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

by Bill Bryson

The woods were silent because spring had not yet come. In a normal year we would be walking into the zestful bounty of a southern mountain spring, through a radiant, productive, newborn world alive with the zip of insects and the fussy twitter of birds—a world bursting with fresh wholesome air and that rich, velvety, lung-filling smell of chlorophyll you get when you push through low, leafy branches. Above all, there would be wildflowers in dazzling profusion, blossoming from every twig, pushing valiantly through the fertile litter on the forest floor, carpeting every sunny slope and stream bank—trillium and trailing arbutus, Dutchmen’s breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, mandrake, violets, snowy bluets, buttercups and bloodroot, dwarf iris, columbine and wood sorrel, and other cheerful, nodding wonders almost beyond counting. There are 1,500 types of wildflower in the southern Appalachians, 40 rare types in the northern Georgia woods alone. They are a sight to lift the hardest heart. But they were not to be seen in the woods this grim March. We trudged through a cold, silent world of bare trees, beneath pewter skies, on ground like iron.