Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

As I stood there, some fat guy in a uniform stepped out of a security booth and waddled towards me looking cross and officious.

“The hell you think you’re doing?” he barked.

“Pardon me?” I replied, taken aback, and then: “I’m looking at that hill.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I can’t look at a hill?”

“Not here you can’t. This is private property.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Well, it’s private-like the sign says.” He indicated a post that was in fact signless and looked momentarily struck. “Well, it’s private,” he added.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” I said again, not appreciating yet how keenly this man took his responsibilities. I was still marveling at the hill. “That’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?” I said.

“What is?”

“That mountain. There isn’t a scrap of vegetation on it.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not paid to look at hillsides.”

“Well, you should look sometime. I think you’d be surprised. So is that the zinc factory then?” I said, with a nod at the complex of buildings over his left shoulder.

He regarded me suspiciously. “What do you want to know for?”

I returned his stare. “I’m out of zinc,” I replied.

He gave me a sideways look as if to say “Oh, a wise guy, huh?” and said suddenly, decisively, “I think maybe I’d better take your name.” With difficulty he extracted a notebook and a stubby pencil from a back pocket.

“What, because I asked you if that was a zinc factory?”

“Because you’re trespassing on private property.”

“I didn’t know I was trespassing. You don’t even have a sign up.”

He had his pencil poised. “Name?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Sir, you are trespassing on private property. Now are you gonna tell me your name?”

“No.”

We went through a little back and forth along these lines for a minute. At last he shook his head regretfully and said, “Play it your way then.” He dragged out some communication device, pulled up an antenna, and got it to operate. Too late I realized that for all his air of exasperation this was a moment he had dreamed of during many long, uneventful shifts in his little glass booth.

“J.D.?” he said into the receiver. “Luther here. You got the clamps? I got an infractor in Lot A.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m impounding your vehicle.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I only pulled off the road for a minute. Look, I’m going, OK?”

I got in the car, started the engine, and made to go forward, but he blocked the way. I leaned from the window. “Excuse me,” I called, but he didn’t move. He just stood with his back to me and his arms crossed, conspicuously disregarding me. I tooted the horn lightly, but he was not to be shifted. I put my head out the window and said, “All right, I’ll tell you my name then.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Oh, for God sake,” I muttered and then, out the window, “Please?” and then, whinily, “Come on, buddy, please?” but he had set a course and was not to be deflected. I leaned out once more. “Tell me, did they specify ‘asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?” Then I breathed a very bad word and sat and steamed.

Thirty seconds later a car pulled up and a man in sunglasses got out. He was wearing the same kind of uniform as the first guy but was ten or fifteen years older and a whole lot trimmer. He had the bearing of a drill sergeant.

“Problem here?” he said, looking from one to the other of us.

“Perhaps you can help me,” I said in a tone of sweet reason. “I’m looking for the Appalachian Trail. This gentleman here tells me I’m trespassing.”

“He was looking at the hill, J.D.,” the fat guy protested a little hotly, but J.D. raised a palm to still him, then turned to me.

“You a hiker?”

“Yes, sir,” I indicated the pack on the backseat. “I just wanted directions and the next thing I know”-I gave a cheerfully dismayed laugh-“this man’s telling me I’m on private property and he’s impounding my car.”

“J.D., the man was looking at the hill and asking questions.” But J.D. held up another calming hand.

“Where you hiking?”

I told him.

He nodded. “Well, then you want to go up the road about four miles to Little Gap and take the right for Danielsville. At the top of the hill you’ll see the trail crossing. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Not a problem. You have a good hike, you hear?”

I thanked him again and drove off. In the rearview mirror I noticed with gratification that he was remonstrating quietly but firmly with Luther-threatening, I very much hoped, to take away his communication device.

The route went steeply up to a lonesome pass where there was a dirt parking lot. I parked, found the AT, and walked along it on a high exposed ridge through the most amazingly devastated terrain. For miles it was either entirely barren or covered in the spindly trunks of dead trees, a few still weakly standing but most toppled. It brought to mind a World War I battlefield after heavy shelling. The ground was covered in a gritty black dust, like iron filings.

The walking was uncommonly easy-the ridge was almost perfectly flat-and the absence of vegetation provided uninterrupted views. All the other visible hills, including those facing me across the narrow valley, looked to be in good health, except where they had been scarred and gouged by quarrying or strip mining, which was regularly. I walked for a little over an hour until I came to a sudden, absurdly steep descent to Lehigh Gap-almost a thousand feet straight down. I wasn’t at all ready to stop walking-in fact, I was just getting into my stride-but the idea of going down a thousand feet only to turn around and come straight back up held zero appeal, and there wasn’t any way to double back without walking miles along a busy highway. That was of course the trouble with trying to do the AT in day-sized pieces. It was designed for pushing on, ever on, not for dipping in and out of.

With a sigh, I turned around and trudged back the way I had come, in a mood neatly suited to the desolate landscape. It was almost four o’clock when I reached the car-much too late to try an alternative hike elsewhere. The afternoon was as good as shot. I had driven 350 miles to get to Pennsylvania, had spent four long days in the state, and walked a net eleven miles of the Appalachian Trail. Never again, I vowed, would I try to hike the Appalachian Trail with a car.

Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas-piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles or more. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is still an imposing presence, but the stony mass that rises from the New England woods today represents, at most, the stubby bottom one-third of what was ten million years ago.

That the Appalachian Mountains present so much more modest an aspect today is because they have had so much time in which to wear away. The Appalachians are immensely old-older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than most other mountain chains, older indeed than almost all other landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.

Something over a billion years ago, the continents of earth were a single mass called Pangaea surrounded by the lonely Panthalassan Sea. Then some unexplained turmoil within the earth’s mantle caused the land to break apart and drift off as vast asymmetrical chunks. From time to time over the ages since-three times at least-the continents have held a kind of grand reunion, floating back to some central spot and bumping together with slow but crushing force. It was during the third of these collisions, starting about 470 million years ago, that the Appalachians were first pushed up (like a rucked carpet, as the analogy nearly always has it). Four hundred seventy million years is a span pretty well beyond grasping, but if you can imagine flying backwards through time at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about sixteen years to cover such a period. It’s a long time.