stagnating, I realize. And yet, my library is full of books I have yet to read, because I genuinely enjoy reading and wish I had the time to commit myself to all of them. I fear I may never complete the library I’ve built, by which I mean to read it exhaustively. Plenty of my books are for reference, of course, but a great many are literary works of some length that would require considerable spans of my life to take in completely. Over the last year or so, I’ve read large passages of some, but few have I finished, the most recent of which is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Bryson is the author of a wide variety of humorous memoirs and books about travel, and this particular opus chronicles his endeavor to hike the Appalachian Trail. It was a fantastic read, thematically balanced, enticingly paced, and thoroughly enjoyable. One of the best things about it is the skillful manner in which Bryson weaves together the narrative of his journey—including several anecdotes that made me literally laugh aloud—with a wealth of historical, scientific, and political information seasoned with just the right dash of social commentary and personal reflection. He writes in such an entertaining style, drawing together arresting statistical trivia with his own affecting ruminations that not only educate, but make you feel a part of the journey. You go with him, partaking of both the pervasive vision and the intimate details—each stinging scrape, each rain-soaked sock, the smile-inducing moment of his "first refreshment in the wilderness" when toilet paper proved an effective coffee filter, and each immeasurably splendid parachute back to the comfort of everyday life, from the taste of a cheeseburger and cream soda to a warm shower and fresh laundering after a week’s deprivation, each encountered with almost virginal gratitude—through Bryson’s clever and charming turn of phrase, by which he manages to be both cavalier and eloquent, both shrewdly educative and verbally spry. He is at once beguiling storyteller and artful scribe. I only wish I could write like Bryson, and bring my thoughts and experiences to life as vividly and readably as he does.
The book is about a hike. So naturally, a thematic mainstay of Bryson’s account is the tremendous variations in landscape and terrain, including a vast diversity of mountain ranges and individual peaks, many of which become points of focus for his musings and encounters. The Appalachian Trial, or AT, which he describes as the “granddaddy of long hikes,” stretches some 2,200 miles across 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia all the way to the glorious and forbidding northern terminus of Mount Katahdin in Maine’s Baxter State Park. Between these points, we find Bryson and his colorful companion, the rotund, recovering-alcoholic, and almost delightfully profane Stephen Katz, scaling a multitude of peaks in a dizzying spectrum of weather, both inclement and fair. Blood Mountain, for instance, the highest and most formidable peak on the Georgian stretch, is followed by the descent into Neels Gap, where we genuinely feel their sovereign relief in returning to civilization—a paved highway, the sound of passing cars, postcards and refrigeration. As Bryson writes at one point, “It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread” (Bryson, 55). They so carefully negotiated the jostling wind gusts and frozen streams of Big Butt Mountain, followed closely, via Bearpen Gap, by the fierce winds of Albert Mountain. They ambled across the lofty peak of High Top in Tennessee to the “hallelujah moment” when they first beheld the “sudden new world” of the awesome and muscular Smokies and began to grasp the dense magnificence and challenge of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, with 16 peaks above 6,000 feet, including Clingman’s Dome—at 6,643 feet, the highest point on the trail. They hiked the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park, which Bryson owns to be his favorite part of the trail, with its gentle grades; twittering birds; the palpable tranquility of spring; and yes, believe it or not, its cheeseburgers. Later in the trip, after a brief hiatus, Bryson returns to the trail, this time without Katz, and faces some of its toughest territory, including that jagged “sea of rocks” known as Pennsylvania and the frighteningly stiff winds of Mount Washington in Maine. He also encounters the quartzite majesty of Kittatinny Mountain in the Delaware River Gap, where the reader partakes of his brimming delight at being in the “cartographically thoughtful hands of the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference” maps. We follow Bryson as he discovers, both directly and with the help of the “indispensible” Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, the true difference between Vermont and New Hampshire. As he says, “New Hampshire is hard” (Bryson, 221), and in the company of his neighbor Bill Abdu, he tackles the “beast” Mount Lafayette before moving on to the “commanding summits” and “unpredictable and downright pernicious weather” of White Mountains National Forest.
Bryson devotes an entire chapter to Mount Washington. I figured I might as well give it an entire paragraph. The region, which apparently owes much of its infamously severe weather to the interaction between northern and southern weather systems that differ dramatically in both altitude and moisture, is startlingly perilous, even, as he shares, for seasoned, well-equipped hikers. Despite this, the fair-like mountaintop is a tourist phenomenon. Bryson’s account of the Summit Information Center there borders on the surreal, particularly his amusing recollection of the meteorological marvel “Breakfast of Champions,” a short video he apparently had to view twice, it was so good. “It was filmed with a fixed camera on one of the summit terraces and showed a man sitting at a table, as if at an open-air restaurant, during one of its famous blows. While the man holds down the table with his arms, a waiter approaches against the wind with great and obvious difficulty, like someone wingwalking at 30,000 feet. He tries to pour the customer a bowl of cereal, and it all flies horizontally from the box. Then he adds milk, but this goes the same way (mostly over the customer—a particularly gratifying moment). Then the bowl flies away and the silverware, as I recall, and then the table starts to go, and then the film ends” (Bryson, 232). From here, Bryson takes us through the Hundred Mile Wilderness of Maine (with its stout devotees and plenitude of slopes), once again alongside the ultimately lovable Katz, and finally to the roof of Mount Killington, from which panoramic prospect he was able to behold the entirety of New England’s eminent peaks, and was “acutely aware of how providence has favored the land into which [he] was born” (Bryson, 272).
In addition to documenting his journey, Bryson provides a brilliant and hilarious expose on the quality of local culture in towns and hamlets bordering the AT as well as a fairly comprehensive history of the trail itself, beginning with the vision of the well-meaning but somewhat ne’er-do-well forester and conservationist Benton MacKaye, whose friend Charles Whitaker originally published the idea for the trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921. The Appalachian Trail Conference itself was founded in 1925, but as Bryson reveals, while much of MacKaye’s original vision and spirit survives in the AT, it was actually the somewhat disagreeable Washington lawyer Myron Avery, despite his strained and ultimately doomed association with MacKaye, who is essentially responsible for the trail and began to make actual progress toward its development around 1930. It was under Avery’s direction that the trail was extended from 1,200 miles (as originally envisioned by the conference) to over 2,000; was constructed, through mountain wilderness and with entirely volunteer efforts; and was officially completed on August 14, 1937. Bryson and Katz began their footwork almost 59 years later on March 9, 1996.
In the course of the book, he also discusses just about every conceivable peril of solitude and the wilds, including an entire chapter devoted to that “gradual and insidious sort of trauma” known as hypothermia and a chapter that was both chilling and at times facetiously foreboding on the history of bear attacks along the eastern seaboard. But aside from hosts of deadly animals, such as nests of lethally venomous snakes, relentless fire ants, and parasitically deranged moose, Bryson coyly reports a cornucopia of potential dangers to which the wilderness sojourner is susceptible, including flash floods, strange and debilitating diseases (many of which have no known cure), and “loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex.” Honestly, when his elucidative efforts aren’t so disquieting, they’re enough to make you explode with laughter.
And there you go. Bryson is also a humorist. One of the most amusing aspects of his style is the personal transparency with which he recounts his interaction with the various personalities he comes across in the course of the journey, beginning with his thoroughly relatable tale of feigning knowledge to Dave Mengle of the Dartmouth Co-Op (a local outfitter) and continuing with the introduction of his companion, the Welles-ish Katz, who had effectively become “Iowa’s drug culture” before joining Bryson on his epic jaunt and whose devotion to every potentially unhealthy faire, including sausages, bags of cookies, bricks of cheese, and the “imperishable” spectrum of the Little Debbie label, is enough to give any reader more than a few Snickers. Bryson shares such delightfully candid details, right down to his avoiding equipment that seemed to invite ridicule, including a designer ground cloth, sewing kit, emergency whistle, and orange spade for burying your personally manufactured fertilizer. Oh, the incomparable treat of a sincere and personable anecdotist! He treats us to this same forthright and quirky approach throughout the story via a series of sometimes suspenseful, at times rapturously funny, and on occasion absorbingly poetic vignettes that relate his entire journey, spaced out by a series of chapters and partial-chapters that deliver the scoop on the AT itself, revealing its biological and ecological breadth to a tasteful and satisfying degree, for instance, never spending too long on scientific discourse as to be tedious or prosaic, but imparting enough so as not to leave you feeling conceptually hungry or dishearteningly curious. Bryson is, I believe, a master of such dynamic prose, which is the cornerstone of taking a potentially mundane enterprise and tailoring a narrative of capital entertainment. One of my favorite parts is Bryson’s astounding illumination that nearly the entire living portion of a tree is comprised of just a few paper-thin layers of tissue that rest between the bark and the mass of dead heartwood. More remarkable still, a tree's delicate yet powerful anatomy allows it to lift enormous volumes of water—in some cases, several hundred gallons per day—from roots to leaves and otherwise to perform its every other living function by way of this modest sleeve of moist tissue. As he says, “Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water” (Bryson, 122).
One of the most hilarious sequences in the book involves a parasitic and richly annoying trail acquaintance named Mary Ellen, who latched onto Bryson and Katz for a few days. Direct and continuous interaction with such a person would prove agonizing, for sure, but through the comfortable distance of readership, as the bane of Bryson and Katz through ridiculous chatter and a remarkable lack of consideration, she is truly a comedic high point. In asking Katz his sign, for example, only to such a pathetically clueless person might “cunnilingus” refer to the zodiac, at which point, you could almost kiss Katz for his deft and delicious sarcasm, though it sprang from acute irritation.
Bryson’s treatment of local characters and culture is a tongue-in-cheek tour-de-force, adding more treasure to the trove, as in the description of their arrival at Mull’s Motel in the “palpably weird and unsettling” Hiawassee, Georgia, and its chilling resemblance to James Dickey’s description of Southern highlanders in his novel Deliverance. A short spell later, Bryson delivers a visit to the hyper-commercialized “shock to the system” called Gatlinburg, where the first stage of the journey ends, after which he and Katz resolve not to hike the entire trail, but to pick it up in Roanoke. Gatlinburg, with all its overweight tourists consuming “dribbly food,” motels, gift shops, and wax museums, becomes an apt focal point for some thought-provoking social commentary, since all the merchants, attractions, and other random diversions are continually replaced, like rows of shark teeth, constantly moving forward to take the place of previous generations of commercial miscellany. As Bryson says, “… that is the way of America.... I know the world is ever in motion, but the speed of change in the United States is simply dazzling” (Bryson, 103). I thought about this recently when the one of my many alarm clocks began to fail and could no longer go off at its set time each day. I’ve only had the thing for about three years. My mom, on the other hand, recently replaced a simple digital alarm clock that lasted more than 30 years. Such is the way of America indeed, at least modern-day America. From a profiteering standpoint, the only problem with manufacturing a sturdy, reliable, long-lasting product is that the consumer stops buying it. Solution: don’t make your product so well that the average person won’t need another one within five years. And so, things aren’t built to last anymore. Things are made to be routinely replaced, not due to a sensible degree of wear, but to feed an economic system that is forever scrounging the bottom of the American pocketbook for untapped gain. And Gatlinburg is, I suppose, a microcosm of this system, a chorus line of alarm clocks, each ready to wear out and be made obsolete at any moment. Of course, I can’t think of a better system. I certainly wouldn’t choose to put the whole economic behemoth in government hands. No, I would rather have 20 independent commercial corporations vying for my money than one government entity, evasive to accountability, taking it without asking. And until there’s a serious market for a lasting alarm clock again, I suppose we’ll keep pouring our money into the poorly-made, hyper-replaceable ones. Unfortunately, as Bryson later observes of the perished resort culture of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, America has entered the age of the “retarded attention span.” Perhaps quality manufacturing was doomed the moment industrial America discovered our culture’s pervasive appetite for selective amnesia. A wholesome actress who’s just caught a break poses in her birthday suit, and people are shocked. But five minutes of infamy later, she’s a household name; everyone is ready to see her in any role whatever; and no one remembers or cares what disgraceful, demeaning, or exploitative steps she may have taken to get there. Given our proclivity for cultural amnesia and rampant consumerism, Bryson certainly makes an excellent point—the enduring attraction of the Appalachian Trail, still quietly faithful to its founding tenets and, to a certain degree, to Benton MacKaye’s original vision, is indeed a kind of miracle.
A Walk in the Woods also touches on the political and industrial issues associated with the AT, all of which reflect the pervasive cultural response to the trail at different historical junctures since its birth. Bryson demonstrates, through a number of historical anecdotes, that the trail has had a checkered history and gone through phases of popularity and pending concern, both socially and politically. He gives us thorough, enlightening, and occasionally disturbing indictments of the Appalachian Trail Conference (and its “monumentally useless” maps), the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and a variety of private organizations, whose policies, procedures and general wastefulness often seem to border on (or to traverse intolerably) the ridiculous. The shortage or, as Bryson puts it, the “chronic misapplication of funds” in the Shenandoah National Park is a perfect example. But more than this, he delves, with engrossing detail, into the ecological transformation and bereavement of the American woods and of the eastern U.S., which is reflected in the AT’s history. During the sequence in which he and Katz trek through the Chattahoochee Forest, he reveals a wealth of disquieting information about the “multiple-use” policies of the U.S. Forest Service. According to Bryson’s information, despite the fact that approximately 191 million (about 80 percent) of the 240 million acres of American forest owned by the government is held by the Forest Service, the law allows for a wide variety of potentially devastating industrial efforts, including mining, oil and gas extraction, housing developments, ski resorts, and of course—logging. More specifically, the Forest Service is principally a road-building entity, the world’s largest in fact, the avowed aim of which is to build an additional 580,000 miles of forest roads by the middle of the 21st century for the purpose of allowing private timber companies to access stands of trees previously out of their reach. Bryson clearly believes these efforts to betray the original aim of the Forest Service, which was to allow the extraction of minerals and harvesting of timber in a sensible and sustainable way, which seems to form the crux of the conservation-industrialization debate. Bryson holds that the efforts of agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service are tantamount to ecological rape and—given the “sumptuous inefficiency” it demonstrated in the 1990s—industrial suicide, were it not a government agency, and thus able to pleasantly avoid a large degree of capital accountability. Personally, I assume that most environmentalists realize that the lumber used to build their houses and condominiums, restaurants and shopping centers, tables and chairs, picture frames and pencils doesn’t magically appear from nowhere or get left under the pillows of lumber tycoons by faeries or wood nymphs. In the same way, I imagine people who love to criticize the oil industry do so, I hope, with a certain awareness of their own culpability, as they complain about the environmental dangers of oil spills and drilling and of greenhouse gasses and the effects of the internal combustion engine while careening down the street in their Suburban, Civic, or Prius. Natural resources are a necessary part of civilized life in the present age. But what is sensible, and what is sustainable? Perhaps it’s best Bryson doesn't attempt to answer these questions, as it would certainly have the potential to dramatically derail his narrative. He does, however, offer plenty of criticism, enough to spark much political curiosity and, one would hope, self-awareness, even a helpful dash of culpability, in the conscientious and contemplative reader. If I had one criticism of Bryson, it is that he seems to lack such awareness, or to ignore it. He criticizes heavily and shows severe political biases that seem at times unbalanced by sense and information. And of course, there’s a flipside to every coin.
In truth, what Bryson seems to appreciate most is a rustic setting, a balance of nature and cultivation. At one point, he even laments the fact that the Appalachian Trail Conference seems almost “phobic about human contact,” and weighs his experience with a charming hike he took with his son through Luxembourg, where the landscape delivered an almost seamless integration of unbridled nature and rural cultivation. In other words, what he really wants is a stretch of woods followed, every so often, by a conveniently placed stretch of farmland, with a few quaint bakeries and country inns here and there for convenient measure.
Bryson mentions, at one point, the degree to which the National Park Service itself has a history of causing extinctions, with 42 species of mammal having disappeared from national parks in the 20th century. The loss of species is unfortunate and in some cases potentially devastating, both aesthetically and ecologically, but it takes more than a simple correlation to demonstrate that the Park Service is responsible for these losses, either by initiative or neglect. As any statistician or logically trained person will tell you, correlation does not imply causality. In fact, the budgetary neglect Bryson mentions and the subsequent lack of evidence is perhaps better support for suspicion, since funding for research in national parks would indeed help to demonstrate such correlative relationships. But lack of such research is hardly conclusive in itself. Either way, Bryson seems convinced, like so many, of the evils of government. I can’t say I wholeheartedly disagree, but as is always the case, painting with too broad a brush leaves us susceptible to ignoring valuable information. Bias is blinding. It forfeits the objectivity that might otherwise reveal the truth. And like all of us, Bryson is wearing his own blinders.
He furthermore asserts his distaste for hunting with justification that's downright clumsy. For instance, Bryson, who’s been quoting biological trivia and population numbers in the wild, from who-knows-what-source, throughout the book, suddenly objects to the increased lottery for Maine hunting licenses because the dramatically recovered population of moose in the state to 30,000 is really “just a guess.” “Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses” (Bryson, 242). Like many, Bryson seems to trust statistics when they suit his purpose or align with his bias and to distrust them in most other cases. I suppose we’re all human, even masterful authors. Another notable prejudice rears its head in the dinner sequence at Shaw’s guesthouse in Monson, Maine, where Bryson notes he would remember to lock his door upon the realization that two thru-hikers who were also lodging there were devout Christians. You get the feeling they took a little too long to say grace, at least for the famished Bryson and Katz. I suppose appetite is liable to betray anyone’s bigotry.
Perhaps the principal and most convincing of Bryson’s reflections is that there is something ethereally beautiful and somehow unimprovable about the American woods, and while you needn’t press your physical limits by scaling mountains, braving blizzards, and wading through mud and water to appreciate its elemental allure and complexity, as he says, it helps. At one point, he remarks, “…the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude” (Bryson, 55). The same idea is alive in the practice of religious fasting. From the “awesomely unlovely” bunkhouse at Rainbow Springs or the dark and cramped mice battles in the Birch Spring Gap Shelter to the “restless funk” of their snow-induced holiday in Franklin, North Carolina, and the “strangely agreeable” state of going without in the wilds, the theme of longsuffering is lucidly championed. It’s the same dichotomy that so deeply affects Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. The experience of deprivation causes you to view the world through a dramatically different lens. Bryson uses this framework to celebrate and campaign for the strained syndrome of the hiker, beginning with the “hell” of the first day of something for which you’re so incredibly ill-prepared and the “dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill,” a burden to make one, as Bryson once says of Katz, “almost cataleptic with displeasure,” but leavened with moments of sweet arrest at the sensational vistas unfolding before them and evolving into a kind of serenity, a hypnosis of habit and transformed understanding of distance. “The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret” (Bryson, 71). As he distinctly conveys, the understanding breeds community as well, a sense of being part of a “sympathetic affiliation” of people of so many different ages and walks of life who all experience those discomforts tempered with moments of supreme hallelujah and the weariness that cultivates an understanding of the “colossal scale of the world.” He naturally begins the book by imparting his initial inspiration, his desire to cultivate eyes of “chipped granite”—in many ways, a perspective among the same romantic notions inspired by the writings of naturalist John Muir and, as Bryson later references, the grandeur portrayed in Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits. Though neither Bryson nor his companion from Des Moines hiked all 2,200 miles, he surely acquired the angle of true awe, the “granite eyes” bestowed by having done so. And the experience shaped him, and shaped him richly. The mileage wasn’t the same, but the shift of mind and spirit certainly was. He was no longer a “cupcake,” but rather one who could look at the beckoning wilds with a masculine sniff and utter, “Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods" (Bryson, 4). It’s enough to make anyone, in the words of John Muir, want to “throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence.”
Work Cited
Work Cited
- Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Broadway Books, 1998.
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1 comment:
I lived in East Tennessee (near Roan Mountain) for about five years when I was growing up. There's a certain spot on the Appalachian Trail that is very special to me. I'm hoping to go there and visit it again here in the next few years.
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