AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller
336 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 27 to March 1
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
All I want from a hiking narrative is precisely that: a hiking narrative. This book comes closest to that seemingly straightforward ideal, providing an almost day-by-day account of Miller's 2003 thru-hike -- in fact, Miller's recounting becomes almost tedious, a repetition of getting up, eating oatmeal, walking however many miles up and down hills and mountains, maybe going into town to stay at a bunkhouse and consume a lot of calories. The text is largely pieced together from the online trail journal he maintained at the time, so when the tedium of a particular segment got under his skin, you can feel it for yourself. Miller's prose doesn't scintillate; I'd put his skills as a writer just barely above David Brill, below Suzanne Roberts and Dan White, and well below Cheryl Strayed and Bill Bryson. What keeps me from giving this a higher score isn't his prose (which is serviceable), it's his tendency to shoehorn economic libertarianism into a book about a goddamned hike.
Okay, so Miller really only devotes three or four pages directly to his economic views. At one point, apropos of getting a ride from someone, he compares having the government pay for college to the totalitarian control of Romanian Communism. Toward the end he devotes two pages to a rant on having to pay thousands of dollars in taxes, and deciding to quit his job in part because he was getting taxed to death. (People who complain about this baffle me; in my entire life I've had to pay extra on tax day exactly once, and that was rectified simply by adding one more dependent on my withholding form. If you're paying so much extra at the end of the year, you must be in some rarefied tax bracket I can barely conceive of. Miller also hints at -- but never explicitly states -- the myth that earning more means you take home less, because the government likes to punish initiative or something. We have a progressive tax system, where each base income level is taxed only so much, so this is mathematically impossible, but it's a popular myth/talking point all the same.) The ideological derails don't have to be as head-scratching as that to be noticeable. The entire book is suffused with the sort of privilege that willfully conflates starting out with privilege with the quasi-heroic ideal of being a self-made man. It's a popular myth in our culture, one Miller worships even as his wife takes care of their kids at home, as trail town residents let him sleep in their basements, as organizations and volunteers maintain the trail and feed him and give him rides and buy the land he walks on. Even, dare I say it, as he traverses the nation's longest national park corridor itself. Nope, this hike is all about David Miller and getting away from that mean ol' IRS for a summer to be a real man, a free man (who just happens to be traversing government land we all helped buy for him).
There are certain political issues you would expect to permeate a thru-hike narrative. Just about every book will have at least a token chapter on conservation and ecology. (This is actually a rather glaring omission in AWOL.) If the writer is a woman, there will inevitably be material on the dangers women face from the human fauna along the trail. Miller's political content was slight, to be sure, but all the more glaring because of how little place it had in a trail narrative. His privileged "It's such a struggle to have to pay taxes" attitude soured me on what otherwise would have been a pretty darn good hiking narrative.
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