A Journey North: One Woman's Story of Hiking the Appalachian Trail by Adrienne Hall
209 pages
Published 2000
Read from February 3 to February 6
Rating: ★★ out of 5
When I read a book about hiking a long trail, I don't want to read about a lot of stupid stuff that has nothing to do with hiking a long trail. I don't see why this is a difficult concept for so many writers. Sure, a little bit of backstory and emotional context is acceptable, as long as it doesn't involve eating cremated pieces of your mom or page after page describing how hot your ex-girlfriend's ass was ten years ago. But all these thru-hike writers seem to forget the reason why anyone might want to read their books in the first place, which makes a genre that should be a perfect fit for my interests into one of the most regularly disappointing regions of the Dewey decimal system.
Hall writes with the dexterity of a C-list newsmagazine correspondent, e.g. without much to speak of. Every chapter follows the same outline: a brief trailside scene-setting, a diversion into some broader essay topic (the failed reintroduction of red wolves to the Smokies, air pollution, cell phone towers, stupid and long-debunked myths about universal goddess worship in utopian matriarchal societies in the make-believe past), followed by a quick sketch of trail life and a capper that tries to weave the two topics together. But even the trail narrative itself, the whole point of reading a book like this, was a tiresome slog. Hall's boyfriend/fiancee is a sitcom caricature of A Man: uncommunicative, holds his emotions clasped tight behind his teeth, loves his dog, otherwise mostly a moving lump in hiking boots, while Hall paints herself as little more than an optimistic gal willing to follow her man anywhere, even if she isn't particularly interested in the experience. The other thru-hikers barely get more than a nickname and one trait apiece, if that. The trail itself, a vivid character in every other trail narrative I've read, emerges only as a rocky, flooded, mosquito-infested unpleasantness, set dressing at best to whatever else Hall prefers to talk about at that moment.
As with everything else I read, exposure to more examples of the genre cause me to grade more harshly than I did at first. If I were to read As Far as the Eye Can See today, I doubt I'd give it such a generous grade. But even that book gave a sense of what the Appalachian Trail might actually be like, perhaps because Brill wanted to hike it instead of tagging along with a boyfriend because he wanted to go. Out of all the books that could be written and stories that could be told about the AT, I'm not sure why this one needed to be printed.
No comments:
Post a Comment