Wild

In the summer of 1995, Cheryl Strayed walked 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which twines more than twice that distance along the west coast of America from the Mexican border to Canada. She did it to conquer her demons. The result of her hike was a memoir, Wild, published in 2012, which she calls “a journey from lost to found”.

Her mother had died four years earlier of cancer, scattering her stepfather and siblings across the country; her father was abusive; she had recently divorced her own husband after engaging in repeated one-night stands and taking up heroin. After the divorce, Strayed was the name she invented for herself: she had come “unmoored by sorrow”, and had strayed from the path she wanted. She decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, which she hoped would “both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been”.

It’s a classic theme of literature: you feel lost, you travel alone, you find yourself again. But this is no On The Road or As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. This is no young, disenchanted man going on an adventure to experience new things. It’s also nothing like Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which relates an equally daunting hike along the Appalachian Trail, but from the comfortable perspective of a middle-aged man who can return to his family any time he chooses. Wild shows a woman at the point of no return: Cheryl must hike this trail alone, or lose her sense of self forever.

Five pages into Wild, I am deeply uncomfortable. Cheryl intersperses the account of her hike with memories of her mother’s agonising death, her divorce and other events which have left her deeply grieving. But the hike provides no relief for the reader from the onslaught. From the beginning she details the heaviness of her pack (nicknamed Monster) which she can barely lift, the immediate blistering and tearing of her skin from its weight, the torturous blackening and loss of her toenails, the agony in every step she takes. At night she is cold and utterly alone, listening to branches snap and imagining a bear or a mountain lion prowling outside. She has filled her stove with the wrong fuel, and cannot cook any hot food; she has brought far too little money to enjoy the comforts of the occasional rest stop. She is infinitely vulnerable to wild animals; to the strength needed to hike; to men she encounters. She feels “creeping anxiety” from a miner who gives her a ride.

The trail terrain varies from the Mojave Desert…

Picture from http://www.pcta.org

To the peaks of the Sierra Nevada:

Picture from backpacker.web

Yet Cheryl battles on, through blazing heat and knee-deep snow, only bypassing the High Sierra from the sheer necessity of their unseasonably snowy peaks. She finds friends in other hikers, acts as “one of the guys” at a rest stop and eventually becomes a seasoned hiker. Her body, which she has always thought of badly, becomes tanned and muscular and a useful tool rather than the site of her low self-image. She does, indeed, gain back her sense of self.

Twenty years on, she is happily married with two children, so it seems that the hike did conquer her demons. It also produced a visceral, painful, humbling and courageous book, which I am deeply happy to have found.