Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter’s, and while he was off in the footwear section I had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest-it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety-and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches.

I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve. “What?” he said. “What?”

I showed him the map. “Yeah, what?” Katz didn’t like mysteries.

“Look at the map, and then look at the part we’ve walked.”

He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his face. “Jesus,” he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. “We’ve done nothing.”

We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded silence. All that we had experienced and done-all the effort and toil, the aches, the damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles-all that came to two inches. My hair had grown more than that.

One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine.

In a way, it was liberating. If we couldn’t walk the whole trail, we also didn’t have to, which was a novel thought that grew more attractive the more we considered it. We had been released from our obligations. A whole dimension of drudgery-the tedious, mad, really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between Georgia and Maine-had been removed. We could enjoy ourselves.

So the next morning, after breakfast, we spread our maps across my motel room bed and studied the possibilities that were suddenly opened to us. In the end we decided to return to the trail not at Newfound Gap, where we had left it, but a little farther on at a place called Spivey Gap, near Ernestville. This would take us beyond the Smokies-with its crowded shelters and stifling regulations-and put us back in a world where we could please ourselves. I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up cab companies. There were three in Gatlinburg. I called the first one.

“How much would it be to take take two of us to Ernestville?” I inquired.

“Dunno,” came the reply.

This threw me slightly. “Well, how much do you think it would be?”

“Dunno.”

“But it’s just down the road.”

There was a considerable silence and then the voice said: “Yup.”

“Haven’t you ever taken anybody there before?”

“Nope.”

“Well, it looks to me on my map like it’s about twenty miles. Would you say that’s about right?”

Another pause. “Might be.”

“And how much would it be to take us twenty miles?”

“Dunno.”

I looked at the receiver. “Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.”

Then I hung up.

“Maybe not my place to say,” Katz offered thoughtfully, “but I’m not sure that’s the best way to ensure prompt and cheerful service.”

I called up another cab company and asked how much it would be to Ernestville.

“Dunno,” said the voice.

Oh, for christ sake, I thought.

“What do you wanna go there for?” demanded the voice.

“Pardon?”

“What do you wanna go to Ernestville for? Tain’t nothin there.”

“Well, actually we want to go to Spivey Gap. We’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, you see.”

“Spivey Gap’s another five miles.”

“Yeah, I was just trying to get an idea…”

“You shoulda said so ’cause Spivey Gap’s another five miles.”

“Well, how much would it be to Spivey Gap then?”

“Dunno.”

“Excuse me, but is there some kind of gross stupidity requirement to be a cab driver in Gatlinburg?”

“What?”

I hung up again and looked at Katz. “What is it with this town? I’ve blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.”

I called up the third and final company and asked how much it would be to Ernestville.

“How much you got?” barked a feisty voice.

Now here was a guy I could do business with. I grinned and said, “I don’t know. A dollar fifty?”

There was a snort. “Well, it’s gonna cost you more than that.” A pause and the creak of a chair going back. “It’s gonna go on what’s on the meter, you understand, but I expect it’ll be about twenty bucks, something like that. What do you wanna go to Ernestville for anyway?”

I explained about Spivey Gap and the AT.

“Appalachian Trail? You must be a danged fool. What time you wanna go?”

“I don’t know. How about now?”

“Where y’at?”

I told him the name of the motel.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen minutes at the outside. If I’m not there in twenty minutes, then go on ahead without me and I’ll meet you at Ernestville.” He hung up. We had not only found a driver, we’d found a comedian.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton-not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened-was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a school-teacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. 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.

Suddenly-I can’t altogether explain it, but suddenly-I had a powerful urge not to be this far south any longer. I turned to Katz.

“Why don’t we go to Virginia?”

“What?”

Somebody in a shelter a couple of days before had told us how delightful-how gorgeously amenable to hiking-the mountains of the Virginia Blue Ridge were. Once you got up into them, he had assured us, it was nearly all level walking, with sumptuous views over the broad valley of the Shenandoah River. People routinely knocked off twenty-five miles a day up there. From the vantage of a dank, dripping Smokies shelter, this had sounded like Xanadu, and the idea had stuck. I explained my thinking to Katz.

He sat forward intently. “Are you saying we leave out all the trail between here and Virginia? Not walk it? Skip it?” He seemed to want to make sure he understood this exactly.

I nodded.

“Well, shit yes.”

So when the cabdriver pulled up a minute later and got out to look us over, I explained to him, hesitantly and a bit haplessly-for I had really not thought this through-that we didn’t want to go Ernestville at all now, but to Virginia.