Krishna
This book describes a walk the Bill undertook after relocating to America – after many years of living in Britain. He decides to walk the entire Appalachian trail. By now you know that anything Bill describes will be a treat. With his trademark humour, even the first few pages draw you in. He fantasizes about the dangers he could be in : mauled by bears, bitten by snakes and so on. But it goes downhill later. More of that later.
We have reviewed some of his books – some breathtakingly wonderful books earlier. For example see the review of his excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything or his not so great but still interesting Notes From A Small Island.
The cover is a kind of a ‘clickbait’ I think. The book may or may not be to your liking – I was not exactly lost in admiration – but (hope this is not a spoiler alert) the author comes nowhere close to any bears – let alone have one staring at him in close proximity as the cover suggests.
He says matter of factly that he did not know what he was getting into, when he decided to walk the full length of the Appalachian trail! He goes on to talk about the books he read on the dangers of bear attacks and how to react when you are being chased by a hungry grizzly vs a hungry black bear and what each of those attacks will feel like for the victim – a bit of motivational reading before you embark on a trip where these may happen to you!
He is amazed to find that an old friend of his, Katz, wants to go with him, until he finds the friend totally out of shape and totally disorganized to boot.
As ever, he goes into how the Appalachian trail was built from 1921 to 1937. The effort was planned by Benton MacKaye an engineer. But he was a dreamer and the plans were just that – plans – for several years. It took a hustler, a lawyer at that, called Myron Avery who saw this to conclusion, literally by bullying everyone who stood in his way, including MacKaye. They did not speak to each other after a great disagreement. However, without Avery, the trail would not have been built. It is ironic that, at the time it was built (the greatest hiking trail in the world) practically no one noticed it. Also ironic that Avery’s name is not associated with the trail when, in the end, it did become famous. Avery died relatively young and MacKaye, who lived to a ripe old age, was happy to talk about it whenever called upon to do so, and so mostly recognized as the force behind the building of the trail.
He finds that in the depths of the trail, there seem to be no ends of slopes. Just when you thought you were through, there is another one and so on, apparently infinitely. He describes how difficult it is in the first days of the trek when you are not used to the physical labour or the weight of the pack on you!
There follow some humorous events where at the site of the first day’s rest, they find that Katz threw out almost all the essentials (food, even coffee filter, and many others) needed for survival in a fit of pique that his backpack was heavy and making it difficult for him to carry it all and go on.
There are also fascinating descriptions of how the forest department of US, a government department that exists, as many understand it, to protect the forest is the main cause of its pillaging and destruction.
He talks of an annoying female who attaches herself to them and refuses to leave, but all the while keeps criticizing everything they do. Mary Ellen was obnoxious and a pest that stuck to them. Yet when they slip away to find a cheap restaurant and gorge themselves in the middle, they feel that they had abandoned her.
He then describes trudging through a snowstorm and finding shelter. Staying in a town for two days to have the trails become passable.
What elevates this tale is that he peppers his narration with facts – the bald spots in the Smokey mountains having biodiversity of flowers and how they came to be there. He talks about the salamanders and how they evolutionally have changed little. He talks about how many species of both the flowers and the animals are going extinct due to severe underfunding of the National Parks Service by the government. Fascinating stuff.
The tale itself is a series of how they walked the trail and decided to cut across portions of it, how they walked on a road running parallel to it etc. And a description of what to Americans means ‘busy’ when the volume flowing though such a monumental hiking trail is trivial to the author’s eyes and some hilarious incidents involving Katz and his pursuit of improbable relationships along the way.
But soon you realize that it is a rambling book. They abandon the walk in the middle (even after counting the ‘skip’ that they did) and return home. Our man Bill Bryson keeps going back to sections of the trail in his car and in a desultory fashion looks around souvenir shop, in a town that was burnt underground through a coal fire and had to be evacuated. Unless you are a hardcore fan of Bryson, these annoy you because they sound like the diary entries of a wandering man who wrote it all down and published a book of the musings.
The book by now reads like a random jottings of short trips to various places and the history of those places. Some science – like what a silent killer hypothermia could be – are fascinating but this now reads like a lot of interesting tidbits strung together in an ordinary book on a travelog.
Yes, there are interesting factoids the author blends into the story and there is a very realistic set of troubles he and Katz (yes, he comes back for another go at the Maine part of the trail) get into, but all in all, it feels a bit disjointed to me.
I am not disappointed that they did not hike it end to end, no. But this book is probably not the kind of subject matter that I enjoy – it could just be me.
Some of his other books are brilliant, as the examples in the beginning would attest.
6/10
= = Krishna