A Walk in the Woods: Chapters 4–7

So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked.

But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace.

It was conceived a century ago as a kind of woodland bank, a permanent repository of American timber, when people grew alarmed at the rate at which American forests were falling.

In 1987, it casually announced that it would allow private timber interests to remove hundreds of acres of wood a year from the venerable and verdant Pisgah National Forest, next door to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park...

Actually we had done eight point four, but this had included several formidable escarpments, including a notable wall of hell called Preaching Rock, the highest eminence since Springer Mountain, for which we had awarded ourselves bonus miles, for purposes of morale.

We had hiked twenty-two miles in two days—a highly respectable distance for us—but a distinct listlessness and sense of anticlimax, a kind of midmountain lassitude, had set in.

There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane.

I decided to go out to reconnoiter and see how stranded we might be.

At about one o’clock we came at last to old 64, a lonesome, superannuated two-lane road through the mountains.

He introduced us around—each person greeted us with a friendly but desultory nod—and indicated which were the spare bunks, one on the top level, nearly up at the ceiling, the other on the bottom on the opposite side of the room.

On the second night, at nine o’clock, an unlikely noise came from his tent—the punctured-air click of a beverage can being opened—and he said in a pugnacious tone, “Do you know what that was, Bryson? Cream soda. You know what else? I’m drinking it right now, and I’m not giving you any. And you know what else? It’s delicious.”

In eastern North America, there was no such impediment to retreat, so trees and other plants found their way through river valleys and along the flanks of mountains until they arrived at a congenial refuge in the Smokies, and there they have remained ever since.

The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting—certainly the most striking—example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal—the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk.

Outside there was no picnic table, as at most other shelters, and no privy.

He was eating a carrot (nobody could cadge food like Katz) and was about to ask me something, but when his eye lit on Bob’s transparent pouch, he said: “Hey, look—a pouch with a window. Is that for people who are so stupid they can’t figure out how to get it open?”