Bill Bryson - A Walk In The Woods

Instead, I sat on a rock and watched the sunset. The pond was almost painfully beautiful. The long rays of the setting sun made the water shimmer golden. Offshore, two loons cruised, as if out for a spin after supper. I watched them for a long time, and thought about something I had seen on a BBC nature program some time before.

Loons, according to the program, are not social creatures. But towards the end of summer, just before they fly back to the North Atlantic, where they pass the winter bobbing on stormy waves, they host a series of get-togethers. A dozen or more loons from all the neighboring ponds fly in, and they all swim around together for a couple of hours for no discernible reason other than the pleasure of being together. The host loon leads the guests on a proud but low-key tour of his territory-first to his favorite little cove, say, then perhaps over to an interesting fallen log, then on to a patch of lily pads. “This is where I like to fish in the mornings,” he seems to be saying. “And here’s where we’re thinking of moving our nesting site next year.” All the other loons follow him around with diligence and polite interest. No one knows why they do this (but then no one knows why one human being would want to show another his converted bathroom) or how they arrange their rendezvous, but they all show up each night at the right lake at the right time as certainly as if they had been sent a card that said: “We’re Having a Party!” I think that’s wonderful. I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t kept thinking of Katz stumbling and gasping and searching for a lake by moonlight.

Oh, and by the way, the loons are disappearing everywhere because their lakes are dying from acid rain.

I had a rotten night, of course, and was up before five and back on the trail at first light. I continued on north in the direction I guessed Katz had gone, but with the nagging thought that I was plunging ever farther into the Hundred Mile Wilderness-not perhaps the best direction to go if he was somewhere nearby and in trouble. There was a certain incidental disquiet at the thought that I was on my own in the middle of nowhere-a disquiet briefly but vividly heightened when I stumbled in my haste on the return descent to the deep, nameless valley and came within a trice of falling fifty long feet, with a messy bounce at the bottom. I hoped I was doing the right thing.

Even flat out it would take me three days, perhaps four, to reach Abol Bridge and the campground. By the time I alerted authorities, Katz would have been missing for four or five days. On the other hand, if I turned now and went back the way we had come, I could be in Monson by the following afternoon. What I really needed was to meet somebody coming south who could tell me if they had seen Katz, but there was no one out on the trail. I looked at my watch. Of course there wasn’t. It was only a little after six in the morning. There was a shelter at chairback Gap, six miles farther on. I would reach it by eight or so. With luck, there might still be someone there. I pressed on with more care and a queasy uncertainty.

I clambered back over the pinnacle of Fourth Mountain-much harder with a pack-and into another wooded valley beyond. Four miles after leaving Cloud Pond, I came to a tiny stream, barely worthy of the term-really just a slick of moist mud. Speared to a branch beside the trail, in an intentionally prominent place, was an empty pack of Old Gold cigarettes. Katz didn’t smoke much, but he always carried a pack of Old Golds. In the mud by a fallen log were three cigarette butts. He had obviously waited here. So he was alive and hadn’t left the trail, and clearly had come this way. I felt immeasurably better. At least I was going in the right direction. As long as he stuck to the trail, I was bound eventually to overtake him.

I found him four hours after setting off, sitting on a rock by the turnoff for West chairback Pond, head inclined to the sun as if working on his tan. He was extensively scratched and muddy, and wildly bedraggled, but otherwise looked OK. He was of course delighted to see me.

“Bryson, you old mountain man, you’re a welcome sight. Where have you been?”

“I was wondering the same of you.”

“Guess I missed the last watering hole?”

I nodded.

He nodded, too. “Knew I had, of course. Soon as I got down to the bottom of that big cliff, I thought, ‘Shit, this can’t be right.’”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I don’t know. I got it in mind somehow that you must have pushed on. I was real thirsty. I think I might have been a little confused-a little addled, as you might say. I was real thirsty.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I pushed on and kept thinking I had to come to water sooner or later, and eventually I came to a mud slick-”

“Where you left the cigarette pack?”

“You saw it? I’m so proud. Yeah, well, I soaked up some water there with my bandanna, because I remembered that’s what Fess Parker did once on the Davy Crockett show.”

“How very enterprising.”

He accepted the compliment with a nod. “That took about an hour, and then I waited another hour for you and had a couple of smokes, and then it was getting dark so I put my tent up, ate a Slim Jim, and went to bed. Then this morning I sponged up a little more water with my bandanna and I came on here. There’s a real nice pond just down there, so I thought I’d wait here where there was water and hope that you’d come along eventually. I didn’t think you’d leave me up here on purpose, but you’re such a walking day dream I could just imagine you getting all the way to Katahdin before you noticed I wasn’t with you.” He put on an exaggerated accent. “‘Oh, I say, de light ful view-don’t you agree, Stephen? Stephen…? Stephen…? Now where the deuce has he got to?’” He gave me a familiar smile. “So I’m real glad to see you.”

“How’d you get so scratched up?”

He looked at his arm, which was covered in a zigzag of dried blood. “Oh that? It’s nothing.”

“What do you mean it’s nothing? It looks like you’ve been doing surgery on yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t want to alarm you, but I also got kind of lost.”

“How?”

“Oh, between losing you and coming upon the mud slick, I tried to get to a lake I saw from the mountain.”

“Stephen, you didn’t.”

“Well, I was real thirsty, you know, and it didn’t look too far. So I plunged off into the woods. Not real smart, right?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, I learned that real fast because I hadn’t gone more than half a mile before I was totally lost. I mean totally lost. It’s weird, you know, because you’re thinking all you’ve got to do is go downhill to the water and come back the same way, and that shouldn’t be too tough as long as you pay attention. But the thing is, Bryson, there’s nothing to pay attention to out there. It’s just one big woods. So when I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea where I was I thought, ‘OK, well, I got lost by going downhill, so I’d better go back up.’ But suddenly there’s a lot of uphills, and a lot of downhills too, and it’s real confusing. So I went up and up and up until I knew I’d gone a lot farther than I’d come, and then I thought, ‘Well, Stephen, you stupid piece of shit’-’cause I was getting a little cross with myself by this time, to tell you the truth-I thought, ‘you must have gone too far, you jackass,’ so I want back down a ways, and that didn’t work, so then I tried going sideways for a while and-well, you get the picture.”

“You should never leave the trail, Stephen.”

“Oh, now there’s a timely piece of advice, Bryson. Thank you so much. That’s like telling somebody who’s died in a crash, ‘Drive safely now.’”