long night's snooze - when, at some indeterminate dark hour, there was a sound nearby that made my eyes fly open. Normally, I slept through everything - through thunderstorms, through Katz's snoring and noisy midnight pees - so something big enough or distinctive enough to wake me was unusual. There was a sound of undergrowth being disturbed - a click of breaking branches, a weighty pushing through low foliage - and then a kind of large, vaguely irritable snuffling noise.
Bear!
I sat bolt upright. Instantly every neuron in my brain was awake and dashing around frantically, like ants when you disturb their nest. I reached instinctively for my knife, then realized I had left it in my pack, just outside the tent. Nocturnal defense had ceased to be a concern after many successive nights of tranquil woodland repose. There was another noise, quite near.
"Stephen, you awake?" I whispered.
"Yup," he replied in a weary but normal voice.
"What was that?"
"How the hell should I know."
"It sounded big."
"Everything sounds big in the woods."
This was true. Once a skunk had come plodding through our camp and it had sounded like a stegosaurus. There was another heavy rustle and then the sound of lapping at the spring. It was having a drink, whatever it was.
I shuffled on my knees to the foot of the tent, cautiously unzipped the mesh and peered out, but it was pitch black. As quietly as I could, I brought in my backpack and with the light of a small flashlight searched through it for my knife. When I found it and opened the blade I was appalled at how wimpy it looked. It was a perfectly respectable appliance for, say, buttering pancakes, but patently inadequate for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur.
Carefully, very carefully, I climbed from the tent and put on the flashlight, which cast a distressingly feeble beam. Something about fifteen or twenty feet away looked up at me. I couldn't see anything at all of its shape or size - only two shining eyes. It went silent, whatever it was, and stared back at me.
"Stephen," I whispered at his tent, "did you pack a knife?"
"No."
"Have you get anything sharp at all?"
He thought for a moment. "Nail clippers."
I made a despairing face. "Anything a little more vicious than that? Because, you see, there is definitely something out here."
"It's probably just a skunk."
"Then it's one big skunk. Its eyes are three feet off the ground."
"A deer then."
I nervously threw a stick at the animal, and it didn't move, whatever it was. A deer would have bolted. This thing just blinked once and kept staring.
I reported this to Katz.
"Probably a buck. They're not so timid. Try shouting at it."
I cautiously shouted at it: "Hey! You there! Scat!" The creature blinked again, singularly unmoved. "You shout," I said.
"Oh, you brute, go away, do!" Katz shouted in merciless imitation. "Please withdraw at once, you horrid creature."
"Fuck you," I said and lugged my tent right over to his. I didn't know what this would achieve exactly, but it brought me a tiny measure of comfort to be nearer to him.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm moving my tent."
"Oh, good plan. That'll really confuse it."
I peered and peered, but I couldn't see anything but those two wide-set eyes staring from the near distance like eyes in a cartoon. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be outside and dead or inside and waiting to be dead. I was barefoot and in my underwear and shivering. What I really wanted - really, really wanted - was for the animal to withdraw. I picked up a small stone and tossed it at it. I think it may have hit it because the animal made a sudden noisy start (which scared the bejesus out of me and brought a whimper to my lips) and then emitted a noise - not quite a growl, but near enough. It occurred to me that perhaps I oughtn't provoke it.
"What are you doing, Bryson? Just leave it alone and it will go away."
"How can you be so calm?"
"What do you want me to do? You're hysterical enough for both of us."
"I think I have a right to be a trifle alarmed, pardon me. I'm in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, staring at a bear, with a guy who has nothing to defend himself with but a pair of nail clippers. Let me ask you this. If it is a bear and it comes for you, what are you going to do - give it a pedicure?"
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," Katz said implacably.
"What do you mean you'll cross that bridge? We're on the bridge, you moron. There's a bear out here, for Christ sake. He's looking at us. He smells noodles and Snickers and - oh, shit."
"What?"
"Oh. Shit."
"What?"
"There's two of them. I can see another pair of eyes." Just then, the flashlight battery started to go. The light flickered and then vanished. I scampered into my tent, stabbing myself lightly but hysterically in the thigh as I went, and began a quietly frantic search for spare batteries. If I were a bear, this would be the moment I would choose to lunge.
"Well, I'm going to sleep," Katz announced.
"What are you talking about? You can't go to sleep."
"Sure I can. I've done it lots of times." There was the sound of him rolling over and a series of snuffling noises, not unlike those of the creature outside.
"Stephen, you can't go to sleep," I ordered. But he could and he did, with amazing rapidity.
The creature - creatures, now - resumed drinking, with heavy lapping noises. I couldn't find any replacement batteries, so I flung the flashlight aside and put my miner's lamp on my head, made sure it worked, then switched it off to conserve the batteries. Then I sat for ages on my knees, facing the front of the tent, listening keenly, gripping my walking stick like a club, ready to beat back an attack, with my knife open and at hand as a last line of defense. The bears - animals, whatever they were - drank for perhaps twenty minutes more, then quietly departed the way they had come. It was a joyous moment, but I knew from my reading that they would be likely to return. I listened and listened, but the forest returned to silence and stayed there.
Eventually I loosened my grip on the walking stick and put on a sweater - pausing twice to examine the tiniest noises, dreading the sound of a revisit - and after a very long time got back into my sleeping bag for warmth. I lay there for a long time staring at total blackness and knew that never again would I sleep in the woods with a light heart.
And then, irresistibly and by degrees, I fell asleep.
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Kirkus Reviews (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
The Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin, consists of some five million steps, and Bryson (Notes from a Small Island, 1996, etc.) seems to coax a laugh, and often an unexpectedly startling insight, out of each one he traverses. It's not all yuks though it is hard not to grin idiotically through all 288 pages for Bryson is a talented portraitist of place. He did his natural-history homework, which is to say he knows a jack-o-lantern mushroom from a hellbender salamander from a purple warty back mussel, and can also write seriously about the devastation of chestnut blight. He laces his narrative with gobbets of trail history and local trivia, and he makes real the "strange and palpable menace'' of the dark deep woods in which he sojourns, the rough-hewn trailscape "mostly high up on the hills, over lonely ridges and forgotten hollows that no one has ever used or coveted,'' celebrating as well the "low-level ecstasy'' of finding a book left thoughtfully at a trail shelter, or a broom with which to sweep out the shelter's dross. Yet humor is where the book finds its cues - from Bryson's frequent trail companion, the obese and slothful Katz, a spacious target for Bryson's sly wit, to moments of cruel and infantile laughs, as when he picks mercilessly on the witless woman who, admittedly, ruined a couple of their days. But for the most part the humor is bright sarcasm, flashing with drollery and intelligence, even when its a far yodel from political sensitivity. Then Bryson will take your breath away with a trenchant critique of the irredeemably vulgar vernacular strip that characterizes many American downtowns, or of other signs of decay he encounters off the trail (though the trail itself he comes to love). "Walking is what we did,'' Bryson states: 800-plus out of the 2,100-plus miles, and that good sliver is sheer comic travel entertainment. |
The New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Bryson is… great company right from the start - a lumbering, droll, neatnik intellectual who comes off as equal parts Garrison Keillor, Michael Kinsley, and… Dave Barry. |
The Boston Globe (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
A Walk in the Woods is an almost perfect travel book. |
Lily An (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Although I read this book when it first came out... I still think about it all the time. The book has become somewhat famous in our family...and we have been know to utter the word FLUNG… from time to time . That is all due to the writing and delivery of Bill Bryson and his buddy Katz. The book is more than just a travelogue… more than a diary and the ruminations of a 40 year old out to prove he is not over the hill yet{pun intended!} It is a wonderful blend of wit and wisdom, philosophy and wonderful characters. This is your chance to meet Bill Bryson… and Katz (I think that line about him being the drug culture of Iowa is delightful!!) Bill has been accused of being sarcastic... but he says what he thinks and he is not there to hurt your feelings or those of the person in question. If you met an irritating person somewhere... and they latched onto you in the middle of nowhere and decided to join your group on the trail... wouldn't you have some thoughts that you would either keep to yourself or talk with your companions about? It can be compared to conversation at a mall when watching people… some you wonder who they think they are by the way they talk or dress or the expression on their face and others you wonder what they are thinking about you. Now you know guys do the same thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the hike on the Appalachian Trail... it would not have been a trip I would have taken if not for Bill Bryson and his dry wit. I am glad that he introduced me to Katz and I will be forever grateful for the insights he provided and the time I spent on the AT...When you read this book you will enjoy his hemming and hawing over the equipment at the local sporting goods store...and the final thoughts on those choices and you will learn why some things have to be Flung off the side of a mountain. What a trek this was...the emotional and the physical...Have fun on the trail… Thank you Mr. Bryson... Don't forget the Snickers Bars! |
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