A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Darren.”
    Darren got out, grinned a hello, opened the trunk, and stared blankly at it while the perception slowly spread through his brain that it was also packed solid. He was so drunk that I thought for a moment he might fall asleep on his feet, but he snapped to and found some rope and quite deftly tied our packs on the roof. Then, ignoring the vigorous advice and instructions of his partner, he tossed stuff around in the back until he had somehow created a small cavity into which Katz and 1 climbed, puffing out apologies and expressions of the sincerest gratitude.
    Her name was Donna, and they were on their way to some desperate-sounding community—Turkey Balls Falls or Coon Slickor someplace—another fifty miles up the road, but they were pleased to drop us in Hiawassee, if they didn’t kill us all first. Darren drove at 127 miles an hour with one finger on the wheel, his head bouncing to the rhythm of some internal song, while Donna twirled in her seat to talk to us. She was stunningly pretty, entrancingly pretty.
    “Y’all have to excuse us. We’re celebrating.” She held up her plastic cup as if in toast.
    “What’re you celebrating?” asked Katz.
    “We’re gittin married tomorrah,” she announced proudly.
    “No kidding,” said Katz. “Congratulations.”
    “Yup. Darren yere’s gonna make a honest woman outta me.” She tousled his hair, then impulsively lunged over and gave the side of his head a kiss, which became lingering, then probing, then frankly lascivious, and concluded, as a kind of bonus, by shooting her hand into a surprising place—or at least so we surmised because Darren abruptly banged his head on the ceiling and took us on a brief but exciting detour into a lane of oncoming traffic. Then she turned to us with a dreamy, unabashed leer, as if to say, “Who’s next?” It looked, we reflected later, as if Darren might have his hands full, though we additionally concluded that it would probably be worth it.
    “Hey, have a drink,” she offered suddenly, seizing the bottle round the neck and looking for spare cups on the floor.
    “Oh, no thanks,” Katz said, but looked tempted.
    “G’won,”
she encouraged.
    Katz held up a palm. “I’m reformed.”
    “Yew
are?
Well, good for you. Have a drink then.”
    “No really.”
    “How ‘bout yew?” she said to me.
    “Oh, no thanks.” I couldn’t have freed my pinned arms even if I had wanted a drink. They dangled before me like tyrannosaur limbs.
    “Yer
not reformed, are ya?”
    “Well, kind of.” I had decided, for purposes of solidarity, to forswear alcohol for the duration.
    She looked at us. “You guys like Mormons or something?”
    “No, just hikers.”
    She nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with that, and had a drink. Then she made Darren jump again.
    They dropped us at Mull’s Motel in Hiawassee, an old-fashioned, nondescript, patently nonchain establishment on a bend in the road near the center of town. We thanked them profusely, went through a little song-and-dance of trying to give them gas money, which they stoutly refused, and watched as Darren returned to the busy road as if fired from a rocket launcher. I believe I saw him bang his head again as they disappeared over a small rise.
    And then we were alone with our packs in an empty motel parking lot in a dusty, forgotten, queer-looking little town in northern Georgia. The word that clings to every hiker’s thoughts in north Georgia is
Deliverance
, the 1970 novel by James Dickey that was made into a Hollywood movie. It concerns, as you may recall, four middle-aged men from Atlanta who go on a weekend canoeing trip down the fictional Cahulawasee River (but based on the real, nearby Chattooga) and find themselves severely out of their element. “Every family I’ve ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary,” a character in the book remarks forebodingly as they drive up. “Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them