Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

Even as I said these things, I realized with a kind of horrible, seeping awareness that he was right. We had ditched her, left her to the bears and wolves and chortling mountain men. I had been so completely preoccupied with my own savage lust for food and a real bed that I had not paused to consider what our abrupt departure would mean for her-a night alone among the whispering trees, swaddled in darkness, listening with involuntary keenness for the telltale crack of branch or stick under a heavy foot or paw. It wasn’t something I would wish on anyone. My gaze fell on my pie, and I realized I didn’t want it any longer. “Maybe she’ll have found somebody else to camp with,” I suggested lamely, and pushed the pie away.

“Did you see anybody today?”

He was right. We had seen hardly a soul.

“She’s probably still walking right now,” Katz said with a hint of sudden heat. “Wondering where the hell we got to. Scared out of her chubby little wits.”

“Oh, don’t,” I half pleaded, and distractedly pushed the pie a half inch farther away.

He nodded an emphatic, busy, righteous little nod, and looked at me with a strange, glowing, accusatory expression that said, “And if she dies, let it be on your conscience.” And he was right; I was the ringleader here. This was my fault.

Then he leaned closer and said in a completely different tone of voice, “If you’re not going to eat that pie, can I have it?”

In the morning we breakfasted at a Hardees across the street and paid for a taxi to take us back to the trail. We didn’t speak about Mary Ellen or much of anything else. Returning to the trail after a night’s comforts in a town always left us disinclined to talk.

We were greeted with an immediate steep climb and walked slowly, almost gingerly. I always felt terrible on the trail the first day after a break. Katz, on the other hand, just always felt terrible. Whatever restorative effects a town visit offered always vanished with astounding swiftness on the trail. Within two minutes it was as if we had never been away-actually worse, because on a normal day I would not be laboring up a steep hill with a greasy, leaden Hardees breakfast threatening at every moment to come up for air.

We had been walking for about half an hour when another hiker-a fit-looking middle-aged guy-came along from the other direction. We asked him if he had seen a girl named Mary Ellen in a red jacket with kind of a loud voice.

He made an expression of possible recognition and said: “Does she-I’m not being rude here or anything-but does she do this a lot?” and he pinched his nose and made a series of horrible honking noises.

We nodded vigorously.

“Yeah, I stayed with her and two other guys in Plumorchard Gap Shelter last night.” He gave us a dubious, sideways look. “She a friend of yours?”

“Oh, no,” we said, disavowing her entirely, as any sensible person would. “She just sort of latched on to us for a couple of days.”

He nodded in understanding, then grinned. “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”

We grinned, too. “Was it bad?” I said.

He made a look that showed genuine pain, then abruptly, as if putting two and two together, said, “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.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble finding people to hold her down for you,” the man said absently, scanning the sky, and added: “Supposed to snow.”

I made a crestfallen noise. This was the last thing we wanted. “Really? Bad?”

He nodded. “Six to eight inches. More on the higher elevations.” He lifted his eyebrows stoically, agreeing with my dismayed expression. Snow wasn’t just discouraging, it was dangerous.

He let the prospect hang there for a moment, then said, “Well, better keep moving.” I nodded in understanding, for that was what we did in these hills. I watched him go, then turned to Katz, who was shaking his head.

“Imagine her saying that after all we did for her,” he said, then noticed me staring at him, and said in a kind of squirmy way, “What?” and then, more squirmily, “What ?”

“Don’t you ever, ever , spoil a piece of pie for me again. Do you understand?”

He winced. “Yeah, all right. Jeez,” he said and trudged on, muttering.

Two days later we heard that Mary Ellen had dropped out with blisters after trying to do thirty-five miles in two days. Big mistake.

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.

And so we walked, hour upon hour, over rollercoaster hills, along kinife-edge ridges and over grassy balds, through depthless ranks of oak, ash, chinkapin, and pine. The skies grew sullen and the air chillier, but it wasn’t until the third day that the snow came. It began in the morning as thinly scattered flecks, hardly noticeable. But then the wind rose, then rose again, until it was blowing with an end-of-the-world fury that seemed to have even the trees in a panic, and with it came snow, great flying masses of it. By midday we found ourselves plodding into a stinging, cold, hard-blowing storm. Soon after, we came to a narrow ledge of path along a wall of rock called Big Butt Mountain.