by Bill Bryson
“No, afraid not,” she answered wistfully. “Lived here all my life, but haven’t got to it yet. One day I will.”
Katz, mindful of Beulah’s husband, was practically dragging me towards the safety of the woods, but I was curious.
“How long have you been a ranger?” I called back.
“Twelve years in August,” she said proudly.
“You ought to give it a try sometime. It’s real nice.”
“Might get some of that flab off your butt,” Katz muttered privately, and stepped into the woods. I looked at him with interest and surprise — it wasn’t like Katz to be so uncharitable — and put it down to lack of sleep, profound sexual frustration, and a surfeit of Hardees sausage biscuits.
Shenandoah National Park is a park with problems. More even than the Smokies, it suffers from a chronic shortage (though a cynic might say a chronic misapplication) of funds. Several miles of side trails have been closed, and others are deteriorating. If it weren’t that volunteers from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club maintain 80 percent of the park’s trails, including the whole of the AT through the park, the situation would be much worse. Mathews Arm Campground, one of the park’s main recreational areas, was closed for lack of funds in 1993 and hasn’t been open since. Several other recreation areas are closed for most of the year. For a time in the 1980s, even the trail shelters (or huts, as they are known here) were shut. I don’t know how they did it — I mean to say, how exactly do you close a wooden structure with a fifteen-foot-wide opening at the front? — and still less why, since forbidding hikers from resting for a few hours on a wooden sleeping platform is hardly going to transform the park’s finances. But then making things difficult for hikers is something of a tradition in the eastern parks. A couple of months earlier, all the national parks, along with all other nonessential government departments, had been closed for a couple of weeks during a budget impasse between President Clinton and Congress. Yet Shenandoah, despite its perennial want of money, found the funds to post a warden at each AT access point to turn back all thru-hikers. In consequence, a couple of dozen harmless people had to make lengthy, pointless detours by road before they could resume their long hike. This vigilance couldn’t have cost the Park Service less than $20,000, or the better part of $1,000 for each dangerous thru-hiker deflected.
On top of its self-generated shortcomings, Shenandoah has a lot of problems arising from factors largely beyond its control. Overcrowding is one. Although the park is over a hundred miles long, it is almost nowhere more than a mile or two wide, so all its two million annual visitors are crowded into a singularly narrow corridor along the ridgeline. Campgrounds, visitor centers, parking lots, picnic sites, the AT, and Skyline Drive
(the scenic road that runs down the spine of the park) all exist cheek by jowl. One of the most popular (non-AT) hiking routes in the park, up Old Rag Mountain, has become so much in demand that on summer weekends people sometimes have to queue to get on it.
Then there is the vexed matter of pollution. Thirty years ago it was still possible on especially clear days to see the Washington Monument, seventy-five miles away. Now, on hot, smoggy summer days, visibility can be as little as two miles and never more than thirty. Acid rain in the streams has nearly wiped out the park’s trout. Gypsy moths arrived in 1983 and have since ravaged considerable acreages of oaks and hickories. The Southern pine beetle has done similar work on conifers, and the locust leaf miner has inflicted disfiguring (but mercifully usually nonfatal) damage on thousands of locust trees. In just seven years, the woolly adelgid has fatally damaged more than 90 percent of the park’s hemlocks. Nearly all the rest will be dying by the time you read this. An untreatable fungal disease called anthracnose is wiping out the lovely dogwoods not just here but everywhere in America. Before long, the dogwood, like the American chestnut and American elm, will effectively cease to exist. It would be hard, in short, to conceive a more stressed environment.
And yet here’s the thing. Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.
We hiked through deep-seeming woods, along gloriously untaxing terrain, climbing a gentle 500 feet in four miles. In the Smokies, you can climb 500 feet in, well, about 500 feet. This was more like it. The weather was kindly, and there was a real sense of spring being on the turn. And there was life everywhere — zumming insects, squirrels scampering along boughs, birds twittering and hopping about, spider webs gleaming silver in the sun. Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitching noise. I saw an owl, which watched me imperturbably from a nearby stout limb, and loads of deer, which raised their heads to stare but otherwise seemed fearless and casually returned to their browsing when I had passed. Sixty years ago, there were no deer in this neck of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They had been hunted out of existence. Then, after the park was created in 1936, thirteen white-tailed deer were introduced, and, with no one to hunt them and few predators, they thrived. Today there are 5,000 deer in the park, all descended from those original thirteen or others that migrated from nearby.
Surprisingly, considering its modest dimensions and how little room there is for real backcountry, the park is remarkably rich in wildlife. Bobcats, bears, red and gray foxes, beaver, skunks, raccoons, flying squirrels, and our friends the salamanders exist in admirable numbers, though you don’t often see them, as most are nocturnal or wary of people. Shenandoah is said to have the highest density of black bears anywhere in the world — slightly over one per square mile. There have even been reported sightings (including by park rangers, who perhaps ought to know better) of mountain lions, even though mountain lions haven’t been confirmed in the eastern woods for almost seventy years. There is the tiniest chance that they may exist in pockets in the northern woods (we shall get to that in due course, and I think you’ll be glad you waited) but not in an area as small and hemmed in as Shenandoah National Park.
We didn’t see anything terribly exotic, or even remotely exotic, but it was nice just to see squirrels and deer, to feel that the forest was lived in. Late in the afternoon, I rounded a bend to find a wild turkey and her chicks crossing the trail ahead of me. The mother was regal and unflappable; her chicks were much too busy falling over and getting up again even to notice me. This was the way the woods were supposed to be. I couldn’t have been more delighted.
We hiked till five and camped beside a tranquil spring in a small, grassy clearing in the trees just off the trail. Because it was our first day back on the trail, we were flush for food, including perishables like cheese and bread that had to be eaten before they went off or were shaken to bits in our packs, so we rather gorged ourselves, then sat around smoking and chatting idly until persistent and numerous midgelike creatures (no-see-ums, as they are universally known along the trail) drove us into our tents. It was perfect sleeping weather, cool enough to need a bag but warm enough that you could sleep in your underwear, and I was looking forward to a long night’s snooze — indeed was enjoying a long night’s snooze — when, at some indeterminate dark hour, there was a sound nearby that made my eyes fly open. Normally, I slept through everything — through thunderstorms, through Katz’s snoring and noisy midnight pees — so something big enough or distinctive enough to wake me was unusual. There was a sound of undergrowth being disturbed — a click of breaking branches, a weighty pushing through low foliage — and then a kind of large, vaguely irritable snuffling noise.
Bear!
I sat bolt upright. Instantly every neuron in my brain was awake and dashing around frantically, like ants when you disturb their nest. I reached instinctively for my knife, then realized I had left it in my pack, just outside the tent. Nocturnal d
efense had ceased to be a concern after many successive nights of tranquil woodland repose. There was another noise, quite near.
“Stephen, you awake?” I whispered.
“Yup,” he replied in a weary but normal voice.
“What was that?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“It sounded big.”
“Everything sounds big in the woods.”
This was true. Once a skunk had come plodding through our camp and it had sounded like a stegosaurus. There was another heavy rustle and then the sound of lapping at the spring. It was having a drink, whatever it was.
I shuffled on my knees to the foot of the tent, cautiously unzipped the mesh and peered out, but it was pitch black. As quietly as I could, I brought in my backpack and with the light of a small flashlight searched through it for my knife. When I found it and opened the blade I was appalled at how wimpy it looked. It was a perfectly respectable appliance for, say, buttering pancakes, but patently inadequate for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur.
Carefully, very carefully, I climbed from the tent and put on the flashlight, which cast a distressingly feeble beam. Something about fifteen or twenty feet away looked up at me. I couldn’t see anything at all of its shape or size — only two shining eyes. It went silent, whatever it was, and stared back at me.
“Stephen,” I whispered at his tent, “did you pack a knife?”
“No.”
“Have you got anything sharp at all?”
He thought for a moment. “Nail clippers.”
I made a despairing face. “Anything a little more vicious than that? Because, you see, there is definitely something out here.”
“It’s probably just a skunk.”
“Then it’s one big skunk. Its eyes are three feet off the ground.”
“A deer then.”
I nervously threw a stick at the animal, and it didn’t move, whatever it was. A deer would have bolted. This thing just blinked once and kept staring.
I reported this to Katz.
“Probably a buck. They’re not so timid. Try shouting at it.”
I cautiously shouted at it: “Hey! You there! Scat!” The creature blinked again, singularly unmoved. “You shout,” I said.
“Oh, you brute, go away, do!” Katz shouted in merciless imitation. “Please withdraw at once, you horrid creature.”
“Fuck you,” I said and lugged my tent right over to his. I didn’t know what this would achieve exactly, but it brought me a tiny measure of comfort to be nearer to him.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m moving my tent.”
“Oh, good plan. That’ll really confuse it.”
I peered and peered, but I couldn’t see anything but those two wide-set eyes staring from the near distance like eyes in a cartoon. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be outside and dead or inside and waiting to be dead. I was barefoot and in my underwear and shivering. What I really wanted — really, really wanted — was for the animal to withdraw. I picked up a small stone and tossed it at it. I think it may have hit it because the animal made a sudden noisy start (which scared the bejesus out of me and brought a whimper to my lips) and then emitted a noise — not quite a growl, but near enough. It occurred to me that perhaps I oughtn’t provoke it.
“What are you doing, Bryson? Just leave it alone and it will go away.”
“How can you be so calm?”
“What do you want me to do? You’re hysterical enough for both of us.”
“I think I have a right to be a trifle alarmed, pardon me. I’m in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, staring at a bear, with a guy who has nothing to defend himself with but a pair of nail clippers. Let me ask you this. If it is a bear and it comes for you, what are you going to do — give it a pedicure?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Katz said implacably.
“What do you mean you’ll cross that bridge? We’re on the bridge, you moron. There’s a bear out here, for Christ sake. He’s looking at us. He smells noodles and Snickers and — oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Oh. Shit.”
“What?”
“There’s two of them. I can see another pair of eyes.” Just then, the flashlight battery started to go. The light flickered and then vanished. I scampered into my tent, stabbing myself lightly but hysterically in the thigh as I went, and began a quietly frantic search for spare batteries. If I were a bear, this would be the moment I would choose to lunge.
“Well, I’m going to sleep,” Katz announced.
“What are you talking about? You can’t go to sleep.”
“Sure I can. I’ve done it lots of times.” There was the sound of him rolling over and a series of snuffling noises, not unlike those of the creature outside.
“Stephen, you can’t go to sleep,” I ordered. But he could and he did, with amazing rapidity.
The creature — creatures, now — resumed drinking, with heavy lapping noises. I couldn’t find any replacement batteries, so I flung the flashlight aside and put my miner’s lamp on my head, made sure it worked, then switched it off to conserve the batteries. Then I sat for ages on my knees, facing the front of the tent, listening keenly, gripping my walking stick like a club, ready to beat back an attack, with my knife open and at hand as a last line of defense. The bears — animals, whatever they were — drank for perhaps twenty minutes more, then quietly departed the way they had come. It was a joyous moment, but I knew from my reading that they would be likely to return. I listened and listened, but the forest returned to silence and stayed there.
Eventually I loosened my grip on the walking stick and put on a sweater — pausing twice to examine the tiniest noises, dreading the sound of a revisit — and after a very long time got back into my sleeping bag for warmth. I lay there for a long time staring at total blackness and knew that never again would I sleep in the woods with a light heart.
And then, irresistibly and by degrees, I fell asleep.
Chapter 12
I’d expected Katz to be insufferable in the morning, but in fact he was surprisingly gracious. He called me for coffee and when I emerged, feeling wretched and cheated of sleep, he said to me: “You OK? You look like shit.”
“Didn’t get enough sleep.”
He nodded. “So you think it really was a bear?”
“Who knows?” I suddenly thought of the food bag — that’s what bears normally go for — and spun my head to see, but it was safely suspended a dozen or so feet from the ground from a branch about twenty yards away. Probably a determined bear could have gotten it down. Actually, my grandmother could have gotten it down. “Maybe not,” I said, disappointed.
“Well, you know what I’ve got in here, just in case?” Katz said and tapped his shirt pocket significantly. “Toenail clippers — because you just never know when danger might arise. I’ve learned my lesson, believe me, buddy.” Then he guffawed.
• • •
And so we returned to the woods. For virtually the length of Shenandoah National Park, the AT closely parallels and often crosses Skyline Drive
, though most of the time you would scarcely guess it. Often you will be plodding through the sanctuary of woods when suddenly a car will sail past through the trees only forty or fifty feet away — a perennially startling sight.
In the early 1930s, the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club — which was Myron Avery’s baby and for a time virtually indistinguishable from the Appalachian Trail Conference itself — came under attack from other hiking groups, particularly the patrician Appalachian Mountain Club in Boston, for not resisting the building of Skyline Drive through the park. Stung by these rebukes, Avery sent MacKaye a deeply insulting letter in December 1935, which effectively terminated MacKaye’s official (but even then peripheral) relationship with the trail. The two men never spoke again, though to his credit MacKaye paid Avery a warm tribute on his death in 1952 and generously noted that the tra
il could not have been built without him. A lot of people still dislike the highway, but Katz and I quite warmed to it. Frequently we would leave the trail and hike on the road for an hour or two. This early in the season — it was still early April — there were hardly any cars in the park, so we treated Skyline Drive as a kind of broad, paved, alternative footpath. It was novel to have something firm underfoot and exceedingly agreeable to be out in the open, in warm sunshine, after weeks in impenetrable woods. Motorists certainly had a more cosseted, looked-after existence than we did. There were frequent expansive overlooks, with splendid views (though even now, in clear spring weather, blanketed with a dirty haze beyond about six or seven miles), information boards giving helpful explanatory notes on the park’s wildlife and flora, and even litter bins. We could do with some of this on the trail, we agreed. And then, when the sun got too hot or our feet grew sore (for pavement is surprisingly hard on the feet) or we just felt like a change, we would return to the familiar, cool, embracing woods. It was very agreeable — almost rakish — to have options.
At one of the Skyline Drive
turn-ins that we came to, an information board was angled to direct the reader’s attention to a nearby slope handsomely spread with hemlocks, a very dark, almost black native conifer particularly characteristic of the Blue Ridge. All these hemlocks, and all the hemlocks everywhere along the trail and far beyond, are being killed by an aphid introduced accidentally from Asia in 1924. The National Park Service, the board noted sadly, could not afford to treat the trees. There were too many of them over too wide an area to make a spraying program practicable. Well, here’s an idea. Why not treat some of the trees? Why not treat a tree? The good news, according to the board, was that the National Park Service hoped that some of the trees would stage a natural recovery over time. Well, whew! for that.
Sixty years ago, there were almost no trees on the Blue Ridge Mountains. All this was farmland. Often in the woods now the trail would follow the relics of old stone field walls, and once we passed a small, remote cemetery — reminders that this was one of the few mountaintop areas in the entire Appalachian chain where people once actually lived. Unluckily for them, they were the wrong kind of people. In the 1920s, sociologists and other academics from the cities ventured into the hills, and they were invariably appalled at what they found. Poverty and deprivation were universal. The land was ridiculously poor. Many people were farming slopes that were practically perpendicular. Three-quarters of the people in the hills couldn’t read. Most had barely gone to school. Illegitimacy was 90 percent. Sanitation was practically unknown; only 10 percent of households had even a basic privy. On top of that, the Blue Ridge Mountains were sensationally beautiful and conveniently sited for the benefit of a new class of motoring tourist. The obvious solution was to move the people off the mountaintops and into the valleys, where they could be poor lower down, build a scenic highway for people to cruise up and down on Sundays, and turn the whole thing into a great mountaintop fun zone, with commercial campgrounds, restaurants, ice cream parlors, miniature golf, and whatever else might turn a snappy dollar.