Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has stirred up
some rather strong opinions
in the hiking world but we
believe Henry David would approve.

Bryson on Bryson
By Lisa O’Donnell
The Winston-Salem, N.C., Journal
Nov. 24, 2002

Bill Bryson writes hilarious books about travel. His accounts of his adventures in the United States, Australia and Great Britain have attracted legions of readers.
It would seem logical, then, that a globetrotter such as Bryson would feel at ease navigating his way through various cultures.
Quite the contrary; Bryson bumbles along like the rest of us. “I’m a terrible traveler!,” Bryson said, “I get lost. I miss trains. I get confused. rve made a living out of incompetence.”
During a recent visit to Tokyo, he became completely befuddled trying to decipher Japanese writing.
“You can’t figure anything out. You can study it until the cows come home and you’re never going to understand!” Bryson said. “I love that feeling of being totally adrift.”
Bryson recently spoke at Lenoir_Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C. He talked about his passion for adventure and his warped view of the world.
He has written several books on travel, including rm a “Stranger Here Myself,” “The Lost Continent,” “In a Sunburned Country” and most famously “A Walk in the Woods,” a best-selling book about his hike on the Appalachian Trail.

Partner on the trail

The book is a first-person account of his attempt to walk the trail with Stephen Katz, his out-of-shape hiking partner who is exhausted less than two miles into the 2,100-mile trail.
Katz was a notorious junk-food eater who had trouble losing weight on the trail.

“I got really sick of eating trail food,” Bryson said. “His philosophy was, ‘Got to fuel Up.’ His trail food was broken cookies and M&Ms. Whenever we’d stop, he’d say, 'Got to fuel up.’ The weight was falling off my body. “He asked me with these chipmunk cheeks full of trail food, 'Why aren't I losing any weight?’”
Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He moved to England in his early 20s and wrote for newspapers and magazines. His career as a travel writer began in 1987 with the publication of “The Lost Continent,” a book about traveling through small towns in the United States.
Bryson is a cultural observer with a wicked sense of humor. Occasionally, he miffs a few people. “In The Lost Continent” he joked that upon entering Mississippi, he saw a sign that read: “Welcome to Mississippi, We Shoot to Kill.” He is not afraid to take on sacred cows. “In A Walk in the Woods,” he calls Henry David Thoreau “priggish” and “tiresome.”

A view of Thoreau

Thoreau, Bryson wrote, “thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes, and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core.”
Though his forte is humor writing, Bryson’s books are informative and insightful.
“Most of the time you know when a situation could be funny,” Bryson said. “You know in a piece of writing when it’s time for a joke.”
Writing the joke can be difficult.
“I’m the world’s worst teller of stories,” Bryson said. “I tell a joke and it’s ‘No, no ľ it was two nuns and an Indian, and it was East not West.’
“I’m not quick. When I come up with a quip, it’s 11 hours later.”
People are so accustomed to Bryson’s sidesplitting humor that they are disappointed when he writes serious pieces for such publications as National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine.
“A Walk in the Woods” was so wildly popular that Bryson became a victim of his success. His publishers wanted more books about hiking with Katz.
Instead, Bryson wrote about another unforgiving landscape ľ Australia.
His experiences there became the subject for “In a Sunburned Country.” The book, his most recent, was published in 2001.
“Australia does have theoretically more dangerous things than anywhere else,” he said. “They have caterpillars that can kill you. A jellyfish rubs against your leg and you are in writhing agony and dead in a couple of seconds. A kangaroo will tear you to pieces.”
Such a harsh and vast country intrigued Bryson. During his research, he discovered that, in one particular year, The New York Times published just about as many stories on Belarus and Burundi as it did on Australia.
Bryson grew obsessed with Australia.
“It’s a most marvelous country; Australia is the United States of 40 years ago,” he said. “It’s the America I grew up in. There’s an innocence there, a trust. You go to the countryside and there’s little towns going strong that have not been Wal-Marted to death.”
Publishers agreed to the book only because they believed the Olympics in Sydney had stirred the public’s interest in Australia.
Bryson hasn’t been able to generate any enthusiasm in the publishing world for a book about Canada.
“You mention Canada and their faces go ashen,” he said.
The familiar rhythms of life fascinate Bryson.
“Whether you are from Hickory or Kenya, you are human,” he said. “You have the same aspirations. Most likely you watch a sport with a circular object. Yet people do things in such different ways.
“I find the infinite patterns that the eath throws out by having all this cultural diversity so amazing.”

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