Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long. A world called the Pacific Crest Trail.

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for

the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.

They had become not so much inanimate objects to me as extensions of who I was, as had just about everything else I carried that summer—my backpack, tent, sleeping bag, water purifier, ultralight stove, and the little orange whistle that

They were the things I knew and could rely upon,

My mother was forty-five. She looked fine. For a good number of years she’d mostly been a vegetarian.

I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.

thought about my older sister, Karen, and

Leif. About my husband, Paul, and about my mother’s parents and sister, who lived a thousand miles away.

“Paper roses, paper roses, oh how real those roses

It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more.

brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming

The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: my mother.

“Perhaps you should try a shorter trip first,” Paul had suggested when I told him about my plan during one of our should-we-stay-together-or-get-divorced discussions several months before.

“I’ve gone backpacking!” I’d said indignantly, though he was right: I hadn’t. In spite of all the things I’d done that struck me as related to backpacking, I’d never actually walked into the wilderness with a

backpack on and spent the night. Not even once.

A month ago, I’d been firmly advised to pack my backpack just as I would on my hike and take it on a trial run. I’d meant to do it before I left Minneapolis, and then I’d meant to do it once I got to Portland. But I hadn’t.

My trial run would be tomorrow

my first day on t...

And that someone had to be me. I owed at least that much to my mother.

He deferred his admission for a year and we stayed in Minnesota so I could

be near my family, though my nearness in the year that followed my mother’s death accomplished little.

But after about fifteen minutes of walking

on the PCT, it was clear that I had never walked into desert mountains in early June with a pack that weighed significantly more than half of what I did strapped onto my back.

With him I felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter.

I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a

different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.

There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that...

that it would be wise to improve one’s physical fitness before setting out, to train specifically for the hike, perhaps. And, of course, admonishments about backpack weight. Suggestions even to refrain from carrying the entire guidebook itself because it was too heavy to carry all at once and unnecessary anyway—

nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.

which I should have been reading to see what lay ahead the next day,

which I should have read before starting the trail, but

My mind was a crystal vase that contained

But I hadn’t factored in my lack of fitness, nor the genuine rigors of the trail, until I was on it.

The PCT suddenly seeming so far in my future, though it was only forty-eight hours away.

I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering. Since

entirely different breed: as thoroughly prepared as I was not; versed in trail matters I didn’t even know existed. He’d been planning his hike for years,

gathering information by corresponding with others who’d hiked the PCT in summers before, and attending what he referred to as “long-trail” hiking conferences.

In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning. Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed.

endured. I wadded it up in a ball and put it

I’d only wanted to be alone. 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 radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense.

and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had befor...

when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

didn’t have the gear I needed; I didn’t have the knowledge and experience. And because I was solo, I didn’t have a margin for error either. By bailing out like most of the other PCT hikers had, I’d miss the glory of the High Sierra.

But if I stayed on the trail, I’d risk my life.

He didn’t need to know that there was yet another front on which I was an absolute fool.

“Imagine your life if you’d had a father who loved you as a father should,” Vince countered.

father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts.

Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.