2016 read #26: Walking on the Wild Side by Kristi M. Fondren.

Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail by Kristi M. Fondren
143 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 29 to March 30
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

This one is a bit of an oddity, both as a book on the Appalachian Trail and within the context of my recent (post-college) reading habits. I found it during one of my periodic searches through the Suffolk County library catalog for new-to-me hiking narratives. Outwardly, Walking on the Wild Side is packaged as if it were yet another trail memoir, with an "outdoorsy" font, a generic title that could apply to just about any AT narrative, and a cover photograph of booted feet propped up in leisurely contemplation of a view. With movie versions of Wild and A Walk in the Woods recently in theaters, I've been expecting a wave of copycat memoirs to peak sometime in the next year or two; I assumed Wild Side was the first to appear, and promptly put in an ILL request.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Wild Side, while no doubt packaged and marketed to capitalize on the copycat wave, is actually a sociological study upon the subculture of long-distance hiking upon the Appalachian Trail, the result of interviews and participant observation. I almost discarded the book upon this discovery, before my own academic instincts reemerged from hibernation (my BA is in anthropology) and I found myself unable to resist that dry, dry thesis prose. It was almost like discovering an old favorite pair of shoes in a closet, and finding them still comfy.

As is often the case with sociological research (and with science in general), Fondren merely takes the time to properly document aspects of the long-distance hiking subculture that were already obvious to anyone who's read the memoirs and watched the YouTube vlogs. Proper documentation is nothing to be sniffed at, and to be fair, Fondren expands upon certain behaviors and places them within a sociological context, which I found illuminating. Academic works tend to err in the direction of scrupulously contextualizing any statement or assertion, which can make for dull or repetitive reading, but it's a useful practice, and in any case, Wild Side was a brief read. What makes it odd is how Rutgers University Press is so evidently trying to market this dry and rather niche study in order to cash in on the current long-distance hiking craze, even going so far as to have various professors awkwardly attempt to provide blurbs for the back cover. ("Upon finishing a chapter, the reader is anxious to move on to the next one," raves Professor Alan Graefe of Penn State.) The trick worked on me, and it worked on Suffolk County, whose libraries (which typically avoid university press type material) have obtained four copies and counting, so I guess I can't fault them. It just seems like an unexpected move for a university press, because it's, well, a trick.