Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

Elsewhere, bridges were being brushed aside and riverside towns inundated. Before the day was out, the Delaware River would rise forty-three feet. By the time the waters finally receded, 400 people were dead and the whole of the Delaware Valley was devastated.

Into this gooey mess stepped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a plan to build a dam at Tocks Island, very near where I was walking now. The dam, according to the Corps’ plan, would not only tame the river but allow the creation of a new national park, at the heart of which would be a recreational lake almost forty miles long. Eight thousand residents were moved out. It was all done very clumsily. One of the people evicted was blind. Several farmers had only parts of their land bought, so that they ended up with farmland but no house or a farmhouse but no land. A woman whose family had farmed the same land since the eighteenth century was carried from her house kicking and bellowing, to the delight of newspaper photographers and film crews.

The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well. A dam across the Missouri River in Nebraska silted up so disastrously that a noisome ooze began to pour into the town of Niobrara, eventually forcing its permanent abandonment. Then a Corps dam in Idaho failed. Fortunately it was in a thinly populated area and there was some warning. Even so, several small towns were washed away and eleven people lost their lives. But these were relatively small dams. Tocks Dam would have held one of the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, with forty miles of water behind it. Four substantial cities-Trenton, Camden, Wilmington, and Philadelphia-and scores of smaller communities stood downstream. A disaster on the Delaware would truly be a disaster.

And here was the nimble Army Corps of Engineers planning to hold back 250 billion gallons of water with notoriously unstable glacial till. Besides that there were all kinds of environmental worries-that salinity levels below the dam would rise catastrophically, for example, devastating the ecology lower down, not least the valuable oyster beds of Delaware Bay.

In 1992, after years of growing protests that spread far beyond the Delaware Valley, the dam plan was finally put on hold, but by this time whole villages and farms had been bulldozed. A quiet, remote, very beautiful farming valley that had not changed a great deal in 200 years was lost forever. “One beneficial result of the [canceled] project,” notes the Appalachian Trail Guide to New York and New Jersey, “was that the land acquired by the federal government for the national recreation area has provided the Trail with a Protected corridor.”

To tell you the truth I was getting a little wearied of this. I know the Appalachian Trail is supposed to be a wilderness experience, and I accept that there are countless places where it would be a tragedy for it to be otherwise, but sometimes, as here, the ATC seems to be positively phobic about human contact. Personally, I would have been pleased to be walking now through hamlets and past farms rather than through some silent “protected corridor.”

Doubtless it is all to do with our historic impulse to tame and exploit the wilderness, but America’s attitude to nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me. I couldn’t help comparing my experience now with an experience I’d had three or four years earlier in Luxembourg when I went hiking with my son for a magazine assignment. Luxembourg is a much more delightfui place to hike than you might think. It has lots of woods but also castles and farms and steepled villages and winding river valleys-the whole, as it were, European package. The footpaths we followed spent a lot of time in the woods but also emerged at obliging intervals to take us along sunny back roads and over stiles and through farm fields and hamlets. We were always able at some point each day to call in at a bakery or post office, to hear the tinkle of shop bells and eavesdrop on conversations we couldn’t understand. Each night we slept in an inn and ate in a restaurant with other people. We experienced the whole of Luxembourg, not just its trees. It was wonderful, and it was wonderful because the whole charmingly diminutive package was seamlessly and effortlessly integrated.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition-either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit-that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.

I would have much preferred it if the AT guidebook had said: “Thanks to the Conference’s efforts, farming has been restored to the Delaware River Valley, and the footpath rerouted to incorporate sixteen miles of riverside walking because, let’s face it, you can get too much of trees sometimes.”

Still, we must look on the bright side. If the Army Corps of Engineers had had its foolish way, I’d have been swimming back to my car now, and I was grateful at least to be spared that.

Anyway, it was time to do some real hiking again.

In 1983, a man walking in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts just off the Appalachian Trail saw-or at least swears he saw-a mountain lion cross his path, which was a little unsettling and even more unexpected since mountain lions hadn’t been seen in the northeastern United States since 1903, when the last one was shot in New York State.

Soon, however, sightings were being reported all over New England. A man driving a back road of Vermont saw two cubs playing at the roadside. A pair of hikers saw a mother and two cubs cross a meadow in New Hampshire. Every year there were half a dozen or more reports in similar vein, all by credible witnesses. In the late winter of 1994 a farmer in Vermont was walking across his property, taking some seed to a bird feeder, when he saw what appeared to be three mountain lions about seventy feet away. He stared dumbstruck for a minute or two-for mountain lions are swift, fierce creatures, and here were three of them looking at him with calm regard-then hightailed it to a phone and called a state wildlife biologist. The animals were gone by the time the biologist arrived, but he found some fresh scat, which he dutifully bagged up and dispatched to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Laboratory. The lab report came back that it was indeed the scat of Felis concolor, the eastern mountain lion, also variously and respectfully known as the panther, cougar, puma, and, especially in New England, catamount.

All this was of some interest to me, for I was hiking in about the same spot as that initial mountain lion sighting. I was back on the trail with a new keenness and determination, and a new plan. I was going to hike New England, or at least as much of it as I could knock off until Katz returned in seven weeks to walk with me through Maine’s Hundred Mile Wilderness. There are almost 700 miles of gorgeously mountainous Appalachian Trail in New England-about a third of the AT’s total trail length-enough to keep me occupied till August. To that end, I had my obliging wife drive me to southwestern Massachusetts and drop me on the trail near Stockbridge for a three-day amble through the Berkshires. Thus it was that I was to be found, on a hot morning in mid-June, laboring sweatily up a steep but modest eminence called Becket Mountain, in a haze of repellent-resistant blackflies, and patting my pocket from time to time to check that my knife was still there.