Review: "The Road to Little Dribbling," Bill Bryson

  

By Paul Carrier

As soon as I began reading The Road to Little Dribbling, I snorted. On the first page. Of the prologue. More sniggers followed, along with assorted guffaws, chuckles and even an occasional belly laugh.

Not that such a reaction was surprising. This is a book by the prolific Bill Bryson, after all, the man who gave us A Walk in the Woods, a 1998 classic in which he described his far-from-successful attempt to tackle the Appalachian Trail.

In 1996, Bryson released Notes from a Small Island, which recounted his affectionate impressions of Britain, where the Iowa native has spent most of his adult life. (His wife is British, for one thing.) Now Bryson is back with a fresh look at his adopted home, which he loves so much that he now holds dual American and British citizenship.

This time around, Bryson set out to avoid the communities he profiled in Notes from a Small Island, and although he revisits some sites, he breaks new ground as well. The author follows a rambling south-to-north route that takes him from Bognor Regis in West Sussex to Cape Wrath in the Scottish Highlands, which Bryson describes as "the farthest you could travel in a straight line (in Britain) without crossing salt water."

Run an image search for Bryson and you’ll be greeted with countless photos of a smiling, genial-looking, twinkly-eyed fellow who comes across as a great wit bubbling over with bonhomie and good cheer. Which he is. But Bryson is not one-dimensional. He can be acerbic, ruthlessly judgmental and unforgiving. A real smart-ass, in other words.

The combination makes for the best of all possible worlds, as Bryson alternates between lovingly poetic descriptions of the British countryside and caustic assessments of the more troublesome people, places and practices he encounters in his rambles. The Road to Little Dribbling combines bits and pieces of memoir, travelogue, social commentary, history, and, of course, plenty of laugh-out-loud stuff.

This American-born Brit can be self-deprecating, a quality that he has the good sense to display sparingly. Thus, the now 65-year-old writer opens The Road to Little Dribbling by describing a freakish, entirely preventable mishap. "One of the things that happens when you get older," he writes, "is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself," as he goes on to explain, to humorous effect. From time to time, he pokes fun at his own lapses in memory.

Bryson has a fondness for flitting from one subject to the next, thanks to unexpected linkages and jumping-off points. When he visits Durham, his ruminations range from medieval architecture to his six-year stint as a university chancellor to the glory of Britain’s underfunded universities (compared to their fat American cousins) to the time, years ago, when he almost saw a toddler drown in the River Wear. (The tyke's mother saved him at the last possible moment.)

Cutting observations are a Bryson hallmark, and he doesn’t disappoint on that score. Offended by a high-rise apartment building that mars a seafront view, he notes: "The world is full of shitty things that should never have happened. Look at Sean Hannity." Later, Bryson spots an online critique of a favorite café by someone who wrote that he was "dissapointted" during his visit. "If you are too stupid to spell ‘disappointed’ even approximately correctly," Bryson says, "you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level." So there.

An overpriced sandwich — an overpriced anything — makes him peevish. So do overly boisterous crowds, poorly designed museum displays, misspelled signs and rude store clerks. Oh, and litterbugs. Bryson despises them. When he sees a kid toss a wrapper on the ground three feet from a trash bin, he muses that Britain "is going to require a lot of euthanasia" if the country is "ever going to sort itself out."

In other words, he’s a perfect travel companion: knowledgeable, curious, opinionated, entranced by what is charming, appalled by what is despicable, erudite or plainspoken as the situation requires, and always willing to tell readers exactly what he thinks, sometimes in delightfully crude language.

Despite his curmudgeonly ways, Bryson never remains churlish for long. He clearly has a deep and abiding love for his adopted home. "Britain is infinite," he writes. "There isn’t anywhere in the world with more to look at in a smaller space — nowhere that has a greater record of interesting and worthwhile productivity over a longer period at a higher level." 

Review: "A Walk in the Woods," Bill Bryson

By Paul Carrier

Why bother hiking the Appalachian Trail, with all of the discomfort and grubbiness of a slog from Georgia to Maine, when Bill Bryson has done it (or at least a chunk of it) for you?

A Walk in the Woods is Bryson’s chuckle-a-minute account of the trek he took  along sections of the more than 2,100-mile AT. Accompanying him was sidekick Stephen Katz, a grumbling, unathletic, overweight buddy with an excessive fondness for any snack that bears the Little Debbie label.

Their adventures on what was, at the time of its completion, the longest footpath in the world may inspire some readers to follow in their footsteps. But many more are likely to thank Bryson for exorcising the trail-trekking demons of would-be hikers.
 

With characteristic wit, Bryson explains that he rationalized the excursion in several ways before setting out. It would, he writes,  “get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth” and make him feel more at home in his adopted New Hampshire town.

“When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake,” he writes.

And so, he and Katz head off to Georgia, where the two neophyte hikers take to the woods.

I enjoyed the book so much when it first came out about a decade ago that I recently decided to reread it. A Walk in the Woods was no disappointment the second time around. In fact, it’s so funny that I irritated my wife no end by reading sections to her at all-too-frequent intervals.

Take, for example, an “awesomely unlovely” bunkhouse that Bryson and Katz get stuck in while taking shelter from a snowstorm.

“If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it,” Bryson writes. “He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

But Bryson doesn’t only take aim at the funny bone. He also offers impressive helpings of ecology, biology, politics and history.

Among other things, we learn that the Appalachian Trail has been “moved around” from time to time and that partly as a result of those periodic relocations no one seems to know precisely how long the AT is.

We discover that the Great Smoky Mountains have more native species of trees than all of Europe, that so-called experts give conflicting advice on how to protect yourself from bears in the wild, that 70 percent of all eastern bird species have suffered drops in population since the 1960s and that 42 species of mammals disappeared from America’s national parks in the 20th century.

In a lighter vein (and Bryson is a master of the lighter vein), we learn that “woods are spooky” because they may conceal “armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus.” When Bryson visits Harpers Ferry, W. Va., we get his take on Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, whom Bryson labels an interesting fellow for the simple reason that “few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox.”

In the end, though, Bryson's greatest accomplishment here involves something more than placing his comic sensibility and professorial bent on display. He makes us appreciate the Appalachian Trail, so that even if we have no intention of hiking it, we’re still damn glad it’s out there. Just in case.