A Walk in the Woods: Complete & Unabridged

"It is an extraordinary experience to find yourself face-to-face in the woods with a wild animal that is very much larger than you. You know these things are out there, of course, but you never expect at any particular moment to encounter one, certainly not up close--and this one was close enough that I could see the haze of flealike insects floating in circles about its head. We stared at each other for a good minute, neither of us sure what to do. There was a certain obvious and gratifying tang of adventure in this, but also something much more low-key and elemental--a kind of respectful mutual acknowledgment that comes with sustained eye contact. It was this that was unexpectedly thrilling--the sense that there was in some small measure a salute in our cautious mutual appraisal. I was smitten."

Bill Bryson wrote the above in describing his encounter with a moose by a stream. He was walking a stretch of the Appalachian Trail through Maine known as the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, when he saw the beast at the water's edge, "staring at [him] with a baleful expression." And yet the passage could just as easily describe my, or any reader's, encounter with Bryson's book itself.

A Walk in the Woods is very much larger than you. Any book that attempts to chronicle a hike some 2,200 miles long, to transcribe the effects of those five million steps, must be necessarily grand. And yet Bryson's journey is not intimidating or tiresome--in fact, this author-as-narrator is one of the most personable to come along in a nonfiction book since, well, Bryson in Neither Here Nor There. In that travelogue, we watch as the middle-aged writer treks through Western Europe on the path he'd previously carved out as a twenty-something backpacker. In Woods, Bryson learns what it really means to backpack.

Alongside his fearless, blunt-tongued, Little Debbie-loving hometown pal Stephen Katz, Bryson embarks on a mission to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, a wilderness preserve through that range of mountains stretching from the deep smoky forests of Georgia to the high peaks and thick, dank foliage of northern Maine. His list of rationalizations for such an undertaking parallel the varying tones of his prose: "It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land after nearly twenty years of living abroad... 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.'" Which I imagine was not the publisher's first choice for a title.

But Bryson isn't concerned only with burning off the chub and reveling in barrel-chested male bravado. An aching sense of mortality is creeping in, and he wants to see it all before he loses his chance. The mortality I'm speaking of, however, is not Bryson's, but the woods'. He explains how if global temperatures continue to rise, all North American woodlands south of Massachusetts might dry up into savannah. This duality of purpose pervades the narrative: one minute, he's waxing hallucinogenic on the sheer pleasures of pie during a pit-stop off the trail in a nearby town ("She brought me a vast, viscous, canary-yellow wedge of lemon pie. It was a monument to food technology, yellow enough to give you a headache, sweet enough to make your eyeballs roll up into your head--everything, in short, you could want in a pie so long as taste and quality didn't enter into your requirements."); the next minute, he's a Zen philosopher, uncovering those mysteries locked away under the tranquil canopy of leaf and branch ("Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.").

Bryson's keen ability to mix comedy with sincerity is what keeps this travel memoir from becoming another muddy slog through another splendid landscape. As readers, we experience both gob-smacking guffaw and jaw-dropping awe--had this ended in tragedy, our empathetic tears would have completed the Holy Trinity of induced emotion. Luckily, Bryson never meets the ferocious black bear he fears after reading the handy guide Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, though their unseen presence pervades the book. Bryson is effective in conveying such potential dangers of the trail, simply and to the point: "Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do." You may never unwrap a Snickers bar in the woods again.

The trail is full of surprises and wonder. It is also full of long stretches of mundane, back-breaking, mosquito-ridden labor. Bryson's accomplishment is how, though his writing, he strokes lovingly even his most tender wounds and finds bliss within the blisters. At the end you emerge, bleary-eyed and proud, with a newfound respect for the woods and for those who seek them, and a fresh perspective on such abstract concepts as time, beauty, friendship, and, of course, the glorious existence of pie.

You may even be a little smitten.