‘Wild,’ a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed
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 also 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, head lamp, also 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, and also 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 and a menstrual sponge, lantern, water bottles, iodine pills, a foldable saw (“for what, I did not know”), two pens and three books in addition to “Staying Found”: 1. “The Pacific Crest Trail, Vol. 1: California,” 2. William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and 3. 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, 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 only 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.
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 ne 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.”
Preview CHERYL STRAYED ON WILD | TIFF 2016
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.”
But in “Wild,” the two tales Strayed tells, of her difficult past and challenging present, are delivered in perfect balance. Yet I was riveted step by precarious step. . . . through Strayed’s encounter with bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lion scat, ice, record snow and predatory men. She also 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 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.
Facing Fear in the WILD!!!!
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail http://www.oprah.com/
Preview Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern,
& Cheryl Strayed: Wild Interview
Academy Award Winner ReeseWitherspoon stars in this inspirational true story about a fierce path taken. After years being haunted by memories of her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern), as Cheryl Strayed (Witherspoon) makes a rash decision to embark on a challenging trek across the Pacific Crest Trail.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything.
In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.
Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X50NxSCPNw