Appalachian Book Club

We’re in Rutland, Vermont, at the Days Inn next to the Denny’s because the Inn at Long Trail was full last night and we needed to rest and resupply before we turn definitively South at last and head toward Manchester Center, about 60 miles away. Vernont is really living up to its reputation so far, with lovely pine needle cushioned dirt trails, frequent short side quests to interesting country stores and coffee shops, and a plethora of beautiful open fields. I think I’ve taken more pictures of just the fields in Vermont than I took in all of New Hampshire, so I’ll illustrate this post with some of my favorites.

There is still a lot of climbing and descending in Vermont. It’s a wrinkly land, with every climb containing numerous smaller ups and downs. The trail so far generally climbs up 800 or so feet above a road and stream, then gradually rises and falls for a few miles, then drops down another 800 feet to the next road, and so on. In a fifteen mile day we’re still doing three or four thousand feet of climbing, but it’s somehow not as menacing as three thousand feet of New Hampshire climbing, or as aggressively vertical as three thousand feet of Maine climbing. Vermont is basically all what Campbell Scott, in “Top of the Food Chain,” called “the hilly lumpy bumpy part of town outside of town.” The ongoing tendinitis in my right ankle yearns for the flatlands of Massachusetts and Connecticut, but the rest of me is pretty happy to have a hundred more miles of Vermont to enjoy.

I’m still trying to gather my thoughts and recover from the general trauma of New Hampshire enough to write about it, so in the meantime I thought let’s have a meeting of the Appalachian Book Club. I’ve brought four books to share that I read so far on the trail, and I hope you’ll recommend some more in the comments. 

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

If you’re reading this newsletter you’ve surely read A Walk in the Woods. But have you read it lately? The main thing I remembered about this book was that Bryson didn’t actually hike the whole trail, and anecdotally that’s the main thing everyone else remembers about it too. But I think our collective impression of Bryson’s failure as a hiker stems mostly from his success as a self-deprecating humorist. He actually hiked more than 800 miles of the trail, which is a whole lot of miles by any standard. We’re at mile 487 right now, and believe me, 800 is a lot of miles. If I met a section hiker who’s done 800 miles of the trail, and I have, I would congratulate them for the impressive accomplishment, not sneer that they didn’t even finish the trail.

So, when I re-read A Walk In The Woods earlier in the hike without the expectation that I was reading the definitive chronicle of an AT thru-hike, I was much more able to enjoy the book on its own terms. It offers a lot of trail history, both cultural and geographic. Bryson also spends a surprising amount of time on comprehensive critiques of both the Forest Service and the U.S. National Parks, which feels a bit dated now. But the 90’s were the last moments before criticizing the Forest Service put you on a particular side of the culture wars, so it’s interesting to see that critique made from a hard-line ecological perspective. 

If you haven’t read A Walk In The Woods yet, please do yourself a favor and rectify that oversight promptly. And if you read it once in the distant past, I would say it has enough substance to reward a revisit. But if you ever find yourself sharing a trail with me and you want to hear a forty five minute tirade, ask me what Bryson got wrong about the moose (it is: everything). 

A Walk in the Park, by Kevin Fedarko

This worthy follow-up in the “A Walk In…” family of books is journalist and former Colorado River poop raft captain Kevin Fedarko’s story of thru-hiking the Grand Canyon with his photographer partner Pete McBride. It turns out thru-hiking the Grand Canyon is barely possible for the most experienced and prepared canyon rat, which Fedarko and McBride are absolutely not. 

It’s not an Appalachian story in any way, of course, but it is a satisfying tale of two ignorant newbies learning what they didn’t even know they didn’t know about hiking, with an enormous amount of help from experts. It’s also full of cultural and geological history of the Grand Canyon, which gets a bit intrusive toward the middle of the book and makes the pacing sag a little. I was glad I pushed through, because the second half is well worth it.

Fedarko’s writing is terrific. His talent I most envy is a gift for describing landscapes in a way that’s almost dreamlike, more metaphorical than literal. I often found myself not so much visualizing the land he was describing but rather feeling what it felt like to see it, which I think is a deeper and better reading experience. There’s also a thread running through the story about his relationship with his father, and the way that fathers can pass on a love for the outdoors to their kids, and you bet he got me in the feels with all that business. 

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Through the last hundred or so miles of Maine and most of New Hampshire I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and the highest praise I can give it is that it kept me awake and turning pages after some of the most exhausting hiking days of my entire life. This is flat-out one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s a retelling of David Copperfield set in the Appalachian Mountains of Western Virginia in the early 2000s, as the opioid epidemic was starting to massacre entire poor communities at scale. And all of those details combined to make me think I wouldn’t like it, so if you’re feeling that way too, forget them. It’s a book about people—real people—the things they do and the things that are done to them, and how difficult it is to tell the difference. It’s both funny and heartbreaking and you will fall in love with at least a few of the people you meet in there. It’s a whole world, the way the very best novels are, and I’m sad that I had to leave it. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

Breece Pancake (the D’J was an Atlantic magazine typo of his middle initials that he liked and decided to keep) was a West Virginian associate professor of English and short story writer who killed himself in 1977, at age 26, with only six published stories. This collection adds six more unpublished stories and I believe contains his entire literary output.

There are a lot of “undiscovered geniuses” in American letters, and most of them are undiscovered for a reason, but Breece Pancake is the real thing. A couple of these stories tip over the razor’s edge into melodrama, but the best of them are perfect short stories—deep enough to capture whole lifetimes but short enough to land like a punch, or what Stephen King called “a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”   

Pancake’s stories are all set in more or less the same Appalachia as Demon Copperhead, but a few decades earlier, and if you just finished the latter novel and miss the places and people you met in it, these stories feel like a prequel of sorts. They’re grittier and less funny, but no less human. 

So that’s one book of Appalachian adventure, one of non-Appalachian adventure, and two of Appalachian culture. I hope that sets the parameters appropriately broadly, and I need some new books to read so please join me in the comments with your own recommendations.