A WALK IN THE WOODS
REDISCOVERING AMERICA ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL
by Bill Bryson
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened
upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian
Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the
serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes.
From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills'
whose very names--Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White
Mountains-- seem an invitation to amble. 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"?
And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion
through the pleasant New England community in which I had just settled. It seemed such
an extraordinary notion--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through
woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White
Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north
in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after years of waddlesome
sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myself with the scale
and beauty of my native land after nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be
useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for
myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in
the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer
have to feel like such a cupcake. 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."
And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are the home of one
of the world's great hardwood forests-- the expansive relic of the richest, most diversified
sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world--and that forest is in trouble. If the
global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the
whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already
trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately
hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain
ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to
experience this singular wilderness, it was now.
So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention-- told friends and
neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those
who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in
whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this was way beyond--way beyond--
anything I had attempted before.
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless
acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come
stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from
an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled
unconsciousness.
The woods were full of peril--rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of
copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized
by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly;
poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of
moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and
befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into
glacial lakes.
Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who had
stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot
owl--the last he saw of his scalp it was dangling from talons prettily silhouetted against a
harvest moon--and of a young woman who was woken by a tickle across her belly and
peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead bunking down in the warmth between
her legs. I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and
bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly
vaporized ("tweren't nothing left of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts of
lightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath
falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding
on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a flash flood; of hikers
beyond counting whose last experience was of trembling earth and the befuddled thought
"Now what the------?"
It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to
envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of
hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of
pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing
towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized
boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appetite for pink,
plump, city-softened flesh.
Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods--giardiasis, eastern
equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis,
schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine
encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous
system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with
a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less
arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it
can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of
maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms
include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath,
dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle
spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and--hardly
surprising, really-- chronic depression.
Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in
the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human
respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them-- by
lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice have recently
A WALK IN THE WOODS
REDISCOVERING AMERICA ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL
by Bill Bryson
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened
upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian
Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the
serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes.
From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills'
whose very names--Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White
Mountains-- seem an invitation to amble. 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"?
And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion
through the pleasant New England community in which I had just settled. It seemed such
an extraordinary notion--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through
woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White
Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north
in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after years of waddlesome
sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myself with the scale
and beauty of my native land after nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be
useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for
myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in
the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer
have to feel like such a cupcake. 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."
And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are the home of one
of the world's great hardwood forests-- the expansive relic of the richest, most diversified
sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world--and that forest is in trouble. If the
global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the
whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already
trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately
hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain
ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to
experience this singular wilderness, it was now.
So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention-- told friends and
neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those
who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in
whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this was way beyond--way beyond--
anything I had attempted before.
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless
acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come
stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from
an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled
unconsciousness.
The woods were full of peril--rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of
copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized
by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly;
poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of
moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and
befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into
glacial lakes.
Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who had
stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot
owl--the last he saw of his scalp it was dangling from talons prettily silhouetted against a
harvest moon--and of a young woman who was woken by a tickle across her belly and
peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead bunking down in the warmth between
her legs. I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and
bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly
vaporized ("tweren't nothing left of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts of
lightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath
falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding
on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a flash flood; of hikers
beyond counting whose last experience was of trembling earth and the befuddled thought
"Now what the------?"
It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to
envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of
hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of
pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing
towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized
boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appetite for pink,
plump, city-softened flesh.
Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods--giardiasis, eastern
equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis,
schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine
encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous
system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with
a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less
arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it
can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of
maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms
include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath,
dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle
spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and--hardly
surprising, really-- chronic depression.
Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in
the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human
respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them-- by
lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice have recently
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