Wilderness

In A Walk in the Woods, wilderness is a recurring theme Bill Bryson treats with both awe and deflation. His headline claim: “The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years.” His marquee example is Henry David Thoreau — whom Bryson skewers as finding nature “splendid” only so long as he could “stroll to town for cakes and barley wine,” yet who, on an 1846 visit to Katahdin in real wilderness, found it “grim and wild … savage and dreary” and was left “near hysterical.” Bryson contrasts this with the “tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord.”

The book also frames wilderness statistically — America “is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests,” with a third of the lower forty-eight covered in trees (728 million acres) and Maine alone holding 10 million uninhabited acres, an area bigger than Belgium without a single permanent resident. The wiki links this thread to Walden as a direct foil, given Bryson’s deflation of Thoreau’s pastoral idyll.

Context: “Wilderness” as an American cultural idea — wild nature as both sublime and threatening, and a thing to be preserved — runs from the Transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson) through the conservation movement; the Wilderness Act of 1964 later gave it a legal definition as land “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Where this appears

• A Walk in the Woods — Bryson’s “300 years of unnerving” thesis, the deflation of Thoreau’s romantic wilderness via his hysterical Katahdin reaction, and the statistics on America as a still-forested land.