BILL BRYSON’S “A WALK IN THE WOODS”

by William H. Benson

September 15, 2011

     Bill Bryson, the writer, moved back to the United States in 1995, with his British-born wife and their four children, and settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he intended, for employment, to write books. First, he decided to take a hike, and so he begins his book, A Walk in the Woods.

     “Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town. A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail.”

     So he decided that in 1996 he would hike the entire Appalachian Trail, all 2,100 miles of it, and then write a book of his adventures. He knew it would be a daunting task, especially for someone  overweight and without hiking experience. Early on he learned that perhaps only 10% of those who begin the trail ever finish it; it is exhausting, unnerving, and dangerous.

     It passes through fourteen states, from its southern point at Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to its furthest northern point at Mount Katahdin in Maine. If successful, Bryson would see portions of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, a corner of West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, a tip of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

     Stephen Katz, a friend from Bryson’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, agreed to join him on the hike. Katz smoked, was a recovering alcoholic, was not in great physical shape, and griped. Bill Bryson’s wife was doubtful that he and Katz would relate well on a hike.

     With tents, sleeping bags, large quantities of noodles, cooking equipment, and rain gear all loaded in packs perched precariously atop their backs, they set out from Amicalola Falls Lodge, near Georgia’s Springer Mountain one spring morning. “The date was March 9, 1996,” he wrote. “We were on our way.” The temperature was 11 degrees F.

     The trail that first day opened his eyes to what lay ahead for him. “I trudged perhaps a hundred feet up the hill, then stopped, bug-eyed, breathing hard, heart kabooming alarmingly. Katz was already falling behind and panting even harder. I pressed on. I was hopelessly out of shape—hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared.  Every step was a struggle.”

     The woods—elms, chestnuts, hemlocks, dogwoods, red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, sugar maples—stretch upwards on either side of the trail and enclose and swallow every hiker.

     Bryson wrote, “The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Seven miles seems so little, but it’s not, believe me. With a pack, it is not easy.”

     The Appalachian Trail does not offer campgrounds with hot showers and warm cafeteria food every few miles, for days can go by when you see only a handful of people or no semblance of civilization. Just the trail. A person survives with the food, clothing, and shelter that he or she carries.

     In the woods, Bryson learned to live with fear, for danger seemed always just ahead. Constantly he watched out for bears, bobcats, water moccasins, or a moose. Extreme care was required when the side of the trail disappeared in a sheer drop to a point dozens of feet below. Protection and shelter were mandatory when the weather turned cold or wet or miserable.

     Then, apt to disrupt his health were the microbes: “giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis.”

     But the greatest danger came from the woods themselves. One day Katz, when alone and quite thirsty, decided to leave the trail and get a drink from a lake he saw a short distance away. In a moment he was lost. Katz explained, “There’s nothing to pay attention to out there. It’s just one big woods.”

     Bryson wrote, “And once you were lost in these immense woods, you would die. It was as simple as that. No one could save you. No helicopter could spot you through the cover of trees. No rescue teams could find you. There would be bears down there too—bears that had possibly never seen a human.”

Fortunately, Katz wandered around, stumbled upon the trail, and thus saved his life. It was a miracle.

     Bill Bryson walked 870 miles of the Appalachian Trail that summer, for he said, he came “to realize that this was way beyond—way beyond—anything I had attempted before.” He and Katz skipped difficult portions of it, like the Smoky Mountains, and kept moving northward.

     A century and a half ago, an oddball named Henry David Thoreau built a cabin beside Walden Pond, and then wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” 

SHAY’S REBELLION

by William H. Benson

September 1, 2011

     Daniel Shays was bankrupt and angry. A farmer in rural Massachusetts and a former captain in the army, he gathered about him a number of debt-ridden farmers who had fought in the last war, and together they marched on Springfield, Massachusetts in September and forced the terrified justices on the state’s Supreme Court to adjourn. The year was 1786. The following January he led 1200 men, each clutching a pitchfork, back into Springfield and demanded muskets and canons plus laws in their favor.

     State officials hunted these rebels down over the next few weeks, but the Massachusetts legislature caved in: They dropped direct taxation and lowered court fees. As a result of Shays’ Rebellion, officials understood that without a national government, the thirteen states were powerless to protect themselves from large-scale domestic violence, like Shays. Hence the need for a strong national government.

     Before, during, and after a revolution, a question continues coming up, “What is next?” And the answers are “fight or cower,” “keep struggling”, or “build a new government.”

     At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen states struggled to write a plan for a new national government. Compromise may have guided their practical decision-making, but their overall ideology was decidedly focused upon the historical past, specifically upon the ancient Greeks and the Romans. One of those delegates, John Dickinson, said, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”

     One scholar of the Constitutional Convention, Douglass G. Adair, said that when Dickinson referred to “experience” he was meaning “both political wisdom gained by participation in events, and wisdom gained by studying past events.”

     Certain of the delegates—especially Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—knew their history well, and came to the Convention convinced that each of the three kinds of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—by themselves had “mortal diseases” or defects. Monarchy degenerated into tyranny, an aristocracy evolved into a corrupt and unjust oligarchy, and a pure democracy disintegrates into anarchy, class conflict, and social disorder.

     Indeed, a pure democracy had “existed in Greece and Italy only for short spaces of time” and each time had ended in a dictatorship.

     It was the delegates’ genius to bring the three types of government together into a single plan: a democracy in the lower House, an aristocracy in the upper House or the Senate, and the monarchy in the Presidency. “If there is one certain truth, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties can never be preserved without a strong executive, or without separating the executive from the legislative power.”

     “The office and power of the President was consciously designed to provide the energy, secrecy, and dispatch traditionally associated with the monarchical form.”

     On September 17, 1787, the day the Convention adjourned, Benjamin Franklin spoke up and urged all the delegates to vote for the plan, saying, “It will astonish our enemies.”

     This experience, this history, this Constitution casts a perpetual shining light upon America’s people and her events, and some fail to see that light. A month ago the news reports were quite grim: “Is the political system broken? Last weeks relentless debt-ceiling showdown in Washington revealed a government that can no longer address our nation’s problems.” Huh? Really? Is that right?

     Others saw it differently: There is “a word for the rancor and the division that you describe. It’s called democracy.” Indeed, if anything, the fight for fiscal responsibility demonstrated a government that is capable of working toward a better solution, and the rest of the world took notice.

     The year of 2011 is now being called the year of rebellion by the dispossessed, an Arab Spring. First, in Tunisia, then in Egypt, in Libya, in Yemen, and in Syria people revolted, demanding a change.

     The slaughter in Syria has appalled the world; more than 2000 killed. “The tanks are firing at random. Their aim seems to kill and terrify as many people as possible.” So anxious is President Bashar al-Assad to retain his power, he thinks he can slaughter his own people without any personal consequences. What is next? More confrontation and more bloodshed. One side will win, and it is doubtful it will be the rebels.

     Last week, Libya’s emboldened rebels marched into Tripoli and strode through Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fortress-like compound, anxious to lay their hands on him. After the revolution, what is next? The answer is that the rebels will draft plans for a new government, and hopefully it will be better than the horrific dictatorship that the Libyans endured for forty-two years. We can “hope for the best, stop predicting the worst, and prepare for something in between.”

     Shays’ Rebellion prodded the wiser men of the thirteen states to create a strong federal government, one better than what they had, and after 224 years, I think we can conclude that they did.

AMERICAN GRAFITTI

by William H. Benson

August 18, 2011

     George Lucas had by 1972 directed only one full-length feature film THX 1138, a science-fiction film that failed, but he had ideas for two other films. The first was autobiographical, of his final days in Modesto, California, after he and his friends had graduated from high school, when they spent their nights cruising up and down the street, listening to the car radio and looking for love. The second film was a space opera in which the forces of good confront and vanquish the forces of evil.

     Lucas pitched the first film, American Graffiti to the major film studios, and each turned him down until United Artists finally advanced him $10,000 to write the script. The studio officials insisted though that Lucas work with a low budget, only $600,000, which was increased by another $175,000 when Francis Ford Coppola signed on as the producer.

     Lucas began filming on June 26, 1972 and ended on August 4, 1972. Except for Ron Howard, known as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, Lucas cast unknowns: Richard Dreyfus, Cindy Williams, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, Suzanne Sommers, and Wolfman Jack, as himself. Lucas picked Harrison Ford, who was then working as a carpenter, because he arrived at Lucas’ home to build cabinets.

     Lucas ended up editing most of the film himself. The backbone to the film’s scenes was Wolfman Jack’s radio show, for Lucas had written each scene with the idea that audiences would listen to a series of  songs supposedly being played over the car radio throughout the film. The music was all late fifties, very early sixties, except for Elvis Presley because RCA would not sign a release of his songs.  

     United Artists’ officials had little expectations for the film. They thought the title silly, and the film more suitable as a television movie. But Lucas insisted upon his original vision, and so the studio gambled by spending another $500,000 on marketing and promotion. The movie, American Graffiti: Where were you in ’62? was released on August 1, 1973.

     Studio officials were astonished when it was nominated for Best Picture of the Year in 1973, and since then, thirty-eight years ago this month, American Graffiti has grossed an estimated $200 million, one of the most profitable movies ever made. Studio officials decided it was wise to listen to George Lucas, and so they bet heavily on Lucas’ second film, that of a space opera. It was released to wild acclaim in 1977 under the title Star Wars.

     What was it about American Graffiti that both audiences and critics loved? One critic wrote: “One of the most influential of all teen films, American Graffiti is a funny, nostalgic, and bittersweet look at a group of recent high school grads’ last days of innocence.” This was before Vietnam, before the British Invasion, and before hippies and flower power.

     The story is set in 1962 and revolves around four boys: Steve Bolander, Curt Henderson, John Milner, and Terry “the Toad” Fields. Two of them, Steve and Curt, intend on flying to the East Coast the next day. Curt, played by Richard Dreyfus, has doubts about leaving Modesto, and Steve, played by Ron Howard, lectures him, “We’re finally getting out of this turkey town and now you want to crawl back into your cell, right? You just can’t stay 16 forever! You’ve got to get that into your head!”

     Curt happens to see a beautiful girl, played by Suzanne Sommers, who is driving a white T-bird and spends the rest of the night trying to get a message to her, even driving out to the local radio station where he meets the legendary disc jockey Wolfman Jack. Curt listens as the Wolfman tells him, “There’s a great big beautiful world out there.”

     So it is Curt who flies out the next morning while Steve remains behind to sort things out with his girlfriend, played by Cindy Williams. College is not in the plans for John Milner, who drives and races his yellow Deuce coupe, nor for Toad Fields, the classic nerd.

     “Do we stay in our home town or do we leave?” is the question the film asks, and each character answers that question as best they can for themselves.

     The dorms open up this week; for some it is today, and last May’s high school graduates will move into a college dorm room and begin classes next week. Do we leave our home town, or do we stay? And if we leave, might we return? Seeking an education is always the right choice. Staying behind to cruise and party all night long and get into trouble with the law is not normally the best of choices. For some students, a lot of growing up is accomplished in those first few months in those dorm rooms.

     A version of American Graffiti is played out each year in mid-August in most towns across America, and it was George Lucas’ insight to put that version into a dramatic form and onto a screen with music rumbling in the background.

TRIVIAL KNOWLEDGE

by William H. Benson

August 4, 2011

     “History is more or less bunk,” said Henry Ford. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worthwhile is the history we made today.” An interesting opinion.

     Late in Ford’s career someone challenged him to a series of trivia questions, and he admitted that he did not know the answers, but he replied, “Why should I know the answers? I have a dozen managers on my staff who could find the answers to those questions within an hour. Why should I clutter my mind with useless knowledge?” An interesting question.

     Thomas Edison, Ford’s mentor and his former employer, was of a different mindset. Those job applicants who wished to work for the Wizard of Menlo Park had to first complete a 150-question trivia questionnaire so difficult that no more than ten percent passed it. Edison thought his questions “exceedingly simple,” and believed that recent college graduates were “amazingly ignorant.”

     Ford and Edison may have been poles apart on the issue of trivia knowledge, but both were successful. Perhaps one could say that Henry Ford saw the “big picture” first without bothering with the minor details, but Edison drew his “big picture” in his mind from those trifling details.

     By the way, Albert Einstein took Edison’s test and failed it miserably, struggling with certain questions, such as, “what country, besides Australia, has native kangaroos, where Napoleon was born, and what is the principal acid in vinegar?”

     Recently, I found at the local public library Ken Jennings’ book Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. It was Jennings who won seventy-four games in a row on Jeopardy! between June 2 and November 30 in 2004, losing his seventy-fifth game when he missed Final Jeopardy!: “Most of the firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work for only four months a year.” He answered incorrectly, with “What is FedEx?”

     His take-home winnings totaled $2,522,700, but he did not stop there: he appeared on other game shows and won even more money, until as of today he has earned $3,773,414.29, more than any other game show contestant.

     How did he prepare himself for such a spectacular achievement? First, he admits that as a child he was drawn toward trivia, that he was predisposed to accumulating factoids of knowledge. In college at BYU, he played on the university’s quiz bowl team, and he admits that he reads a lot, soaking up, like a vacuum sweeper, enormous quantities of facts.

     Jennings confesses in his book though that his reading was not exclusively reference works and encyclopedias. “Should I admit,” he asks, “how many mythology questions I knew only because of the Thor comic books I read as a kid, or how many geography questions I know from globe-trotting reality shows? Almost all my knowledge of stars and constellations comes from bad sci-fi movies. All my national flags come from NBC Olympic coverage.”

     In his book, Jennings explores the interconnectedness between intelligence and knowledge, and  quotes from A. J. Jacobs, the man who has read all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, who said, “Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing, but they do live in the same neighborhood.”

     Jennings writes, “The power of trivia. It ignites our curiosity about things we didn’t think we were interested in.” “Simple facts, even trivial ones, are the building blocks that can be stacked and combined to form substantive knowledge, and even wisdom.” “Trivia is bait on the fishing rod of education. By the time you realize what you’ve swallowed, you’re hooked.”

     A quiz bowl coach, Eric Hilleman, admonished Jennings, “The more facts you accumulate, the easier it becomes to learn new things because you have a web of knowledge to fit those new facts into. Facts and intelligence form a vicious circle.”

     Any kind of achievement or any pursuit of excellence requires time, lots of time, far more than we would expect; plus plenty of discipline and patience; and is best accomplished in steady increments, repeated daily, rather than in one big hysterical push. Someone once said, “People fail to develop excellence the same way they fail to read big books. They either won’t start or they don’t finish.” The answer is “The major character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.” The question is “Who is John Galt.”

     For the curious, for those with a trivia-oriented mind, the above answers in order are: Papua New Guinea has kangaroos, the island of Corsica was Napoleon’s birthplace, acetic acid is the primary acid in vinegar, and H & R Block furloughs its white-collar employees eight months out of the year.   

DOMESTICATION

by William H. Benson

July 21, 2011

     It is summer. We know it is so because we see the things we associate with summer: a slice of watermelon, strawberries, corn on the cob, a grilled hamburger, perhaps a fried chicken leg or pork ribs marinated in barbeque sauce. In a few weeks, we will be eating peaches and garden-fresh tomatoes and going to the county fair. A backyard barbeque and a rodeo means that the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of summer are stuck on sensory overload.

     Much of what we eat throughout the summer we owe to certain of our forbears, those exceedingly intelligent individuals, who—through trial and error—learned that that if they would domesticate certain plants and animals, the result would be an infinitely tastier and more dependable food supply.

     Domestication of plants and animals is not something we, the people of this age, normally think about; it is just something we inherited, as if it is our right since we are human beings, and yet in the history of humanity, it was not always a given.

     The dog was the first animal that human beings domesticated, about 15,000 years ago and was achieved simultaneously in both Asia and North America. Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wrote, “Wolves were domesticated in Eurasia and North America to become our dogs and were used as hunting companions, sentinels, pets, and in some cultures food.”

     Because of human supervision over the breeding of wolves, the dog evolved into its own species with its own unique characteristics, especially dramatic variation in hair form, color, and physical size. Dogs are definitely not wolves: in the wild, a female wolf will reproduce only once a year and in the same season, but a domesticated dog can breed multiple times each year, in any season.

     Human beings next domesticated sheep and goats, about 11,000 years ago and then pigs, which are true omnivores, animals capable of eating both animal and plant food.

     Then about 10,000 years ago cows and cats were domesticated. The plant-eating cow ensured humans a steady supply of milk and meat. As for cats, in the March 2011 issue of National Geographic, a writer speculated that “Wild cats were the only animals believed to have domesticated themselves, attracted at first by rodent prey found around early agricultural settlements in the Middle East, beginning almost 10,000 years ago.”

     Other members of the cat family were no so eager to be tamed. Despite repeated attempts over the centuries, the cheetah was never domesticated. Jared Diamond wrote, “Prized by ancient Egyptians and Assyrians and modern Indians as hunting animals infinitely superior to dogs,” the cheetah, once in captivity and locked in a cage, will not breed.

     Next domesticated, about 8,000 years ago, was the chicken, a species derived from the red jungle fowl of India and Nepal. Scientists have discovered that the chicken has a mutation at a gene called the TSHR, which they speculate “played some role in domestication.” It might explain why chickens will breed in captivity and more frequently than the red jungle fowl does in the wild.

     In the South American Andes, about 6,000 years ago, both the llama and the alpaca, different breeds of the same species, were domesticated. A llama though has difficulty carrying the weight of a grown man, a fact that held back the progress of those Native American civilizations when contrasted with those of Eurasia.

     Roughly at the same time, but in the Middle East, in the steppes north of the Black Sea, the horse was domesticated, and because it could carry a grown man, it accelerated civilization’s progress. Above all else, the horse transformed warfare. When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers rode their horses into the Inca town of Cajamarca, the people gaped in astonishment, as if these men were from another planet.

     Jared Diamond wrote, “The shock of a horse’s charge, its maneuverability, the speed of attack that it permitted, and the raised and protected fighting platform that it provided left foot soldiers nearly helpless in the open.”

     But a close cousin of the horse, the zebra, refuses domestication. These animals will not be rode nor roped, and when they bite, they will not let go. Their nasty disposition prevents taming.

     Diamond argues that to become a successful candidate for domestication, an animal must exhibit a series of qualities, and if any one of them are missing, it will not happen. “Of the world’s 148 big terrestrial herbivorous mammals, only 14 have ever been domesticated: sheep, goat, pig, cow, llama, horse, both types of camels, water buffalo, donkey, yak, reindeer, bali cattle, and mithen.”

     Domestication has added much that is good to human existence, and somehow in that work of domesticating plants and animals, human beings have further domesticated themselves.

     Enjoy your summer days! Eat well, pet your dog or cat, and go to the rodeo.   

STEVE MARTIN

by William H. Benson

July 7, 2011

     The funniest comic performance I can remember seeing when a child was what happened one night on The Dean Martin Show, perhaps in the year 1964. Dom Delouise, a young comedian then, came out onto the stage dressed in a full-length silk robe and a turban. In an East European accent, he announced that he was Dominick the Great, the world’s greatest magician, but he told the audience, “No applause. Save it for the end.”

     He then introduced his assistant, a homely gypsy-looking girl with a grin, whom he said was named “Shegoondala.” I learned later that his assistant was actually Ruth Buzzi, who two years later earned a spot of fame on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. But that night every magic trick that Dominick the Great performed Shegoondala tried to help but would unintentionally reveal how the trick was done, and so he would quickly pull the curtain shut.

     Delouise’s act was a parody of a legitimate magician’s performance, a feeble and ridiculous imitation, and in that lay the comedy. To me at the time it was truly funny.

     A dozen years later another young and rising comedian achieved enormous success with exactly that, a parody of a comedian’s and magician’s act, and his name was Steve Martin.

     Recently I read Steve Martin’s short autobiography Born Standing Up, and in it wrote, “I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.”

     Martin’s act was so different than that of the typical comedian—men such as Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Bob Newhart, or Bill Cosby, who told stories or monologues with a series of well-delivered punchlines. Instead, for an hour and a half Martin was wild and crazy, and said so repeatedly, “I am a wild and craaaaaazy guy!” Even his feet would go crazy.

      He did magic tricks that everyone could see how they were done. He twisted balloons into rabbit ears. He wore on his head an arrow that looked as if it had passed through his head. He wore goofy glasses, he played his banjo, and he sang zany lyrics. There were no funny stories with a punchline. His antics were more suited for the middle school-aged, but all of America, of all ages ate it up. “Well excuuuuuuse me,” he would shout at the guy adjusting the spot light, and the crowds would roar.

     Steve Martin grew up in Anaheim, California, and when just thirteen years old he landed a job at Disneyland, selling magic tricks in a store. At eighteen he moved out of his house, fed up with his father’s consistent sarcasm directed at him, and so he started clowning around at the Bird Cage Theater at Knottsberry Farm. Eventually, he took his solo act on the road and discovered enormous success.

     He admits now that there was a dark side to stand-up comedy. The travel was relentless. The act itself was exhausting. Then, after the show he had to stare at the four walls of a hotel room. He says, “It was the loneliest period of my life. . . . Nowhere to look but inward.” Also, he wrote, “In a public situation, I was expected to be the figure I was onstage, which I stubbornly resisted.”

     He quit cold turkey. After a series of sold-out shows in Atlantic City, he packed his balloons and his head-arrow for a final time and never unpacked them. He was exhausted, and he knew he needed a new outlet for his creative talents. He turned to the movies, a media more to his liking, for he said, “Instead of my going to every town to perform my act, a movie would go while I stayed home. . . . Movies were social; stand-up was anti-social.”

     This year marks his thirty-year anniversary of that decision to quit stand-up comedy.

     I did not care for Steve Martin’s brand of humor nor for his movies, for they truly are zany, but the funniest and the most original act I saw him perform was on The Tonight Show as the Great Flydini. Steve Martin stepped onto the stage that night and never said a word, but his hands, his gestures, his face, the lift of his chin, his fingers, his eyebrows, and the utter outrageous nuttiness of what he was doing made me laugh and made Johnny Carson laugh too.

     Again, it was a parody of an authentic magician.     

     Steve and his parents were estranged from the day he moved out of the house at eighteen. His father snubbed him, refused to support or encourage him, and had even written a series of sarcastic remarks about his son’s comic act in his own real estate business’s newsletter, a thing that pained Steve immensely, bringing him to the point of tears when he tells about it, even now. His father said of his son’s acting, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.” Oh, yes, the tears of a clown are real.

     Late in life he and his father and mother and sister reconnected: they began eating lunch together once a week and the ruptured relationship began to heal.

     Dominick the Great and the Great Flydini. You can see them both on Youtube, and they are still, I think, over-the-top funny.