You know a book is good when you want to put off finishing it. I just didn't want to be without Cheryl.
At 26 years old Cheryl Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a natural 2,650-mile-long trail from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington.(1) Although she did not hike the entire thing she accomplished 1,100 miles of the beautiful and occasionally fatal trail, hiking 5-7 miles per day.(2) To put this incredible journey into perspective, and her genuine guts to take such a journey on as a complete beginner, not to mention her being an unfit, mentally unstable ex-heroin addict, a thru-hiker would have to hike 20 miles a day to complete the entire trail within a single year. She went out on this mission with the hope of gaining some perspective about the abandonment she felt as she grieved her mother, the distance between herself, her siblings, and her step-father, and her wonderings about her estranged father, more significantly, she went out on this mission alone.
The beautiful thing about going alone is that every triumph is yours, every consequence of every mistake is yours, everything that you have to figure out is on you. That’s a really powerful experience. And sometimes it is beautiful and positive and exciting, and sometimes it's negative and hard and lonely. I wanted that. I welcomed that.
—Cheryl Strayed, 2019 (3)
Reading Wild was an experience I would compare to the experiences I have had in my therapist's office. I wasn't there with Strayed in the motel room from where her hike began, nor on the trail by day, or in her tent by night. I was aware that I was being told this story, I hadn't been taken on the journey, this was a retelling of her life after all: she was decades older sitting down and writing these moments from memory. I felt that. I felt as though I had been given the luxury of hours in the company of this omnipotent woman, who, through telling me about her path, helped me navigate my own.
When I first set out to read Wild I had already watched the film adaption but it had long left my memory; I had no idea who Cheryl Strayed was and I wasn't quite sure why I cared about her hiking a trail in America I had never heard of. I got a chapter or two in and cried so much about the thought of my mother dying and leaving me on earth having not shown her all the love I truly wanted to. I became distressingly upset about the state of our relationship and couldn't face the reasons as to why it was this way. I desperately need my mother to live well beyond my ugly adolescence so we can be friends when I am older and something more than her daughter. I was so affected by Strayed's mother's death that I could not possibly keep reading.
I was newly twenty then, and at the height of self-destruction, so perhaps I didn't want to listen to what she was telling me. She was ahead of me in the journey I was about to go on, I can see that now, two years on. Fret not: it did not take me two years to finish the book, I just couldn't be in denial about my poor life choices and read an inspiring memoir subtitled 'From Lost to Found'. So, I dog-eared the page (don't hate me), closed the book, and returned it to my bookshelf.
The two years passed and I left my self-destructive tendencies, and dysfunctional family members behind. After reading Eat Pray Love the previous summer I was ready now for all the older, wiser, more healed women of the world to share their learned life lessons with me. I was ready to hear harsh truths and be given the motivation by somebody else's triumph through perseverance.
That's precisely what I got from Strayed's recount of her PCT journey in Wild.
Strayed's writing is beautifully simple yet its impact is fascinating. She smoothly transitions from the present moment on the trail to her memories or her inner monologue. As she is connecting with herself we connect with her, wherever she transports us to, we're already there. The most significant instance of this was the alignment of my reactions to hers as the book progressed. By the time we were halfway through neither I nor 26-year-old Strayed were particularly startled by the presence of a bear in camp.
Wild provided me with some words of wisdom that stuck with me days after I had read them. Her conclusion on the behavior of her step-father after her mother passed settled inside of my brain sparking my own explorations and reasoning.
There is so much more to say about this book from its feminist author to its religious and spiritual depictions, the launching of her hiking boots off the ace of a mountain to her thinking a wild fox is her mother, but I will leave it here. This is a beautiful book and I wish Cheryl Strayed could accompany me through life forever.
Some memorable quotes from WILD: A Journey from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave.
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable.
Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of beimg, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
If you love the sound of #Wild and Cheryl's journey over the Pacific Crest Trail, but reading is not your thing, good news: it's also a film!! (Available on Amazon Prime, Disney+, Youtube, and Apple TV)
(3) Talty, Alexandra (July 31, 2019). "Wild Author Cheryl Strayed On Her Greatest Legacy". Forbes. Archived from the original on August 5, 2019.
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