Wild

Self-absorbed and self-destructive young woman with mommy issues and poor impulse control does something she’s preposterously unprepared for; survives despite herself.

I’m not sure how to classify this or recommend it. It’s not a travelogue; not really a journey of self-discovery (we get glimpses of the older Strayed, the one who wrote this book years later, and she sounds like she has grown up and learned but it certainly didn’t happen over the course of this book). Mostly it seems like a humblebrag trying to pass itself off as a rite of passage—but it’s not clear what the passage is or what if any development occurs. There’s not that much PCT content in it, and much of that is the excitement of other hikers at getting to bask in the presence of Cheryl. The majority of the book is a look back at her short life of astoundingly poor life choices. I feel sorry for the author and the people in her life, but not enough to spend any time thinking about after dashing off this blurb.


One note: if you have any backcountry experience whatsoever, you might want to skip this one: you will find it exasperating.

Every year, thousands of people make long, dangerous journeys on foot, by bicycle, car, animal, boat, balloon or plane. Of those thousands, a percentage decide to write a book about it. A percentage of those actually finish it, and a percentage of those who finish it get it published. Few are worth reading by the general, none adventure travel public. Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is an exception.
The movie was good, but I now think of it as a one-hour, fifty-five minute commercial for the book. Strayed writes with unflinching honesty about her past and her 1995 walk on the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d feared that Wild would be a weepy, sentimental, clichéd account of a woman getting empowerment from hiking by a bad writer. Not so. Everything’s balanced here and you realize as you read it that it’s not a book by a hiker who writes, but a book by a writer who hikes.

I’m not sure I would have ever picked up Wild if it weren’t a book group choice but I ended up enjoying it much more than I had expected. It’s one of those books cited as having changed people’s lives and thoroughly motivational, which I find off-putting, but I did like the idea of her solo walk along the PCT. And having read it, I did much more enjoy the parts about hiking over her life story.

Cheryl’s life before the PCT was a sad one. She lost her mother to cancer and went off the rails a bit after that. Her family grew further apart and she pushed herself away from her husband. She turned to sex and drugs to fill an unfillable void in her life. I did find it a bit hard to grasp that she had been shooting up heroin the week before she started her hike yet had no signs of withdrawal. Perhaps she brushed over that part of her life on purpose but it really did come across blasé about drug use. She made it seem like it was something you could pick up and walk away from in an instant.

Completely unprepared for the reality of hiking in extreme temperatures and at altitude, it’s amazing she actually survived to tell her tale. Her feet are ripped to shreds by her boots and she can barely lift her pack. She names her pack Monster and her destroyed feet become a recurring theme. Whilst other hikers she meets along the way have trained for years, Cheryl just marches straight out into the wilderness.

I believe she did the walk in the nineties, which makes it a much more isolated experience than now. She has no GPS or mobile phone, there’s no internet at her check in points to keep in touch with the outside world. Now, she could have taken an ereader rather than having to destroy books as she went. I imagine there were also a lot less people out walking than there would be today. However she is met with many acts of kindness from an array of characters that she meets along the way.

I saw that she has had a novel published and looked it up as I liked her easy style of writing. However it does seem to be heavily based on her life; a mother dying of cancer is the central plot as far as I can tell. So I’ll probably be skipping that although I do plan on watching the film adaptation.

I tend not to read nonficiton too often, yet I really enjoyed this book. The main reason was the parallels between her narrative and Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the hero's journey. You can argue whether or not she is a real hero and what she got in the end, but the fact remains that her story draws elements from the monomyth which, in my opinion, makes it more appealing to a broader audience.
The story is one of acceptance: her life hasn't been that great and she's made some bad decisions along the way, but her arduous trip gives her a new perspective and allows her to accept herself for who she is and learn to be happy. She may not explicitly state what new insight she gained or exactly when or how she changed, but by the end you realize: she doesn't have to.

For my full review, see: strakul.blogspot.com/2014/02/book-review-wild-by-cheryl-strayed.html