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

by Bill Bryson

I had thought we would have a jump on the crowds, but there was a fair scattering of other hikers—three students from Rutgers University in New Jersey, an astoundingly fit older couple with tiny packs hiking to their daughter’s wedding in far-off Virginia; a gawky kid from Florida named Jonathan—perhaps two dozen of us altogether in the same general neck of the woods, all heading north. Because everyone walks at different rates and rests at different times, three or four times a day you bump into some or all of your fellow hikers, especially on mountaintops with panoramic views or beside streams with good water, and above all at the wooden shelters that stand at distant intervals, ostensibly but not always actually, a day’s hike apart in clearings just off the trail. In consequence you get to know your fellow hikers at least a little, quite well if you meet them nightly at the shelters. You become part of an informal clump, a loose and sympathetic affiliation of people from different age groups and walks of life but all experiencing the same weather, same discomforts, same landscapes, same eccentric impulse to hike to Maine.