2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2024 read #7: In the Land of Giants by Max Adams.

In the Land of Giants: A Journey through the Dark Ages by Max Adams

446 pages

Published 2016

Read from January 10 to January 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Regardless of any intent (or lack of it) from the respective publishers, I feel this book functions as a spiritual sequel to Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky. Where Higgins traveled Britain in search of its Roman history, Adams paces around the archipelago to encounter its early medieval history. Adam even begins his narrative at Hadrian’s Wall, a fittingly literal symbol for the end of Roman Britain.

The “Dark Ages” — locally defined as the five centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the death of Alfred the Great — are dubbed such because of the lack of contemporary written sources and readily dateable artifacts (such as coins or inscriptions), which makes it impossible to draw together any real narrative account. In Giants, Adams leans instead into an experiential approach, journeying on foot, by boat, and sometimes by motorbike through historically laden landscapes:

What counts, on this sort of journey, is the sense of place, the passing of time. There is no better way to insinuate oneself into the Dark Age mind than to camp close to the ramparts of an ancient fort on the edge of the limitless sea and ponder the spiritual and secular worlds of those who built it.

Adams presents a nice mix of historical reference and walking adventures, the latter more diligently detailed than some Appalachian Trail memoirs I could name. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane’s travelogues, such as The Old Ways, though Adams’ prose (while solid enough) never reaches the poetic strata of Macfarlane’s finest. However, the chapters where Adams describes riding his motorcycle instead of hiking are much less interesting.

Landscape archaeology fascinates me. It aligns with my own interests in nature and how human societies integrate themselves into (or else bludgeon their way through) ecological systems and geological constraints. I particularly enjoyed how Adams underlined the usefulness of place-names in reconstructing histories of settlement and land management. Sadly, landscape archaeology was barely touched upon during my undergraduate career, amounting to maybe a single slide during an intro course, likely a single paper during a theory class. I’d love to read more about it, especially something that grounds it in testable hypotheses rather Adams’ penchant for vibes. (Though to be fair to him, it would be impossible in our capitalist world to get the funds and workforce needed to excavate or even survey a fraction of the sites we would need to study from this book alone.)

Giants’ historical content is of the space-saving school that assumes you’re already familiar with the outlines of the period (or, perhaps, might be motivated to look up various kings and kingdoms on your own time). At least there’s a chronology appended to the end, though it could use more detail, especially with a time period so dimly known even to those who study it.

2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.

Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.

As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.

That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.

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.

2016 read #21: On the Beaten Path by Robert Alden Rubin.

On the Beaten Path: An Appalachian Pilgrimage by Robert Alden Rubin
238 pages
Published 2000
Read from March 22 to March 23
Rating: ★½ out of 5

It's easy to pick out a proverbial A-list of long-hike narratives: Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods -- both big bestsellers, both turned into movies, both with general audience appeal (Strayed's Oprah-ready story of climbing up from rock bottom, Bryson's Brysonesque humor) and noticeable cultural impact. It helps that there are, to my knowledge, only two such books. Separating the B-list from the C-list is more subjective, a matter of taste as much as a calculus of publishing house cachet, promotional effort, copies sold, and so on. I'd say Almost Somewhere, I Promise Not to Suffer, and The Cactus Eaters are securely on the B-list, at least demonstrating an effort toward general readership, while The Wild Birds' Song and AWOL on the Appalachian Trail are confirmed C-listers, doggedly niche, making no pretense at telling a broader, relatable life story beyond "There's this trail and I wanted to hike it."

I made up this categorization system on the spot for this review in order to have a new angle to discuss yet another hiking book: On the Beaten Path, put out by some no-name press (currently a subsidiary of Globe-Pequot, pumping out the likes of Hemingway's Guns and Mark Twain for Cat Lovers), with no driving personal narrative beyond "I was depressed and didn't like my job, so I quit to hike the AT," slots comfortably within the C-listers. Hypothetically, its author could have the makings of a better or bolder writer than other C-listers, but the problem is, he knows it -- and he seems to think he's a better writer than he actually is, to boot. (Not a hiking pun. Okay, maybe it is.) I almost quit Path in the first chapter, where Rubin goes on at length (that length: two entire pages of text) about the origins of his trail name, Rhymin' Worm, which originated as a gimmick account on a poetry message board -- a fact which still seems to impress Rubin with its cleverness. Perhaps I'm more blasé about such wonders than were the wide-eyed poets and netizens of the late '90s. Regardless, I don't think anybody, then or now, on or off the trail, needed samples of the Rhymin' Worm's doggerel "Ballad."

I came even closer to pitching the damn thing aside early in chapter two, when I encountered the line, "Who is this intrepid Rhymin' Worm of ours?" That's just pure canned corn right there. At that point, huffing at the page, reaching the end in this Rhymin' Worm's company seemed as out of my reach as the summit of Katahdin seems to an office-soft hiker on the Springer approach trail. Couldn't I just quietly stuff it into the library's return slot and await my next ILL'd hiking narrative?

Yet, countering that impulse: it's spring now, and I'm restless, eager for the woods and the rocks and all the momentary marvels of hiking. I've watched all the competently produced hiking videos on YouTube, and alas, I'm starting to run out of unread thru-hike books as well (or at least those contained in the Suffolk County library system). I resolved to tough out even the most tedious trudge through Rubin's supposed cleverness. Maybe there would be little rewards along the way, peeks at fiddleheads and the clean smell of damp leaves. Maybe it would all be worthwhile.

There are a few such moments: gazing at Comet Hale-Bopp above the summits of Georgia, the colorful rise of spring, a rainy night in a Vermont barn. But even after the worst of his cornball flourishes have been spent, Rubin is an unpleasant hiking companion. He exudes judgy negativity in a way I've never seen in a published first-person adventure story. Even Bill Bryson turned his signature misanthropy into something funny. Rubin indulges in bare-all psychological confessionism, but unlike Cheryl Strayed, the wounds he exhibits really aren't that interesting. He portrays himself as alternately seething and moping his way up the Appalachian spine -- and as a bigot on top of everything else. After hiking companionably for some distance with a trail buddy, Rubin suddenly has qualms about continuing on with him after learning the man is gay. He fumes for days (and pages of manuscript) after finding a bible burnt in a shelter. Rubin seldom stints a negative word about anyone else he encounters, except for one fellow sad middle-aged man with a dusting of literary pretension. Imagine that.

I suppose Path could be taken as an antidote to the golly-gee positivity of so much other trail literature, a warning of the psychological toil, the trudgery typically glossed over in other books with a few anecdotes of heavy packs and snoring companions. That, however, doesn't make it more of a joy to read.

2016 read #18: Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage.

Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage
289 pages
Published 2013 (British edition published 2012)
Read from March 12 to March 13
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

From the glowing, sylvan, almost mythological optimism of Roger Deakin, and the more measured, philosophical cadences of Robert Macfarlane -- not to mention the golden light and luminous rains of my trip to Ireland, seven years ago and still my only venture off this continent -- I've become something of an Anglophile, in the sense that I've developed a long distance love affair with this idealized conception of England, and the British Isles generally. The subtitle of the British edition of this book, Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, would have hooked me in and gotten me reading it a lot sooner than its watered-down American sobriquet. Poets or troubadours make no difference to me; it's the bit about tramping the Pennine Way that would have reeled me in.

In that sense, it's interesting that Walking Home is the first book in my reading history that depicts something less than an idealized experience, both of hiking a long-distance path and of the ostensibly "wild" places of the English countryside. Where Deakin finds tranquil immersion in the unlikeliest fens and urban waterways, and Macfarlane finds pockets of the wild in every hedgerow, Armitage acknowledges the intrusion of the modern into the remotest moors. Towers and radar domes and farms turned junkyards are the mileposts of his walk, drenching somewhat my immediate reaction of "I simply must hike the Pennine Way someday!" Armitage's walk is measured by poetry readings, and his perception of the world picks up people and human concerns; the journey is essentially the spine of his book, while the pages crowd with personalities and nightly counts of donations at the door. You can just sense that heath and moor and rock and fog is not where Armitage, given his druthers, would rather be. Which makes this something of a unique narrative in my experience, approaching it as I do with the canons of hiking books and English nature writing as my compass points.

I'm no judge of poetry, so I can't rate the occasional poem Armitage includes. They didn't do much for me, for the most part. And his prose, while certainly adequate, doesn't have the warmth and beauty of Deakin's or Macfarlane's or Helen Macdonald's -- perhaps because he isn't so clearly infatuated with the scenes he depicts. The anecdotes and asides are funny, but the book as a whole has a middling feel, almost a sense of a big project planned in advance and then completed with flagging enthusiasm, much like Armitage's hike itself.

2016 read #4: The Wild Birds' Song by Jim Coplen.

The Wild Birds' Song: Hiking South on the Appalachian Trail by Jim Coplen
183 pages
Published 1998
Read January 8
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

In a time when hiking videos, some of good quality, document thru-hikes of various long trails, is there really any point to the long-distance hiking narrative anymore? Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods made a fine comic spectacle of it, Cheryl Strayed's Wild made an Oprah-ready memoir of recovery out of it, Dan White made us stare at his ex-girlfriend's ass in The Cactus Eaters -- but is there any need, now, for a backpacking tale that isn't buttressed by some pseudo-literary gimmick? After spending last autumn, and the winter so far, watching countless hours of hiking on YouTube, courtesy of the likes of Will "Red Beard" Wood and Joe Brewer, I'm no longer convinced that books like The Wild Birds' Song serve a purpose, not when I can get my daydream fix with GoPro color and sound.

I'm sure this book must have been more of a novelty when it was published. Heck, even two years ago, this would have been more of a novelty for me, personally. It's no fault of Coplen's that his narrative now seems flimsy and inessential, a mildly diverting way to spend the evening and little more. Back when this was written, a book like this was probably the only way most people could have a taste of day-to-day life on the Appalachian Trail. Now that we have people carting untold numbers of gizmos through the woods, a vlog (or a video diary -- does anyone say "vlog" anymore? is that a failed neologism?) is a much better fit for the vicarious thru-hike experience, which makes a book like this something of a quaint little relic.

2014 read #29: Journey on the Crest by Cindy Ross.

Journey on the Crest: Walking 2600 Miles from Mexico to Canada by Cindy Ross
312 pages
Published 1987
Read from March 19 to March 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Finally! A straightforward book about long-distance backpacking that doesn't detour into political screeds, childrearing philosophies, intimate details of broken relationships, eating cremated remains, or any other bizarre and unappealing distraction! Ross's prose here is undeveloped, as if she stitched together actual journal entries with only minimal polish, but it's a brisk read and at times her descriptions are vivid. Not a perfect hiking narrative, but it's exactly what I asked for, so I'm happy with it.

Incidentally, the more narratives of the Pacific Crest Trail I read, the better I like my own hazy plan to hike it in sections, possibly skipping the clearcuts and the desert sections to string together the highlights. Racing from desert heat to deep Sierra snows and hauling ass to try to beat winter in the North Cascades seems like more work than enjoyment.

2014 read #26: Scraping Heaven by Cindy Ross.

Scraping Heaven: A Family's Journey Along the Continental Divide by Cindy Ross
325 pages
Published 2003
Read from March 7 to March 11
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I seem to rate these hiking narratives (or, in this case, llama-packing narrative) as a simple ratio between the amount of trail and scenery description and the amount of (to me) extraneous matter, like politics, religion, broad gender stereotyping, and weird interpersonal drama. I liked this book both for its glimpse of a new (to me) long distance trail and for its depiction of hiking long distances with young children, as Ross and her husband take their offspring along the Continental Divide Trail over the course of five summers. However, with each passing year Ross devotes less and less space to descriptions of what they see and do in the mountains; by their third or fourth season, Ross summarizes weeks of adventure into a single paragraph, leaving proportionally more and more of the narrative to reiterating the same basic points about how the journey is tough on their kids but teaches them self-confidence, how her husband is an uncommunicative male who gets grumpy because they can't have sex, how her kids marvelously adapt and entertain themselves, and oh, did she mention she feels this string of adventures teaches her kids their capabilities and how to believe in themselves? It gets a little preachy at times, diminishing what could otherwise be an interesting and unusual adventure tale. (Also repetitive: Ross makes sure to work in some variant of "scraping heaven" into her account of each and every summer on the trail.)

2014 read #25: I Promise Not to Suffer by Gail D. Storey.

I Promise Not to Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail by Gail D. Storey
222 pages
Published 2013
Read from March 5 to March 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5

If this had been a novel instead of my current obsession, a hiking narrative, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. A needy and codependent woman follows her standard-issue stoic doctor husband on his thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. While he refuses to use maps, ask for directions, or talk about his feelings for months at a time, she obsesses over whether he really loves her or wants her to be there. All the while Storey weaves in recollections of the various New Age and neo-Buddhist retreats and encounters she had as a bored rich wife looking for some kind of prepackaged meaning, and traces it all back to her issues with her mother, who shut her out emotionally after Storey dared to sleep with some men back when she was in her 20s. On top of everything, the dialogue isn't naturalistic by any definition; the "characters" state what Storey needs them to, in order to forward the "plot."

If this hadn't been a hiking narrative, I would have found nothing of interest here. I don't like tales of the privileged and prosperous desperately seeking after "meaning," and Storey is egregious about this, rarely going more than a page or two without going on at length about how the PCT was magically "changing" the two of them, and oozing her affluence and wealth on every page. Enough of this crap about learning how to love the world in some cosmic pseudo-mystic malarkey. Just talk about trail experiences already.

2014 read #22: AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller.

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.

2014 read #12: A Journey North by Adrienne Hall.

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.

2014 read #8: Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail by Suzanne Roberts.

Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail by Suzanne Roberts
265 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 23 to January 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Brief mention of eating disorders and sexual assault, themes addressed at length in the book.

The back cover copy of Almost Somewhere ends with the stinger, "...not just the whimsical coming-of-age story of a young woman ill-prepared for a month in the mountains but also the reflection of a distinctly feminine view of nature." Even though I crave more hiking narratives and had thought I'd depleted my library's stock of them, I almost put the book back right there.

I don't like the word feminine. I don't like the word masculine. They imply intrinsic, incontrovertible gender values or "truths" that I don't have time for. If people want to be feminine or masculine (according to whatever cultural norms they attach to those terms), that's their own business. I'm all about people being whatever gender, mix of genders, or lack of genders they wish to be. Unlike everyone else on the internet these days, I don't like the proliferation of labels that sprouted up with third-wave feminism, possibly because my privilege as a heterosexual, cis-sexual male makes me undervalue the importance of labels and identity; whether it's a privileged mindset or not, I like the label "person" or "people," or if necessary "cultural norms of femininity" or "cultural norms of masculinity." (I do, apparently, value the proliferation of exact, pedantic terminology that sprouted with postmodern scholarship.) Labeling whatever distinct view of nature Roberts transmits as "feminine" promises an awkward fit with my reading sensibilities.

There are, obviously, many things women (primarily) must be concerned with in the wilderness. Rape culture and its nasty surface scum of predatory males can slosh up everywhere. Body image and its pathological outcomes -- anorexia, bulimia -- doesn't get left behind at the trailhead. There are more hygiene products to pack in and pack out. Social expectations and judgments against "girls" in the woods are entrenched and shitty, though possibly a little less obnoxious now than when Roberts hiked in 1993. And there are obvious ways the "classic" wilderness ethic, as promulgated and shared by men such as Muir and Abbey, is exclusionary, masculist in its very inception. I understand the need for female narratives and perspectives in what, originally, was pretty much a boys' club.

Beyond the social and physical realities of "femininity" in western society, however, I do not see how Roberts' view of nature is distinct or feminine. She cites her inability to "leave" her body to experience the divine transfiguration of Muir in the Sierra. Well, neither have I -- Muir was a holy prophet, his writings an inspiration rather than an instruction manual, transmitting an ideology rather than a reality. She dwells on the unromantic stuff, knee pain and digging catholes and bumming food and Advil off other hikers when they ran out -- but the reality is, hiking is unromantic. In the moment, it is all knee pain and poor planning and struggle. It's only afterwards, on the drive home perhaps, or on lazy days when basecamping, that this sport feels closer to the radiance of Muir.

Roberts not-so-subtly projects an image of the "man" in the woods -- a risk-taking braggart, a posturing ape, oblivious to things like thunderstorms above treeline. With the exception of some friendly, vivacious German hikers they meet on their last night (and there always have to be friendly, vivacious Germans in our American trail narratives), all men in Roberts' world are solitude-seeking, peak-conquering, phallocentric macho dickheads. After having a panic attack on a log bridge and needing to be helped off by her friend, Roberts offers a sweeping statement: "Certainly, no man would have allowed his friend to rescue him off that log, yet I wasn't a man, and trying to act like one wasn't going to get me anywhere." Certainly, she says, condemning all men everywhere to Tim the Tool-Man Taylor stupidity. Her big conclusion -- that the distinctly feminine view of nature incorporates community and "the journey" rather than the destination -- is both cliche and exclusionary for no discernible purpose. As a man, I can safely say I would ask my friends for help, with a quickness. I have turned around short of my "destination," and still enjoyed myself. And I can also say that my favorite moments on hikes involve tip-toeing through fern glades, the book-smell of damp beech leaves, watching bees fondle flowers, all this journey stuff Roberts' yoga instructor told her was "feminine." Trying to force a gender identity on the universal experiences of hiking seems, well, regressive.

I wish this reductive "Men Are from Mountain Summits, Women Are from Lovely Little Forested Lakes" crap weren't so pervasive in Roberts' writing, because otherwise I quite enjoyed Almost Somewhere. Describing a much shorter trip than Cheryl Strayed or David Brill, Roberts has the luxury of presenting a daily diary of experiences and impressions, detailing flowers and climbs and views, something this poor, snowbound East Coaster very much appreciated.

(Edit: Rereading this in 2023, I would first like to acknowledge that, yes, hello, I am and have always been genderfluid and nonbinary even when I didn't have the words for it, and also that I wrote a lot of unnecessary words up there that can be summed up as "I don't like gender-essentialist feminism and, in fact, don't think it's especially feminist at all.")

2013 read #127: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Goddamn it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1) well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable "finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing center.

I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then, pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Wild is one of those special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different genre altogether.

I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an adult understood people who go into existential crises because their parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit about a parent.

That's not even getting to Strayed's description of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.

All that whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail friends died a few years later.

I can see how, on technical grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral, though, those weren't a good fit for me.

Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.

2013 read #44: Walking the Big Wild by Karsten Heuer.

Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail by Kasten Heuer
246 pages
Published 2004
Read from April 1 to April 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

As a young teen, I loved the empty spots on the map. I filled them with a hash of speculative routes and symbols denoting possible basecamps, kayak adventures, and massive, continent-spanning bushwhacks. I traced lines along the mountain spines of the west and the white reaches of the north, naively figuring the terrain would be both easily traversable and utterly deserted. Water access never once crossed my mind.

One of my more ambitious routes roughly paralleled Heuer's path in this book: Beginning in Yellowstone, forging north along Montana ridgelines, clambering through the Canadian Rockies, fetching up in the Yukon. Heuer's account of Canada's backcountry amplifies that of Cassandra Pybus in The Woman Who Walked to Russia, dismembering my naive notions of the unspoiled blank spaces on the map. It's disheartening to realize that, despite Canada's positive reputation down here in the States, they're really kind of terrible at conservation; timber and energy conglomerates seem to win every time. Heuer's log of oil development and clear cuts and abandoned extraction roads rife with snowmobilers was nothing short of depressing.

This book reminded me of all the conservation-minded adventure books I read in the '90s, which used fairly banal adventure to generate sympathy and interest for naively optimistic conservation initiatives. Like those authors, Heuer is positive that grassroots education can overcome the PR campaigns of international corporations and their bottomless pockets. Looking back from these grim latter days of Western capitalism, it's like a window on a far more innocent time, even though it was just nine years ago.

2013 read #39: As Far as the Eye Can See by David Brill.

As Far as the Eye Can See: Reflections of an Appalachian Trail Hiker by David Brill
187 pages
Published 1990
Read from March 17 to March 18
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I may not be reading this at the tail end of the month, but I think this book makes a nice bookend to The Cactus Eaters, from the beginning of March. Instead of the ennui and small economic crises of the late '90s, which Dan White fled for the Pacific Crest Trail, Brill orients himself as a member of a lost generation, old enough to have observed the upheavals of the '60s and '70s but not old enough to have faced the draft-or-revolution test when he came of age. Here he presents his 1979 journey up the Appalachian Trail (AT) as a substitute test, a self-imposed challenge to stimulate "personal growth" at the cusp of adulthood. It's a predictable story, worn down to nubs and truisms today, but it's probably inevitable in a book like this. Why the sons of the middle class are so concerned about "finding themselves" I'll never know; you'd think spending six months hiking in the woods would be its own reward, without all this late adolescent philosophical mumbo-jumbo. But it comes with the genre.

Even though The Cactus Eaters got weird and far, far too personal, at least Dan White had a way with words. Brill plods through his story with all the grace of an undergraduate writing assignment, shoehorning a clumsy simile into every paragraph as if following some test prep center's guidelines for good writing. Which is hilariously apt, since at the time he published this book, Brill was "Coordinator of the Writing Center at Roane State Community College," something I didn't notice until after I made this comparison. In an additional contrast to The Cactus Eaters, which portrays White descending into poisonous, neurotic obsession with the trail, Brill maintains a tone of bright-eyed optimism and the romance of the backwoods. It makes for syrupy reading sometimes, but to be quite honest, it's exactly what I wanted out of this book. It may not be a particularly good book, but I can't be too hard on it.

2013 read #31: The Cactus Eaters by Dan White.

The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind -- And Almost Found Myself -- On the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White
374 pages
Published 2008
Read from February 27 to March 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5

This is a book about an enthusiastic but under-prepared writer who hears about a nation-spanning footpath and, with a bosom companion, sets out to hike it end to end -- and fails spectacularly. So, basically A Walk in the Woods, except not as funny or charming, and set way out West. Also, the writer's companion is his girlfriend, and much of the book -- most of the book -- centers on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) as a test of their relationship.

At one point I peeked ahead to see whether Dan White and "Allison" (probably not her real name) do indeed fail spectacularly, and I found out they do, in a manner of speaking: they have an altogether commonplace breakup and go their separate ways. Which made reading the stuff in between really, really weird. I'm here to read funny tales of the author bumbling his way up the PCT, not the author's extended paean to a relationship that crumbled a decade before. I especially don't want to read about the sex. Maybe I have vestigial conservative tics buried deep in my brain, but I just don't see why the general public needs to know about your trailside lovemaking, or read you going on at length about sex with your ex, or get regular updates on how all the hiking firmed up her ass. It's like a casual acquaintance telling bland anecdotes about his California vacation and then leaning in close with milky breath and telling you all about the hard drive loaded with stag shots of his college sweetheart. It's just... weird. I'm trying to imagine White's pitch to his agent. "We'll sell the book on the idea that it's Bill Bryson fumbling around in the desert, but really it'll be about me fucking and fighting with this girl I used to go out with back in the day. Did I ever tell you how hot she was? Let me describe her for you one more time."

So that was kind of tedious and strange. And except for a few chuckle-worthy incidents in the first part of the book, overall it just wasn't that funny. Which is a damn shame. Of all the National Scenic Trails, the PCT has always been my favorite. It is the only one I still wish to hike end to end. My fondness for the locale and the trail itself (together with White's competency with words) is all that kept this book from an abysmal rating. There was just enough PCT flavor to keep me reading and engaged through all the ex-to-be melodrama and tedious dollar-store existential angst. I just feel that I was misled about what this book was gonna be like.