Recently, I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. I’ve followed the author (literarily) through England and Iceland and small town America and I’ve enjoyed being virtually carried along.
A Walk in the Woods, however, is a stretch for me because Bryson is talking about hiking the Appalachian Trail, something I would never, ever attempt to do. Ever.
In my defense, consider this: If someone said to you, “Hey, let’s walk over 2,000 miles through rocks and mud and wind and rain, just for fun!” what would you say? I’d say, “How about not?”
I’m a wimp. I admit it. I enjoy trees and flowers and fresh air and sunsets as much as the next person, but only if I have simultaneous access to amenities and, sadly, the Appalachian Trail provides precious few.
Fran Lebowitz once said, “First of all, nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.”
I can do without chairs. I can stand for reasonable amounts of time and I am not opposed to sitting on a stump if the need arises, but I have become (un)reasonably attached to sleeping in a bed. I am even more attached to bathroom facilities, places with toilets that flush and showers with walls and towel bars.
Now that I am older and able to draw such lines in the sand, I have decided that I will happily commune with nature during daylight hours, but I will not camp. If the Phoenician Frolicking Food Festival offers nothing but Port-o-Potties, I order take out and go home. So you can see how the idea of sleeping for days on end in crude, mouse-infested shelters would not be my idea of a vacation.
I know the trail offers spectacular views, but they come with spectacular blisters and mosquito bites, snakes and bears and intestinal parasites I shudder to even mention. I’ll wait for the movie.
What say I cover a similar distance traveling from one Cracker Barrel to another, especially if each one is in the parking lot of a Hampton Inn where there are (I cannot stress this enough) showers? I could drive the Appalachian Trail, or better yet, take a tour bus so I could look out the window.
Hikers insist that there’s something to be said for having your own legs carry you all that distance, but I think that thing is, “Owwwww!” I bought a pair of hiking boots for a Canyonlands trip I took last summer (bus ride, regular bathroom stops, terminating each day in a standard hotel), and busted them out on the Bryce Canyon Wimp Trail. Three dry, dusty hours later, I decided that rock formations also look beautiful from a distance. The boots went back in the box awaiting a time when trails come dotted with coffee bars.
Thank goodness there remains a group of hardier people who hike the Appalachian Trail every year, if not all at once, breaking it up into segments and doing it over the course of a few years, which is even more fascinating because they go in knowing the rigors they faced the first time. Amazing. I guess the carrot on the end of that long, long stick is the ability to say that you’ve done it, to claim that hard-won Appalachian badge of courage.
I will have to be content to get my badge in some other area, like needlecraft or flower arranging. A walk in the woods? No, thank you. Not my cup of camp stove, creosote tea.
