A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

Just last week I had three ladies from California—middle-aged gals, real nice, kind of giggly but, you know,
nice
—I dropped them off and they were in real high spirits. About four hours later they called and said they wanted to go home. They’d come all the way from California, you understand, spent God knows how much on airfares and equipment—I mean, they had the nicest stuff you ever saw, all brand new and top of the range—and they’d walked maybe a mile and a half before quitting. Said it wasn’t what they expected.”
    “What do they expect?”
    “Who knows? Escalators maybe. It’s hills and rocks and woods and a trail. You don’t got to do a whole lot of scientific research to work that out. But you’d be amazed how many people quit. Thenagain, I had a guy, oh about six weeks ago, who shoulda quit and didn’t. He was coming off the trail. He’d walked from Maine on his own. It took him eight months, longer than it takes most people, and I don’t think he’d seen anybody for the last several weeks. When he came off he was just a trembling wreck. I had his wife with me. She’d come to meet him, and he just fell into her arms and started weeping. Couldn’t talk at all. He was like that all the way to the airport. I’ve never seen anybody so relieved to have anything done with, and I kept thinking, ‘Well, you know, sir, hiking the Appalachian Trail is a voluntary endeavor,’ but of course I didn’t say anything.”
    “So can you tell when you drop people off whether they’re gonna make it?”
    “Pretty generally.”
    “And do you think we’ll make it?” said Katz.
    He looked at us each in turn. “Oh, you’ll make it all right,” he replied, but his expression said otherwise.
    Amicalola Falls Lodge was an aerie high on a mountainside, reached up a long, winding road through the woods. The man at the airport in Manchester had certainly seen the right weather forecast. It was piercingly, shockingly cold when we stepped from the car. A treacherous, icy wind seemed to dart around from every angle and then zip up sleeves and pant legs.
“]ee-zuss!”
Katz cried in astonishment, as if somebody had just thrown a bucket of ice water over him, and scooted inside. I paid up and followed.
    The lodge was modern and very warm, with an open lobby dominated by a stone fireplace, and the sort of anonymously comfortable rooms you would find in a Holiday Inn. We parted for our rooms and agreed to rendezvous at seven. I got a Coke from a machine in the corridor, had a lavishly steamy shower involving many towels, inserted myself between crisp sheets (how long would it be till I enjoyed this kind of comfort again?) watched discouraging reports by happy, mindless people on the Weather Channel, and slept hardly at all.
    I was up before daybreak and sat by the window watching as apale dawn grudgingly exposed the surrounding landscape—a stark and seemingly boundless expanse of thick, rolling hills covered in ranks of bare trees and the meagerest dusting of snow. It didn’t look terribly forbidding—these weren’t the Himalayas—but it didn’t look like anything you would particularly want to walk out into.
    On my way to breakfast, the sun popped out, filling the world with encouraging brightness, and I stepped outside to check out the air. The cold was startling, like a slap to the face, and the wind was still bitter. Dry little pellets of snow, like tiny spheres of polystyrene, chased around in swirls. A big wall thermometer by the entrance read 11 °F.
    “Coldest ever for this date in Georgia,” a hotel employee said with a big pleased smile as she hurried in from the parking lot, then stopped and said: “You hiking?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, better you’n me. Good luck to ya. Brrrrrrr!” And she dodged inside.
    To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out