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

by Bill Bryson

On the way out I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence “This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him,” and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but—and here is the absolutely salient point—once would be enough.

Compared with most other places in the developed world, America is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees—728 million acres in

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body.

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.

There are twenty-five varieties of salamander in the Smokies, more than anywhere else on earth. Salamanders are interesting, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. To begin with, they are the oldest of all land vertebrates. When creatures first crawled from the seas, this is what came up, and they haven’t changed a great deal since.

So Gatlinburg is appalling. But that’s OK.

“Twenty dollars is a bit much for a couple of burgers, don’t you think?” I squeaked in a strange, never-before-heard Bertie Wooster voice.

Lol 1998

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week.

Sixty years ago, there were almost no trees on the Blue Ridge Mountains. All this was farmland.

But not the mineworkers. Mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to immigration, miners were infinitely expendable. When the Welsh got belligerent, you brought in Irish. When they failed to satisfy, you brought in Italians or Poles or Hungarians. Workers were paid by the ton, which both encouraged them to hack out coal with reckless haste and meant that any labor they expended making their environment safer or more comfortable went uncompensated. Mine shafts were bored through the earth like holes through Swiss cheese, often destabilizing whole valleys. In 1846 at Carbon-dale almost fifty acres of mine shafts collapsed simultaneously without warning, claiming hundreds of lives. Explosions and flash fires were common. Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, 50,000 people died in American mines.

Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so

Moose are killers

She thought again, with an air of encroaching panic. These were obviously questions that had never penetrated her skull. Her partner came to her rescue. “We had a couple of low moments in the early phases,” he said, “but we put our faith in the Lord and His will prevailed.” “Praise Jesus,” whispered the girl, almost inaudibly. “Ah,” I said, and made a mental note to lock my door when I went to bed. “And God bless Allah for the mashed potatoes!” said Katz happily and reached for the bowl for the third time.

“I read in the paper the other day that a man from Portland hiked Katahdin to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday,” she said conversationally. That made me feel immensely better, as you can imagine. “I expect I’ll be ready to try again by then,” Katz said,

From the roof of Killington there was a 360-degree panorama over nearly the whole of New England and on to Quebec as far as the distant bluish nubbin of Mont Royal. Almost every peak of consequence in New England—Washington, Lafayette, Grey-lock, Monadnock, Ascutney, Moosilauke—stood etched in fine relief and looked ten times closer than it actually was. It was so beautiful I cannot tell you. That this boundless vista represented but a fragment of the Appalachians’ full sweep, that under my feet there lay a free and exquisitely maintained trail running for 2,200 miles through hills and woods of equal grandeur, was a thought almost too overpowering to hold. I don’t recall a moment in my life when I was more acutely aware of how providence has favored the land to which I was born. It seemed a perfect place to stop.

Herrero, Stephen. Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. New York: Lyons and Burford, 1988.