This book is a pleasant, mock-heroic account of two middle aged men against nature, trying to hike the Appalachian Trail despite no apparent love for hiking.  Indeed, the whole set-up seems clearly artificial, as the author, one dryly humorous Bill Bryston, and Stephen Katz, an out-of-shape recovering alcoholic and drug addict from Iowa, seek to hike and muse about the most famous hiking trail in the United States, one whose history has attracted a fair amount of lore.

The account is a strange and compelling mixture of insightful trivia (including a lot of in-jokes that I was able to get ranging from a commentary on the geological work of John McPhee on the orogeny of the Appalachian Mountains around the Delaware Water Gap [1] and its flattering praise of the legendary Allan Partridge, who was once the superintendent of the United States Military Academy and founded Norwich University, of which I am a graduate).  These bits of obscure trivia are tied together with grim musings on the destructiveness of mankind and various fungal plagues that have wiped out species of trees and birds, leaving the woods of the Appalachian Trail to be a surprisingly quiet place.

One of the more curious features is the subtle criticism that Bill Bryson provides to elitist snobs who have tended to turn some parts of the Appalachian Trail into overly commercialized havens (see Mount Washington, New Hampshire) and have cut off the Appalachian Trail from the “real life” of the poor of Appalachia by “rural gentrification” and kicking out the poor of the mountains of West Virginia so that the land could be unspoiled (if artificial) wilderness for middle and upper-class hikers.  Between the very violence against nature of exploiting Appalachia’s wilderness to the violence of evicting poor people with great views so that wealthier thru-hikers could enjoy an unspoiled hike over pristine wilderness strikes this son of Appalachia as a great evil, however it may strike Bill Bryson.

The book is clearly designed as a comedy, as well as part sermon against acid rain and the greed and hubris of homo americanus, though it contains plenty of elements of tragedy as well, such as the aforementioned evicted mountaineers and the evacuated and ghostly town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where the coal underneath the city started burning, turning the city into an infernal pit of smoking subterranean coal (with its CO2 emissions) and the threat of sinkholes that almost swallowed up a young boy in his own backyard.  If this were Florida, we’d just call it an exit ramp from the interstate.

The book also contains two humorous and apologetic “quitting narratives,” one of them in the commercialized horror that is Gatlinburg, Tennessee and the other in the nearly trackless wilderness of rural Maine.  The two points place the “ideal mean” of the manly rural hiker between the laziness and ersatz civilization that marks the lifestyle of Americans and the horrors and dangers of the untamed wilderness, which do not include the humble and dopey (and very loveable) moose.  The book is an excellent and reasonably quick 300-or-so page read, but your opinion of it will depend on the extent to which you find the book’s conceit to be believable, and your opinion of the author’s numerous rants about everything from blackflies to the the rednecks of Deliverance (I for one found Bryson rather condescending and hostile towards my people of Appalachia, and a bit too tainted with snobbish elitism, and a hint of socialism, from his time in Europe, but perhaps I am a bit biased).  That said, if you like a mock heroic account of two hilariously unsuitable wild men seeking to tackle the Appalachian Trail, you will find much to enjoy–either laughing with or at the author and his companion.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/book-review-annals-of-the-former-world/