A Walk in the Woods, Entry 2

So far, I am really enjoying reading this book. As mentioned in my last post, I am having many personal connections as I read this book. However, the author still has not hiked in any of the specific places I have hiked yet, but I think those places are coming, a lot faster than I originally presumed, as well. Where I am in the book, Bryson and his friend have decided that they are going to skip hiking through the Smokies, and instead, they are going to drive up to Virginia, where they will get back on the trail. Not to say that the pair hasn’t already hiked quite a while on the Appalachian Trail and they have suffered a lot through the Smokies, but I am still really disappointed that they are not doing the whole trail. It doesn’t even make sense why I am disappointed; it’s not like I’m giving up. But in a way, I guess I’m reading vicariously through their journey (if that is even possible) and I have really connected to the author and his friend, and I do not want them to give up! Just think, when/if they get to the end of the trail, they went through all that pain and suffering and determination, and they can’t even say they hiked the whole Appalachian Trail! I suppose they could say, “I hiked the whole Appalachian Trail, except for the hundred or so miles we drove instead.” That does not sound nearly as impressive, though. Earlier on in the book, on the day the hike starts, Bryson writes, “To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this” (33). Where did this happy, excited man go? There has definitely been some character development. It’s probably just really easy for us, as the readers, to quickly judge Bryson and his hiking partner (Katz) as quitters, but we are comfy in our warm houses, sitting down, while Bryson and Katz are cold and muddy and sleep with mice running over them. In fact, they even have a totally different mindset in the wilderness. Bryson writes when Katz gains pleasure from killing seven mice in one night, “Occasionally it troubled me (I presume it must trouble all hikers from time to time) just how far one strays from the normal measures of civility on the trail” (96). Often, character development and characters changing only occur in fiction books, where the author can control what the characters do, etc. But here, in this nonfiction book, I am definitely starting to see some character development and seeing the personalities of Katz and Bryson starting to change. However, unlike the common book where the characters get more mature throughout, I feel that this book is not just a consistent, linear, uphill trend (with a slope of about 1.63872. Yay math).

A linear graph like this one, although this graph does not have the slope I mentioned.

 
Instead, I feel that the characters in this book become more mature sometimes, such as when they are planning the trip or gathering supplies, but at other times, the characters are incredibly immature, such as when they are angry at the mice so they kill them or they are terrified of the noise in the woods, assume it’s a pair of bears (that rhymes!) and decide to fight these bears with nail clippers. Maybe just the general inconsistency of their development differentiates these characters’ changes from those of characters in fiction books, since it is a more realistic pattern of change (up down up down etc.). In this way, the constant changing of characters in this book follows more closely a cosine curve (starting at the top, where they were fully mature as middle-aged men, then starting to decline as they hike the trail, where they reach their minimum immature-ness and begin to climb back up to maturity, no pun intended).

Here is the infamous cosine graph

 I think this also helps exemplify the mysticism of the trail and the unusual effects it has on people, and the isolation people feel on the trail from the rest of the world, which connects back up to Bryson’s quote I mentioned before about the lack of normal civility on the trail. However, I think I am going to stop writing now, because when you start seeing plot structures as trigonometric functions, I think that’s a small hint that you have written more than enough...