InsaneJournal

Quotes, thoughts, Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods"
It's one of those books that inspires me to go on an adventure.

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


On Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance by Canadian academic Stephen Herrero “If this is not the last word on the subject, then I really, really, really, do not wish to hear the last word”.

All the books will tell you that if a grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life

“In many places in America now, it is not possible to be a pedestrian even if you wanted to be”

Even if it is safe, people assume it isn't. When I used to work at Market Basket in high school, occasionally they'd let me go early. One day I realized that instead of calling my mother and explaining, and then hanging round the strip mall waiting for her to get me, I could just walk the two blocks to her office. It wasn't the best road to walk on ever, but it really wasn't that far, and fairly safe. And yet everyone got so worried about me doing that- my managers even threatened not to let me go early if I was planning to walk. People around here at least, seem to believe that if it doesn't have a sidewalk, you're not supposed to walk on it, and usually only the downtown has sidewalks. Cities are very different, but the majority of North America is not cities, it's mid to small rural towns where most of the useful stuff has migrated away from the original central village square to strip malls by the highway. That's far, and inconvenient, and occasionally dangerous at night or in bad weather. People will either repeatedly stop to ask if you need a ride, or they will honk their horns angrily at you for having the gall to be a pedestrian.

People usually don't encourage other people to walk if there's a car available and anyone walking must not *have* a car available (which must mean you're really pathetically poor, I guess).

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is still an imposing presence but the stony mass that arises from the New England woods today represents at most, the stubby bottom one third of what it was ten million years ago

Wow. I'm a bit overwhelmed.

Vermont is Volvos and antique shops and country inns with cutely contrived names like Quail Hollow Lodge and Fiddlehead Farm Inn. New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with license plates bearing the feisty slogan “Live Free or Die”. The landscape, too, differs crucially. Vermont’s mountains are comparatively soft and rolling and its profusion of dairy farms gives it a more welcoming and inhabited feel. New Hampshire is one big forest. Of the state’s 9, 304 square miles of territory, some 85 percent-an area somewhat larger than Wales- is woods and nearly all the rest is either lakes or above treeline. Some apart from the very occasional town or ski resort, New Hampshire is primarily, sometimes rather dauntingly, wilderness

Being from the far southeastern part of the state, more North Shore than Great North Woods, it doesn't feel that way to me so much, most of the time. But that's because I'm so used to it- I keep thinking that *everyone* has this much forest and wild animals in their backyard(everyone's woken up in the middle of the night hearing a feline howl that is definitely no domestic cat, haven't they?)

Even the people in this town appear to be sort of unable to see the literal forest for the literal trees- people keep saying "you really live out in the sticks, don't you" and it's like, "yeah, we don't live in town, but haven't you noticed, most of this town is woods?" I think roughly four miles of it isn't- there is absolutely no excuse for going "I got so lost, out there in the woods". If you've lived in this town or any town near it for any length of time and you're still calling my neighbhorhood "the boondocks", I'd hate to see how you'd handle anything further north. I've hardly *been* to the north country, and people think my town is the end of civilization?

And the mountains, yes. I don't usually think that I live in the mountains, but then I drive up one of the really big hills, where you can finally see above the trees and I realize that this entire town is ringed by a series of small mountains.

Which brings us back to the size issue. Bryson says NH is larger than Wales, and NH is one of the smallest Northeastern states, which tend to be a bit smaller than other states in the union. The sheer amount of space that implies is...I mean, wow.

I have some pictures, which I'll post soon.