How The Long Struggle In Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods

In the book, A Walk In The Woods, by Bill Bryson, Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz make a long trek across the Appalachian Trail. This trail is approximately 2,100 miles long, and the duo do not make it all the way through. Actually they barely scratch the surface of the long and hardship filled trail. As Bryson puts it however “Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.” (Bryson 30) because when all someone does all day is hike distance becomes void of meaning. This is actually the reason hikers take long treks such as this, everything becomes timeless, and it seems almost as if you get lost in yourself and the beauty of the nature around you. The reason Bryson writes about his time spent on the trail is to share his experience with everyone else, especially those who can not experience it first hand. This is his gateway to freedom and beauty unimaginable to those who do not travel by foot. Bryson states “You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no …show more content…
Clearly evident through which the way he writes about traveling. A person who takes a walk down the bike trail every once in awhile can not see the world the way a hiker does, who has spent countless days surrounded by nothing but wilderness and the companionship of those whom they choose to be with. Bryson brushes upon how even if people are active, they are only to a certain extent,“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative.” (Bryson 57) as shown in the above