No one talks about books anymore.
Book clubs may start their sessions with a statement abut the book the members are supposed to be reading, but that quickly devolves into gossip, and club business.
I recently finished reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. The book was published by Broadway Books in 1998. The book is a 284 account of his trek along the Appalachian Trail. He actually walked 870 miles of the 2,000 mile Trail, a record to be envied as most hikers do not walk all of the miles in a single season.
Bryson shared his fears of bears. And of his ability to walk the long trail.
Both his fears were unfounded. He didn't see a bear on the trail, though he had a close encounter with a moose.
Bryson's poetic and often, funny prose are a siren song to wandered to grab a forty pound hiking pack and take up the Appalachian Trial in Georgia and follow it all the way to Maine.
The book is also a call for better environmental protection actions.
Bryson doesn't preach his sermon for protection of the last of our natural beauties, he simply compares the Trail as it is now to the way it looked when it was completed in 1937 and to how the Trail looked even earlier, before humans began exploiting it.
He tells the story of the magnificent American Chestnut tree, now no longer thriving in America.
Along the way Bryson compares Benton McKay's view of the Trail to its reality, often wistfully yearning for Mckaye's dream, other times decrying it.
One of Bryson's side trips takes the reader to the almost forgotten Centralia, Pennsylvania.
Centralia is not far off the Appalachian Trail as it passes through Pennsylvania. Centralia sent chills up my back. It could easily be the poster child for the Environmental Protection Agency.
I prer fiction to non fiction. Yet this book held my interest. I couldn't wait to get back to it after I had set it down for the day.
Not since Travels with Charley by john Steinbeck has a non fiction book so captured my heat and imagination. A Walk in the Woods was a New York Times Bestseller and probably can e found in most libraries. However, if you want your own copy, I suggest any major bookstore or Amazon.Com.
