书摘:A Walk In The Woods (2)

A WALK IN THE WOODS: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson (ZT)

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the
woods--giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain
spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis,
brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern
equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the
brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to
spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around
your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure.
No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a
tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body
for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is
a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The
symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever,
chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the
extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle
spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions,
and--hardly surprising, really--chronic depression.

Then there is the little-known family of organisms called
hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice
and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by
anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them--by
lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice
have recently scampered. In 1993 a single outbreak of hantavirus
killed thirty-two people in the southwestern United States, and the
following year the disease claimed its first victim on the AT when a
hiker contracted it after sleeping in a "rodent-infested shelter."
(All AT shelters are rodent infested.) Among viruses, only rabies,
ebola, and HIV are more certainly lethal. Again, there is no
treatment.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of
murder. At least nine hikers (the actual number depends on which
source you consult and how you define a hiker) have been murdered
along the trail since 1974. Two young women would die while I was
out there.

For various practical reasons, principally to do with the long,
punishing winters of northern New England, there are only so many
available months to hike the trail each year. If you start at the
northern end, at Mount Katahdin in Maine, you must wait for the
snows to clear in late May or June. If, on the other hand, you start
in Georgia and head north, you must time it to finish before mid-
October, when the snows blow back in. Most people hike from south to
north with spring, ideally keeping one step ahead of the worst of
the hot weather and the more irksome and infectious of insects. My
intention was to start in the south in early March. I put aside six
weeks for the first leg.

The precise length of the Appalachian Trail is a matter of
interesting uncertainty. The U.S. National Park Service, which
constantly distinguishes itself in a variety of ways, manages in a
single leaflet to give the length of the trail as 2,155 miles and
2,200 miles. The official "Appalachian Trail Guides", a set of
eleven books each dealing with a particular state or section,
variously give the length as 2,144 miles, 2,147 miles, 2,159 miles,
and "more than 2,150 miles." The Appalachian Trail Conference, the
governing body, in 1993 put the trail length at exactly 2,146.7
miles, then changed for a couple of years to a hesitantly vague
"more than 2,150 miles," but has recently returned to confident
precision with a length of 2,160.2 miles. In 1993, three people
rolled a measuring wheel along its entire length and came up with a
distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about the same time, a careful measure
based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey maps put the distance
at 2,118.3 miles.

What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end it is
not easy. The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not particularly
formidable as mountains go--the highest, Clingmans Dome in
Tennessee, tops out at a little under 6,700 feet--but they are big
enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350 peaks over
5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the
vicinity. Altogether, it takes about five months, and five million
steps, to walk the trail from end to end.

And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you
need. It may seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to
realize that this wasn't going to be even remotely like an amble
through the English Cotswolds or Lake District, where you head off
for the day with a haversack containing a packed lunch and a hiking
map and at day's end retire from the hills to a convivial inn for a
hot bath, a hearty meal, and a soft bed. Here you sleep outdoors and
cook your own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty
pounds, and when you're hauling that kind of weight, believe me,
never for a moment does it escape your notice. It is one thing to
walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe
on your back.

My first inkling of just how daunting an undertaking it was to be
came when I went to our local outfitters, the Dartmouth Co-Op, to
purchase equipment. My son had just gotten an after-school job
there, so I was under strict instructions of good behavior.
Specifically, I was not to say or do anything stupid, try on
anything that would require me to expose my stomach, say "Are you
s hitting me?" when informed of the price of a product, be
conspicuously inattentive when a sales assistant was explaining the
correct maintenance or aftercare of a product, and above all don
anything inappropriate, like a woman's ski hat, in an attempt to
amuse. 


_________________________________________________________________

***** ABOUT THE AUTHOR ***** (ZT)

Bill Bryson's books include "A Walk in the Woods," "I'm a Stranger
Here Myself," "In a Sunburned Country," "Bryson's Dictionary of
Troublesome Words," "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (which
earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize), "The Life and Times of the
Thunderbolt Kid," and "Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors."
Bryson lives in England.
_________________________________________________________________