The Appalachian Trail, for those who don't know, stretches some 2,160 miles, from Springer Mountain, in Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, in Maine. And Bryson meets the challenge with all the enthusiasm and humor that befits his other travel books. You'll find none of the monotony that plagues so much other travel writing.
And his writing is rich in excitement. In fact, Bryson begins by scaring his readers: He writes of the trail's perils -- dangerous animals, killing diseases, "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex". And bears ... that bite.
He writes of the power of woods to unnerve. "The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core."
He writes of his hiking partner, Stephen Katz, a childhood friend from Iowa who had been attracted to drugs and alcohol until he was found by the police "in an upended car in a field outside the little town of Mingo, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, still clutching the steering wheel and saying, 'Well, what seems to be the problem, officers?"' Katz is seriously out of shape and given to seizures ever since he took "some contaminated phenylthiamines about 10 years ago". Bryson remarks, "I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back."
Once readers are finished being scared, though, Bryson hits his writing (and hiking) strides -- telling the history of the trail, the hell of the early going when he and his partner were not yet conditioned, the quirky characters they met, the geology, biology, ecology of the terrain, and jokes. You turn the pages not knowing what's around the next bend.
Then, after trudging for what seems like forever, he arrives in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and sees a map of the trail "about six inches wide and four feet high". He writes: "I looked at it with polite, almost proprietorial interest -- it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety -- and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches."
"My hair had grown more than that."
He concludes: "One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine."
A Walk in the Woods is part humor writing, part travel narrative, part memoir, and part terror.
But readers will find themselves, as Bryson, liberated by the immense smallness of nature -- much like Thoreau's writing decades before. A Walk in the Woods is exhilarating fun. You can't miss it!
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.