Sarah
A Walk in The Woods
Types of Poverty Although poverty is defined as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions”, Bryson’s poverty is more of a personal one. While he suffers through unappetizing food and cramped living conditions, he still is in possession of the most expensive camping equipment. Bryson’s poverty lies more in his disconnection from the luxuries he had taken for granted in his life. His experiences with what would be considered real poverty occur in his brief and occasional sojourns from the trail and into small Appalachian towns. According to Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee, authors of The Road to Poverty, “Americans are once again beginning to recognize rural poverty as a persistent and escalating phenomenon of social life in the United States” (Billings, Blee 3). Through his journey on the trail, Bryson becomes one of the Americans that recognize this poverty.
Connections to the Past Bryson was not the first man to turn to the isolation of the woods for clarity nor was the first man to take to the road in the direction of self-discovery. Those men were the Transcendentalists and the Beats. Henry David Thoreau settled in a cabin in Massachusetts on Walden Pond when the world seemed to be too much and too focused on technology. Jack Kerouac hitchhiked across the country trying to find himself. Bill Bryson has taken the Transcendentalist’s return to nature and the Beat’s need to travel and combined them into one journey. Bryson essentially alienates himself from society, an action critical to the Beats according to Men van Elteren in his article “The Subculture of the Beats”. “The beat ethos was held together by some common element characteristics […] including: alienation, that is, the sense of separation and place-bound estrangement from mainstream society” (van Elteren 3).
Relationship with the Actual Road Despite Bryson’s intended journey on a hiking trail, he often interacts with the road itself. As Bryson’s journey is on foot, he makes many observations on the road itself. Throughout the novel are commentaries on cars and highways. He develops what could only be called a love hate relationship with the road, often directly relating to the conditions of his hike. It is partially Bryson’s disgust for the road that inspires his journey. “I wanted to see what was out there,” says Bryson “All over American today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods” (Bryson 12).
