A Walk in the Woods

Bill Bryson's 1998 tale of a middle-aged hike on the Appalachian Trail

Let’s get one thing straight: I love Bill Bryson. He writes carefully, revealing his respect for readers. His curiosity is as boundless as his research is meticulous. I’m going to read all of his books.

But sometimes curiosity kills the cat, which is why I give Walk merely four-and-a-half stars. (At the same time thinking to myself, What a pretentious asshole you are, Demarest!)

The tangents that his voracious appetite for curiosities forces him to veer off into — those enticing but disorienting side trails he finds more interesting and/or amusing than the safer main trail — frankly render me a bit lost. Happily lost, sure, but lost just the same.

What am I reading about again?

A Walk in the Woods was published in 1998. Pared down and poetically enhanced beyond the liberties Bryson himself had already taken (according to the real friend who hiked with him and whose character provided largely fictionalized comic relief) the book in 2015 was made into a cute buddy movie with Robert Redford (Bryson) and Nick Nolte (Stephen Katz).

The movie is fun, and the lush scenery makes it nice to watch, even though most of it was shot in Georgia and probably enhanced by a computer. The promontory onto which the pair gingerly tiptoe is likely entirely CGI. I don’t think it’s in Georgia. It wouldn’t make sense to drag a film crew up a mountain.

You can see the movie for free (with ads) here.

Aside from making a game attempt at getting you to drop any foolish hiking fantasies you may harbor — if the obvious physical challenge isn’t reason enough to keep you on your couch, there’s also the bears and snakes and the rare homicidal maniac to consider — A Walk in the Woods does not teach you much about how to withstand the journey. This is no how-to book. The only thing it says about hiking equipment, for example, is that it’s overpriced, obtusely technical, and a topic hiking afficionados never tire of discussing.

Instead, the narrative is prototypical Bryson, a mostly true, humorous and heartfelt story with a vast array of interesting asides about whatever he finds interesting: The history of the trail, the animals and how their numbers have so often dwindled due to human stupidity, the last ice age and how it’s actually still in progress, the fickle mountain weather, the decimation of the American Chestnut, and so on.

Somehow, and I don’t remember exactly how, Bryson manages to mention that Antarctica is the driest place on Earth in terms of precipitation. The guy is probably really good at Jeopardy!

Travelogue or not, the Appalachian Trail got busier for a couple years after the book came out, even though Bryson did, truly, anger Fans of The Trail by making the effort seem at least unpleasant and perhaps dangerous. His reference to mountain men sodomy in Deliverance did not help endear the Yankee Englishman to proud Southerners.

By the way, when I say history I mean history. True to form, Bryson goes back eons, all the way to the several geological ice-age transformations that created the Great Lakes and the several mountain ranges through which the trail winds.

The people who first imagined the trail envisioned relatively luxurious periodic rest stops that would allow the anticipated steady stream of hikers to revitalize themselves with a civilized bowel movement, a hot shower, a nice meal, and so forth.

It never happened. That said, FDR’s depression era jobs programs did improve the path. They painted vertical white stripes on tree trunks to show the way. They built railroad-tie stairs in the steeper sections. They also built rustic shelters that turned out to be more appropriate than would have been the imagined fancier accommodations.

The Centralia Digression

To be honest, the second half of the book fell apart a little for me, this after loving the first part.

The second half, Chapter 14 to be precise, is where Bryson spends some time telling the story of an infamous Pennsylvania anthracite coal mining town that was slowly destroyed (it took 20 years) after a controlled burn at the city dump ignited an underground coal seam in 1962.

Bryson seems to revel in mocking the often inane ineffectiveness of government institutions and human beings in general (in The Body he spends no small amount of ink on the famous icepick lobotomy) so I imagine Centralia was for him utterly irresistible. The government’s nonfeasance was so inhumanly devoid of empathy that the underground fire was still burning as he wrote the book, by which time the “Town That Was” had become infamous. Experts at the time said the fire might burn on for centuries. It’s still burning now.

During the admittedly engrossing digression, Bryson leaves the Appalachian Trail to explain that anthracite, that shiny hard and beautifully black coal, is difficult to extinguish once it gets burning, so Centralia’s little fire department couldn’t put it out. Prayers at St. Ignatius didn’t help either. The fire kept coming back, Bryson notes wryly, like one of those trick birthday candles.

The fire crawled along so slowly that if officials had acted within, say, a decade, they could have dug a trench to cut off the fire’s fuel supply — a subterranean firebreak. But bureaucracy moved slowly, as is its custom, and there were no rich people in Centralia to help speed things along, so only a halfhearted effort was made to dig the firebreak.

In the end, when the money ran out the fire was already on the other side of the too-late trench and so the underground fire smoldered on until the ground here and there in the close-knit little town started to spew noxious smoke from cracks in the ground and basement walls began to feel unnaturally hot. The highway into town collapsed. A detour was built to circumnavigate the little town. The gas station closed down, afraid the tanks would explode.

(You can see why Bryson found Centralia irresistible.)

Finally, in the 1980s, after a boy nearly fell into a burning pit that opened suddenly at his feet, the feds simply declared the town a disaster, bought the whole thing for $42 million, and shut it down. Anyone who agreed to move got a “fair” price for their house or business. Those who wanted to stay could do that, too, although they no longer owned the building they lived in, nor the land beneath it. The electricity and water systems somehow still operate, but the sewer system shut down, leaving septic tanks and outhouses.

The fire failed to scare away a handful of intrepid souls who maintain the common areas and pay particular attention to the cemetery, where people still come to be buried beside family members.

Here’s a documentary on the town. There have been many over the years.

So I get Bryson’s attention to Centralia. But the thing is, Centralia is a good 25 miles from the Appalachian Trail. He manages to work it into the book during a period in which the trail’s psychic pull on him is weaker than his aversion to hiking and he compromises by trying to follow the trail as closely as he can by car and, in the process, somehow happens upon the evacuated town.

Part 1

The first part of the book, which I think could stand alone except that it’s only 157 pages long, starts with Bryson’s trip to the sporting goods store to get overly complicated hiking gear (everything’s so expensive!) and his endless search for a hiking buddy. He needs a hiking buddy because his sensible wife convinces him it’s foolhardy for a fortyish man with a bit of a belly to set off alone. She also cleverly assumes he’ll find no similarly aged friend crazy enough to accompany him.

Bryson’s search for a hiking partner does appear fortunately doomed until one Stephen Katz — an acquaintance he hasn’t seen for years and has less than fond memories of — unexpectedly volunteers to go after hearing about Bryson’s quest from one of the guys who had sense enough to decline the challenge. Katz is in worse shape than Bryson, and a recovering alcoholic. He has an annoying habit of throwing away items in his backpack — food, clothes, whatever — because it’s all too heavy. (Maybe that’s only in the movie?)

The two start at the southern terminus of the trail in Georgia, cautiously optimistic, thinking they’ll do the entire AT (as the trail is called throughout the book). After struggling to cover a small part of the trail, and having not a few adventures along the way, they come to their senses. Katz declares victory and they go home.

Part 2

The second part of the book finds Bryson back home but still doing AT hikes occasionally, a few miles at a time. He has his wife drive him to a starting point and pick him up at a predesignated end point. Katz eventually rejoins him for a particularly difficult stretch.

And of course there’s Centralia. But I digress.

A few lingering thoughts after having just finished reading:

• He was frustrated by most trail maps, some of which were so inaccurate they were worse than having no map at all.

• He was critical of the forest service — not the people but the organization — which seemed to him mostly occupied with helping lumber companies cut trees down rather than preserve them.

• Bears and rattlesnakes and brain-scrambling hypothermia and getting lost and starving can kill you, but there also have been murders committed on the desolate trail. The murders are especially disturbing because people hiking the trail normally are supportive of each other, the same as one driver will stop for another driver stuck in a snow storm.

Bryson reportedly said the book was hard to write. Walking in the woods doesn’t offer much in the way of excitement, especially if the feared bears and rattlesnakes keep their distance. But Bryson pulls it off anyway. It’s a short book, 274 pages, and the writing is so effortless to read I was done in a couple days. I laughed more than a few times.

In the movie, Bryson’s character more than once insists he’s not going to write a book about the experience. Alas, writers have to write as much as hikers have to hike.

Bill Bryson

Here’s a summary of the Appalachian Trail state by state.

Another Centralia documentary, from 1982. I’m sure you can find others.