Page 59 - Complete_advanced_students_book_with_answers_Neat

Unit 5
Most of this vast forest area is now gone, but what
survives is more impressive than you might expect. The
Chatahoochee is part of four million acres of forest
stretching up to the Great Smoky Mountains. On a
map of the USA it is just a smudge of green, but on
foot, the scale of it is colossal. It would be four days
before Katz and I crossed a highway and eight till we
came to a town.
In a normal year we would be walking into the
dynamic abundance of a southern mountain spring,
through a radiant, productive world alive with insects
and birds. Above all, there would be wild fl owers
blossoming from every twig and pushing through the
forest floor. Instead, we trudged through a silent world
of bare trees. In this way, we fell into a simple routine.
5
Sometimes other hikers would come along, and tell
me where he was. Because everyone walks at diff erent
rates and rests at different times, several times a day
you bump into fellow hikers, especially on mountain
tops or beside streams, and at the wooden shelters that
stand at distant intervals.
6
Around four, we would find somewhere to camp.
One of us would go off to fetch water while the other
prepared noodles. Sometimes we would talk, but
mostly we existed in a kind of companionable silence.
By six o’clock, dark, cold and weariness would force
us to our tents. Katz went to sleep instantly as far as I
could tell. I would read until my shoulders and arms
grew chilly. So I would put myself in darkness and
lie there listening to the peculiarly clear, articulated
sounds of the forest at night.
Adapted from A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson hours I would sit and wait for Katz to catch up.
A And so we walked – up mountains, through forgotten
hollows, along ridges and through mile after mile of
dark, deep, silent woods, on a trail about half a metre
wide.
B In consequence, you get to know your fellow hikers
quite well if you meet them at the shelters. Even at
busy times, however, the woods are great providers
of solitude, and I encountered long periods of perfect
aloneness, when I didn’t see another soul for hours.
C So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought
that they may be hiding wild beasts, there is something
sinister about them that makes you sense an atmosphere
of doom with every step, and leaves you profoundly
aware that you ought to keep your ears pricked.
D The American woods have been unnerving people like
this for 300 years. Henry Thoreau thought nature was
splendid, but when he experienced this real wilderness,
he was unnerved to the core. This wasn’t the tame
world of overgrown orchards that passed for wilderness
in suburban Massachusetts, but a forbidding country
that was ‘wild and savage’. Apparently, the experience
left him, ‘almost hysterical’.
E There is a strange frozen violence in a forest out of
season. Fallen trees lay across the path every fi fty
or sixty yards, often with great bomb craters of dirt
around their roots. Dozens more lay rotting on the
slopes, and every third or fourth tree, it seemed, was
leaning on a neighbour. It was as if the trees couldn’t
wait to fall over.
F When the first Europeans arrived in the New World,
there were perhaps 950 million acres of woodland
in what became the lower forty-eight states. The
Chatahoochee National Forest, through which Katz
and I now trudged, was part of an immense canopy
stretching from Alabama to Canada and beyond.
G Each morning we rose at first light, shivering and
rubbing arms, made coffee, broke camp, and set off into
the silent woods. We would walk from half past seven
to four. We seldom walked together, but every couple of
57