Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

The two big shocks were how expensive everything was-each time Dave dodged into the storeroom or went off to confirm a denier rating, I stole looks at price tags and was invariably appalled-and how every piece of equipment appeared to require some further piece of equipment. If you bought a sleeping bag, then you needed a stuff sack for it. The stuff sack cost $29. I found this an increasingly difficult concept to warm to.

When, after much solemn consideration, I settled on a backpack-a very expensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-stinting-here sort of thing-he said, “Now what kind of straps do you want with that?”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, and recognized at once that I was on the brink of a dangerous condition known as retail burnout. No more now would I blithely say, “Better give me half a dozen of those, Dave. Oh, and I’ll take eight of these-what the heck, make it a dozen. You only live once, eh?” The mound of provisions that a minute ago had looked so pleasingly abundant and exciting-all new! all mine!-suddenly seemed burdensome and extravagant.

“Straps,” Dave explained. “You know, to tie on your sleeping bag and lash things down.”

“It doesn’t come with straps?” I said in a new, level tone.

“Oh, no.” He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose. “You’ll need a raincover too, of course.”

I blinked. “A raincover? Why?”.

“To keep out the rain.”

“The backpack’s not rainproof?”

He grimaced as if making an exceptionally delicate distinction. “Well, not a hundred percent…”

This was extraordinary to me. “Really? Did it not occur to the manufacturer that people might want to take their packs outdoors from time to time? Perhaps even go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars! Are you shi-,” I paused and put on a new voice. “Are you saying, Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn’t have straps and it isn’t waterproof?”

He nodded.

“Does it have a bottom in it?”

Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not in his nature to grow critical or weary in the rich, promising world of camping equipment. “The straps come in a choice of six colors,” he offered helpfully.

I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas-a three-season tent, self-inflating sleeping pad, nested pots and pans, collapsible eating utensils, plastic dish and cup, complicated pump-action water purifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, seam sealer, patching kit, sleeping bag, bungee cords, water bottles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, pack cover, a rather nifty compass/thermometer keyring, a little collapsible stove that looked frankly like trouble, gas bottle and spare gas bottle, a hands-free flashlight that you wore on your head like a miner’s lamp (this I liked very much), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated long johns and undershirts, four bandannas, and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had to go back again and ask what it was for exactly. I drew the line at buying a designer groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmart for $5. I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one’s poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. The orange spade in particular seemed to shout: “Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way for Mr. Buttercup!”

Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books- The Thru-Hiker’s Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, a geological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collins chew, and the complete, aforementioned set of official Appalachian Trail Guides, consisting of eleven small paperback books and fifty-nine maps in different sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin and ambitiously priced at $233.45 the set. On the way out I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence “This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him,” and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, which made it both exciting and daunting, but mostly daunting. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plastic packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-inflating sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long time trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, entirely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, cozily domesticated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglike creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: “Hey, Virgil, there’s one over here. Y’all remember the rope?” But I couldn’t really.

I hadn’t been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blankets and card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once you got used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with time, and the fact that the fabric gave everything inside a sickly greenish pallor, like the glow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A little claustrophobic perhaps, a little odd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.

This wouldn’t be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

On the afternoon of July 5, 1983, three adult supervisors and a group of youngsters set up camp at a popular spot beside Lake Canimina in the fragrant pine forests of western Quebec, about eighty miles north of Ottawa, in a park called La Vérendrye Provincial Reserve. They cooked dinner and, afterwards, in the correct fashion, secured their food in a bag and carried it a hundred or so feet into the woods, where they suspended it above the ground between two trees, out of the reach of bears.

About midnight, a black bear came prowling around the margins of the camp, spied the bag, and brought it down by climbing one of the trees and breaking a branch. He plundered the food and departed, but an hour later he was back, this time entering the camp itself, drawn by the lingering smell of cooked meat in the campers’ clothes and hair, in their sleeping bags and tent fabric. It was to be a long night for the Canimina party. Three times between midnight and 3:30A.M. the bear came to the camp.

Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a little tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine its quiet grunts and mysterious snufflings, the clatter of upended cookware and sounds of moist gnawings, the pad of its feet and the heaviness of its breath, the singing brush of its haunch along your tent side. Imagine the hot flood of adrenaline, that unwelcome tingling in the back of your arms, at the sudden rough bump of its snout against the foot of your tent, the alarming wild wobble of your frail shell as it roots through the backpack that you left casually propped by the entrance-with, you suddenly recall, a Snickers in the pouch. Bears adore Snickers, you’ve heard.