I don’t think I’m likely ever to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. I like walking, and I sometimes like walking distances that are somewhat outside the ordinary (I’ve finished the Great Saunter, an annual 32-mile walk around Manhattan, 5 times). But I’d generally rather walk in a city than in the woods, and I have basically zero interest in camping. I like indoor plumbing, and real beds, and being able to take a hot shower every day, and meals that are cooked in a proper kitchen, whether it’s my own or a restaurant’s. So, yeah: I can’t imagine hiking the more-than-2100-mile distance of the AT between Georgia and Maine. I’ve done a day hike that included a little of the AT up near Garrison, NY, but this book is the closest I’m likely to get to much of the rest of it.
So, the book: Bill Bryson decides he wants to thru-hike the AT and sets off from Georgia with a friend from high school, Katz. Bryson and Katz are not, as it turns out, particularly well prepared to thru-hike the AT. They make it as far as the Smokies, then drive to Virginia, and then take a break, after which Bryson does some day hikes of sections between Harpers Ferry and points north, and eventually they meet up again, planning to hike the Hundred Mile Wilderness to the AT’s finish at Mount Katahdin in Maine. (Spoiler alert: they don’t manage the Hundred Mile Wilderness.) The book is partly a (sometimes humorous) story about walking (parts of) the AT, and partly a story about Bryson’s friendship with Katz, and partly a story about the AT itself—its history and geology, the people who walk it/have walked it, the animals that live/have lived in the woods it passes through. Sometimes I liked the way those things meshed together, and sometimes I wanted the book to be more of one thing or another.
Highlights for me: 1) the very beginning, when Bryson buys all his gear, then sets up his tent in his basement to try it out, then ends the first chapter with this: “This wouldn’t be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew I was quite wrong” (17). 2) Bryson’s side-trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, and the eerie quiet smokiness of the almost-ghost-town. 3) Bryson’s description of the moose as a creature that “runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other” (347). 4) Katz and Bryson’s sort-of falling out and subsequent making up in Maine. 5) This, from near the book’s very end:
I had come to realize that I didn’t have any feelings towards the AT that weren’t confused and contradictory. 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 to 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. (389)
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