A Walk in the Woods

was some warning. Even so, several small towns were washed away and eleven people
lost their lives. But these were relatively small dams. Tocks Dam would have held one of
the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, with forty miles of water behind it. Four
substantial cities -- Trenton, Cam-den, Wilmington, and Philadelphia -- and scores of
smaller communities stood downstream. A disaster on the Delaware would truly be a
disaster.
And here was the nimble Army Corps of Engineers planning to hold back 250 billion
gallons of water with notoriously unstable glacial till. Besides that there were all kinds of
environmental worries -- that salinity levels below the dam would rise catastrophically, for
example, devastating the ecology lower down, not least the valuable oyster beds of
Delaware Bay.
In 1992, after years of growing protests that spread far beyond the Delaware Valley,
the dam plan was finally put on hold, but by this time whole villages and farms had been
bulldozed. A quiet, remote, very beautiful farming valley that had not changed a great
deal in 200 years was lost forever. "One beneficial result of the [canceled] project," notes
the Appalachian Trail Guide to New York and New Jersey, "was that the land acquired by
the federal government for the national recreation area has provided the Trail with a
protected corridor."
To tell you the truth I was getting a little wearied of this. I know the Appalachian Trail
is supposed to be a wilderness experience, and I accept that there are countless places
where it would be a tragedy for it to be otherwise, but sometimes, as here, the ATC
seems to be positively phobic about human contact. Personally, I would have been
pleased to be walking now through hamlets and past farms rather than through some
silent "protected corridor."
Doubtless it is all to do with our historic impulse to tame and exploit the wilderness, but
America's attitude to nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me. I couldn't help
comparing my experience now with an experience I'd had three or four years earlier in
Luxembourg when I went hiking with my son for a magazine assignment. Luxembourg is
a much more delightful place to hike than you might think. It has lots of woods but also
castles and farms and steepled villages and winding river valleys-- the whole, as it were,
European package. The footpaths we followed spent a lot of time in the woods but also
emerged at obliging intervals to take us along sunny back roads and over stiles and
through farm fields and hamlets. We were always able at some point each day to call in at
a bakery or post office, to hear the tinkle of shop bells and eavesdrop on conversations
we couldn't understand. Each night we slept in an inn and ate in a restaurant with other
people. We experienced the whole of Luxembourg, not just its trees. It was wonderful,
and it was wonderful because the whole charmingly diminutive package was seamlessly
and effortlessly integrated.
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or
proposition--either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places,
or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the
Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature
could coexist to their mutual benefit--that, say, a more graceful bridge across the
Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be