Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

We had lunch with Connolly at Skyland, and then he left us to hitchhike back to his car at Rockfish Gap and return home. Katz and I bade him farewell and then pushed on, for that was what we did. We had nearly completed the first part of our adventure, so there was a certain home-stretch perkiness in our steps. We walked for three days more, stopping at restaurants when we came to them, and camping in shelters, which once again we had mostly to ourselves. On our next to last day on the trail, our sixth since setting off from Rockfish Gap, we were walking along beneath dull skies when there came an abrupt, cold roaring of wind. Trees danced and swayed, dust and leaves rose up around us in boisterous swirls, and our jackets and outerwear took on sudden lives of their own, leaping and flapping about us. There was a roll of thunder and then it began to rain-a really cold, miserable, penetrating rain. We sheathed ourselves in nylon and stoically pushed on.

It turned out to be an awful day in nearly every way. In the early afternoon, I discovered that I had lost my backpack raincover (which, may I just say here, was a completely useless, ill-designed piece of crap anyway, for which I had paid $25) and that nearly everything in my pack now ranged from disagreeably damp to completely sodden. I had, fortunately, taken to wrapping my sleeping bag in a double thickness of trash bags (cost: 35 cents), so it at least was dry. Twenty minutes later, as I sheltered under a bough waiting for Katz, he arrived and immediately said, “Hey, where’s your stick?” I had lost my beloved walking stick-I suddenly remembered propping it against a tree when I had stopped to tie a lace-and was filled with despair. That stick had seen me through six and a half weeks of mountains, had become all but part of me. It was a link with my children, whom I missed more than I can tell you. I felt like weeping. I told Katz where I thought I’d left it, at a place called Elkwallow Gap, about four miles back.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said without hesitation and started to drop his pack. I could have wept again-he really meant it-but I wouldn’t let him go. It was too far, and besides, Elkwallow Gap was a public place. Someone would have taken it as a souvenir by now.

So we pressed on to a spot called Gravel Springs Hut. It was only half past two when we got there. We had planned to go at least six miles farther, but we were so soaked and the rain was so unrelenting that we decided to stop. I had no dry clothes, so I stripped to my boxer shorts and climbed into my sleeping bag. We spent the longest afternoon I can ever remember listlessly reading and staring out at the pattering rain.

At about five o’clock, just to make our day complete, a group of six noisy people arrived, three men and three women, dressed in the most preposterously Ralph Lauren-style hiking clothes-safari jackets and broad-brimmed canvas hats and suede hiking boots. These were clothes for sauntering along the veranda at Mackinac or perhaps going on a jeep safari, but patently not for hiking. One of the women, arriving a few paces behind the others and walking through the mud as if it were radioactive, peered into the shelter at me and Katz and said with undisguised distaste, “Ooh, do we have to share?”

They were, to a degree that would have been fascinating in less trying circumstances, stupid, obnoxious, cheerfully but astonishingly self-absorbed, and not remotely acquainted with trail etiquette. Katz and I found ourselves carelessly bumped and jostled into the darkest corners, sprayed with water from clothes being shaken out, and knocked in the head with casually discarded equipment. In astonishment, we watched as clothes we had hung up to dry on a small clothesline were pushed and bunched to one side to make abundant room for their stuff. I sat sullenly, unable to concentrate on my book, while two of the men crouched beside me in my light, and had the following conversation:

“I’ve never done this before.”

“What-camp in a shelter?”

“No, look through binoculars with my glasses on.”

“Oh, I thought you meant camp in a shelter-ha! ha! ha!”

“No, I meant look through binoculars with my glasses on-ha! ha! ha!”

After about a half an hour of this, Katz came over, knelt beside me, and said in a whisper, “One of these guys just called me ‘Sport.’ I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Pitch my tent in the clearing. You coming?”

“I’m in my underpants,” I said pathetically.

Katz nodded in understanding and stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “can I have your attention for a minute? Excuse me, Sport, can I have your attention? We’re going to go out and pitch our tents in the rain, so you can have all the space in here, but my friend here is in his boxer shorts and is afraid of offending the ladies-and maybe exciting the gentlemen,” he added with a brief, sweet leer, “so could you turn your heads for a minute while he puts his wet clothes back on? Meanwhile, I’ll say good-bye and thank you for allowing us to share a few inches of your space for a little while. It’s been a slice.”

Then he jumped down into the rain. I dressed hastily, surrounded by silence and self-consciously averted gazes, then bounded down with a small, wimpily neutral good-bye. We pitched our tents about thirty yards away-not an easy or enjoyable process in a driving rain, believe me-and climbed in. Before we had finished, voices from the shelter had resumed and were succeeded by peels of triumphant laughter. They were noisy until dark, then drunkenly noisy until the small hours. I wondered if at any point they would experience some twinge of charity or remorse and send over a peace offering-a brownie, perhaps, or a hot dog-but they did not.

When we woke in the morning, the rain had stopped, though the world was still insipid and dreary, and water was dripping from the trees. We didn’t bother with coffee. We just wanted to get out of there. We broke down our tents and packed away our stuff. Katz went to get a shirt from the line and reported that our six friends were sleeping heavily. There were two empty bourbon bottles, he reported in a tone of disdain.

We hefted our packs and set off down the trail. We had walked perhaps 400 yards, out of sight of the camp, when Katz stopped me.

“You know that woman who said ‘Ooh, do we have to share?’ and shoved our clothes to the end of the clothesline?” he asked.

I nodded. Of course I remembered her.

“Well, I’m not real proud of this. I want you to understand that. But when I went to get my shirt, I noticed her boots were right by the edge of the platform and, well, I did something kind of bad.”

“What?” I tried to imagine, but couldn’t.

He opened his hand and there were two suede shoelaces. Then he beamed-a big, winning beam-and stuck them in his pocket and walked on.

And that was about it for the start of our great adventure. We walked eighteen miles to Front Royal, where my wife was to pick us up in two days if she managed to find her way by car from New Hampshire in an unfamiliar country.

I had to go off for a month to do other things-principally, try to persuade people to buy a book of mine even though it had nothing to do with effortless weight loss, running with the wolves, thriving in an age of anxiety, or the O.J. Simpson trial. (Even so, it sold over sixty copies.) Katz was going back to Des Moines, where he had a job offer for the summer building houses, though he promised to come back in August and hike the famous and forbidding Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine with me.