Angerer is better known by the pseudonym Stephen Katz, Bill Bryson's hiking buddy in the 1998 best-selling book A Walk in the Woods. He has a prosthetic leg. His right leg was amputated a few years ago after a blood clot left his foot cold, he said. He has long, thin hair and a gray goatee.
But now Bryson had become a big deal in England after writing Notes From a Small Island. He asked Angerer to go along on a 2,200-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail.
Angerer had no idea he would become a character that lives on in humor travelogue lore.
"I thought I wasn't in half-bad shape," Angerer said. "I was never that at all."
They stumbled and bumbled half the distance through the trail, Angerer eating Little Debbie snack cakes and Bryson puffing a pipe, the smoke from which Angerer could smell as he lagged in the distance. Just when Angerer said he was getting the hang of the hiking thing, Bryson wanted to quit, only later to reconnect on the last stretch of trail.
"The book is true for the most part," he said, although there was a lot more cussing, a couple of teeth he got knocked out in a fall and the fact he wasn't as much of a womanizer as depicted.
