LS* – A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

November 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

While, overall, it was an enjoyable read that managed to keep my interest, I was not that keen on it. It is an example of what I am expecting is a subgenre of writing where the author sets out on an ‘adventure’ with little or no preparation (and often with an even less prepared companion), and then recounts his misadventures. Amusing, but to someone who believes research and preparation, a bit difficult to engage with.

Bryson is, in fact, a good writer, and when he actually turned his eye on the environment around him managed to craft some nice phrases. The phrases I tended to like often fell into a few rhetorical categories.

He often presented sensory information by evoking humans either singularly, as with sighs, fidgets, and murmurs, or collectively, as with his simile of “the noises of a convalescent ward after lights out.”
He was very effective giving the reader a sense of being immersed in space, with trees that surround and loom, or drawing on the simile of a child “lost in a crowd of strange legs.”
And he was good at givign the landscape — especially the forest — a sense of agency, often a somewhat ominous one.

Contents

Phrases I like

clear, articulated noises of the forest at night
the sighs and fidgets of wind and leaves
the weary groan of boughs
the endless murmurings and stirrings, like the noises of a convalescent ward after lights out
trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides.
Woods choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings.
They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs.
Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

Sentences I like

So I would put myself in darkness and lie there listening to the peculiarly clear, articulated noises of the forest at night, the sighs and fidgets of wind and leaves, the weary groan of boughs, the endless murmurings and stirrings, like the noises of a convalescent ward after lights out, until at last I fell heavily asleep. p. 51

——

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings. They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie and you know you are in a big space. Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive. p. 44

From Silent Noon, by D. G. Rossetti*

(*quoted in Bryson, I think)

the pasture gleams and glooms
beneath billowing skies that scatter and amass
visible silence, still as the hourglass, deep in the sun-searched growths