A Walk in the Woods

by Bill Bryson

  So we pressed on to a spot called Gravel Springs Hut. It was only half past two when we got there. We had planned to go at least six miles farther, but we were so soaked and the rain was so unrelenting that we decided to stop. I had no dry clothes, so I stripped to my boxer shorts and climbed into my sleeping bag. We spent the longest afternoon I can ever remember listlessly reading and staring out at the pattering rain.

  At about five o’clock, just to make our day complete, a group of six noisy people arrived, three men and three women, dressed in the most preposterously Ralph Lauren-style hiking clothes — safari jackets and broad-brimmed canvas hats and suede hiking boots. These were clothes for sauntering along the veranda at Mackinac or perhaps going on a jeep safari, but patently not for hiking. One of the women, arriving a few paces behind the others and walking through the mud as if it were radioactive, peered into the shelter at me and Katz and said with undisguised distaste, “Ooh, do we have to share?”

  They were, to a degree that would have been fascinating in less trying circumstances, stupid, obnoxious, cheerfully but astonishingly self-absorbed, and not remotely acquainted with trail etiquette. Katz and I found ourselves carelessly bumped and jostled into the darkest corners, sprayed with water from clothes being shaken out, and knocked in the head with casually discarded equipment. In astonishment, we watched as clothes we had hung up to dry on a small clothesline were pushed and bunched to one side to make abundant room for their stuff. I sat sullenly, unable to concentrate on my book, while two of the men crouched beside me in my light, and had the following conversation:

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “What — camp in a shelter?”

  “No, look through binoculars with my glasses on.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant camp in a shelter — ha! ha! ha!”

  “No, I meant look through binoculars with my glasses on — ha! ha! ha!”

  After about a half an hour of this, Katz came over, knelt beside me, and said in a whisper, “One of these guys just called me ‘Sport.’ I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Pitch my tent in the clearing. You coming?”

  “I’m in my underpants,” I said pathetically.

  Katz nodded in understanding and stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “can I have your attention for a minute? Excuse me, Sport, can I have your attention? We’re going to go out and pitch our tents in the rain, so you can have all the space in here, but my friend here is in his boxer shorts and is afraid of offending the ladies — and maybe exciting the gentlemen,” he added with a brief, sweet leer, “so could you turn your heads for a minute while he puts his wet clothes back on? Meanwhile, I’ll say good-bye and thank you for allowing us to share a few inches of your space for a little while. It’s been a slice.”

  Then he jumped down into the rain. I dressed hastily, surrounded by silence and self-consciously averted gazes, then bounded down with a small, wimpily neutral good-bye. We pitched our tents about thirty yards away — not an easy or enjoyable process in a driving rain, believe me — and climbed in. Before we had finished, voices from the shelter had resumed and were succeeded by peels of triumphant laughter. They were noisy until dark, then drunkenly noisy until the small hours. I wondered if at any point they would experience some twinge of charity or remorse and send over a peace offering — a brownie, perhaps, or a hot dog — but they did not.

  When we woke in the morning, the rain had stopped, though the world was still insipid and dreary, and water was dripping from the trees. We didn’t bother with coffee. We just wanted to get out of there. We broke down our tents and packed away our stuff. Katz went to get a shirt from the line and reported that our six friends were sleeping heavily. There were two empty bourbon bottles, he reported in a tone of disdain.

  We hefted our packs and set off down the trail. We had walked perhaps 400 yards, out of sight of the camp, when Katz stopped me.

  “You know that woman who said ‘Ooh, do we have to share?’ and shoved our clothes to the end of the clothesline?” he asked.

  I nodded. Of course I remembered her.

  “Well, I’m not real proud of this. I want you to understand that. But when I went to get my shirt, I noticed her boots were right by the edge of the platform and, well, I did something kind of bad.”

  “What?” I tried to imagine, but couldn’t.

  He opened his hand and there were two suede shoelaces. Then he beamed — a big, winning beam — and stuck them in his pocket and walked on.

  Part 2

  Chapter 13

  And that was about it for the start of our great adventure. We walked eighteen miles to Front Royal, where my wife was to pick us up in two days if she managed to find her way by car from New Hampshire in an unfamiliar country.

  I had to go off for a month to do other things — principally, try to persuade people to buy a book of mine even though it had nothing to do with effortless weight loss, running with the wolves, thriving in an age of anxiety, or the O.J. Simpson trial. (Even so, it sold over sixty copies.) Katz was going back to Des Moines, where he had a job offer for the summer building houses, though he promised to come back in August and hike the famous and forbidding Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine with me.

  At one point very early in the trip he had talked earnestly of doing the whole trail, pushing on alone until I was able to rejoin him in June, but when I mentioned this now he just gave a hollow laugh and invited me to join him in the real world when I felt up to it.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m amazed we’ve come this far,” he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.

  Eighteen miles was a heroic distance for us, but we were filthy and trail-weary and more than ready for a town, and so we plodded on. We reached Front Royal about seven, dead tired, and went to the first motel we came to. It was arrestingly dire, but cheap. The bed sagged, the TV picture jumped as if it were being mercilessly goosed by an electronic component, and my door didn’t lock. It pretended to lock, but if you pushed on it from outside with a finger, it popped open. This perplexed me for a moment until I realized that no one could possibly want any of my possessions, so I just pulled it shut and went off to find Katz and go to dinner. We ate at a steakhouse down the street and retired happily to our televisions and beds.

  In the morning, I went early to Kmart and bought two complete new sets of clothes — socks, underwear, blue jeans, sneakers, handkerchiefs, and the two liveliest shirts I could find (one with boats and anchors, the other with a famous-monuments-of-Europe motif). I returned to the motel, presented Katz with half — he couldn’t have been more thrilled — then went to my room and put on my new attire. We met in the motel parking lot ten minutes later, looking crisp and stylish, and exchanged many flattering comments. With a day to kill, we went for breakfast, had an idle, contented saunter through the modest central business district, poked around in thrift shops for something to do, found a camping store where I bought a replacement hiking stick exactly like the one I had lost, had lunch, and in the afternoon decided naturally to go for a walk. It was, after all, what we did.

  We found some railroad tracks, which followed the stately curves of the Shenandoah River. There is nothing more agreeable, more pleasantly summery, than to stroll along railroad tracks in a new shirt. We walked without haste or particular purpose, mountain men on holiday, chatting seamlessly about nothing in particular, stepping aside from time to time to let a freight train lumber past and generally enjoying the abundant sunshine, the beckoning, infinite gleam of silver track, and the simple pleasure of moving forward on legs that felt tireless. We walked almost till sunset. It was a perfect way to finish.

  The following morning we went to breakfast, and then came the three hours of fidgety tortur
e of standing at the edge of a motel drive watching traffic for a particular car filled with beaming, excited, much-missed faces. For weeks and weeks I had tried not to visit that shadowy ache where thoughts of my family lay, but now that they were nearly here — now that I could let my thoughts run free — the anticipation was nearly unbearable.

  Well, you can imagine, I’m sure, the joyous reunion scene when they finally arrived — the exuberant hugs, the scatter-gun chatter, the tumble of needlessly but delightfully detailed information about the problems of finding the right interstate exit and correct motel, the impressed appraisal of dad’s new body, the less impressed appraisal of his new shirt, the sudden remembering to include Katz (bashfully grinning on the margins) in the celebrations, the tousling of hair, the whole transcendently happy business of being rejoined.

  We took Katz to National Airport in Washington, where he was booked on a late afternoon flight to Des Moines. At the airport, I realized we were already in different universes (he in a “Where do I go to check in?” sort of distraction, I in the distraction of knowing that my family waited, that the car was badly parked, that it was nearly rush hour in Washington), so we parted awkwardly, almost absently, with hasty wishes for a good flight and promises to meet again in August for the conclusion of our long amble. When he was gone I felt bad, but then I turned to the car, saw my family, and didn’t think about him again for weeks.

  It was the end of May, almost June, before I got back on the trail. I went for a walk in the woods near our home, with a day pack containing a bottle of water, two peanut butter sandwiches, a map (for form’s sake), and nothing else. It was summer now, so the woods were a new and different place, alive with green and filled with birdsong and swarming mosquitoes and pesky blackfly. I walked five miles over low hills through the woods to the town of Etna, where I sat beside an old cemetery and ate my sandwiches, then packed up and walked home. I was back before lunch. It didn’t feel right at all.

  The next day, I drove to Mount Moosilauke, fifty miles from my home on the southern edge of the White Mountains. Moosilauke is a wonderful mountain, one of the most beautiful in New England, with an imposing leonine grandeur, but it is rather in the middle of nowhere so it doesn’t attract a great deal of attention. It belongs to Dartmouth College, of Hanover, whose famous Outing Club has been looking after it in a commendably diligent and low-key way since the early years of this century. Dartmouth introduced downhill skiing to America on Moosilauke, and the first national championships were held there in 1933. But it was too remote, and soon the sport in New England moved to other mountains nearer main highways, and Moosilauke returned to a splendid obscurity. Today you would never guess that it had ever known fame.

  I parked in a small dirt parking lot, the only car that day, and set off into the woods. This time I had water, peanut butter sandwiches, a map, and insect repellent. Mount Moosilauke is 4,802 feet high, and steep. Without a full pack, I walked straight up it without stopping — a novel and gratifying experience. The view from the top was gorgeously panoramic, but it still didn’t feel right without Katz, without a full pack. I was home by 4:00P.M. This didn’t feel right at all. You don’t hike the Appalachian Trail and then go home and cut the grass.

  I had been so absorbed for so long with setting up and executing the first part of the trip that I hadn’t actually stopped to consider where I would be at this point. Where I was, in fact, was companionless, far away from where I had gotten off the trail, and impossibly adrift from a touchingly optimistic hiking schedule I had drawn up nearly a year before. This showed me to be somewhere in the region of New Jersey by about now, blithely striding off up to thirty miles a day.

  It was clear that I had to make some adjustments. Even overlooking the large hunk that Katz and I had left out by jumping from Gatlinburg to Roanoke, and no matter how I juggled the numbers, it was abundantly evident that I was never going to hike the whole thing in one season. At my pace, if I returned to the trail at Front Royal where we had left off and resumed hiking north, I would be lucky to reach central Vermont by winter, 500 miles shy of the trail’s northern terminus at Mount Katahdin.

  This time, too, there was no small, endearingly innocent pulse of excitement, that keen and eager frisson that comes with venturing into the unknown with gleaming, untried equipment. This time I knew exactly what was out there — a lot of long, taxing miles, steep rocky mountains, hard shelter floors, hot days without showers, unsatisfying meals cooked on a temperamental stove. Now, moreover, there would be all the perils that come with warmer weather: wild and lively lightning storms, surly rattlesnakes, fever-inducing ticks, bears with appetites, and, oh, one unpredictable, motiveless, possibly drifting murderer, since reports of the deaths of the two women killed in Shenandoah National Park were just making the news.

  It was more than a little discouraging. The best I could do was to do, well, the best I could do. Anyway, I had to try. Everyone in town who knew me (not a huge number, admittedly, but enough to have me forever dodging into doorways whenever I saw a familiar face approaching along Main Street) knew that I was trying to hike the AT, which patently I could not be doing if I was to be seen skulking in town. (“I saw that Bryson fellow today slipping into Eastman’s Pharmacy with a newspaper in front of his face. I thought he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail. Anyway, you’re right. He is odd.”)

  It was clear I had to get back on the trail — properly back on, far from home, somewhere at least reasonably proximate to northern Virginia — if I was to have any pretense of hiking the trail with anything approaching completeness. The problem was that it is almost impossible nearly everywhere along the AT to get on and off the trail without assistance. I could fly to Washington or Newark or Scranton, or any of several other places in the region of the trail, but in each case I would still be scores of miles short of the trail itself. I couldn’t ask my dear and patient wife to take two days to drive me back to Virginia or Pennsylvania, so I decided to drive myself. I would, I figured, park at a likely looking spot, take a hike up into the hills, hike back to the car, drive on a way, and repeat the process. I suspected this would turn out to be fairly unsatisfying, possibly even imbecile (and I was right on both counts), but I couldn’t think of a better alternative.

  And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.

  Harpers Ferry is an interesting place for a number of reasons. First, it is quite pretty. This is because it is a National Historical Park, so there are no Pizza Huts, McDonald’s, Burger Kings, or even residents, at least in the lower, older part of town. Instead, you get restored or re-created buildings with plaques and interpretation boards, so it doesn’t have much, or indeed any, real life, but it still has a certain beguiling, polished prettiness. You can see that it would be a truly nice place to live if only people could be trusted to reside there without succumbing to the urge to have Pizza Huts and Taco Bells (and personally I believe they could, for as much as eighteen months), so instead you get a pretend town, attractively tucked between steep hills at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers.

  It is a National Historical Park because, of course, it is a historic place. It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkness, captured the federal armory without resistance (it was guarded by a single night-watchman), yet still managed to kill a hapless passerby — who was, ironically, a freed black slave. When news got out that a federal armory with 100,000 rifles and a great deal of ammunition was in the hands of a small band of lunatics, the president, James Buchanan, dispatched Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee (at that time
still a loyal Union soldier, of course) to sort things out. It took Lee and his men less than three minutes of fighting to overcome the hapless rebellion. Brown was captured alive, swiftly tried, and sentenced to be hanged a month hence.

  One of the soldiers sent to oversee the hanging was Thomas J. Jackson — soon to become famous as Stonewall Jackson — and one of the eager onlookers in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth. So the capture of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry served as quite a neat overture for all that followed. Meanwhile, in the wake of Brown’s little adventure, all hell was breaking loose. Northern abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson made Brown a martyr, and Southern loyalists got up in arms, quite literally, at the idea that this might be the start of a trend. Before you knew it, the nation was at war.

  Harpers Ferry remained at the center of things throughout the exuberantly bloody conflict that followed. Gettysburg was just thirty miles to the north, Manassas a similar distance to the south, and Antietam (where, it is worth noting, twice as many men died in one day as the total American losses in the War of 1812, Mexican War, and Spanish-American War combined) was just ten miles away. Harpers Ferry itself changed hands eight times during the war, though the record in this regard belongs to Winchester, Virginia, a few miles south, which managed to be captured and recaptured seventy-five times.

  These days, Harpers Ferry passes its time accommodating tourists and cleaning up after floods. With two temperamental rivers at its feet and a natural funnel of bluffs before and behind, it is forever being inundated. There had been a bad flood in the town six months before, and the park’s staff was still busy mopping out repainting, and carrying furnishings, artifacts, and displays down from upstairs storage rooms. (Three months after my visit, they would have to take everything back up again.) At one of the houses, two of the rangers came out the door and down the walk and nodded smiles at me as they passed. Both of them, I noticed, were packing sidearms. Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.