Week 18: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (Broadway, 1998, paperback)
This is the first of three novels I read while I hiked Isle Royale National Park. Isle Royale is a large wooded island in Lake Superior. I’d previously read Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country, about his visits to Australia, during my own recent travels to Sydney, Alice Springs, and Cairns. A Walk in the Woods chronicles Bryson’s attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Bryson’s tone in each novel is a humorous blend of adventure and paranoia, primarily about the dangers lurking in nature. In In a Sunburned Country the fears were about the numerous deadly snakes native to Australia, as well as the inhospitable dangers of western Australia (the “outback”). For A Walk in the Woods, Bryson clearly conveys his fear of running into a bear or a wolf, or a serial killer. Encounters with any of these he clearly acknowledges to be extremely remote, yet fear of them still underlines his early thoughts about his planned hiking trip.
The dry humor comes from his acknowledgment of his fears and of the struggles he faced in his hike; and by continually presenting himself as the common man and not the devoted outdoorsman. The funniest passages are about his extended hikes with his friend Katz, the only person to take up Bryson’s call for a companion on the trail. Katz is clearly underprepared—overweight, a recovering alcoholic, and not prepared for the suffering that comes from days of backpacking. Katz starts out the epitome of the unprepared backpacker, twice tossing significant supplies down the hill to lighten his load. He doesn’t really progress to an expert hiker, but he does still it through with Bryson despite the pain and getting lost.
Bryson’s tone becomes more serious in the second half of the novel, when he abandons his plan to hike the entire Trail and instead opts for a series of day hikes. He ruminates on our relationship with nature and how we keep it at a distance behind manicured parks. He points out our destructive impact and the beauty we never really see.
I appreciate Bryson’s style, particularly his deadpan humor about the people he meets along the trail. I liked the history he presents of the Trail and his ruminations on conservation. The mocking tone he takes with more experienced or devoted hikers wore thin, though; and I’ll admit his turn towards day hikes turned me away as well. I can appreciate the struggles he faced, but more devotion to his cause would have kept my respect. By the end, it was more a book about the Trail rather than a description of his experiences hiking it.
Overall, though, a good read to get me into the rhythm of my hikes on Isle Royale.
Next week . . . A Superior Death by Nevada Barr.