A Walk in the Woods

Years ago, I guess around 1990, my brother's best friend thru-hiked the Appalachian Trial. Georgie to Maine--ostensibly, to decide where he was going to graduate school. He's a geologist now in Oregon, helping that state decide the most geologically sound places to put or expand roadways. Highway 101, which extends up the entire Pacific Coast, gives him fits--and rightly so in some places.

Of course, I'm pretty sure he had decided where he was going to grad school by the time he hit North Carolina--which meant he still had about three months of hiking ahead of him. But he is one of the hardy few, some would say the crazy few, who have hiked the entirety of the AT in one season. Heck, he trained for it, even. I remember my mother laughing when the intrepid hiker came to visit the family in Tucson, and would take off up the wash that ran behind mom's house with his pack on his back, loaded with the economy-size Tide laundry detergent to add a semblance of the necessary weight to his training.

The AT has been on my mind this week, in part because the wedding I went to in Maryland last weekend was fairly adjacent to where the trail snakes through that state--and because I swear the lovely lady GPS system (really, a very nice female British voice, calmly taking us to perilous parts unknown) had us driving on the trail to get to the morning-after brunch.

It sounds like exaggeration, doesn't it? But when the GPS has you traveling a road that becomes less road-like by the inch, until you are skidding over loose shale and rock and the way narrows so barely one car can pass, until the road climbs precipitously so that the driver has to maintain the perfect speed, else he'll either not have enough oomph to crest the peak or he'll lose control on the gravel and go careening over the edge, until the folks in the car following your lead call you to double check that we're on the correct route, and meet the assurance that the British lady has yet to say "recalculating" in her dulcet tones to gently acknowledge you've left the route any sensible driver would take with the phrase, "Okay, but you are aware we just passed a bathtub" that as entirely unassociated with the road...

The view, when we reached the height of this precarious road, was stellar. And when we finally saw a real, civilized road (with freshly painted double lines authoritatively stretching down the middle of the road), and embraced its smooth terrain, the first sign we saw said, in large white letters, "Appalachian Trail". And suddenly, the route we had taken made a great deal of sense.

I was still chuckling about the adventure on the way home, when I was stuck in the Houston airport, delayed by thunderstorms. I had finished my book en route, and had wandered fruitlessly through the fiction section of the airport bookstore. Trailing through the nonfiction, I saw a book that had long caught my eye, and finally decided this was the perfect opportunity to pick it up.



I'm most of the way through Bill Bryson's A Walk in The Woods, which is a very amusing blend of travel writing, memoir, and anthropological history of the Appalachian Trail. I laughed out loud at his description of reading about bear attacks before he left on his adventure, and several more times at the antics of his erstwhile hiking partner. But I've also learned a great deal about the AT, its keepers, and the environment that surrounds it. And I have a great deal more respect for my brother's best friend, and the journey he took from Georgia to Mt. Washington.

I have to confess, I lost my train of thought a bit in this post. In the middle of writing, my sister-in-law called, and we went for a walk. Walking along the Rillito River (which only runs when it rains heavily) is not at all like Bryson's description of walking the AT.

But sometimes, it just feels good to walk.