A WALK IN THE WOODS by Bill Bryson 簡介（ZT)
Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson
decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by
walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches
from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing
landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes--and to a
writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also
provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic
silliness of his fellow human beings.
For a start there's the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen
Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk. Despite Katz's
overwhelming desire to find cozy restaurants, he and
Bryson eventually settle into their stride, and while on
the trail they meet a bizarre assortment of hilarious
characters. But "A Walk in the Woods" is more than just a
laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness
to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its
fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the
conservation of America's last great wilderness.
_________________________________________________________________
A WALK IN THE WOODS: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson (ZT)
CHAPTER ONE
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New
Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the
edge of town.
A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the
celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along
America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning
Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From
Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump,
comely hills whose very names--Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands,
Green Mountains, White Mountains--seem an invitation to amble. Who
could say the words "Great Smoky Mountains" or "Shenandoah Valley"
and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to
"throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump
over the back fence"?
And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously
beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in
which I had just settled. It seemed such an extraordinary
notion--that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through
woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough
and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin,
floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have
seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after
years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective
way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land
after nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be useful (I
wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn
to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants
and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about
fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel
like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes
with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped
granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, "Yeah, I've s hit in the
woods."
And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are
the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests--the expansive
relic of the richest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to
grace the temperate world--and that forest is in trouble. If the
global temperature rises by 4 degrees C over the next fifty years,
as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness
below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in
frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the
stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red
spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about
to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this
singular wilderness, it was now.
So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention--told
friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it
common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books
and talked to people who had done the trail in whole or in part and
came gradually to realize that this was way beyond--way
beyond--anything I had attempted before.
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a
guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high
hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a
bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve
and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a
troubled unconsciousness.
The woods were full of peril--rattlesnakes and water moccasins and
nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild
boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure
corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants
and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and
poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by
a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles
them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and
into glacial lakes.
Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard
of a man who had stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was
swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot owl--the last he saw of his
scalp it was dangling from talons prettily silhouetted against a
harvest moon--and of a young woman who was woken by a tickle across
her belly and peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead
bunking down in the warmth between her legs. I heard four separate
stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing
tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people
abruptly vaporized ("tweren't nothing left of him but a scorch
mark") by body-sized bolts of lightning when caught in sudden storms
on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath falling trees, or eased
off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding
on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a
flash flood; of hikers beyond counting whose last experience was of
trembling earth and the befuddled thought "Now what the--?"
It required only a little light reading in adventure books and
almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would
find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened
wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of
pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened
undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water,
before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady
eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appetite for
pink, plump, city-softened flesh.
BGM: A Walk In The Forest
【Piano and Cello Duet】Brian Crain with YuJeong Lee
來源: Justaddmusic 於 2013-10-03 20:15:19
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