Book 12 - Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

The last book was a memoir of personal recovery and how a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail enabled a young girl reconnect with who she had once been and find the strength to grow into who she wanted to become. This book couldn’t be more different in tone and intent, even if it is about a similarly long through-hike of the East Coast equivalent: the Appalachian Trail. Bill Bryson started his adventure from the place Cheryl Strayed wanted to arrive. He was already a successful author, and settled in his life. As far as we know he had no great demons to face down in the wild, no need for a long physical challenge in order to find his centre. One of the walks was a slightly desperate throw of the dice, the other more of a whim, probably with a book in mind. You might not find much personal redemption in Bryson but there is more humour and information about his surroundings.

I honestly do not know what I can write here that will add anything to what is already known about Bill Bryson and his books. He is an institution. An author used a a reference point in the quotes on the cover of other books; someone who defines his own category. He writes about places or things with humour and although he seems to place himself in the centre of the story, deep down it is not really about him. The narrative might be about his actions and reactions but he doesn’t go deep in his own psyche. He is more interested in what he sees (which is as it should be). I find it confusing when he is described as a humorist; yes he can be funny but he also does his research and is informative. It’s a neat trick: as a reader you learn stuff whilst being amused. It’s what keeps you going and what sets him apart. He has great skill in presenting information, which in other hands could be dry, and make it come alive. Take for example this about trees:

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem, and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do this is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in the forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that phloem, xylem, and cambium perform

I will never look at trees in the same way again.

But Bryson can also be a bit spiky. His contempt for the National Park Service, which maintains the trail, is a recurring theme.

Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957 decided to ‘reclaim’ Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow trout. To that end, biologists dumped extravagant quantities of a poison called rotenone into 15 miles of creek. Within hours, tens of thousands of dead fish were floating on the surface like autumn leaves - what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist. Among the 31 species of Abrams Creek fish that were wiped out was one called smoky madam, which scientists had never seen before. Thus the Park Service biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and eradicating a new species of fish in the same instant.

The payoff at the end might be wonderfully ironic but it is the “what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist” that is really cutting (especially with the substitution of naturalist for biologist).

I came away from this book with an increased appreciation of the skill with which Bryson puts his books together and the craftsmanship of his writing. It makes an interesting comparison with Wild, in the one I was deeply impressed by the story, in the other by the way the story was told.

Date of first publication
1997

Link to last book

This is pretty obvious. The Appalachian Trail is the east coast equivalent of the Pacific Crest Trail so the two books make an interesting comparison, especially as both the walks must have happened at roughly the same time. Although Wild was published only a couple of years ago and A Walk in the Woods dates from 1997, Strayed started her walk in 1995.