Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that the phloem, xylem, and cambium perform. They also manufacture lignin and cellulose; regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum, oils, and resins; dole out minerals and nutrients; convert starches into sugars for future growth (which is where maple syrup comes into the picture); and goodness knows what else. But because all this is happening in such a thin layer, it also leaves the tree terribly vulnerable to invasive organisms. To combat this, trees have formed elaborate defense mechanisms. The reason a rubber tree seeps latex when cut is that this is its way of saying to insects and other organisms, “Not tasty. Nothing here for you. Go away.” Trees can also deter destructive creatures like caterpillars by flooding their leaves with tannin, which makes the leaves less tasty and so inclines the caterpillars to look elsewhere. When infestations are particularly severe, some trees can even communicate the fact. Some species of oak release a chemical that tells other oaks in the vicinity that an attack is under way. In response, the neighboring oaks step up their tannin production the better to withstand the coming onslaught.

By such means, of course, does nature tick along. The problem arises when a tree encounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepared, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells, and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has the faintest idea, chemically speaking, what hit it. It spreads by means of spores, which are produced in the hundreds of millions in each canker. A single woodpecker can transfer a billion spores on one flight between trees. At the height of the American chestnut blight, every woodland breeze would lose spores in uncountable trillions to drift in a pretty, lethal haze on to neighboring hillsides. The mortality rate was 100 percent. In just over thirty-five years the American chestnut became a memory. The Appalachians alone lost four billion trees, a quarter of its cover, in a generation.

A great tragedy, of course. But how lucky, when you think about it, that these diseases are at least species specific. Instead of a chestnut blight or Dutch elm disease or dogwood anthracnose, what if there was just a tree blight-something indiscriminate and unstoppable that swept through whole forests? In fact, there is. It’s called acid rain.

But let’s stop there. I think we’ve both had enough science for one chapter. But hold that thought, please, and bear it in mind when I tell you that there wasn’t a day in the Appalachian woods when I didn’t give passing thanks for what there was.

So the forest through which Katz and I passed now was nothing like the forest that was known even to people of my father’s generation, but at least it was a forest. It was splendid in any case to be enveloped once more in our familiar surroundings. It was in every detectable respect the same forest that we had left in North Carolina-same violently slanted trees, same narrow brown path, same expansive silence, broken only by our tiny grunts and labored breaths as we struggled up hills that proved to be as steep, if not quite as lofty, as those we had left behind. But, curiously, though we had come a couple of hundred miles north, spring seemed further advanced here. The trees, predominantly oak, were more fully in bud, and there were occasional clumps of wildflowers-bloodroot and trillium and Dutchmen’s breeches-rising through the carpet of last year’s leaves. Sunlight filtered through the branches overhead, throwing spotlights on the path, and there was a certain distinctive, heady spring lightness in the air. We took off first our jackets and then our sweaters. The world seemed altogether a genial place.

Best of all, there were views, luscious and golden, to left and right. For four hundred miles through Virginia, the Blue Ridge is essentially a single long fin, only a mile or two wide, notched here and there with deep, V-shaped passes called gaps but otherwise holding generally steady at about 3,000 feet, with the broad green Valley of Virginia stretching off to the Allegheny Mountains to the west and lazy pastoral piedmont to the east. So here each time we hauled ourselves to a mountaintop and stepped onto a rocky overlook, instead of seeing nothing but endless tufted green mountains stretching to the horizon, we got airy views of a real, lived-in world: sunny farms, clustered hamlets, clumps of woodland, and winding highways, all made exquisitely picturesque by distance. Even an interstate highway, with its cloverleaf interchanges and parallel roadways, looked benign and thoughtful, like the illustrations you used to get in children’s books in my boyhood, showing an America that was busy and on the move but not too busy to be attractive.

We walked for a week and hardly saw a soul. One afternoon I met a man who had been section hiking for twenty-five years with a bicycle and a car. Each morning he would drop the bike at a finishing point ten miles or so down the trail, drive the car back to the start, hike between the two and cycle back to his car. He did this for two weeks every April and figured he had about another twenty years to go. Another day I followed an older man, lean and rangy, who looked to be well into his seventies. He had a small, old-fashioned day pack of tawny canvas and moved with extraordinary swiftness. Two or three times an hour I would sight him just ahead, fifty or sixty yards away, vanishing into the trees. Though he moved much faster than I did and never seemed to rest, he was always there. Wherever there was fifty or sixty yards of view, there he would be-just the back of him, just disappearing. It was like following a ghost. I tried to catch up and couldn’t. He never looked at me that I could see, but I was sure he was aware of me behind him. You get a kind of sixth sense for the presence of others in the woods, and when you realize people are near, you always pause to let them catch up, just to exchange pleasantries and say hello and maybe find out if anyone has heard a weather forecast. But the man ahead never paused, never varied his pace, never looked back. In the late afternoon he vanished and I never saw him again.

In the evening, I told Katz about it.

“Jesus,” he muttered privately, “now he’s hallucinating on me.” But the next day Katz saw him all day-behind him, following, always near but never overtaking. It was very weird. After that, neither of us saw him again. We didn’t see anyone.

In consequence, we had shelters to ourselves each night, which was a big treat. You know your life has grown pathetic when you’re thrilled to have a covered wooden platform to call your own, but there you are-we were thrilled. The shelters along this section of trail were mostly new and spanking clean. Several were even provisioned with a broom-a cozy, domestic touch. Moreover, the brooms were used ( we used them, and whistled while we did it), proving that if you give an AT hiker an appliance of comfort he will use it responsibly. Each shelter had a nearby privy, a good water source, and a picnic table, so we could prepare and eat our meals in a more or less normal posture instead of squatting on damp logs. All of these are great luxuries on the 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 is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy-something we could all do with more of in our lives.