A Walk in the Woods: Chapters 8–12

Before they could demur, which was clearly their instinct, we thanked them profusely and climbed into the back seat.

We were halfway through this simple, disappointing repast when the waitress dropped the bill on the table as she passed.

The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks.

Then the estimable Ms. Parton built an amusement park called Dollywood.

If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier.

Somebody in a shelter a couple of days before had told us how delightful—how gorgeously amenable to hiking—the mountains of the Virginia Blue Ridge were.

Today the AT is a wilderness by design—actually, by fiat, since many of the properties Shaffer passed were later compulsorily purchased and quietly returned to woodland.

They often collected in prodigious, not to say rapacious, quantities.

They often collected in prodigious, not to say rapacious, quantities.

“I can’t find one [friend] that will bear the fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations,” John Bartram complained wearily in a letter to his English patron.

In 1817, he produced (literally, for he not only wrote the text but set most of the type himself) the seminal Genera of North American Plants, which stood for the better part of a century as the principal encyclopedia of American botany.

For four hundred miles through Virginia, the Blue Ridge is essentially a single long fin, only a mile or two wide, notched here and there with deep, V-shaped passes called gaps but otherwise holding generally steady at about 3,000 feet, with the broad green Valley of Virginia stretching off to the Allegheny Mountains to the west and lazy pastoral piedmont to the east.

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without benefit of metal.

Nearly everything in the store required microwaving or oven heating or scrupulous refrigeration or came in large, family-sized quantities.

Late the next morning, when I realized that I had considerably outstripped Katz and Connolly, who were talking and not making particularly good time, I stopped to wait for them in a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel.