Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
This book hit me much differently than other memoirs I’ve read. I’ve read other books about mountaineers and felt no desire whatsoever to replicate any part of their experience, not even a fleeting pang of envy for their adventure. But this book was different.
Cheryl Strayed, at the beginning of her hike, is a woman who has lost her way. After her mother dies, Cheryl starts to fray and unravel, beginning with a series of affairs that destroy her marriage to a flirtation with heroin addiction. When she decides she’s going to hike alone from California to Washington despite her lack of experience, it honestly doesn’t seem like the worst possible decision she could make.
This book appealed to me for two main reasons. One, because I spent every vacation as a child vacationing in western National Parks, I was familiar with the landscape she trudged through. Although I never did overnight backpacking trips, I know the feeling of switchback after switchback, seeing nothing but the ground in front of your boots, and how it feels to go from “sweaty” to “shivering” in twenty minutes. Also, the same year Cheryl was backpacking alone through California and Oregon, I backpacked alone through Europe. I was a little bit younger, never married, mother still alive, not yet graduated from college, and in old world cities rather than the American wilderness, but in a strange bit of synchronicity, I also had ill-fitting boots from REI that damaged my feet so badly that I eventually couldn’t take the pain and nerve damage anymore and switched to cheap canvas flats that were little better than walking barefoot.
Strayed talks a little bit about the trail and the landscape, but mostly she talks about her life and the people she meets along the trail. There are some odd happenings, like when she encounters a stray llama, or when she tries and fails to attend the Rainbow gathering, which inexplicably moved. She talks about her mother, her mother’s life, her horse, and losing the fight with cancer. I cried a lot–heady stuff. She talked a lot about what it’s like to be a woman travelling alone, which I had really forgotten until this memoir reminded me. She reminded me of the fast, deep, and ultimately superficial friendships you make while travelling.
It’s more memoir than trail guide, which I enjoyed, as I like a good memoir, especially one with such a relatable narrator. I don’t know if this will be as meaningful if you were never a woman who backpacked by herself for a couple of months with bad boots, but apparently it was enough to inspire Reese Witherspoon.
