A Walk in the Woods: review

Bill Bryson is a British-American writer who has lived in the UK for much of his adult life.  It was while he was living in the States in the mid-90s, however, that he got the idea of walking the Appalachian Trail, a path stretching over 2,000 miles from Maine to Georgia (or, as most people walk it, from Georgia to Maine).  Bryson ended up hiking over 800 miles of the path in an inconsistent, sporadic fashion, with an old friend named Stephen Katz (a pseudonym), an out-of-shape recovering alcoholic.  The result of this adventure was a travelogue titled A Walk in the Woods, which came out in 1998.  Years later, the book was made into a movie starring Robert Redford (see my review here).  I saw the movie first and became curious enough to want to read the book, knowing that the movie was doubtless a Hollywoodized version of the tale.  When I did finally sit down to read the book on my phone's Kindle app, my suspicions were confirmed:  there are plenty of ways in which the book and the movie diverge, although the basic story is the same.

The book, unlike the movie, gives us almost no insights into what Bryson's wife Cynthia was thinking.  Cynthia is a barely-there background presence in the book, popping up only occasionally.  The narrative focuses, for the most part, on Bryson and Katz, but it frequently digresses into exposition about the trail—its ecology, its history, its odder aspects, and even, at times, the politics of its construction and maintenance.  What comes through in these digressions is Bryson's uncomplicated love of and fascination with nature, and his sadness at how modernity is heedlessly ripping away at that nature as people continue to develop the land.  At the same time, as Bryson himself admits at the end of his tale, he is a creature of those same modern forces, and he appreciates things like decent houses, shops, restaurants, and nicely furnished hotels.

I was interested in A Walk in the Woods because I knew that Bryson would offer at least some hard-earned insights that would be similar to the ones that had come to me during my three walks across South Korea.  I should start off by noting there are disanalogies:  Bryson actually hiked in the mountains, for one thing, while I merely walked along a fairly well-manicured bike path that was over 95% flat.  Bryson talked about doing 14-mile days (about 23 km); on flat ground, that's a fairly modest, fairly easy distance, but among the steep hills and mountains of the Appalachian Trail, that's an impressive effort, so my hat is off to Bryson and Katz for their achievement.

What were some of Bryson's insights?  I took a ton of notes as I read; the Kindle app allows a reader to highlight passages and leave notes or comments, all of which are stored as a list that the reader can go back to later.  While I won't burden you, in this review, with every single passage I quoted and commented on, I'll share a few of Bryson's more interesting points and my reactions to them.  First:

"Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds."

This is a reference to pack weight.  I reacted to this by noting that I had brought my own pack's base weight down, over the years, to a bit over twenty pounds (10 kg).  And while I'd like to be charitable and assume that most of the experienced hikers carrying their forty-some pounds are doing so because they're on the AT and not on a bike path, I've seen plenty of YouTube videos showing expert hikers who have done the Pacific Crest Trail (the western US's answer to the AT) with packs weighing no more than ten pounds.  That's with water.  Then again, it could be that things were different in the 90s.  Hiking gear today is extremely high-tech—light, flexible, versatile, and durable.

Bryson talked about bringing too much with him in the early stages of his trek, but as he went along, he developed a keener sense of what he needed and what was superfluous.  This dovetails with my own experience, and I think it's something that hikers and backpackers have to live through in order to understand the principles at work.  You can hear the old proverb that "You should pack as little as possible, then throw away half," but until you've actually gone distance hiking, your understanding of that proverb will only be at the superficially intellectual level, not at the heart-level of real experience.

"There is always more hill."

Ha ha—yes!  I do know this feeling despite not having had to face anything like the hilly terrain that Bryson walked.  You're walking up a nasty hill that has many curves along the path you're following; you think you've come to the top, but no!  There's still more hill to go.  As bad as this was for me, I can only imagine how much worse it had been for Bryson, who was in his forties when he hiked the AT.

"It means effectively not only that you must walk a prescribed distance each day but then spend the night penned up with strangers."

One of the things I loved about walking the Four Rivers path was that, once I was away from major cities, I often had the path to myself.  That, or the number of passing bikers was minimal, with almost no fellow walkers at all.  Bryson's remark makes me wonder whether I really want to hike the AT myself.  While he was at pains to say that the AT was often empty, he was truthful enough to observe that the stopping points were where hikers tended to congregate and camp together.  That's the last thing I'd want at the end of a long day's hike:  a crowd of jabbering people.  I worry that the Camino de Santiago might be like that.

"You know your life has grown pathetic when you're thrilled to have a covered wooden platform to call your own."

I responded to this by commenting, "How different from my own attitude toward shwimteo."  I saw nothing pathetic about those raised resting places, each of which possessed its own quiet architectural dignity.  If anything, I was thankful to find every shwimteo that I ended up using.  This is one aspect of trekking in which Bryson and I seem to part ways.

"Eventually, on the trail, everything reminds you of food."

I can definitely relate to this.  One of the things I love about trans-Korea hikes is how my life narrows down to something very simple and focused:  today's goal is to get from A to B, and it's only when I get to B that I can think about eating a decent meal.  So more often than not, I'd end a daily hike feeling terribly thirsty, but also somewhat hungry.  Not ravenous, mind you, but hungry.

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

This is a complaint I've made several times:  the US, as a whole, is very walker-unfriendly, and that needs to change.  Some effort could be made at, say, the state level to create networks of trails and walking routes that connect the dots between and among major cities and little towns, with shwimteo-like facilities along the way for weary travelers to rest their heads.  One thing I hated about my 2008 walk in the Pacific Northwest was the danger that came with walking along freeways and highways, many of which had either narrow shoulders or no shoulder at all, thus forcing me to dodge traffic as best I could.

I remember, at one point during the 2008 walk, trying to cross a particular bridge that had no sidewalk.  Traffic was constantly streaming across the bridge; I would walk twenty feet, then stop to let cars pass, then walk another twenty feet, and so on.  A police car eventually showed up:  someone had reported that I looked as if I'd wanted to jump.  What an idiot, I remember thinking.  What jumper leaps off a bridge while wearing a full backpack?  The officer ended up beckoning me into his cruiser and giving me a ride the final few miles to a motel.  Upshot:  the US is walker-unfriendly.  Build more paths, people!

"a certain home-stretch perkiness in our steps"

At this point in the travelogue, Bryson and Katz are calling it quits, having concluded they'd done enough of the Appalachian Trail to be able to say that they had walked it.  Not all of it, of course, but they had walked it all the same.  That said, I could relate to the feeling of elation that comes with the knowledge that you're walking the final few miles of your long journey.  It's an elation born of a feeling of deep accomplishment, a kind of self-satisfaction that isn't so much boastful as it is a species of fulfillment.  Historically, my walking speed picks up on the final day of my Four Rivers walk:  even with a pack on my back, I can almost make 5 km/h, which is roughly my speed while unencumbered.  There's just something about knowing that the goal is not far ahead, something that pulls you along like gravity when you're on a slight downward slope.

"I bought a bucket-sized Coke and sat in a booth by the window, feeling very pleased.  I had done seventeen miles over a reasonably challenging mountain in hot weather.  I was grubby, sweat-streaked, ... and rank enough to turn heads.  I was a walker again."

As with the previous insight, this one resonates with me.  When you've done a hard day's trekking, nothing beats a massive sugar hit from a cold, tasty soda, and knowing how hiking lowers your blood-sugar levels, you also know that you can indulge in your soda with no serious consequences to worry about.

So there were many moments, while I read A Walk in the Woods, at which I could easily relate to Bryson's experience.  I still don't know what hiking seventeen miles in mountainous terrain on a hot day might feel like, but maybe that sort of experience lies somewhere in my future.

Bryson's book is full of humor, interesting facts about the AT's history and ecology, and maybe even some life lessons.  Bryson does engage in some obvious exaggeration and embellishment here and there, but it's not enough to take me, as a reader, completely out of the story.  I don't begrudge him his embellishments any more than I'd begrudge an old salt telling his fish stories.  A Walk in the Woods makes for easy, pleasant, edifying reading, and I highly recommend it.

Oh, one last thing:  the book, like the movie, does talk about an obnoxious woman named Mary Ellen, a know-it-all snot who uses every opportunity she can to tell Bryson and Katz what they're doing wrong.  Unlike the movie, however, the book tells us what became of Mary Ellen:  for all her bluster, she ended up quitting and going home mere days after having met the two men.  I had a moment of grim satisfaction when I read that.  Bryson had done an excellent job of making me hate Mary Ellen, and oh, I do hate her with a passion.