A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, “Bear!” before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.

stories of people abruptly vaporized (“tweren’t nothing left of him but a scorch mark”) by body-sized bolts of lightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines;

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.

Altogether, it takes about five months, and five million steps, to walk the trail from end to end.

This wouldn’t be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want.

but then a few pages later he cautions that “there may be danger in making noise,” since that can attract a hungry bear that might otherwise overlook you.

What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay it would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.

I did a little jig. I wasn’t going to have to walk, alone.

My last words to him were, “So, how are you with bears?” “Hey, they haven’t got me yet!” That’s the spirit, I thought. Good old Katz. Good old anyone with a pulse and a willingness to go walking with me.

The man beamed and slapped the tickets down on the counter. “No, that’s about it, but you have a real good trip. And hey”—he was addressing Katz now, in a lower voice—”you watch out for those wolves, son, because between you and me you look like pretty good eating.” He gave a wink.

In under seven years, using volunteer labor, he built a 2,000-mile trail through mountain wilderness. Armies have done less.

“You know what I look for in a female these days? A heartbeat and a full set of limbs.”

It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are.

Oh, and here’s the other thing. You don’t have to do this. You’re not in the army. You can quit right now. Go home. See your family. Sleep in a bed.

daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was my all my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared.

I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that 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.

There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane.

It looked, we reflected later, as if Darren might have his hands full, though we additionally concluded that it would probably be worth it.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.

Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing.

If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.

There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler’s fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby’s hand.

Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel.

Thus, Park Service biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and eradicating in the same instant a new species of fish.

I’m afraid my equipment conversations nearly always ended up like that somehow, with the talker retiring with hurt feelings and a piece of formerly prized equipment cradled to his chest. It was never my wish, believe me.

and these in turn will no doubt be gone in another nine years, for that is the way of America.

I don’t mean to suggest that hiking the AT drives you potty, just that it takes a certain kind of person to do it.

And then, lavishly and in unison, we wet ourselves.

One of the younger Bartram’s expeditions lasted over five years and plunged him so deeply into the woods that he was long given up for lost; when he emerged, he discovered that America had been at war with Britain for a year and he had lost his patrons.

(Black bears seem to have been notably more ferocious in former times; nearly every journal has accounts of sudden, unprovoked attacks.

If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.

Each time you leave the cossetted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills, you go through a series of staged transformations—a kind of gentle descent into squalor—and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day, disgustingly so; by the third, you are beyond caring; by the fourth, you have forgotten what it is like not to be like this.

(Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.)

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.

At one end of the public area was a large-scale model of the entire trail, which, had I seen it before I started, might well have dissuaded me from attempting such an ambitious undertaking.

Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, 50,000 people died in American mines.

He nodded. “I’d hate to get lost today. There’s a restaurant in Dalton.” I understood this perfectly. If you’re going to get lost, you don’t want to do it on a restaurant day.

All this high-tech equipment, it appears, is drawing up into the mountains people who perhaps shouldn’t be there.

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying not to sound too wary, for ideas are not Katz’s strongest suit.

but Katz seemed disproportionately happy. It wasn’t often he got his way, even in part.

“No, I just wanted a closer look at the water.” You moronic fit twit.

So we decided to leave the endless trail and stop pretending we were mountain men because we weren’t.

I looked at him. “Stephen, we didn’t even see Mount Katahdin.” He dismissed this as a petty quibble. “Another mountain,” he said. “How many do you need to see, Bryson?”

“As far as I’m concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked it in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson.”