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

by Bill Bryson

Who could say the words “Great Smoky Mountains” or “Shenandoah Valley” and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to “throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence”?

I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, “Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods.”

Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.

That’s the spirit, I thought. Good old Katz. Good old anyone with a pulse and a willingness to go walking with me.

All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

I hoisted my pack and took a backward stagger under the weight (it would be days before I could do this with anything approaching aplomb), jerked tight the belt, and trudged off.

Seven miles seems so little, but it’s not, believe me. With a pack, even for fit people it is not easy.

Don’t tell me that seven miles is not far. 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. Or, alternatively, you poor, sad shmuck, you can walk 2,169 miles through mountains and wilderness to Maine.

Whatever mechanism within you is responsible for adrenaline, it has never been so sleek and polished, so keenly poised to pump out a warming squirt of adrenal fluid. Even asleep, you are a coiled spring.

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 all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That’s 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up.

It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication.

In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred-year-old lodgepole pines in the Targhee National Forest in Idaho for about $2 each after spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads.

It was apparent that for all her bluster she was majestically inexperienced and untrailworthy (she hadn’t the faintest idea how to read a map, for one thing) and ill at ease on her own in the wilderness.

She looked at him. “I don’t know that one.” She made an I’ll—be-darned frown and said, “I thought I knew them all. Mine’s Libra.” She turned to me. “What’s yours?” “I don’t know.” I tried to think of something. “Necrophilia.”

Did he have to get a glass eye or something?” “Well, he wanted to, but his family was kind of poor, you know, so what he did was he got a Ping-Pong ball and painted an eye on it and he used that.”

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.

Perhaps it was the lingering influence of the book, perhaps simply the time of day, or maybe nothing more than the unaccustomedness of being in a town, but Hiawassee did feel palpably weird and unsettling—the kind of place where it wouldn’t altogether surprise you to find your gasoline being pumped by a cyclops.

Even as I said these things, I realized with a kind of horrible, seeping awareness that he was right. We had ditched her, left her to the bears and wolves and chortling mountain men.

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.

Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake.

Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century.

But, hey, let’s not lose our perspective here. The Smokies achieved their natural splendor without the guidance of a national park service and don’t actually need it now.

“So what made you buy a Gregory pack?” he said. “Well, I thought it would be easier than carrying everything in my arms.” He nodded thoughtfully, as if this were an answer worth considering, then said: “I’ve got a Kelty.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular national park in America, but Gatlinburg—this is so unbelievable—is more popular than the park.

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.

peregrinations,”

Everywhere, there was a kind of recklessness borne of a sense that the American woods was effectively inexhaustible. Two-hundred-year-old pecan trees were commonly chopped down just to make it easier to harvest the nuts on their topmost branches.

Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water—several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day—from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere.

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

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

This is inconceivable

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space.

In many places in America now, it is not actually possible to be a pedestrian, even if you want to be.

This is the way all highways should be. For a time it looked as if all highways would be like this. It is no accident that the first highways in America were called parkways. That’s what they were envisioned to be—parks you could drive through.

It is entirely against the spirit of the AT to have restaurant breaks along the trail, but I never met a hiker who didn’t appreciate it to bits.

There was not a single item of conventional trail food—raisins or peanuts or small, portable quantities of packets or canned goods—which was a little dispiriting in a national park.

No one should be sent into a wilderness with maps this bad.

There didn’t seem to be another person within fifty miles. I pushed on, filled with mild disquiet, feeling like someone swimming too far from shore.

All the experience I had piled up in the earlier weeks seemed to make it harder rather than easier to be out on the trail on my own. I hadn’t expected this. It didn’t seem fair. It certainly wasn’t right.

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.

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

Centralia was a reasonably prosperous, snug, hardworking town with a population approaching 2,000. It had a thriving business district, with banks and a post office and the normal range of shops and small department stores, a high school, four churches, an Odd Fellows Club, a town hall—in short, a typical, pleasant, contentedly anonymous small American town.

Sounds like Merrill, Ore.

It seemed odd on reflection that I, or any other severely foolish person, could drive in and have a look around a place as patently dangerous and unstable as Centralia, and yet there was nothing to stop anyone from venturing anywhere.

And here is a thing that most of us fail to appreciate: we are still in an ice age, only now we experience it for just part of the year. Snow and ice and cold are not really typical features of earth. Taking the long view, Antarctica is actually a jungle. (It’s just having a chilly spell.)

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition—either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail.

In fact, although I couldn’t attest any of it to three decimal places, I had a pretty good notion of the weather conditions generally, on account of I was out in them.

A few days later, another hiker called and requested a helicopter because he was a day behind schedule and was afraid he would miss an important business meeting.

Nearly always, they compound the problem by doing something foolhardy—leaving a well-marked path in search of a shortcut, blundering deeper into the woods when they would have been better off staying put, fording streams that get them only wetter and colder.

Hypothermia is a gradual and insidious sort of trauma. It overtakes you literally by degrees as your body temperature falls and your natural responses grow sluggish and disordered.

The annals of trail deaths are full of stories of hikers found half naked lying in snowbanks just outside their tents.

An 1870s account, quoted in Into the Mountains, observes: “Mt. Lafayette is … a true alp, with peaks and crags on which lightnings play, its sides brown with scars and deep with gorges.”