A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
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Young Adult (18-35)Accents
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This is an excerpt from a Walk in the Woods. By Bill Bryson. Read for YOU by Benjamin Walker. Not long after I moved with my family toe, 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 2100 miles along America's eastern seaboard to the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains. The 80 is the granddaddy of long hikes from Georgia to Maine. It wanders across 14 states through plump, comely hills whose very names Blue Ridge Smokies, Cumberland's Green Mountains, White Mountains, Semen, 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 waas, 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 1800 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 view. Had 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 Waddle, Cem sloth It would be an interesting and reflective way to re acquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land. After nearly 20 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 and 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 bit 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 **** 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 expanse of 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 four degrees Celsius over the next 50 years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savannah. Trees are already dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone. The stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods air going and the red spruces, Fraser, ferns, mountain ashes and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience the singular wilderness it was now, so I decided to do it more rationally. I announced my intention, I told my friends and neighbors confidently informed, my publisher made it common knowledge among those who knew me that I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in whole or in part, and came to gradually realize that this was way beyond way beyond anything I had attempted before. Nearly everyone I had talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who'd 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 horse 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 on biblical sex. Rabies crazed skunks, raccoons and squirrels, merciless fire ants and ravening black fly poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak and poison salamanders, even a scattering of moose. Lethal Lee, deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and be funnels them into chasing hapless hikers. The remote sunny meadows and inter glacial lakes literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who would step from his tent for a midnight P and was swooped upon by a short sighted hoot owl. The last he saw of his scalp. It was dangling from Talyn's prettily silhouetted against Ah 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 vaporised toward nothing left to him but a scorch mark by body sized bolts of lightning. When cotton sudden storms on high Ridgelines of tents crushed beneath falling trees or eased off precipice is on ball bearings of beated rain and sent paragliding onto 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