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Real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core." "The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced

He tells you of the power of woods to unnerve. Impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex." And bears that bite.

He tells you of the trail's perils: its dangerous animals, killing diseases, "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of More variety even than the terrain of the 12 states through which the trail passes.īryson has met this challenge with zest and considerable humor. So the challenge to Bryson - a writer of travel books ("The Lost Continent," "Notes from a Small Island") and books about language ("The Mother Tongue," "Made in America") - was to lend variety to He decided to do it because a little voice in his head said one day: All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge."Ī willingness to trudge, in Bryson's case, the full length of the Appalachian Trail, some 2,160 miles, from Springer Mountain, in Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, 'far removed from the seats of strife,' as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. Or as Bryson describes what he calls "the world on foot": "You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants you exist in a tranquil tedium,

Hort of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like Bill Bryson's latest, "A Walk in the Woods: RediscoveringĪmerica on the Appalachian Trail." The only risk is the one posed by all books on nature: a certain monotony.

Rediscovering America on the Appalachian TrailĢ76 pages. 'A Walk in the Woods': On the Trail, With Wit and InsightsīOOKS OF THE TIMES / By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT 'A Walk in the Woods': On the Trail, With Wit and Insights