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

by Bill Bryson

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

If you were going to be a farmer, you could hardly choose a worse place than New England. (Well, the middle of Lake Erie maybe, but you know what I mean.) The soil is rocky, the terrain steep, and the weather so bad that people take actual pride in it.

A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is “nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding.”

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds.

is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other.