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Bill Bryson, Author, A Walk in the Woods
I’m here today to talk about my new book, A Walk in the Woods, which is an account of my attempt to hike the Appalachian trail from end to end in the company of an overweight companion named Stephen Katz. And in so doing, to fulfill a lifelong ambition; namely, not to die out of doors.
The Appalachian Trail is 2,200 miles long. It runs through 14 Eastern states from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The way I first got the idea to hike it was that we moved three years ago to Hanover, New Hampshire after I’d been living in England for 20 years, and I discovered quite unexpectedly that the Appalachian runs right through the little town in which we had settled in New England. I found myself kind of captivated by the very notion of it, the idea of this immensely long 2,200 mile hiking path.
I was looking at it from the perspective of having come from England, where if you tried to build a 2,200 mile-long trail it would have to go around in circles, because there just isn’t space for it there. I got the idea that I would try to hike it, and I really committed myself to doing it. I discovered really quickly that I was getting into something that was a whole lot bigger and harder than anything that I had ever attempted before – as I think you can see in this first passage that I am going to read to you.
[Beginning of passage]
My first inkling of just how daunting an undertaking it was to be came when I went to our local hiking store, the Dartmouth Co-op, to purchase equipment. My son had just gotten an after-school job there, so I was under strict instructions of good behavior. Specifically, I was not to say or do anything stupid, try on anything that would require me to expose my stomach, say “Are you shitting me?” when informed the price of a product; be conspicuously inattentive when a sales assistant was explaining the correct maintenance and aftercare of a product; and above all, don anything inappropriate, like a woman’s ski hat in an attempt to amuse.
I was told to ask for Dave Mengle because he had walked large parts of the trail himself and was something of an encyclopedia of outdoor knowledge. A kindly and deferential sort of fellow, Mengle could talk for about four days solid, with interest, about any aspect of hiking equipment.
I have never been so simultaneously impressed and bewildered. We spent a whole afternoon going through his stock. He would say things to me like: “Now this has a 70-denier high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a ripstop weave. On the other hand, and I’ll be frank with you here,” — and he would lean to me and reduce his voice to a low candid tone, as if disclosing that he had once been arrested in a public lavatory with a sailor — “the seams are lap-felled rather than bias-taped, and the vestibule is a little ramped.”
I think because I mentioned that I had done a little hiking of my own in England, he assumed some measure of competence on my part. I didn’t wish to alarm or disappoint him, so when he asked me questions like, “What’s your view on carbon fiber stays?” I would shake my head with a rueful chuckle in recognition of the famous variability of views on this perennially thorny issue and say, “You know Dave, I’ve never been able to make up my mind on that one. What do you think?”
Together we discussed and gravely considered the relative merits of side compression straps, spindrift collars, crampon patches, load transfer differentials, air-flow channels, webbing loops and something called the occipital cutout ratio. We went through that with every single item. Even an aluminum cookset offered consideration of weight, compactness, thermal dynamics, and general utility that could occupy a mind for hours.
The two big shocks were how expensive everything was and how every piece of equipment seemed to generate a need for some further piece of equipment. If you bought a sleeping bag, then you needed a stuff sack for it. The stuff sack cost $29. I found this an increasingly difficult concept to warm to. When, after some solemn consideration, I settled on a backpack – a very expensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-stinting-here sort of thing – he said, “Now, what kind of straps do you want with that?” “I beg your pardon?” I said. “Straps,” Dave explained, “You know, to tie on your sleeping bag and lash things down.” “It doesn’t come with straps?” I said in a new, level tone. “Oh no,” Dave replied. He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose, “You’ll need a raincover too, of course.” I blinked, “A raincover? Why?” “To keep out the rain,” Dave said. “The backpack’s not rainproof?” I asked. He grimaced as if making an exceptionally delicate distinction, “Well, not 100 percent...”
This was extraordinary to me. “Really?” I said, “Did it not occur to the manufacturer that people might want to take their packs outdoors from time to time? Perhaps even go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?”
“250 dollars,” Dave said. “250 dollars!” I replied, ‘Are you shi-’ I paused and put on a new voice. “Are you saying Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn’t have straps and it isn’t waterproof?” He nodded. “Does it have a bottom in it?” Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not his nature to grow critical or weary in the rich, promising world of camping equipment. “The straps come in a choice of six colors,” he offered helpfully.
I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas. A three-season tent, self-inflating sleeping pad, nested pots and pans, collapsible eating utensils, plastic dish and cup, complicated pump-action water purifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, bungee cords, water bottles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, pack cover, a rather nifty compass/thermometer keyring, a little collapsible stove that looked frankly like trouble, a hands-free flashlight that you wore on your head like a miner’s lamp (this I liked very much), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated longjohns and undershirts, four bandannas, and lots and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had to go back again and ask what it was for exactly.
Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books: The Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, and the complete official set of Appalachian Trail Guides, consisting of eleven small paperback books and 59 maps in different sizes, styles and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin, and ambitiously priced at $233.45 a set. On the way out, I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence, “This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to kill and eat him,” and tossed that into the shopping basket too.
I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, which was both exciting and daunting, but mostly daunting. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plastic packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-inflating sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long time trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, entirely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, domesticated roar of the furnace, but rather outside in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of dog-like creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying, “Hey Virgil, there’s one over here.” But I couldn’t really.
End of passage.
Well, the one thing that I just didn’t want to do on the Appalachian Trail was go out there on my own. It takes about five months to hike it from end to end, and the idea of that much solitude was just a great deal more than I really wanted to undertake on my own. At Christmas, before I set off on the trail, I put little notes in Christmas cards to everyone I knew who lived within 500 miles of the Appalachian Trail, asking them to come along with me, if only part of the way. And not one single person responded. Then just before I was about to set off, I got a call from an old school friend that I’d grown up with in Des Moines, a guy named Stephen Katz, and he volunteered to come with me.
Katz, I knew, was a somewhat unlikely hiking companion. He had spent the previous 30 years leading a life of considerable dissipation and dissoluteness, and really hadn’t engaged in any kind of activity more strenuous than walking to and from the refrigerator to get another beer, since graduating from high school. But he did have the one great, inestimable virtue that he was willing to come with me.
So he flew out to Hanover, and when I greeted him at the airport I could see at once that it was going to be even worse than I had expected. He had put on a lot of weight. He clearly wasn’t an experienced walker at all. The whole thing had a kind of terrible odor of catastrophe about it. But, we set off for Georgia. We flew to Atlanta, made our way to the trail head about 35 miles north of Georgia and began hiking north. Little by little, we began to find our trail legs and to adjust to this new life in which we were so totally immersed and even began to make contact with other people, other hikers along the trail.
Almost without exception, most of the people that you meet along the Appalachian Trail are wonderful, decent, wholesome, good-hearted people who would do anything for you. Unfortunately, if there’s one person who’s kind of an idiot out there anywhere along a 2,000 mile-long footpath, I’m almost certain to run into that person. That’s what happened to us just after we set off on the trail.
[Beginning of passage]
On the fourth evening, we made a friend. We were sitting in a nice little clearing beside the trail; our tents pitched, eating our noodles, savoring the exquisite pleasure of just sitting when a plumpish, bespectacled young woman in red jacket and the customary outside pack came along. She regarded us with the crinkled squint of someone of who is either chronically confused or can’t see very well. We exchanged hellos and the usual banalities about the weather and where we were, then she squinted at the gathering gloom and announced that she would camp with us. Her name was Mary Ellen, she was from Florida and she was, as Katz forever after termed her in a special tone of awe, “a piece of work.”
She talked nonstop, except when she was clearing out her eustachian tubes, which she did frequently by pinching her nose and blowing out with a series of violent and alarming snorts of a sort that would make a dog leave the sofa and get under a table in the next room.
I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods, I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.
“So what are guys eating?” she said, plonking herself down on a spare log. “Noodles? Big mistake. Noodles have got like no energy. I mean, like zero.” She unblocked her ears, “Is that a Starship tent?”
I looked at my tent. “I don’t know,” I said. “Big mistake. They must have seen you coming at the camping store. What did you pay for it?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Too much! That’s how much. You should have got a three-season tent.” “That is a three-season tent,” I replied. “Pardon me saying so, but it is like seriously dumb to come out here in March without a three-season tent.” She unblocked her ears. “It is a three-season tent,” I repeated. “You’re lucky you haven’t froze yet. You should go back and like punch out the guy that sold it to you because he’s been like, you know, negligible selling you that.” “Believe me,” I said, “it is a three-season tent.”
She unblocked her ears and shook her head impatiently and indicated Katz’s tent, “That’s a three-season tent,” she said. “That’s exactly the same tent,” I replied. She glanced at it again, “Whatever.” “How many miles did you guys do today?” she said. “About ten,” I replied. Actually, we had done eight point four, but this had included several formidable escarpments, including a notable wall of hell called Preaching Rock, the highest eminence since Springer Mountain, for which we had awarded ourselves bonus miles, for purposes of morale. “Ten miles?” said Mary Ellen. “Is that all? You guys must be like, really out of shape. I did 14.2.”
“How much have your lips done?” said Katz, looking up from his noodles. She fixed him with one of her more severe squints, “Same as the rest of me, of course,” she said. She gave me a private look as if to say, “Is your friend like seriously weird or something?” She cleared her ears, “I started at Gooch Gap.”
“So did we,” I replied, “that’s only eight point four miles.” She shook her head sharply as if shooing a particularly tenacious fly, “14.2.” “No, really, it’s only about eight point four.” “Excuse me,” she said, “but I just walked it, I think I ought to know.” And then suddenly: “God! Are those Timberland boots? Mega mistake! How much did you pay for them?”
And so it went. Eventually I went off to swill out the bowls and hang the food bag. When I came back, she was fixing her own dinner but still talking away at Katz.
“You know what you’re problem is? Pardon my French, but you’re too fat.” Katz looked at her in quiet wonder. “Excuse me?” he said. “You’re too fat. You should’ve lost weight before you came out here. Shoulda done some training ‘cause you could have like a serious, you know, heart thing out here.” “Heart thing?” said Katz. “You know, when your heart stops and you like, you know, die.” “Do you mean heart attack?’ said Katz. “That’s it,” said Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen was not short on flesh herself and unwisely at that moment she leaned over to get something from her pack displaying an expansive backside on which you could have projected motion pictures for, let us say, an army base. It was an interesting test of Katz’s forbearance. He said nothing but rose to go for a pee, and out of the side of his mouth as he passed me he rendered a certain convenient expletive and three low, dismayed syllables, like the call of a freight train in the night.
End of passage.
One of the things that alarmed and comforted me about Stephen Katz was that he was totally without fear. I mean totally, whereas I was on the edge of terror nearly all the time, largely as a result of having read this stupid book, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. Nothing frightened him at all.
As you gather from all this, we were not the most proficient of hikers. Our hearts were in the right place, but our legs were no good and we discovered that the trail was just way too long for us. I mean, way too long. It’s a discovery that nearly everyone makes at some point along the Appalachian Trail.
So, 90 percent of the people who set off to hike it from end to end fail in their quest. As many as 20 percent drop out after the first week. This is an extraordinarily high drop-out rate, considering that all of those people who drop out in the first week have all kissed their loved ones good-bye and said, “I’ll see you in five months,” and they’ve arranged their lives so that they actually have this gap and can go away for five months and then just seven days later they’re home.
The trail is really hard. It really, really is hard. When the discovery came to us, we had hiked doggedly through Georgia and North Carolina and on into Tennessee, did Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and then had to leave the trail to go resupply. Something you have to do every week or so, is go into a town, hitchhike into a town, to get more food and groceries and whatever else you need, spare batteries and so on. We went into Gatlinburg, Tennessee. By this time, it felt like we had been on the trail for months. I think it had been about two and a half weeks, but it felt like we had been out there doing this for as long back as we could remember. We realized then that we were never gonna hike the whole thing from end to end. It was just too far, and we didn’t have the legs or the heart to do the whole thing. Yet, in a very strange way, we really loved the trail, and we didn’t want to quit hiking. We just had to reappraise our approach to it. We realized that the only other alternative to hiking the whole thing from end to end was to hike it selectively, to do the best parts.
We started hiking all the most famous and most challenging and most rewarding links of the Appalachian Trail. We hiked the two national parks, the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and Shenandoah National Park.We hiked the Delaware Water Gap, a little bit of Pennsylvania, virtually the whole of New England and eventually finished off in the famous and forbidding Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine, which is the climax of the whole Appalachian Trail and really the hardest part anywhere along the whole trail.
Altogether, of the 2,200 miles, we hiked 870 in the course of a summer, which doesn’t seem like very much when you set it alongside the overall trail length, but against almost any other measure, I think it’s a pretty commendable distance for a couple of middle-aged, overweight, hapless guys to walk. It’s equivalent to walking from New York to Chicago, or a little bit just beyond Chicago, in fact.