These reflections are of course the real meat of the memoir, but the exercise was clearly one that took place after the hike. One gets the feeling that perhaps writing this book, and finishing after many years, was as much a journey emotionally and mentally as the hike itself. Strayed manages to stitch together the experiences of her physical journey and those of the life that preceded in such a way that the story is a seamless blend of narrative and reflection. Strayed easily pulls the reader into the simple joys and excitement of her journey so that the monotony she references never becomes too tedious for the reader to endure.Īnd yet Wild is ultimately a serious undertaking, masterfully executed. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched.ĭespite the clear agony of the hike and her emotional journey in telling it, the stories of Strayed’s trip–instant camaraderie with fellow PCT hikers, encounters with eccentric outsiders, even a sexy overnight with a “hot, sweet, self-absorbed” bouncer she meets at one of her off-trail stops–keep Wild fun enough to be a “beach read.” As a generational in-betweener, not quite a Gen Xer, not quite a Millenial–I loved the 90’s touchstones throughout–Nag Champa incense, Nirvana lyrics, Snapple. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past.
Somehow indicative of this is the fact that the landscapes she crosses (which we know are breathtaking) are often an afterthought–she writes quickly, almost dismissively, of the jagged mountains and sweeping panoramas more words are spent on her physical struggle–the battle to keep her toenails, the weight of her pack, Monster, the monotony of hiking:
Strayed relates that though she had, before the hike, imagined herself reflecting and meditating on these struggles, she instead finds nearly all of her time consumed by the physical difficulty of hiking the PCT.
As she relates the story of her physical journey across and 1,100 mile stretch through California and Oregon, she interjects the events of her life that had shattered and dumped her at the start of her hike: the death of her beloved mother, the end of her marriage, struggles with addiction–a jagged, zig-zagging, criss-cross of trails that stand in stark contrast to the single, straight line of the PCT. The at times scorching, at times freezing, frequently wet and always heavy surface of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild is enough to be engaging: a hapless, amateur hiker taking on one of America’s most scenic and formidable hikes, the Pacific Crest Trail (the PCT, in hiker vernacular).
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