Appalachian Trail Quotes

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Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition--either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit--that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I hung up again and looked at Katz. "What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as “so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically nonaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in The Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Personally, I think every guy who calls himself straight should take a hike on the gay Appalachian Trail at least once in his life.
Brad Boney (The Nothingness of Ben (The Austin Trilogy, #1))
Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
When I look back on all the worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.”—Winston Churchill
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn't and wouldn't quit.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is--whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze--perfect.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
There are only three options for black sheep: live authentically and get kicked out of the community, have the courage to move out on your own and rebuild from scratch, or hide your true self and desperately try to fit in (which you never will).
Ben Crawford (2,000 Miles Together: The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail)
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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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),
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the original plan.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas—
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
We are outraged when we are constrained by others, but willfully, unwittingly put limits on ourselves.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it’s time to watch your step.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Her chest full of crisp air and inspiration, her feet atop a forgettable mountain where the stars make you feel insignificant and important all at once. And she sang.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
I did it. I said I'd do it and I've done it.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
I glanced at my watch - it was two minutes to eleven; just right for lunch when and if we ever got to the godforsaken lodge - and took some comfort from the thought that at least I still had my wits about me. Or at least I felt as if I did. Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me - and here was an arresting notion - unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in The Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of “highlight.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
Every eccentric needs a story, and if one is not provided, one will be created.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
we’re going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won’t be doughnut stores.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Many of the most gratifying experiences in life are those that are the most demanding.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called walking “man’s best medicine” and prescribed walks to treat emotional problems, hallucinations, and digestive disorders.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
Ignore the outside voices telling you you're doing it wrong; there is no "wrong." But also watch out for wanting to fit in so badly that you start hiking someone else's hike
Ben Crawford (2,000 Miles Together: The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail)
If I'd been afraid," she said, "I never would have started out in the first place."--Grandma Emma Gatewood
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
She introduced people to the A.T., and at the same time she made the thru-hike achievable. It didn’t take fancy equipment, guidebooks, training, or youthfulness. It took putting one foot in front of the other—five million times.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.
Sharyn McCrumb (The Songcatcher (Ballad, #6))
I had come to realize that I didn't have any feelings towards the AT that weren't thoroughly contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but captivated by it; found the endless slog increasingly exhausting but ever invigorating; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. All of this together, all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
We do not go into the woods to rough it; we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home. —GEORGE WASHINGTON SEARS Now or never. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU I get faster as I get older. —EMMA GATEWOOD
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
I could be dead in a minute,” he said grimly, then clutched my forearm. “Look, if I get shot, do me a favor. Call my brother and tell him there’s $10,000 buried in a coffee can under his front lawn.” “You buried $10,000 under your brother’s front lawn?” “No, of course not, but he’s a little prick and it would serve him right. Let’s go.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . .savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
She had told her children she was going on a walk. That was no lie. She just never finished her sentence, never offered her own offspring the astonishing, impossible particulars.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
Employees who are important don’t need to be told, and if they are not important, being told doesn’t make them so.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
The setting, like so many others, is beautiful and serene. It is unfortunate that the pleasure is inseparable from the pain.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting.
Jennifer Pharr Davis (Becoming Odyssa: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail)
But I love to drink. I can’t help it. I mean, I love it Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you’ve had a couple, love the smell and feel of the taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, under lit glow of a bar at night.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Still, it is important for parents to continue to live their own lives. We can’t sit by and say we’ve already made our decisions, done our striving, and dish out opinions on the doings of our children. Words alone lack authority, and we risk making them surrogates for the life we’d like to lead. We can better relate to the budding aspirations of our children if we follow dreams of our own.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life. However, when the grizzly overtakes
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. "Hiked Maine, I mean." I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin." He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?" I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it." "It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked it in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson." "We missed out a lot of it, you know." "Details," Katz sniffed.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct. This ought to be a little surprising in a national park. I mean it’s not as if mussels are flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars. Still, the Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting-certainly the most striking-example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal-the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America's national parks this century.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
It would be useful (I wasn’t quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. 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.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
At the time of our hike, the Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn't last as long. Route 66 didn't last as long. The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as "America's Main Street," didn't last as long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It's a miracle really.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
The woods were full of peril—rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods. But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop-familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
When you hike through the forest you have no choice but to experience every step. The slow speed at which you move through the wilderness allows you to experience the landscape in such an intimate way. You have the opportunity to slow down and look across every stunning mountain vista, touch the blossoming azaleas, feel the cool mist of the waterfalls, and smell the rich scents of the forest as you pass through it. You have the opportunity to experience this paradise that is our planet.
Joshua Kinser (On the Appalachian Trail: From Springer Mountain To Davenport Gap (The Appalachian Trail Series Book 1))
More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn’t mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler’s fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby’s hand.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
So you must be the guys she was talking about.” “Really?” Katz said. “What’d she say?” “Oh, nothing,” he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes you say: “What?” “Nothing. It was nothing.” But he was smiling. “What?” He wavered. “Oh, all right. She said you guys were a couple of overweight wimps who didn’t know the first thing about hiking and that she was tired of carrying you.” “She said that?” Katz said, scandalized. “Actually I think she called you pussies.” “She called us pussies?” Katz said. “Now I will kill her.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of “the great fellowship of the Open Road” and the “brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, “Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.” More recently, writers who knew the benefits of striking out excoriated the apathetic public, over and over again, for its laziness. “Of course, people still walk,” wrote a journalist in Saturday Night magazine in 1912. “That is, they shuffle along on their own pins from the door to the street car or taxi-cab…. But real walking … is as extinct as the dodo.” “They say they haven’t time to walk—and wait fifteen minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile,” wrote Edmund Lester Pearson in 1925. “They pretend that they are rushed, very busy, very energetic; the fact is, they are lazy. A few quaint persons—boys chiefly—ride bicycles.
Ben Montgomery (Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail)
I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety. Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.
Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)