In her best-selling memoir Wild, American author Cheryl Strayed documents her three-month solo one thousand mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail through northern California to Washington. Occasionally humorous and often harrowing, Strayed’s narrative is one of healing, forgiveness, and self-discovery with, as luck would have it, a literal journey illustrative of the figurative one.
Strayed tells us in the early pages of her memoir that the sequence of events leading up to her first day at the trailhead began not with her decision to attempt the hike, or with her efforts to plan, or with her later decision, that despite the hardship, she would stay. “It had begun before I even imagined it, precisely four years, seven months, and three days before, when I’d stood in a little room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and learned that my mother was going to die.” In Wild, unlike many memoirs focused on travel, the before and after are equally, if not more, important than the journey itself.
In the years that follow her mother’s death, we learn, Strayed becomes increasingly self-destructive, failing to complete her degree, experimenting with drugs, and engaging in the self-described promiscuous behavior that ultimately leads to her divorce. It’s in the midst of this dark chaos that Strayed decides to hike the PCT, seeing it as the only path to her own salvation:
“I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly…I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.”
It’s with this backdrop, hiking the PCT as an act of transformation and redemption rather than the end in itself, that Strayed begins her journey.
As a traveler in general, and a hiker specifically, Strayed is abysmal. Though she imagines this journey as a way out of the dangerous spiral she’s been trapped in, it seems to the reader, at least initially, as merely an extension of the same. She is wildly unprepared for her trip. She explains that she ran out of time to break in her hiking boots, which turn out to be the wrong size and cause her unspeakable agony for the majority of her hike. She runs out of water. I lost count of the number of times she almost steps on a rattlesnake, the warning rattle penetrating the fog of her thoughts at the last moment. The crowning event, however, occurs when, miles from civilization, she accidentally knocks her only pair of boots off the side of a cliff.
It’s frustrating for the reader to see her so careless, so profoundly out of touch with the realities of her situation, at least early in the memoir. She conducts little research and minimal planning. She understands and clearly articulates the risk of being a young woman traveling alone in an isolated area. The groups she runs across are typically men, often hikers like her, and she has more than one very uncomfortable close call. But despite her encounters with danger, from bears to dehydration to drunk fishermen, she doesn’t evolve as a hiker.
That is her primary weakness as a traveler, and especially a solo traveler. We expect a certain amount of unpredictability, obstacles that are impossible to plan for, dangers that we didn’t anticipate. By the same token, we accept a certain level of risk. It’s Strayed’s failure to learn from her mistakes, to react in any way other than panic, to develop a strategy for dealing with these situations that is difficult to accept. Strayed survives on luck and a truly admirable level of stubbornness and tenacity, not because of her wits, or foresight, or adaptability, or experience, or even a love of the outdoors.
Of course, Strayed does not set out with the goal of becoming an expert hiker or traveler. She has no intention of conquering the PCT, only of surviving it. Nor does she expect or even desire any recognition for her accomplishment. Her goals are profoundly personal, so personal that it takes Strayed fifteen years after completing her hike to write her memoir, to see that she has a story with telling. It’s ultimately not the story of a hiker at all, despite Strayed’s celebrity status in wilderness circles. Strayed’s journey, though manifested physically in her memoir as a trip along the PCT, is a search for forgiveness, a trial by fire that allows Strayed to shed her former life and remake herself as someone strong and willful and determined, someone who can trust herself and tell herself over and over, despite the noises in the darkness, that she is not afraid. It is in this aspect of the journey that Strayed becomes heroic.
Let’s be fearless,
Jen
Excerpts from: Strayed, Cheryl. Wild. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012-03-20. iBooks.
Photo 1: Courtesy of Stormovik via Wiki Commons
Photo 2: Courtesy of Walter Siegmund via Wiki Commons
Photo 3: Courtesy of Jane Shelby Richardson via Wiki Commons