Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

I was alone. I was barefoot.

It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope.

when I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When

I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could.

There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

Keep going and walking

I felt like the pack was not so much attached to me as me to it.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.

And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that

had made my life ridiculous.

but most of my exhaustion could be blamed on the outrageous weight of my pack.

I looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother’s presence, remembering why it was that I’d thought I could hike this trail.

In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the sky as the sun faded over the mountains.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.

hiked in the heat of that day with a new determination. Inspired by Greg’s faith in me, I didn’t give quitting another thought.

Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine.

wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress.

Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.

If my mother hadn’t died, for example, would I still have cheated on him? Or if I hadn’t cheated on him, would he have cheated on me? And what if nothing had happened—no mother dying, no cheating on anyone—would we still be getting divorced anyway, having simply married too young?

Asking questions about past decisions what if?

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to

walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I looked at the place I’d come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me.

And I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

“I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.”

Thank you, I thought over and over again. Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me.