America's Appalachian Trail is Where it's AT!

A Walk in the Woods
by Bill Bryson
p. 1998

Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a stark break from the fictional fare I’d been indulging in lately, and the first creative nonfiction book I’ve read in a little while. It chronicles Bryson’s summer of 1996, in which he set out to hike America’s Appalachian Trail from start to finish in order to catalogue the experience in his next book.

I’ve got this image of Bryson in my mind: a guy who set out to do something intense and admirable, who wanted to believe that this experience would be transformative and revelatory. Maybe that’s not quite right, but you certainly don’t set out to do a task like hiking the Appalachian Trail in a single season without expecting it to be the challenge of a lifetime, that much is made clear to the reader. As it is in life, Bryson finds out that the actual experience is not quite what he expected.

A Walk in the Woods alternates between informational and narrative chapters, leaning rather heavily on the informational, because, let’s face it, walking on a path isn’t exactly riveting material, even if there’s an awful lot of it. Bryson does a lot of fear mongering, making the task seem exponentially more dangerous than the experience ended up being, but it’s understandable. He probably psyched himself out an awful lot before he hit the trail, and there were dangers, even if he avoided them himself.

For the majority of his expedition, Bryson is accompanied by his profoundly out of shape old friend, Stephen Katz, who provides a bit of comic relief to the journey, but to be honest, I found Katz’s protestations more cringe-worthy than funny some times. I’m sure Katz’s idea of what he was in for was even less complete than Bryson’s, and since this wasn’t a cinematic piece of fiction, neither man made any life-changing discoveries. The whole book kind of leaves you asking, ‘so what?’

So what, indeed. Not far into their trip, the pair discover to their dismay that they will not be hiking the entire trail and in all, they end up completing less than half of the 2200-mile journey. And yet, in spite of all the disappointments, I find myself reading A Walk in the Woods and fantasizing about hiking it myself, just like Bryson and Katz. I know, after reading Bryson’s story, that I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I’d like to think, and yet I still want to slap a pack on my back and grab my walking stick. There’s something to be said about the power of a real challenge. Knowing me, however, I’d probably be so disappointed that I couldn’t complete the trail that I wouldn’t want to do it at all to avoid the letdown.

Well, that and I don’t think I could physically haul that much around for several months without losing my mind. One thing is for sure, if you're doing it alone, you better like your solitude. And if you're hiking with a companion, you should be prepared to hate them by the time it's all over.

All said, A Walk in the Woods is a must-read for hikers, outdoorsmen, and aficionados of the AT, but it’s not the most interesting piece of travel fiction I’ve read, as it could get a little bland at times. Bryson tries to spice it up with historical anecdotes about the Trail, but ultimately, the book left me wanting more. Perhaps I will never fully understand the appeal until I set foot on the trail myself.

Paul Feig: You Had Me At Page One

Kick Me:
Adventures in Adolescence
by Paul Feig
p. 2002

Needing a mood turnaround after the stark writing of Richard Yates, I quickly picked up a book I knew would cheer me up—because I’d read it already. I haven’t picked up Paul Feig’s creative non-fiction style memoirs, Kick Me, since a copy was loaned to me by a friend in high school, but large parts of it came back to me as I read it for the second time—and even though it wasn’t my first time absorbing his hilarious style of reminiscing, I still found myself having to put the book down by the fourth page in because I was laughing too hard.

The first chapter of Paul Feig’s memoirs, dealing with his early childhood into adolescence and rounding out with his teenage years, focuses on the cruel nicknames bestowed upon Feig as a boy, the first being “Fig Newton” which gradually evolved into a harsher, more obvious twist on his unfortunate surname a few years later. Grade school notoriety aside, Paul Feig’s is a name largely unknown still, but it shouldn’t be. I’ve been following Feig for a few years after discovering he hailed from my very own hometown, Royal Oak, Michigan, but he’s since moved on to bigger things, boasting writing credits for the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” “Arrested Development,” “The Office,” and 2011’s box office hit, “Bridesmaids,” among other things. He even has a few acting credits under his belt, and though none of them are really ‘breakout roles’, my high school self was shocked and amused to find out he portrayed token skinny camp counselor Tim from one of my favorite childhood movies, “Heavyweights.”

Paul Feig may not be a household name, but he should be, because his honest, self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor is very catching. He’s more than two decades my senior, of the opposite gender, and much more outgoing than I ever was, but his cringe-worthy stories of adolescent awkwardness are startlingly accessible no matter who you are. And Feig relates the details of his anecdotes with such clarity that you can easily picture them... which often sends you into another bout of hysterical giggling at poor Feig’s expense. All in his plan, though, I’m sure. Everyone loves a joker, and if you can’t laugh at yourself then you’re all the poorer for it.

When I read Kick Me the first time, I wasn’t familiar with the term, but upon retrospection, Feig’s first book definitely falls under the category of “creative nonfiction” an emerging genre that appeals to me, as it offers up a literary spin on the memoir genre. Kick Me isn’t a straight up set of memoirs detailing Feig’s life from birth to present, it is a story, or rather a collection of short stories that sum up the universal experience of youth. If it can be said that Kick Me has overarching themes that guide it to its logical conclusion, it would be that kids can be cruel, because they don’t understand, but that as you grow and look back, all those things you stressed over when you were ten don’t seem so bad when you’re thirty, so relax, let go of your angst, and just learn to enjoy the roller coaster of adolescence.

I had another motive for finally picking up Kick Me, aside from the fact that it had been collecting dust on my shelf for years. Feig wrote a follow up to his first novel, Superstud: Or How I Became A 24-Year-Old Virgin, which I can only assume follows the same format, and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since I found out about it, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I will be trying out Superstud in a much more timely fashion than it took me to reread Kick Me, I am sure.

I urge anybody to pick up this book and dive in headfirst. Paul Feig is just too funny to pass up, and someone you’d very much like to befriend after his tour of his gawky youth. That he took that showy awkwardness and turned it into a lucrative career is as admirable as it is fitting.