The Plan
You searched for Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, so here is the whole book, chapter by chapter. It is a non-fiction memoir, not a novel, and this summary covers how the walk ends, so it spoils everything. I read the full ebook.
The idea is simple. Bryson has just moved his family to a small town in New Hampshire, after nearly twenty years abroad. A path at the edge of town turns out to be the Appalachian Trail, which runs more than two thousand one hundred miles from Georgia to Maine. He decides to walk it. He is not alone for long.
Chapters One to Three
In chapter one, Bryson buys gear. Everything needs another piece of equipment, and the prices shock him. He gives his reasons: fitness, learning his own country again, and the trouble the great Appalachian forest is in.
Chapter two is a warning. He tells the true story of a black bear that killed a twelve year old boy at a camp in Quebec, in nineteen eighty-three. Then Katz enters. Stephen Katz is an old friend from Des Moines whom Bryson has not seen in about twenty-five years. He calls, asks to come, and says he is in good shape because his car was repossessed. He arrives heavy, hungry, and carrying a bag of Snickers bars.
Chapter three explains the trail’s history. A dreamer named Benton MacKaye proposed it in nineteen twenty-one. A lawyer named Myron Avery did the building, starting in nineteen thirty, and Bryson says Avery deserves the credit. Then they fly to Atlanta, and a driver named Wes Wisson takes them to Amicalola Falls. He tells them that about two thousand hikers set out each spring, and no more than ten percent finish. On the first day Bryson reaches the top of Springer Mountain, astonished at how tired he is, and has to go back to look for Katz.
Georgia and the Smokies
Chapter four is about the woods themselves, which Bryson finds spooky, and about the Chattahoochee forest. Katz and Bryson settle into the routine. A talkative hiker named Mary Ellen catches up with them and eats their last cupcake. In chapter five she drops out with blisters.
Chapter six is a snowstorm on a narrow ledge of path. They push on through deep snow, and the weather improves. Chapter seven is the Smokies. It rains for days, the shelters are crowded with college students, and the two of them stand on a foggy summit and see nothing. In chapter eight they reach Gatlinburg, an ugly tourist town, and argue with a waitress about a twenty dollar bill.
Skipping Ahead
Chapter nine is a pause. Bryson tells the story of Earl Shaffer, who in nineteen forty-eight became the first person to hike the trail in one summer. Officials did not believe him. Bryson also explains how the trail was saved by a national law in nineteen sixty-eight, and how few people complete it.
Chapter ten changes the pace again. He describes a nineteenth century painting of an American wilderness, and the botanists who went deep into the woods looking for plants. Then back to the trail, and a quiet dinner with Katz.
In real terms, this is the moment the book changes shape. After Gatlinburg, they take a cab to Knoxville, rent a car, and drive north to Virginia. They skip a large part of the trail. Bryson is honest about it, and I think the honesty is part of the charm.
Virginia and the Bears
Chapter eleven starts with a statistic. Bryson says the average American walks about one point four miles a week, and he complains that many towns have no way to walk at all. Then he and Katz walk toward Waynesboro, in Virginia. At night in his tent, Bryson hears something large drinking nearby, and spends hours gripping a walking stick, a knife and a light. In the morning, Katz asks if it really was a bear. Bryson does not know.
Chapter thirteen ends the first stretch. They reach Front Royal after about five hundred miles, a million and a quarter steps by Bryson’s count. Katz goes home to Des Moines to take a summer job, and promises to come back in August to hike the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine. Bryson goes off to promote a book. Before he leaves, he visits Harpers Ferry, and the story of a Confederate general and his famous victory there.
Part Two: Alone
Part two opens in Pennsylvania. Bryson drives there, having decided he will not walk across it. The trail runs for two hundred thirty miles across the state, and hikers call it the place where boots die, since it is rocky. The maps are useless, he says. He ends up on a ridge that looks like a battlefield, and after four days he has walked eleven net miles. He swears never to hike the trail with a car again.
Chapter fifteen is a geology chapter. The Appalachians are very old, and were once as high as the Himalayas. Continents collided and moved, and parts of Africa are, in a sense, still in New England.
In chapter sixteen he starts to walk New England for real. He hears about mountain lion sightings, and passes through Norwich and Hanover, his own town. In chapter seventeen, he climbs Mount Lafayette in the White Mountains with a neighbor named Bill Abdu. Bryson is wearing blue jeans, gets dangerously chilled in the wind, and the chapter turns into an essay on hypothermia. Chapter eighteen is about Mount Washington, where a weather station once recorded a wind speed of two hundred thirty-one miles an hour.
Maine and Katz
Chapter nineteen starts with Katz in Bryson’s living room, wearing a newspaper delivery bag, and suggesting they hike with five pounds of gear. Bryson talks him out of it. They start in Caratunk, with three days to limber up before the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Katz throws away clothes and a water bottle. They see a moose. He calls Maine the hardest part of the whole trail. They ford rivers and arrive in Monson at a famous guesthouse.
Then comes the turn. At the store, Katz asks to borrow money for beer. He has started drinking again after years of sobriety, and Bryson is furious. They barely speak after that.
In chapter twenty they enter the wilderness, which is steep and hot. Katz runs out of water. They talk, and Katz admits how hard it is not to drink. Then Bryson goes to fill the bottles and Katz disappears. Bryson spends a night alone at Cloud Pond, and next morning finds Katz four hours later, lost and scratched, but fine.
The End of the Walk
So they decide to leave. At a logging road they get a ride in the back of a pickup truck at seventy miles an hour. They never see Katahdin.
In chapter twenty-one, they stay at a boarding house in Milo, run by a kind woman named Joan Bishop. Katz declares that they did hike the Appalachian Trail, in snow and heat, in the South and the North. He goes back to Des Moines and a sober life. Bryson walks on, off and on, until mid October, and then adds up his miles at the kitchen table. The total is eight hundred seventy miles, which is thirty-nine and a half percent of the trail.
He lists his regrets, including that he did not see a bear, and that he did not climb Katahdin. He says he will. But he keeps what he learned. His last line is Katz’s point: they tried, so they hiked the Appalachian Trail.
My Take
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. The book is not about finishing. It is about what the trail does to people, and about the places along it that are disappearing. That is why Bryson is so open about skipping sections. He cares more about what the woods and the trail mean than about a record.
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