That's why I suspect that the conference almost didn't carry the book for a couple of other reasons that had nothing to do with Mary Ellen and her southern peers. Hikers in the Maine woods can hear the chain saws. Neither service could have been happy with Bryson's book, or its presence on shelves it subsidizes. Nor the trail conference. Bryson deflates the myth of the trail as equalizer, of the hiker as spiritual descendant of the noble savage.
Hikers can be mere savages.
Environmental policy can be ignoble. In the end, like the fractured vote on a Supreme Court decision, the ATC publications committee approved the book, 5-4. Like most things in America that look natural but aren't, the Appalachian Trail was the conception of Benton MacKaye, an obscure academic with a tendency to get fired. In 1921, ten weeks after his wife jumped off a bridge and drowned in New York's East River, MacKaye proposed the plan of a national trail to a friend who edited an architectural journal, where it was published. ATC was founded in 1925, but it wasn't until 1930 that the AT began to take shape, under the leadership of Milton Avery, a hiker and lawyer whose pragmatism eventually shoved MacKaye and his idealism out of the way.