A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. 

4/5 rating. 274 pages.

Book #36 of 2020. Read June 4, 2020.

What do you get when you mix two middle-age, rotund Iowans taking on an impossible hike through 14 states? Why, you get this book! It is about Bill’s hike on the Appalachian Trail, and again solidified him as my favorite author. Bill’s self-effacing and deadpan humor mixed with his eloquent style of story-telling make this a phenomenal travel/adventure tale.

While Bill and his companion, Stephen, set out to complete the over 2,000 miles of the trail, they came up short. On the other hand, this trek brought a great appreciation for hiking and the AT, more specifically. Bill mixes in a good bit of knowledge about the trail – like how many different things can kill you – along with his insights into himself, nature, and much more.

I thought this book was thoroughly entertaining and had me literally laughing out loud. It is definitely a light-hearted book worth a read by anyone!

As Bill says before he leaves: “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.’” He certainly managed that goal! 😂

Quotes:

“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.”

“To ward off an aggressive black bear, Herrero suggests making a lot of noise, banging pots and pans together, throwing sticks and rocks, and ‘running at the bear.'(Yeah, right. You first, Professor.)”

“Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.”

“But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as ‘so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.’”

“In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way – it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system.”

“By the late 1980s – this is so extraordinary I can hardly stand it – [the Forest Service] was the only significant player in the American timber industry that was cutting down trees faster than it replaced them.”

“The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting – certainly the most striking – example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal – the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century.”

“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.”

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