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.