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www.english0905.com Unit 5
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
Most of this vast forest area is now gone, but what aloneness, when I didn’t see another soul for hours.
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 C So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought
map of the USA it is just a smudge of green, but on that they may be hiding wild beasts, there is something
foot, the scale of it is colossal. It would be four days sinister about them that makes you sense an atmosphere
before Katz and I crossed a highway and eight till we of doom with every step, and leaves you profoundly
came to a town. 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
In a normal year we would be walking into the
splendid, but when he experienced this real wilderness,
dynamic abundance of a southern mountain spring,
he was unnerved to the core. This wasn’t the tame
through a radiant, productive world alive with insects
world of overgrown orchards that passed for wilderness
and birds. Above all, there would be wild fl owers
in suburban Massachusetts, but a forbidding country
blossoming from every twig and pushing through the
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forest floor. Instead, we trudged through a silent world that was ‘wild and savage’. Apparently, the experience
left him, ‘almost hysterical’.
of bare trees. In this way, we fell into a simple routine.
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E There is a strange frozen violence in a forest out of
season. Fallen trees lay across the path every fi fty
Sometimes other hikers would come along, and tell
or sixty yards, often with great bomb craters of dirt
me where he was. Because everyone walks at diff erent
around their roots. Dozens more lay rotting on the
rates and rests at different times, several times a day
slopes, and every third or fourth tree, it seemed, was
you bump into fellow hikers, especially on mountain
leaning on a neighbour. It was as if the trees couldn’t
tops or beside streams, and at the wooden shelters that
wait to fall over.
stand at distant intervals.
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F When the first Europeans arrived in the New World,
there were perhaps 950 million acres of woodland
Around four, we would find somewhere to camp.
in what became the lower forty-eight states. The
One of us would go off to fetch water while the other
Chatahoochee National Forest, through which Katz
prepared noodles. Sometimes we would talk, but
and I now trudged, was part of an immense canopy
mostly we existed in a kind of companionable silence.
stretching from Alabama to Canada and beyond.
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 G Each morning we rose at first light, shivering and
grew chilly. So I would put myself in darkness and rubbing arms, made coffee, broke camp, and set off into
lie there listening to the peculiarly clear, articulated the silent woods. We would walk from half past seven
sounds of the forest at night. to four. We seldom walked together, but every couple of
Adapted from A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson hours I would sit and wait for Katz to catch up.
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