Book documents Pacific Crest Trail journey

Cheryl Strayed actually walked the Pacific Crest Trail, a walk of some 1,100 miles virtually from the Mexican border to Washington State – alone. She walked away from a marriage she had ruined, away from the sorrow of her mother’s early death from cancer, away from her heroin habit and dead-end jobs.

Impulsively, she bought guide books and, in order to get equipment and food, sold most of what she owned. She took with her a backpack that was far too heavy and walked in boots that were far too small (eight out of 10 toenails came off). The walk, documented in her book Wild, took six weeks.

The landscapes were constantly changing, as were the animals that came with each one, which she describes in her wonderfully economic prose, especially as she relates to it.

It is, of course, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But somehow it eased the pain of her mother’s death and made the other troubles she’d left behind a little easier to bear.

She meets a number of people along the way, particularly men – one of whom she has a brief overnight with, another of whom lightens her pack and one who appears dangerous. There are brief, pithy descriptions of the people she meets and the conversations she has with them.

There were many adventures, including being lost, overly hot and overly cold and meeting bears and deer and such along the way. She has a brief chat with an owl.

And then there was this: her backpack, which “toppled over onto my boots, clipping the left one in such a way that it leapt into the air as if I’d thrown it. I watched it bounce – it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once – and then I watched it tumble over the edge of the mountain and down into the trees without a sound.

“I gasped in surprise and lurched for my other boot, clutching it to my chest, waiting for the moment to reverse itself, for someone to come laughing from the woods, shaking his head and saying it had all been a joke.

“But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.”

So she sent the other one after it.

Her writing conveys such emotional honesty: a wonderful mix of self-examination, the past and the present; memories and sometimes sassiness; lovely (short) descriptions of the views from the trail – all different – and finally she…. and the reader….. realize that the wilderness had done its inimitable work and she really was at peace.

A wonderful book – Oprah thinks so too: she put it in her book club.

Book info:
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Cheryl Strayed
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95 

Posted by Rae Eastman on December 13, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry