Tuesday, July 14, 1998

        After spending the morning varnishing the little chairs, taking care of some paperwork for Bob, and updating many of the sections of this site that I had left temporarily in the old format, I decided to take myself out to lunch. I showered and dressed and drove out of the driveway, then I decided to drive down to the mailbox and see if the mail was here yet.

        I guess most of the housing developments have these communal mailboxes now, but when we first moved here I thought it was really strange. Of course, we moved here from an apartment, so we were used to getting our mail from a multi-tenant box, but I had always thought that when you lived in a house your mail was delivered to a box attached to the front of the house. And of course, when I was a child we got two mail deliveries a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, along with two newspapers a day, too. Oh well, things change.

        The mail was there, just a couple of bills and a few advertising fliers, and a KEY! I love it when I get a key in the mailbox. It means that there's something in the big box for us. There's a bank of small boxes, twenty or so, and two big boxes on the end that are opened with keys. As I was opening the box I was speculating about what could be in it, and then I remembered that I had ordered a book for Bob.

        When we were in Springfield, we watched a television show that had Bill Bryson reading from his new book, "A Walk in the Woods." I don't think Bob had ever heard of him, but he enjoyed the reading and said he'd like to read the book, so I ordered it for him from the book club. I love Bryson. I think he's a wonderful writer, very funny. My favorite of his books is probably "Notes from a Small Island," which is about his travels in the UK. In fact, I should probably buy another copy. I lent it to a friend who had recently traveled in England and I never got it back. His humor may be, I would guess, a little too "British" for some American readers. He's an American who lived in England for many years, and his writing seems to reflect that. He's dry and a little sarcastic. But I like that kind of humor, and I find him very entertaining. His books sometimes contain a little too much well-researched historical detail for my liking, although I find those passages easy to skim to get to the "good stuff."

        When I looked up "A Walk in the Woods" at Amazon so I could put up a link to it, I sort of idly read some of the reader reviews/comments, which are almost always interesting. People take books very seriously, too seriously sometimes, I think. There are several comments that people felt "betrayed," "shocked," "disappointed," "misled" and "deceived" by the fact that Bill Bryson didn't walk the entire Appalachian Trail.

        I just think that attitude is very strange. I certainly don't like every book that I read, and I occasionally start one that I decide not to finish because I don't care for it. But I don't think that I ever feel betrayed because I book doesn't end up being what I expected it to be, or if a writer's experiences don't live up to what I think he should have done. I suppose the people who were disappointed in the book bought it because they thought it would be a dry, factual travelog about the Trail. I bought it only because it was written by Bryson, a writer I like, and I expected, indeed, wanted, the detours into character description and humorous observation.

        Bryson wakes up the morning after his friend, Stephen Katz, who is walking the trail with him, has thrown many of their provisions over a cliff in a fit of pique at the difficulty of the hike:

    He was quiet a moment. "I'm making coffee." I gathered this was his way of an apology.
    "That's very nice."
    "Damn cold out here."
    "And in here."
    "My water bottle froze."
    "Mine, too."
    I unzipped myself from my nylon womb and emerged on creaking joints. It seemed very strange--very novel--to be standing outdoors in long johns. Katz was crouched over the campstove, boiling a pan of water. We seemed to be the only campers awake. It was cold, but perhaps just a trifle warmer than the day before, and a low dawn sun burning through the trees looked cautiously promising.
    "How do you feel?" he said.
    I flexed my legs experimentally. "Not too bad, actually."
    "Me either."
    He poured water into the filter cone. "I'm going to be good today," he promised.
    "Good." I watched over his shoulder. "Is there a reason," I asked, "why you are filtering the coffee with toilet paper?"
    "I, oh . . . I threw out the filter papers."
    I gave a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "They couldn't have weighed two ounces."
"I know, but they were great for throwing. Fluttered all over." He dribbled on more water. "The toilet paper seems to be working OK, though."
    We watched it drip through and were strangely proud. Our first refreshment in the wilderness. He handed me a cup of coffee. It was swimming in grounds and little flecks of pink tissue, but it was piping hot, which was the main thing.

~ Bill Bryson, "A Walk in the Woods"

        So anyway, the package in the mailbox was, indeed, "A Walk in the Woods." I opened the box while sitting in the car in front of the mailbox, and read a page or two. I looked up and saw a couple of lawn service guys sitting on their mowers and looking at me oddly, so I closed the book and drove off, right to a restaurant where I could have lunch and continue reading. I kept reading until I finished it at around midnight tonight. Great book.