A L S O +T O D A Y "A Walk in the Woods" By Bill Bryson An almost-encounter with two big animals in the middle of the night T A B L E_T A L K Visiting Bankok? Travelers discuss places to go, people to see in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Student protests bloom By Rolf Potts Spring is here -- time to put on the riot gear! (05/19/98) The tomb of the unknown soldier By Roxanne Nelson An unforgettable encounter in southern France (05/18/98) Mondo Weirdo Tales of Koh Samui Readers' adventures on Thailand's fabled -- or is it just mislabeled? -- island (05/15/98) Don't go there By Tim Barrett Way off the beaten track in Mexico (05/14/98) There'll always be a London By Douglas Cruickshank A wandering wonderer ponders the passions of collectors and cabbies (05/13/98) Browse the Wanderlust Features archives		A TALK WITH BILL BRYSON .-. PAGE 2 OF 2 What was your biggest fear going into the trip? Bear attacks. Even though bear attacks are extremely rare, if you're going to get hurt by a big animal on the Appalachian Trail, that's the one that's going to do it. I was aware that my fear was irrational or inflated, but I couldn't quite shake it. Somehow the fact that something is irrational doesn't hold much power out there in the woods. No, it doesn't. Or in any circumstance when you're alone. Because even though I was hiking with Katz, when we were actually in motion most of the time we were several minutes apart. We weren't within sight of each other. I was always in the lead. And there are those times when you come around the bend, and you hear crashing in the undergrowth and something large. Your instinct is to think: Is that a bear? And it always turns out to be a deer or something much more tame and less threatening, but it was never quite out of the back of my mind. What was the most important lesson of the trip? The lesson I got from the trip was just how big the world is. And how big a part of that big world the United States is. The one thing that happens when you get onto the trail is you're approaching the world in a way that you've never approached the world before -- i.e., on foot. You think you know what to expect, but you just don't. When you say 2,200 miles, the only way of conceiving that kind of distance is in terms of air miles or driving. You can't even imagine a distance of that magnitude except in some kind of a machine. It's just huge, and with a lot of hills in between. There's this whole other world out there, this whole other way of looking at that world. And that was something that really stuck with me and made it all worthwhile. I really understand now, in a way I never did before. And most people go through life without understanding at all. Can you bring that understanding home with you? Do you find that you're applying that somehow in day-to-day life? Not day-to-day life. Living in New Hampshire, I like to think when I drive down the road and see a hill and trees that I appreciate the scale of it in a new way, that I know what it would feel like to walk up that hill. I can look at it now, and if it's 2,000 feet, I know the difference between that and a hill that's 3,000 feet in terms of the exertion that is required. The one thing you always tell yourself on the trail is that you will never take running water for granted again. Or, you know, flushed toilets or hot meals. And you do. As soon as you come off the trail, you forget that. You can't sustain that. You instantly take it for granted. Within 24 hours, it all seems completely routine again. One thing that I was especially struck by in your book was the intimacy with nature that you conveyed. It's like living with a person for a long time. You get to know every contour of them, you get to know the nuance of their different moods -- I think you had that same experience with nature. It's certainly true. You are out in this world that most of us normally don't really experience except as backdrop, something in the distance. You realize that the woods are a strange place. Sometimes they're really quite strikingly menacing and remote, and at other times very intimate and almost caressing. Caressing sounds a bit New Age-y, but there are times when it's almost womblike, very comforting. And at other times it seems much more hostile and aggressive. You do feel very small out there. And you find yourself vulnerable to it, kind of at its mercy -- not just the woods but nature in a wider sense. The closest thing in my own life was when I went on the Karakoram Highway that goes up through Pakistan to the Chinese border. There were mountains towering above you that you knew had towered above Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. On a trip like that you come to terms with so many things that you just don't find in your daily life, important truths that we usually don't think about: How small we are. How big the world is. How puny our efforts are. But still how important they are despite the puniness. When I was reading your book I kept thinking about my own experience of being way out in the middle of nowhere and realizing how vulnerable I am and how much I depend on other people or on other things for my survival. It's pretty intense. That's exactly the experience I had. And it's awful to think how easily you could go through life and not have that experience. I take it you are very grateful. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I hated 98.8 percent of it. There were moments of genuine exultation when the sun comes out and spring is coming and you crest a mountaintop and you get a great view. But most of the time it's either just boring as hell, or you're cold or wet or uncomfortable. Most of the time if you're honest, you don't want to be there. You want to be somewhere else where you are more comfortable. I suppose it's like any kind of penance. It's worth it because you get so much out of it. It's worth it just for those moments of exultation. It's also worth it for what you learn about landscape and yourself. And what is your next project? I've pretty well decided that I'm going to go and do a book on Australia. I didn't want to do another travel book. I wanted to go off and do something else -- but Australia really, really appeals to me. And with the Sydney Olympics coming up in 2000, if you're going to do Australia, you've got to do it sooner rather than later. I'm especially attracted by the wide open, unpopulated expanses you find there. In Iowa, where I grew up, you have pretty spacious areas -- but it's inhabited space, cultivated space, something narrow. In Australia, it's just incredible expanses of nothing. I want to feel what that's like, to be in all that nothing. SALON | May 20, 1998