There’s nothing going on.” The deeper satisfactions of the trip were not entirely lost on him, but he was first and foremost a writer on assignment, not a long-distance hiker for its own sake. “Every night when I’d crawl into my tent, I’d just think, ‘I don’t know what the hell we’re doing out here, cause I’m not going to get a book out of this.
There was none of the rapid-fire change of scenery and cast of characters that his earlier travel narratives had relied on. And then it dawned on Bryson: virtually all there is on the AT is the routine of the hiking day. Like so many long-distance AT hikers, they spent the first several days getting accustomed to the trail, figuring out what worked for them and what didn’t, establishing the routine of their hiking days. He recruited his old friend Matt Angerer to be his hiking companion, and the two set out from Georgia’s Springer Mountain in March of 1996. 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.Īnd it would, in the vein of Horace Kephart’s retreat to the Appalachians some 90 years earlier, provide a venue for Bryson’s publishing ambition. 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. Would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth. Thru-hiking the AT, he wrote in the opening pages of the ensuing book, He says the idea came to him while out for a walk in Hanover, when he noticed the Appalachian Trail heading up into the woods on the outskirts of town. Bryson needed a journey to undertake, one with a distinctly American character. His next book would be targeted to an American audience, but his stock in trade was the humorous travel narrative, and he had already published, to a very mixed reception, his take on the classic American road trip. By the mid-1990s, Bill Bryson was an established bestseller in his adopted home of Great Britain, but success had not come so readily in the US market.
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