Unwelcome Visitors

My time here at the edge of the woods on Old Dixie Lane has been full of chasing down squirrels in the house, removing at least a dozen frogs that squeezed inside and shooing away a hundred dirt daubers, lizards and beetles from the kitchen. Almost as if the walls between inside and out temporarily vanish to provide new hunting grounds that beckon scores of crawling, flying and slithering things, free access to sample the domestic life in my living room. Last Sunday brought a new and disturbingly more heart whomping visitor.

Repainting was underway in the spare bedroom and leaving painter Jim with his brushes and buckets of paint, with Farina dawg in the backseat I went off to the market for some groceries. Ordinarily on my return from shopping, groceries get carried in through the front door but since Jim had the entrance hall stacked with his supplies I headed with the bags of groceries to the back screen door. Farina was at my heels and five feet inside the porch she froze, suddenly erupting into snarls and growls, eyes focused on the floor below her long, screen-level perch, a couple of giant plastic bins weighted and piled with dog cushions. Eight feet away a 4-foot snake lay coiled on the floor, head raised in a threatening pose. Knowing the dawg’s tendencies, first thing I did was force her outside and shut the dog door.

Eyeing the evil serpent closely I eased the bags of groceries to the floor and inch by inch reached for a broom and the long-handled litter grabber I keep by the door. Not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, I could have sworn I saw venom dripping from the snake’s open mouth. I called Jim to drop his paintbrush and come out to the back porch pronto. He took the squeeze handle litter grabber and moved to one end of the porch while I circled the dawg perch to flush the snake from behind with the broom. Jim was moments away from wetting his painter pants but with maybe the longest lifetime stretch of his right arm somehow snagged the snake with the grabber. Before I could take the grabber from him the snake wiggled loose, snapping furiously at the air. Trying to avoid my lunges with the grabber, it slithered toward the door end of the porch with me snatching at it with the picker-upper and dodging strikes from what I hoped was a non-venomous head. I caught it; it got away. I lunged, it lunged back and then began squeezing itself into a wide crack between the floor and the wall paneling. On the verge of a heart attack I managed to work the hysterical serpent out of the floor crack. It began to snap at my arm furiously before I was able to get its head in a solid rubber grip. Painter Jim had finally just let go and peed his pants while Farina outside the screen door was leaping two feet into the air and barking 911. The head secure inside the rubber grips, I held the writhing snake with outstretched arm and took it across the road. By then I knew it was a harmless black snake, the kind we are encouraged to leave alone because they are “good” snakes. I flung the good snake into the woods opposite my house. Venomous or not, good notwithstanding, my heart was beating like I’d just witnessed a serial killing. Jim went off to dig a change of clothes out of his truck and Farina went off looking for another snake.

My guess is the snake wiggled into the house under the somewhat ineffective door sweep at the bottom of the back porch screen door.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

I don’t hike. Off the top of my head, best guess would be the longest distance walked at one time is four miles, and that on a pristine beach, flat, soft and easy on bare feet. For one reason or another hiking has never seemed like an activity well suited to my style of physical activity. Walking down the block or strolling city streets has never given me a moment’s pause and I can also last a good while on a treadmill, but heavy boots and heavy backpack on a wooded mountain path never caught my fancy. 

Until I read Bill Bryson’s 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods.

The Appalachian Trail running 2,100 miles from northern Georgia to northern Maine is a series of connected hiking trails traversing fourteen states and half a dozen mountain ranges that was completed in 1937. The elevation gain in hiking the entire trail is equal to climbing Mt Everest sixteen times and every year something like 2,000 people attempt a thru-hike of the trail. It is also popular with day-hikers and between 2 and 3 million walk a portion of the trail every year.

Along with a friend, writer Bill Bryson hiked 500 miles of the trail and wrote a book about his experiences. He wrote about living on instant ramen noodles and Snickers bars for days at a time, about walking an incline in the pouring rain for hours on end with 45 pounds perched on his back and about some of the people they met along the way. His pages are brimming with historical anecdotes about both the trail and the people who helped develop it to what it is today. He writes of a Pennsylvania coal mining town along the route that is home to an underground coal fire that has been burning for decades. One chapter tells of the numbers of birds that at one time filled the trail with song but are now no more. Another describes the geological formation that created this particular stretch of eastern America. Each successive chapter, whether it be about blight, wildlife, characters along the trail, fatigue, odd little towns or staring contests with a moose is a surprise, each is an essential part of the experience told with humor and insight.

On every other page of the book I kept telling myself that this was a hike I wanted to take. Of course, that thought also came with the knowledge that the boots, backpack and ramen noodles would defeat me a half mile down the trail. The thing about the really good travel writers is that they make you feel as if you’re walking right beside them. Bryson never once falls down in that respect.

Like so many good books, this was another gem a long time coming to my attention. For years I’ve been familiar with Bill Bryson and have even read one or two others of his books, but A Walk in the Woods found a special place among my list of books not to be missed. Grab up a bowl of trail mix, a canteen of water and go for an armchair hike with Bryson and his friend Katz.

We can also look forward to a movie version of the book coming out in September starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.