Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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The Appalachian Trail runs 2100-odd miles through the woods from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mt. Katahdin, Maine. Despite the simple-minded observations of many a layman, it is mit much more than just an extremely long trail. Many of those who hike it consider it, in one way or another, sacred.

Although most of the people who use the A.T. do so for a day or a weekend at a time, one can't help being awed by the fact that it is possible to travel virtually the entire wild, scenic, and historic Appalachian range on foot using only one path. The proud few who do this in one season are known as "thru-hikers," and these people are particularly apt to venerate the A.T.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson recounts his experience as an attempted thru-hiker, focusing on the ways in which he does and does not consider the A.T. holy. Unfortunately, the book flounders in boring digressions and fails to maintain its promising focus.

The first thing that suggests at least an ambivalence toward the others' reverence for the trail. is Bryson's title. Conspicuously and thankfully absent are titles like Hiking for Glory or Katahdin: My Ithaka. Neither of these should read as particularly surprising, in light of the emphasis many through hikers place on hiking the entire trail, rather than on spending a few pleasant months in the woods.

A Walk in the Woods develops a refreshingly irreverent tone toward such compulsion. The funniest part of the book comes when Bryson and his trail companion Stephen Katz are on their way from the Atlanta airport to the trailhead and their driver, who operates an informal A.T. shuttle service, talks about would-be thru-hikers who quit and successful-but-miserable thru-hikers who should have quit. In reference to the latter he says, "you know, hiking the Appalachian Trail is a voluntary endeavor." This is just the sort of common sense that might not occur to an especially committed thru-hiker; after all, if the A.T. is sacred, a thru-hike is a crusade.

Bryson is at his best when he is playing the part of the A.T. heretic-he doesn't reach Katahdin and doesn't dwell on it. The sanctity of the thru-hike generally does not seem to occur to him; it is often hard to tell whether he just doesn't know any better, or whether he is pretending not to know better to get under the skin of those who do. In his most refreshing bit of heresy, Bryson ingenuously ridicules the gear junkies that populate the pack of trail enthusiasts. When a hiker he met on the trail tried to start a discussion on the merits of two different brands of backpack, he "ached" to cut the conversation short by saying simply "Well, here's an idea to try to get hold of, Bob. I don't remotely give a shit."

More refreshing still, I can hear the executives at The North Face wince at Bryson's description of his pre-hike gear-shopping trip, which includes statements like "I drew the line at buying a designer groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmart for $5." Bryson manages to offend other trail lovers as well, writing about avoiding a difficult peak by taking a logging road, wishing there were hostels spaced a day's hike apart along the trail, or even-gasp!-Katz's throwing an empty soda can into the woods.

The passage in which Bryson and Katz give up on their thru-hike attempt is a bit strained by cliche (Bryson calls the decision "liberating"), but it introduces the wonderful subtlety that makes Bryson's take on the trail's sacredness interesting. Though he and Katz are not compulsive enough to attempt "the really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between Georgia and Maine," they also don't just quit. The pair like the trail enough to hike pieces in Virginia and, after a long break, meet again in Maine to hike the so-called "hundred-mile wilderness," which ends at Mt. Katahdin (alas, they don't do all hundred miles). The great irony of the book is that Bryson delivers his first paean to the trail-a litany of past thru-hikers' inspirational stories-right after he and Katz give up. Of course, he makes it perfectly clear that he's not crazy enough to go through the "tedious, mad" business of being a thru-hiker himself. It's as if he loves the religion but thinks the fundamentalists are ridiculous.

That subtle distinction would make an excellent book if it weren't buried under all the garbage with which Bryson has filled A Walk in the Woods. His style is informal and conversational, but too often, the conversation becomes dry monologue. An otherwise gripping description of a violent snowstorm in which Bryson and Katz find themselves hopelessly caught is hobbled by feeble sentences like "It was deeply unnerving" and "This was really quite grave."

The book also suffers from countless conspicuously inappropriate digressions. Bryson would do much better to dispense with the lessons on Stonewall Jackson, the Pennsylvania mining industry, and xylem and phloem. The end of the book is surprisingly rewarding; the last chapter almost succeeds in salvaging the book's focus. By the time I got there, though, I was so relieved to be finished that I couldn't enjoy it. I couldn't help but think that it would have been better to skip Bryson's tangents the way he and Katz skipped unnecessary sections of the trail, and I half expected to hear the comment, "You know, reading a book is a voluntary endeavor."