Imagine a grueling, four-month wilderness trek along the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Your guide: an intellectual, who lived half his life in England, well versed in geology, zoology, ecology and pretty much all of the other ‘ologies.’ Yet, this far from ordinary guide summons the sparkle of Twain, and of Billy Crystal. Picture all of this for a sense of what can be found inside the covers of Bill Bryson’s "A Walk in the Woods." Bryson, a self-deprecating intellectual of the first order, provides massive helpings of horse-laughing humor that are pleasantly painful to read. The compulsion to read aloud "Walk’s" funnier passages to friends and family overwhelms, as does the desire to pass the book on to others after the warmth of the last page flickers.

Bryson grew up in Iowa. While in his twenties, he moved to England where he spent 20 years writing for British and American publications. In 1996 he and his family returned to the United States, settling in New Hampshire. One day, he “happened on a path that vanished into the wood on the edge of town.” That path was a tiny segment of the Appalachian Trail: a continuous 2,100-mile, mostly-wilderness trail along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. Intrigued, Bryson thought, what better way to reacquaint himself with his native land, and at the same time: “It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth." After thorough research, Bryson determines his undertaking would be difficult, requiring a companion. Exhausting all of his best choices, Bryson settles on Steve Katz, an old high school buddy. Katz, an overweight and out of shape, X - Files addicted, Snicker munching, surprisingly fetching sidekick becomes the focal point of much of Walk’s hilarity and pathos.

A number of unforgettable characters pop up along the trail. Most memorable is the gratingly obnoxious Mary Ellen, who after she had tagged along for several days, Bryson and Katz ditch using an elaborate deception. “She was, as Katz forever termed her in a special tone of awe, a piece of work." They encounter Bob, the world’s foremost authority on everything. Bryson and Katz spend several days with the delightful John Connolly, a New York schoolteacher who had been hiking the trail a bit at a time for 19 years. One night the three camp with seventeen Boy Scouts and three adult supervisors, “all charmingly incompetent.” After watching a night of the scout’s ineptness: “Even Katz agreed that this was better than TV."

Along the way, Bryson painlessly inserts lessons of history, geology, entomology, and more. We learn about the changes acid rain has brought to the wild, and he recounts the stories of the southern pine beetle, the smoky madtom and wooly adelgids, and about Daniel Boone, Henry David Thoreau and Stonewall Jackson. Bryson delivers an extended geology lesson on the tectonic formation of the 470 million year-old Appalachian Mountains that palatably educates. While praising some of their employees, Bryson effectively and mercilessly bashes the U.S. Forest Service (road builders for the logging industry – “eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system," the National Park Service (“actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct"), and the Army Corps of Engineers (“they don’t build things very well").

Bryson makes his environmental bent abundantly clear. But, his lessons rarely become preachy. They reflect the all too human predisposition to seek the easy way, the momentary thrill, and always at a cost. Without accusation, Bryson reminds us of those often easy to ignore environmental costs.

Bill Bryson’s "A Walk in the Woods" lovingly opens a window to “an America that millions of people scarcely know exists.” There are problems to solve along this great, mountain forest trail. Yet, the air intoxicates. The sights are unforgetable. And the smile remains