Appalachia Project: A Walk in the Woods, 1998

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

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A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, tells the story of one man's attempt to walk the mighty, 2,000+ mile long Appalachian Trail, which begins in north Georgia and follows the Appalachian mountain chain through Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Bryson writes in a dry conversational tone and mixes in geology, geography, sociology, biology, and history as they become relevant and/or entertaining. I'm including lots of quotes in this post to give you the sense of it. Bryson notes that the AT is run and maintained by volunteers. "All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers--indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet." This is a story in itself.

The real story, though, is the trail, the AT, the man against the trail. Here's Bryson describing his initial motivation:
"...It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land. It would be useful to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods.'"

A typical overnight shelter for hikers on the
Appalachian Trail

I appreciate having this book on my mostly-fiction list of Appalachian books (thanks, Jeff Fite) because Bryson actually has his feet on Appalachia, the Appalachia that gives its name to so many concepts, regional commissions, stereotypes, and, yes, mythologies. I've developed the phrase "hands-on and boots-on" to describe certain types of work experiences and it certainly applies here. Bryson has done his research, his book-reading, his interviews and map scanning and could have probably written a pretty good book without physically touching the trail. But it's his personal commitment to experiencing the trail first-hand that makes the book compelling and important. He was kind enough to take us readers along in a way that feels authentic and engages us in a real feeling for this land. Beautiful.

A black bear momma with a huge litter of cubs; bears
are more feared in their absence unless you leave a
cache of snickers bars unprotected.

In the planning phases, Bryson became obsessed with mortal dangers of the expedition. Everything from mighty bears to poisonous bacteria and even murderous humans were explored. Appalachia's black bears filled his imagination with horror:

 "Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but--and here is the absolutely salient point--once would be enough."

And later on, from the bear's point of view:

"...to [bears] people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake...There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler's fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby's hand."

The more salient dangers, however, turned out to be blisters, bug bites, cold, and fatigue. As Bryson and his friend Katz set out in northern Georgia, they encounter unusually cold weather: "When I awoke, it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories."

And, in discussing the key experience of walking the trail: "I was coming to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things--processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condenstation--fill you with wonder and gratitude."

Even deprivation became boring. "Each time you leave the cossetted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills, you go through a series of staged transformations--a kind of gentle descent into squalor--and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day, disgustingly so; by the third, you are beyond caring; by the fourth, you have forgotten what it is like not to be like this."

Chestnuts grew huge, with as much as an acre
under leaf. Today, they are gone.

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Bryson's history of the forest intrigued me. For one thing, he pointed out that the woods have been in a constant state of change all the time, as Earth is not fixed in time, but that changes in the past 20-30 years are endangering the Appalachian region's living things in unprecedented ways. He points out the woods he was walking in would have been unrecognizable to someone hiking there even just 50 years ago. For example, the mighty chestnuts were prevalent throughout the range in living memory and every one of them is gone now. The fall color that we associate with maples and sumacs are a feature of the loss of the chestnuts. And, the woods Bryson walked in the 1990s will be considerably different today, with the loss of many evergreens to acid rain and other species to invasive species and other threats.

I am left considerably saddened. Even as I accept that change is a constant, indeed a necessity, for life on this planet, I grieve the thoughtless disregard for any but human needs that seems to drive change beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. The Applachian forest is a magnificent mega-organism. I wish we would take better care of it.

Bryson is also awed by the sheer scale of our planet. After weeks of walking, he covers only a tiny portion of the trail, and still it is farther than most people ever walk (in total) in their whole lives. When he gets to the top of a mountain, and looks out, he sees trees. Trees and trees and trees. Next mountaintop: same thing. I feel a bit reassured by this that the forest will probably outlive its human influences, but if we are not careful, we won't be around to see its next iteration.

A white mark painted on a tree serves as a trail marker on the AT.

Bryson and Katz repesent us on this journey. Bryson sort of represents the good boy scout character and Katz is the bad boy scout. Somehow, their pairing works, balances the rapture with the squalor, both of which are present in about equal measures on this mega-hike. They hike the southern part of the trail for about six weeks, and then head out on the Maine part of the trail later in the summer. Both of them have very mixed feelings about leaving the trail for good, even though they are in no doubt about the decision. Katz asks Bryson how he feels about leaving the trail. "I thought for a moment, unsure. I had come to realize that I didn't have any feelings towards the AT that weren't confused and contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thral; found the endless slog tedious but irrestible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessnesss; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comfirts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off."

Appalachia Project: The Egg and I, 1945

The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald

The big surprise of this book was that it is not set in Appalachia. My memories have it set in Arkansas, but they lied. I was enjoying reading it so much, however, that I decided to review it anyway.

The Egg and I is the semi-autobiographical tale of MacDonald's life as a young wife, mother, and farmer on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. She starts with some very funny chapters on her childhood to put her reactions to chicken farming into some perspective. These chapters were so funny that they gave me aggressive attacks of hilarity. I feel tickled inside just thinking about some of the incidents, but more so of the specific language MacDonald used, the turn of a phrase. Wonderful.

MacDonald came to hate the chicks
she was supposed to nurture,
unlike the beaming Claudette
Colbert in the movie of the book.

The stories are not solidly set in time, but based on MacDonald's biography on that bastion of authority Wikipedia, they must have taken place in the 1920s, which fits the consumerist aspects of the book. (She divorced the husband in this book in 1931.) MacDonald and her husband were gourmets, well read and educated, used to a high standard of living. This makes it especially funny to see how they adjust to a move to a rundown farm lacking plumbing, electricity, running water, and even at the beginning lacking windows.


I wish MacDonald had written about Appalachia, because her descriptions of the scenery are superbly detailed. I could feel the moisture, the creeping cold, the eerie feeling that I was being stalked by a large animal. I could feel the fatigue, the frustration, and the loneliness, too. I could see the amazing array of greens--old growth, second growth, fruit trees, ferns, moss; and the stark and menacing mountains with their stoles of white ermine that lengthened and shortened with the seasons but never really went away.

MacDonald marvels at the easy availability of food. Clams, crabs, oysters, fish, salmon, venison, duck. Every kind of vegetable, herb, and tuber bursting out of the fertile soil. Berries and fruit dangling heavy and free for the picking. Chicken, of course. And eggs. MacDonald reveled in the eggs. In one passage, she discusses her ability to make the richest of recipes with no guilt whatsoever and as often as she wished:

The astonishing fact that there was always on my pantry shelf a water bucket of double-yoked and checked eggs to do with as I would was a source of constant delight and lured me into trying many of the rich, eggy old-fashioned recipes in Mrs. Lincoln's cookbook. In town, where I would have had to buy my groceries and balance a food budget, I wouldn't have put up with Mrs. Lincoln and her "beat the whites of sixteen large eggs with a fork on a platter..." I would have loved to visit Mrs. Lincoln, but she was hell to cook for unless you lived on a chicken ranch, and then you and Mrs. Lincoln could see eye to eye about a lot of things....The [cream puff] recipe called for "eight eggs to be broken one by one and beaten into the mixture with the bare right hand." I used sixteen.

The Mrs. Lincoln cookbook was Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking, published in 1884. It was akin to today's Joy of Cooking or a very fancy Betty Crocker.

Keeping the huge wood stove
going and boiling and heating
water was an all-day-
 every-day chore

After the idyllic portrayal of housework from A Parchment of Leaves, I appreciated MacDonald's more acerbic descriptions of the 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. never ending labor of farming. She writes, "...my enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I was overtired by the fire and insufficient sleep...My life on the ranch had reached some sort of climax and it was the aftermath which worried me. We were just about to go into another long, dreary winter and I felt harried and uncertain as though I were boarding a steamer with no passport and no luggage. I was leaning on the drainboard of the sink, staring moodily out of the window at the driving rain."

In The Egg and I, MacDonald introduces a family that became famous in its own Hollywood way, the Kettles, as in Ma and Pa Kettle. The Kettles were the ultimate in slovenly slackers, always trying to get something for nothing, begging, unwashed. In the movie of The Egg and I, the Kettles were so funny that they went on to star in many films on their own. I think they may have influenced the creation of "The Beverly Hillbillies," also.

Ma and Pa Kettle

The Kettles were the grossest stereotype of hillbilly and I think it is from them that I developed the feeling that this book was about Appalachia. MacDonald is not unsympathetic and comes to love this family, but she also doesn't pull any punches about their laziness and squalor. And, this book is about life in remote mountains where life is shaped by the landscape. That's somewhat Appalachian also.

That justifies me including this book. It is a picture of a time and place that holds up well, even with the stereotypical and ugly portrayal of the native peoples MacDonald comes in contact with.

Appalachia Project: Back Roads, 2000

Back Roads, by Tawni O'Dell

SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers contained herein.

Back Roads is the story of Harley, a 20-year-old boy-man coping with becoming head-of-household because of the murder of his father and his mother's conviction for it. He is nominally in charge of his three sisters. All four of the siblings struggle with the losses they have sustained and the secrets they individually carry. The book is told first person from Harley's point of view and presents his psychological process in harrowing detail. Harrowing is the word I keep using for this book. It's a great book, but harrowing.

O'Dell makes no claim that this is a book of Appalachia. Facebook friend Katrinka Walker recommended it based on its setting and perhaps on its content of extreme family disruption. The book is set in the current day (of 2000) and takes place in western Pennsylvania, where abandoned coal mines are a major feature of the landscape. When the coal was deemed too dirty and the coal-mining process too hazardous, companies just walked away from their operations. Key scenes of the book take place in an abandoned mining office. The old people in the town remember the heyday of the mines as they cough up coal dust laced phlegm and die off from black lung.

I hear all the time where I live this longing for the coal. It supported families even as it killed them off. It's a regional obsession, rather like the obsession with farming in children's literature, which I've commented on before. If only we went back to family farms, we'd all be alright again. No mention of the stink and the severed limbs and the debt and the sheer crushing labor of it!

Harrowing. I'm only on the third book of my Appalachia reading project and the bane of Appalachia has come upon the scene: incest. Although O'Dell doesn't identify this book as Appalachian, she sure hit the nail on the head. I swear that incest is no more frequent in Appalachia than it is in the general population (and any incident is tragic). I think in Appalachia it is both easier and harder to hide--easier because of isolation but harder because everybody knows everybody's business. We all know who the "baby daddy" is. Maybe Appalachians are just more frank about it. Life is often pretty crappy for everybody. 

Anyway, unraveling the truth about his father's murder leads Harley to unraveling the thread of incest that inhabits his family and grieves him to his breakdown. As the story gets grimmer for Harley, it gets grimmer for the reader. I felt at times like I could not get my breath. I put the book down suddenly and walked around the house. A couple of times Harley vomits before he sobs, and I felt that. The worst thing for me was the heaviness of grief that families ever suffer in this way.

Books like A Boy Named It I think sensationalize the experiences of abused children and teenagers. They get off on it, to a degree. It's not a genre I care for. In Back Roads, O'Dell puts you right into Harley's shoes and into his head, into his confusion and delusion and fear. It is one of the most real portrayals of psychic pain I have ever read. I long to reach out and take away the suffering...but I can't. People just have to work their own way out of it. Offering material help is about the only way to demonstrate caring. One woman in the book brings food. That means something. Harley's court-ordered therapist offers patience and helps cut through red tape. At one point, she offers a safe place to sleep. That means something.

There is sex in this book, and not just incest. Harley is just experiencing his sexual awakening and thinks and talks about sex a lot. There are scenes of masturbation and sexual violence. There are scenes of incest. A part of me is truly sorry I had to read those scenes, but for another part of me, this book allowed me to process this experience vicariously in a way that I hadn't before.

And, as with all behavior, the incest behavior makes sense in the context within which it occurs. That doesn't make it right, but you can see how it happens. Here's an exchange between Harley and his therapist Betty. In her responses, she describes the various paths taken by Harley and his siblings. Harley has cut his hands.

          "Okay, there's something I want to talk about," I said to get her mind off my hands.
          She gave me a look of surprise like she had discovered a bud on a plant she expected to die. "Go on," she said.
          "How can a kid like someone who beats them up? You know. How can they like hanging out with them?"
          "Well," she began... "every child reacts to abuse differently. Some become withdrawn. Some openly hostile. Some self-destructive. But some embrace the abuse. They thrive on it. It's what they get from their abusive parent instead of love and they come to need it."
          "So you're saying a kid can actually want to get hit?"
          "In a sense."
          "Can they think that it's Okay? Morally okay?"
          "Did you think it was okay for your father to hit you?"
          "I didn't think it was okay," I said bluntly, "but I thought it was normal."

That's when I start crying. Nobody should endure it. But really nobody should think it's normal.

Blighted hope turned into mindless violence. Mindless violence turns into blighted hope. The cycle goes round and round. Maybe the murder in this book was the murderer's way of stopping the cycle, making something different happen. I wish for every child to have better choices than that.


Catcher in the Rye
Back Roads made me think about the classic adolescent novel Catcher in the Rye. Both Holden and Harley are on lonely journeys through their home turf, reassessing, realizing, recognizing. Harley lacks Holden's sardonicism, but his self-mockery is just as brutal. Both boys end up in mental institutions. In both books, the reader is engaged by the hero and then taken along through his disintegration.

When I read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was so cool. Holden's self-mockery was so cool. His cursing was so cool. His self-destruction was cool. When I read the book as an adult, I felt mostly that Holden was sad. As sad as Harley is. Just sad.

And please don't tell me that boys like Holden and Harley will come out of their mental illness, that it will make them more valuable adults. I deal with Holdens and Harleys all the time. They are damaged and they most often stay damaged. The magic constituents of resilience elude us and them. If you know the recipe, please post it. Our kids need it and those of us who work with them need it.