“Anyway, we did it,” Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. “Hiked Maine, I mean.”
I looked at him. “Stephen, we didn’t even see Mount Katahdin.”
He dismissed this as a petty quibble. “Another mountain,” he said. “How many do you need to see, Bryson?”
I snorted a laugh. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it.”
“It’s the only way of looking at it,” Katz went on and quite earnestly. “As far as I’m concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked in in the South and I hiked it in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson.”
—Bill Bryson, “Chapter 21,” A Walk in the Woods, p. 272, 1998.
