The High Road

‘Wild,’ a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl

Strayed
By DANI SHAPIROMARCH 30, 2012
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In the summer of 1995, a 26-year-old woman who had never been

backpacking before set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. She had
already separated from her husband, quit her waitressing job and
sold most of her belongings. Now she went to the outdoors store
REI to purchase almost everything she could possibly think of for
her three-month journey: fleece pants and an anorak, a thermal
shirt, two pairs of wool socks and underwear, a sleeping bag, a
camp chair, a head lamp, five bungee cords, a water purifier, a tiny
collapsible stove, a canister of gas and a small pink lighter, two
cooking pots, utensils, a thermometer, a tarp, a snakebite kit, a
Swiss Army knife, binoculars, a compass, a book called “Staying
Found” to teach herself how to use the compass, a first-aid kit,
toiletries, a menstrual sponge, a lantern, water bottles, iodine
pills, a foldable saw (“for what, I did not know”), two pens and
three books in addition to “Staying Found”: “The Pacific Crest
Trail, Vol. 1: California,” William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and
Adrienne Rich’s “Dream of a Common Language.” She also bought
a 200-page sketchbook to use as a journal.

People with any hiking experience (I am not one) will know that
this is the backpack of a rank amateur, that setting out on a 1,100-
mile trek from the Mojave Desert to the Cascades outfitted in
brand-new hiking boots — a size too small, it turned out — and
with 24.5 pounds of water in a dromedary bag is a recipe for
disaster. Fortunately for the reader, it’s also a recipe for a
spectacular book. “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest
Trail” is at once a breathtaking adventure tale and a profound
meditation on the nature of grief and survival.

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 To begin to understand something about Cheryl Strayed, know
that Strayed is not her given name. We never find out the name
she was born with, but we are made to understand with absolute
clarity why she chose to change it, and just how well her new name
suits her. Contemplating divorce, she realized that she couldn’t
continue to use the hyphenated married name she’d shared with
her husband, “nor could I go back to having the name I had had in
high school and be the girl I used to be. . . . I pondered the question
of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with
Cheryl. . . . Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came
into my mind. Immediately I looked it up in the dictionary and
knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life
and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to
deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be
without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about
aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had
diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. . . . I saw the
power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I
was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought
me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

Cheryl Strayed’s load is both literal and metaphorical — so heavy

that she staggers beneath its weight. Her mother has died (lung
cancer, age 45); her father is long gone (“a liar and a charmer, a
heartbreak and a brute”). In what is for her a stunning act of filial
betrayal, her brother and sister find it too painful to come to the
hospital as Strayed’s mother is fading, leaving her, then 22, to
prop up the pillows so that her mother could die, as had been her
wish, sitting up. Strayed’s stepfather, whom she had loved,
disengaged himself from the family and quickly found new love,
unwilling even to take care of his late wife’s beloved mare, who
became so enfeebled that — in one of the book’s most harrowing
scenes — Strayed and her brother are forced to put her down. They
do this the old-fashioned way, by shooting her between the eyes.
Beside herself with grief, Strayed abandons her kind and loving
husband, gets involved with a heroin addict and becomes an addict
herself. Just before leaving for the Pacific trail, even after six
months off drugs, she shoots up once more, “the little bruise on
my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland” now
“faded to a faint morose yellow.” Beneath her wool socks and too-
small hiking boots, that bruise was a continuing reminder of her
“own ludicrousness.”

Photo

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CreditIllustration by Daniel Horowitz
Often when narratives are structured in parallel arcs, the two
stories compete and one dominates. The reader skims the less-
favored one, eager to get back to the other. But in “Wild,” the two
tales Strayed tells, of her difficult past and challenging present,
are delivered in perfect balance. Not only am I not an adventurer
myself, but I am not typically a reader of wilderness stories. Yet I
was riveted step by precarious step through Strayed’s encounters
with bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lion scat, ice, record snow and
predatory men. She lost six toenails, suffered countless bruises
and scabs, improvised bootees made of socks wrapped in duct
tape, woke up one time covered in frogs and met strangers who
were extraordinarily kind to her.

Perhaps her adventure is so gripping because Strayed relates its

gritty, visceral details not out of a desire to milk its obviously
dramatic circumstances but out of a powerful, yet understated,
imperative to understand its meaning. We come to feel how her
actions and her internal struggles intertwine, and appreciate the
lessons she finds embedded in the natural world. In a brief

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 meditation on mountains, for example, she writes: “They were, I
now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to
nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top . .
. there was still more up to go. . . . I was entirely in new terrain.”
“Wild” isn’t a concept-generated book, that is, one of those
projects that began as a good, salable idea. Rather, it started out as
an experience that was lived, digested and deeply understood.
Only then was it fashioned into a book — one that is both a literary
and human triumph.

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What allows us to survive? To lose and then find ourselves? How
do we learn to accept grief instead of permitting it to obliterate us?
How can a young woman who describes herself as having a “hole
in her heart” (a mother-shaped hole, I thought to myself)
transform herself through solitude and high-octane risk and the
comforts of literature (along the way she picked up books like “The
Complete Stories” of Flannery O’Connor and J. M. Coetzee’s
“Waiting for the Barbarians”) into a clearheaded, scarred, human,
powerful and enormously talented writer who is secure enough to
confess she does not have all the answers? “It was enough,” she
tells us as she reaches the poetically named Bridge of the Gods,
which connects Oregon to Washington, “to trust that what I’d done
was true.”

Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of Strayed’s mother, and

the legacy she left her daughter. “‘The first thing I did when each
of you was born was kiss every part of you,’ my mother used to say
to my siblings and me. ‘I’d count every finger and toe and eyelash,’
she’d say. ‘I’d trace the lines in your hands.’” Strayed writes that “I
didn’t remember it, and yet I’d never forgotten it. It was as much a
part of me as my father saying he’d throw me out the window.
More.”

As Strayed’s mother grew sicker, she would repeat the sentence

“I’m with you always” again and again. And, in a way, she was her
daughter’s constant companion through it all. In the end, it was
this: not the loss, not the abandonment, not the rebellion, but the
love itself. The love won out.

WILD
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed
315 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.