A Walk in the Woods

by Bill Bryson

  The Long Branch trail, when we reached it, descended steeply through bowed pines — too steeply, it seemed to me, to come back up if the trail proved impassable, and it looked as if it might. Katz and I urged Jim and Heath to reconsider, but Jim said it was all downhill and well-marked, and he was sure it would be all right. “Hey, you know what day it is?” said Jim suddenly and, seeing our blank faces, supplied the answer: “March twenty-first.”

  Our faces stayed blank.

  “First day of spring,” he said.

  We smiled at the pathetic irony of it, shook hands all around, wished each other luck, and parted.

  Katz and I walked for three hours more, silently and slowly through the cold, white forest, taking it in turns to break snow. At about one o’clock we came at last to old 64, a lonesome, superannuated two-lane road through the mountains. It hadn’t been cleared, and there were no tire tracks through it. It was starting to snow again, steadily, prettily. We set off down the road for the campground and had walked about a quarter of a mile when from behind there was the crunching sound of a motorized vehicle proceeding cautiously through snow. We turned to see a big jeep-type car rolling up beside us. The driver’s window hummed down. It was Jim and Heath. They had come to let us know they had made it, and to make sure we had likewise. “Thought you might like a lift to the campground,” Jim said.

  We climbed gratefully in, filling their nice car with snow, and rode down to the campground. Jim told us that they had passed it on the way up and it looked open, but that they would take us to Franklin, the nearest town, if it wasn’t. They had heard a weather forecast. More snow was expected over the next couple of days.

  They dropped us at the campground — it was open — and departed with waves. Rainbow Springs was a small private campground with several small overnight cottages, a shower block, and a couple of other indeterminate buildings scattered around a big, level, open area clearly intended for camper vans and recreational vehicles. By the entrance, in an old white house, was the office, which was really a general store. We went in and found that every hiker for twenty miles was already there, several of them sitting around a wood stove eating chili or ice cream and looking rosy cheeked and warm and clean. Three or four of them we knew already. The campground was run by Buddy and Jensine Crossman, who seemed friendly and welcoming. If nothing else, it was probably not often that business was this good in March. I inquired about a cabin.

  Jensine stubbed out a cigarette and laughed at my naïveté, which caused her a small coughing attack. “Honey, the cabins went two days ago. There’s two places left in the bunkhouse. After that, people are going to have to sleep on floors.”

  Bunkhouse is not a word I particularly want to hear at my age, but we had no choice. We signed in, were given two very small, stiff towels for the shower, and trudged off across the grounds to see what we got for our $11 apiece. The answer was very little.

  The bunkhouse was basic and awesomely unlovely. It was dominated by twelve narrow wood bunks stacked in tiers of three, each with a thin bare mattress and a grubby bare pillow lumpily filled with shreds of Styrofoam. In one corner stood a potbellied stove, hissing softly, surrounded by a semicircle of limp boots and draped with wet woolen socks, which steamed foully. A small wooden table and a pair of broken-down easy chairs, both sprouting stuffing, completed the furnishings. Everywhere there was stuff — tents, clothes, backpacks, raincovers — hanging out to dry, dripping sluggishly. The floor was bare concrete, the walls uninsulated plywood. It was singularly univiting, like camping in a garage.

  “Welcome to the Stalag,” said a man with an ironic smile and an English accent. His name was Peter Fleming, and he was a lecturer at a college in New Brunswick who had come south for a week’s hiking but, like everyone else, had been driven in by the snow. He introduced us around — each person greeted us with a friendly but desultory nod — and indicated which were the spare bunks, one on the top level, nearly up at the ceiling, the other on the bottom on the opposite side of the room.

  “Red Cross parcels come on the last Friday of the month, and there’ll be a meeting of the escape committee at nineteen hundred hours this evening. I think that’s about all you need to know.”

  “And don’t order the Philly cheese steak sandwich unless you want to puke all night,” said a wan but heartfelt voice from a shadowy bunk in the corner.

  “That’s Tex,” Fleming explained. We nodded.

  Katz selected a top bunk and set about the long challenge of trying to get into it. I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. I lifted it and sniffed it, then wished I hadn’t. I spread out my sleeping bag, draped some socks over the stove, hung up a few things to dry, then sat on the edge of the bed and passed a pleasant half hour with the others watching Katz’s dogged struggle to the summit, which mostly involved deep grunts, swimming legs, and invitations to all onlookers and well-wishers to go fuck themselves. From where I sat, all I could see was his expansive butt and homeless lower limbs. His posture brought to mind a shipwreck victim clinging to a square of floating wreckage on rough seas, or possibly someone who had been lifted unexpectedly into the sky on top of a weather balloon he was preparing to hoist — in any case, someone holding on for dear life in dangerous circumstances. I grabbed my pillow and climbed up alongside him to ask why he didn’t just take the bottom bunk.

  His face was wild and flushed; I’m not even sure he recognized me at that moment. “Because heat rises, buddy,” he said, “and when I get up here — if I fucking ever do — I’m going to be toast.” I nodded (there was seldom any point in trying to reason with Katz when he was puffed out and fixated) and used the opportunity to switch pillows on him.

  Eventually, when it became unsustainably pathetic to watch, three of us pushed him home. He flopped heavily and with an alarming crack of wood — which panicked the poor, quiet man in the bunk underneath — and announced he had no intention of leaving this spot until the snows had melted and spring had come to the mountains. Then he turned his back and went to sleep.

  I trudged through the snow to the shower block for the pleasure of dancing through ice water, then went to the general store and hung out by the stove with half a dozen others. There was nothing else to do. I ate two bowls of chili — the house specialty — and listened to the general conversation. This mostly involved Buddy and Jensine bitching about the previous day’s customers, but it was nice to hear some voices other than Katz’s.

  “You shoulda seen ’em,” Jensine said with distaste, picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue. “Didn’t say ‘please,’ didn’t say ‘thank you.’ Not like you guys. You guys are a breath of fresh air in comparison, believe me. And they made a complete pigpen of the bunkhouse, didn’t they, Buddy?” She passed the baton to Buddy.

  “Took me an hour to clean it this morning,” he said grimly, which surprised me because the bunkhouse didn’t look as if it had been cleaned this century. “There were puddles all over the floor and somebody, I don’t know who, left a filthy old flannel shirt, which was just disgusting. And they burned all the firewood. Three days’ worth of firewood I took down there yesterday, and they burned every stick of it.”

  “We were real glad to see ’em go,” said Jensine. “Real glad. Not like you guys. You guys are a breath of fresh air, believe me.” Then she went off to answer a ringing phone.

  I was sitting next to one of the three kids from Rutgers whom we had been running into off and on since the second day. They had a cabin now but had been in the bunkhouse the night before. He leaned over and in a whisper said: “She said the same thing yesterday about the people the day before. She’ll be saying the same thing tomorrow about us. Do you know, there were fifteen of us in the bunkhouse last night.”

  “Fifteen?” I repeated, in a tone of wonder. It was intole
rable enough with twelve. “Where on earth did the extra three sleep?”

  “On the floor — and they were still charged eleven bucks for it. How’s your chili?”

  I looked at it as if I hadn’t thought about it, as in fact I hadn’t. “Pretty terrible, actually.”

  He nodded. “Wait till you’ve been eating it for two days.”

  When I left to walk back to the bunkhouse, it was still snowing, but peacefully. Katz was awake and up on one elbow, smoking a bummed cigarette and asking people to pass things up to him — scissors, a bandanna, matches — as the need arose and to take them away again as he finished with them. Three people stood at the window watching the snow. The talk was all of the weather. There was no telling when we would get out of here. It was impossible not to feel trapped.

  We spent a wretched night in our bunks, faintly lit by the dancing glow of the stove — which the timid man (unable or reluctant to sleep with the restless mass of Katz bowing the slats just above his head) diligently kept stoked — and wrapped in a breathy, communal symphony of nighttime noises — sighs, weary exhalations, dredging snores, a steady dying moan from the man who had eaten the Philly cheese steak sandwich, the monotone hiss of the stove, like the soundtrack of an old movie. We woke, stiff and unrested, to a gloomy dawn of falling snow and the dispiriting prospect of a long, long day with nothing to do but hang out at the camp store or lie on a bunkbed reading old Reader’s Digests, which filled a small shelf by the door. Then word came that an industrious youth named Zack from one of the cabins had somehow gotten to Franklin and rented a minivan and was offering to take anyone to town for $5. There was a virtual stampede. To the dismay and disgust of Buddy and Jensine, practically everyone paid up and left. Fourteen of us packed into the minivan and started on the long descent to Franklin, in a snowless valley far below.

  And so we had a little holiday in Franklin, which was small, dull, and cautiously unattractive, but mostly dull — the sort of place where you find yourself, for want of anything better to do, strolling out to the lumberyard to watch guys on forklifts shunting wood about. There wasn’t a thing in the way of diversions, nowhere to buy a book or even a magazine that didn’t involve speedboats, customized cars, or guns and ammo. The town was full of hikers like us who had been driven down from the hills and had nothing to do but hang out listlessly in the diner or launderette and two or three times a day make a pilgrimage to the far end of Main Street to stare forlornly at the distant, snow-draped, patently impassable peaks. The outlook was not good. There were rumors of seven-foot drifts in the Smokies. It could be days before the trail was passable again.

  I was plunged into a restless funk by this, heightened by the realization that Katz was verily in heaven at the prospect of several days idling in a town, on vacation from purpose and exertion, trying out various attitudes of repose. To my intense vexation, he had even bought a TV Guide, to plan his viewing more effectively over the coming days.

  I wanted to get back on the trail, to knock off miles. It was what we did. Besides, I was bored to a point somewhat beyond being bored out of my mind. I was reading restaurant place mats, then turning them over to see if there was anything on the back. At the lumberyard I talked to workmen through the fence. Late on the third afternoon I stood in a Burger King and studied, with absorption, the photographs of the manager and his executive crew (reflecting on the curious fact that people who go into hamburger management always look as if their mother slept with Goofy), then slid one pace to the right to examine the Employee of the Month awards. It was then I realized I had to get out of Franklin.

  Twenty minutes later I announced to Katz that we were returning to the trail in the morning. He was, of course, astounded and dismayed. “But it’s the ‘X-Files’ on Friday,” he sputtered. “I just bought cream soda.”

  “The disappointment must be crushing,” I replied with a thin, heartless smile.

  “But the snow. We’ll never get through.”

  I gave a shrug that was meant to look optimistic but was probably closer to indifferent. “We might,” I said.

  “But what if we don’t? What if there’s another blizzard? We were very lucky, if you ask me, to escape with our lives last time.” He looked at me with desperate eyes. “I’ve got eighteen cans of cream soda in my room,” he blurted and then wished he hadn’t.

  I arched an eyebrow. “Eighteen? Were you planning to settle here?”

  “It was on special,” he muttered defensively and retreated into a sulk.

  “Look, Stephen, I’m sorry to spoil your festive arrangements, but we didn’t come all the way down here to drink pop and watch TV.”

  “Didn’t come down here to die either,” he said, but he argued no more.

  So we went, and were lucky. The snow was deep but passable. Some lone hiker, even more impatient than I, had pushed through ahead of us and compacted the snow a little, which helped. It was slick on the steep climbs — Katz was forever sliding back, falling down, cursing mightily — and occasionally on higher ground we had to detour around expansive drift fields, but there was never a place where we couldn’t get through.

  And the weather perked up. The sun came out; the air grew milder and heavier; the little mountain streams became lively with the tumble and gurgle of meltwater. I even heard the tentative twitter of birds. Above 4,500 feet, the snow lingered and the air felt refrigerated, but lower down the snow retreated in daily bounds until by the third day it was no more than scrappy patches on the darkest slopes. It really wasn’t bad at all, though Katz refused to admit it. I didn’t care. I just walked. I was very happy.

  Chapter 7

  For two days, Katz barely spoke to me. On the second night, at nine o’clock, an unlikely noise came from his tent — the punctured-air click of a beverage can being opened — and he said in a pugnacious tone, “Do you know what that was, Bryson? Cream soda. You know what else? I’m drinking it right now, and I’m not giving you any. And you know what else? It’s delicious.” There was a slurpy, intentionally amplified drinking noise. “Mmmm-mmmm. Dee-light-ful.” Another slurp. “And do you know why I’m drinking it now? Because it’s 9 P.M. — time for the ‘X-Files,’ my favorite program of all time.” There was a long moment’s drinking noise, the sound of a tent zip parting, the tink of an empty can landing in undergrowth, the tent zip closing. “Man, that was so good. Now fuck you and good night.”

  And that was the end of it. In the morning he was fine.

  Katz never really did get into hiking, though goodness knows he tried. From time to time, I believe, he glimpsed that there was something — some elusive, elemental something — that made being out in the woods almost gratifying. Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones. I, meanwhile, was wholly, mindlessly, very contentedly absorbed with the business of just pushing forward. My congenital distraction sometimes fascinated him and sometimes amused him, but mostly it just drove him crazy.

  Late on the morning of the fourth day after leaving Franklin, I was perched on a big green rock waiting for Katz after it dawned on me that I had not seen him for some time. When at last he came along, he was even more disheveled than usual. There were twigs in his hair, an arresting new tear on his flannel shirt, and a trickle of dried blood on his forehead. He dropped his pack and sat heavily beside me with his water bottle, took a long swig, mopped his forehead, checked his hand for blood, and finally said, in a conversational tone: “How did you get around that tree back there?”

  “What tree?”

  “The fallen tree, back there. The one across the ledge.”

  I thought for a minute. “I don’t remember it.”

  “What do you mean you don’t remember it? It was blocking the path, for crying out loud.”

  I thought again, harder, and shook my head with a look of feeble apology. I could see he was heading towards exasperation.

>   “Just back there four, five hundred yards.” He paused, waiting for a spark of recognition, and couldn’t believe that it wasn’t forthcoming. “One side a sheer cliff, the other side a thicket of brambles with no way through, and in the middle a big fallen tree. You had to have noticed it.”

  “Whereabouts was it exactly?” I asked, as if stalling for time.

  Katz couldn’t contain his irritation. “Just back there, for Christ sake. One side cliff, other side brambles, and in the middle a big fallen-down oak with about this much clearance.” He held his hand about fourteen inches off the ground and was dumbfounded by my blank look. “Bryson, I don’t know what you’re taking, but I gotta have some of it. The tree was too high to climb over and too low to crawl under and there wasn’t any way around it. It took me a half hour to get over it, and I cut myself all to shit in the process. How could you not remember it?”

  “It might come to me after a bit,” I said hopefully. Katz shook his head sadly. I was never entirely certain why he found my mental absences so irritating — whether he thought I was being willfully obstuse to annoy him or whether he felt I was unreasonably cheating hardship by failing to notice it — but I made a private pledge to remain alert and fully conscious for a while, so not to exasperate him. Two hours later we had one of those hallelujah moments that come but rarely on the trail. We were walking along the lofty breast of a mountain called High Top when the trees parted at a granite overlook and we were confronted with an arresting prospect — a sudden new world of big, muscular, comparatively craggy mountain, steeped in haze and nudged at the distant margins by moody-looking clouds, at once deeply beckoning and rather awesome.