A Walk in the Woods

“The Appalachian Trail was formally completed on August 14, 1937, with the clearing of a two-mile stretch of woods in a remote part of Maine. Remarkably, the building of the longest footpath in the world attracted almost no attention.”

In Chapter 3, Bryson provides a detailed history of the AT. The trail was the brainchild of Benton MacKaye, an employee of the US Labor Department, who envisioned it as a thread connecting mountaintop communities and work camps where urban workers could come to “refresh themselves” by enjoying the wonders of nature.

“Every year between early March and late April, about 2,000 hikers set off from Springer, most of them intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually make it. Half don’t make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get no farther than North Carolina, the next state. As many as 20 percent drop out the first week.”

As Bryson and Stephen Katz begin their adventure, they find a man named Wes Wisson who shuttles hikers from Atlanta to Amicalola Falls State Park near the trail’s starting point, Springer Mountain, for a fee. On the drive there, Wisson explains how he has seen so many hikers over the years that he can typically guess which ones will drop out early and which will make it the whole way.

“Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views and leave you muddled without bearings. They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of legs.”

In the beginning of Chapter 4, Bryson notes that he and Katz just spent their first night on the trail and are hiking the next day when Bryson begins to notice the spooky ambiance of hiking deep in the woods with no one else around. He attributes much of this feeling to knowing that dangerous wild animals are close by but some of it to the fact that one can never really see where one is.

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.”

As they start their adventure, walking hour after hour through the Chattahoochee Forest in Northern Georgia, Bryson attempts to convey a sense of how vast the area feels. Even though it would appear on a map as just a green dot, the scale on foot is enormous.

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.”

In Chapter 5, Bryson and Katz develop a plan to leave the trail and get a motel room and dinner in the small town of Hiawassee, Georgia—because they need a break not only from the trail but also from Mary Ellen. To accomplish this goal, however, they must hike very hard the following day and then hitchhike and hope for a ride once they get to the highway. Once they do reach the highway, they look haggard and possibly even dangerous to motorists, so they begin to think that no one will stop to pick them up. Their “Trail Magic” appears in the form of a Pontiac Trans Am driven by Darren and Donna, a drunken young couple on their way to get married, who stop and offer them a ride to Hiawassee.

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

To begin Chapter 6, Bryson attempts to explain why hiking long distances is so difficult by bringing to light the sheer distances that one must cover on foot. In addition to the aspect of walking mile after mile in vast areas, he explains, one’s ordinary life changes in other ways as well. He notes that “time ceases to have any meaning,” and things such as obligations, ambitions, and duties vanish because all that matters is moving forward (100).

“The Smokies harbor an astonishing range of plant life—over 1,500 types of wildflower, a thousand varieties of shrub, 530 mosses and lichen, 2,000 types of fungus. They are home to 130 native species of tree; the whole of Europe has just 85.”

Once Bryson and Katz finally cross into Tennessee and reach the Smoky Mountains, Bryson begins to describe their surroundings and why botanists call the Smokies “the finest mixed mesophytic forest in the world” (127). In addition, he points out that such rich plant life naturally attracts rich animal life, as evident in the Smokies being home to 67 varieties of mammals, more than 200 types of birds, 80 species of reptiles and amphibians, and—most of all—the black bears, for which the area is most famous.

“I know the world is ever in motion, but the speed of change in the United States is simply dazzling. In 1951, the year I was born, Gatlinburg had just one retail business, a general store called Ogle’s. Then, as the postwar boom years quickened, people began coming to the Smokies by car, and motels, restaurants, gas stations, and gift shops popped up to serve them. By 1987, Gatlinburg had sixty motels and 200 gift shops. Today it has 100 motels and 400 gift shops. And the remarkable thing is that there is nothing remotely remarkable about that.”

Bryson and Katz hike to Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies and then catch a ride to the tourist destination of Gatlinburg eight miles down the mountain. In Gatlinburg, Bryson becomes appalled not only at the commercialization and tourism that exists so close to the AT but also at how much Gatlinburg has changed since he was last there roughly a decade earlier.

“It’s such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules.”

After hiking in the Smokies and eventually catching a ride to nearby Gatlinburg, Bryson and Katz decide to skip a large portion of the AT and pick it up again more than 200 miles away, near Roanoke, Virginia. To do this, they first get a cab to Knoxville. Once there, they rent a car to drive to Roanoke. As they drive, seeing the busy world of crass commercialism outside the woods for the first time in weeks, they’re struck by its contrast to the experience of being on the trail.

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

Bryson refers to the excitement and joy he feels when he discovers how much nicer and well-kept the shelters are in the Blue Ridge Mountains compared to the Smokies. On the trail, small things like being able to prepare a meal on a picnic table rather than having to squat on logs are big deals.

“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. That’s ridiculous.”

Bryson begins Chapter 11 with this passage and then explains how, after he and his family move back to the US (from England) and settle in a small New Hampshire town, he’s shocked to discover that hardly anyone there walks anywhere for anything. He provides an anecdote about knowing a man who drives to work only 600 yards away and a woman who drives a quarter mile to walk on a treadmill.

“It is the quality of craftsmanship that accounts substantially for the glory of Shenandoah National Park. Indeed, it is one the few examples of large-scale human handiwork (Hoover Dam is another, and Mount Rushmore, I would submit, is a third) anywhere in the United States that compliments, even enhances, a natural landscape.”

In the previous chapter, Bryson acknowledges that his favorite part of the AT is the Shenandoah National Park—not only because of its natural beauty but also because it’s well-run despite dealing with various problems like underfunding. He explains in Chapter 12 that there was once a movement to develop this area of the Blue Ridge Mountains as a tourist destination, but the Great Depression came and that commercial impulse was redirected to a social one in which the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed public-use facilities like bridges, picnic shelters, and visitor centers.

“Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and I didn’t know how. I hadn’t just lost Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose.”

In Chapter 14, Bryson discusses his attempts to return to the trail after parting with Katz for their planned summer break. Knowing that continuing to hike the trail and finish it completely will be impossible, he decides to instead drive to various locations and do day hikes. His first stop is in Pennsylvania, where he realizes that this plan doesn’t provide him with the same feeling of purpose that he had when doing long section hikes with Katz.

“Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas—piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles or more.”

Bryson begins Chapter 15 with a discussion concerning geological history. He explains that mountain ranges wear away over millions of years because streams, rain, and other water flow slowly carry granules of sand away. In addition, he explains that because the Appalachians are “immensely old—older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than most other mountain chains, older indeed than almost all other landscape features on earth” (271), they’ve had a much longer time to slowly erode away.

“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 defy it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail.”

In this passage, Bryson refers to his AT visit to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and Tocks Island on the Delaware River, which is one of the last significant undammed rivers in the nation. He explains that the river regularly floods, so, at one time, the Army Corps of Engineers planned to build a dam, and the federal government planned to build an adjacent national recreation area. However, protests ended the plans for the dam. As a result, the government now owns the land through which the AT passes, but this land has no recreation area facilities—just the trail, which thus is now in a protected corridor.

“Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s.”

In Chapter 16, Bryson begins hiking the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, where numerous mountain lion sightings have been reported. However, he notes that the mountain lion has been considered extinct in the eastern US for decades. This leads Bryson to list other animals that have been hunted—literally or virtually—out of existence. He notes that the songbird has been “the real loser in the eastern forests” (292).

“In 1850, New England was 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent woods. Today the proportions are exactly reversed. Probably no area in the developed world has undergone a more profound change in just a century or so, at least not in a contrary direction to the normal course of progress.”

Bryson makes the case that the reason for this proportional reversal of farmland and woods is that New England farmers, up until the 1850s, had the advantage of proximity to the eastern coastal cities. Two things happened to alter this: the invention of the McCormick reaper and the development of the railroad. Because of them, Midwestern farmers now had an advantage because they could harvest in larger quantities and get their produce to the East Coast. As a result, New England farmers moved elsewhere, typically to the Midwest.

“Of all the catastrophic fates that can befall you in the out-of-doors, perhaps none is more eerily unpredictable than hypothermia. There is scarcely an instance of hypothermic death that isn’t in some measure mysterious and improbable.”

Bryson begins Chapter 17 with this passage because when he and his friend Bill Abdu hike some of the New Hampshire portion of the AT in the White Mountains and the weather changes dramatically, he nearly suffers hypothermia himself, having forgotten to pack some of his warmer gear. He explains that the common belief that hypothermia deaths usually occur because of extreme weather conditions is a misconception. Instead, most hypothermia victims die in temperate seasons when air temperature is nowhere near freezing.

“The modern tourist industry, in the sense of people traveling en masse to a congenial spot and finding lots of diversions awaiting them when they got there, is essentially a White Mountains invention.”

The White Mountains are a mountain range in New Hampshire and Western Maine through which the AT crosses. The most famous peak in the White Mountains is Mount Washington, which is the highest peak north of the Smokies and east of the Rockies. In Chapter 18, Bryson and his neighbor Bill Abdu day-hike to the summit of Mount Washington and are startled to find a parking lot full of cars and crowds of tourists bustling in and out of a sprawling array of buildings. Despite their shock to see this then-new visitors’ complex, Bryson notes that this sort of massive mountaintop tourist attraction has been standard in the White Mountains for more than a century.

“Maine is deceptive. It is the twelfth smallest state, but it has more uninhabited forest—ten million acres—than any other state than but Alaska.”

In Chapter 19, Katz returns to New Hampshire so that he and Bryson can get back on the AT and hike Maine’s famous Hundred Mile Wilderness. Bryson notes that in pictures Maine’s forests seem serene and parklike but that the entire state—not just the Hundred Mile Wilderness—is actually difficult to hike. The AT runs for 283 miles in Maine and for northbound hikers includes nearly 100,000 feet of climbing.

“The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail by a factor I couldn’t begin to compute.”

Bryson’s wife drops him and Katz at Caratunk, a tiny community 38 miles from the entry point to the Hundred Mile Wilderness, so they hike for a couple of days just to get to the starting point. Once there, they almost immediately must ford a pond and then several rivers. Adding to these difficulties, they’re hiking in extreme August heat, which radiates off the dark granite walls of Moxie Bald Mountain.

“There is always a measure of shock when you leave the trail and find yourself parachuted into a world of comfort and choice, but it was different this time. This time it was permanent. We were hanging up our hiking boots.”

After beginning their trek through the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine, Bryson and Katz get separated, and Katz becomes lost for a whole night trying to find the AT. After that, they jointly decide to leave the trail and go home. After getting a lift into the town of Milo, they’re dropped at a gas station, and Bryson asks Katz if he’d like a Coke from the vending machine, but he says no, which is unlike him. Bryson surmises that this is because previously when they took a break from the trail, a Coke was a treat that they’d soon be without, but now such comforts will be readily available.

I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this at once, every moment, on the trail or off.”

After they decide to quit their trek and head home, Katz asks Bryson if he feels bad about leaving the trail. Bryson realizes that all of his thoughts and feeling about the trail are confused and contradictory. Katz agrees with him but is more ready than Bryson to consider what they’ve done a true accomplishment.