Armchair Hiking

Well, if you can't be doing something you love (because, oh, just as a hypothetical, you're flat on your back recovering from being yucky sick with stomach flu) you can always read about it.

Getting onto the Appalachian Trail with boots on feet, pack on back, and walking stick in hand, is something I've managed to do only once since moving to Virginia. Reading about it is something I've been able to do more of. My lady love and I have accumulated trail maps and guides, Therma-Rest pads, and Nalgene bottles, plus several books. A Season on the Appalachian Trail, by Lynn Setzer, was a welcome $1 thrift store find by my wife this week, presented to me as I rested on the couch. (Hypothetically, of course)

I blasted through it in one day. Ms. Setzer's book (ISBN 0-89732-382-3) is written for folks who know a little about trail names, trail magic, and the basic geography of the 2,000-plus mile footpath from Mt. Springer to Mt. Katahdin, yet her style is an engaging and amazingly well-organized synthesis of interactions with a couple of hundred "thru-hikers" (the folks who go, or intend to go, the entire route). On-the-spot interviews with hikers at trailheads and shelters are interspersed with comments quoted from trail registers and postcards to give an intimate and detailed picture of what thru-hiking is really like. The early chapters help potential hikers count the cost (are you sure you wanna do this? are you still sure after this horrible true life story of heartbreak, injury, and deprivation?) while the later chapters showcase the mixed bag of joys, frustrations, befuddlements, and growth in maturity for those who endure to the end. Read with nuts-and-bolts books (of which there are plenty) about how to prepare for a hike, A Season would be excellent preparation for what lies ahead.

But of course I couldn't read this one without pulling down Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (ISBN 0-7679-0251-3) from the shelf. Where Setzer provides the full breadth of the thru-hiking experience through the views of many, Bryson focuses on his own pudgy, middle-aged attempt to thru-hike with the help of his inestimable sidekick Katz - with sidetrips into the history of the AT and the men who made it, the flora, fauna and geography of the trail, and a frontal assault on the National Parks Service. Both authors write about the 1996 hiking season, curiously enough, so there is treatment of the same history of weather and dramatic events (including a double murder on the trail) from distinct perspectives. Yet Bryson is riotously funny (his account of sharing the trail with hiker Mary Ellen is worth whatever it costs you to lay hold on the book) and his story is all the better for his fully-documented failure to walk the whole woods.

I'm over the flu now, and itching to get my boots on so I can hike a section (maybe continuing northward from Dick's Dome this time) but my roles as husband, father, provider, and church leader cast their shadow ... plus I somehow dinged up my knee ...