Wild about Wild

Just for a change of pace, I thought I'd write a book review of Wild. From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Unlike most authors recounting long distance hikes, Cheryl Strayed is an exceptional storyteller.  Wild is about her 1000-mile hike along or near the Pacific Crest Trail but the physical trail is really just the backdrop for her personal history, a wonderful cast of colorful characters, and the author's physical and emotional growth along the trail.  She hikes the trail to recover from her mother's premature death, her own relationship and chemical problems, and from a rudderless existence.  She was a complete novice backpacker when she started, with simultaneously inadequate and excessive gear, wilderness ignorance, and a naivete about the PCT.  That she survived is truly amazing, especially given the extreme climates she walked through and several major mistakes she made (like not carrying enough water through the desert and throwing away her ice-ax before she was finished with the snowy sections).

The story skillfully interweaves her family life before her mother died with her adult life story, her hike, and the people she met along the way.   She grew up with domestic abuse, poverty, a "back to the land" existence in rural Minnesota, a father who abandoned the family and a stepfather who made it whole (at least until Cheryl's mother died).  Her adult life spanned going to college in tandem with her mother's attending the same college, marriage at 19 to a wonderful man, the family's dissolution after her mother's death, serial extramarital affairs, heroin use, and many dead end jobs.  Very few people with that kind of background end up doing long-distance hiking much less persevering (as the author did) for1000 miles with footwear that ravage one's feet and a grossly overweight backpack.  She did get geographically lost many times but her lostness was far more emotional than physical.  She found her way back to the trail after many detours but more importantly she found inner strength, natural beauty, and uncommon human goodness among strangers.  Even on the single occasion when she met a bad guy who seemed to have rape in mind she escaped without harm.  She is one lucky woman.

Most books by long distance hikers wear down the reader with day by day, blow by blow descriptions of the trail and/or of hiking gear.  Not this one.  Wild had just the right mix of trail days, Strayed's personal history, and off-trail experiences.  And yet so many of her stories resonated with me about long-distance hiking.  I loved her analogy of long distance hiking as being like knitting a sweater:  You knit it going uphill and then you unravel it going down and then repeat the process over and over and over. 

The characters she met at camps near the trail, in towns, and hitchhiking come alive for the reader because the author portrays them in three dimensions.  Strayed has a gift for timing as well.  The suspense builds in each trail section.  Will she reach the water in time?  Will her money hold out?  Will she find the trail?  Will her resupply box be there?  The author describes in depth just the right number of specific events to enhance reader's understanding of what she went through.  Some experiences illustrate the nature of trail life.  Her obsession with Snapple Lemonade is just one example.  Other vignettes serve to illuminate the author's own history and personality.  At one point, she was down to two cents but she used that experience to reflect that her history of poverty had given her the ingenuity and a kind of fearlessness to keep going.  And some stories are there simply to enable us to appreciate the beauty of the Pacific Crest Trail. 

The year after Bill Bryson's book about walking the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) hit the bestseller list, there was a huge increase in people starting the A.T.  As you would expect, a large proportion of them dropped out along the way.  If A Walk in the Woods is any gauge, folks who work on and around the PCT better brace themselves for the onslaught because this book is going to send thousands of completely unprepared hikers onto the trail next year.  For better or worse, the Pacific Crest Trail is dramatically different from the A.T. and far less forgiving so there will probably be an increase in rescues and deaths on the PCT as well. 

That Strayed was not a "thru hiker" made Wild a better adventure.  She could skip over difficult sections, change her endpoint, and take time off without becoming obsessed about covering every mile of the trail or getting through high mountains before the snows started.  It also absolves her of accusations of cheating by the self-appointed arbiters of thru-hike sanctity (Bill Bryson is still reviled by many thru hikers on the A.T. because he didn't really hike the trail.). 


Because Cheryl Strayed was an inexperienced woman walking alone on a very demanding trail, I think this book will appeal particularly to women but anyone who dreams of getting away from it all would enjoy it and learn that determination trumps equipment, physical fitness, and experience... at least if you're lucky.  .