Book Review: Wild

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail

By Cheryl Strayed

Published: 2012

Read: May 2012

Wild is an awesome, captivating story.  Cheryl Strayed is a 26-year-old woman solo-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 1995.  The way she writes the book makes you feel as though she is telling you her story through the quick-turning pages.  The reading experience is quite different than the first book review I wrote, with this book having fewer (almost none) LOL moments.  Instead, I was living the story while intimately understanding Cheryl's transformation as she grew not only physically, but more importantly, mentally and spiritually, while hiking the trail.  I simply could not put this book down.

Throughout the 315 pages, Cheryl keeps things interesting by weaving the trail hiking experience with stories from her past as they came up as issues and emotions she dealt with and conquered.  The motivation for hiking was to refocus her life after grieving the painful loss of her mother and the ensuing disintegration of her family and her marriage.  She was also breaking free of old bad habits  while building self-confidence to make herself whole again.

The way Cheryl makes the read feel like she's telling you her story personally is through her unique writing style.  I remember being a bit thrown off during the first few pages by the punctuation and sentence formatting.  Re-reading them now makes me realize it was just an adjustment period in getting to know Cheryl's voice.  

"It was the thing that had compelled [the trail creators and advocates] to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days.  It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies... It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild."
(Pg 207)

"I was entering. I was leaving.  California streamed behind me like a long silk veil.  I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore.  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."

(Pg 234)

"I've given you everything," [Cheryl's mother] insisted again and again in her last days.  "Yes," I agreed.  She had, it was true.  She did.  She did.  She did.  She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity.  She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love."

(Pg 268)

Cheryl focuses on the right topics for the right amount of time.  You want to read every word, rather than feeling tempted to skip over boring, needlessly descriptive sections.  Her adventure makes readers (...at least me...) want to get out there and hike - to feel the blisters, the lost toe nails, the sweat-coated body - all for the purpose of experiencing the same transformation that Cheryl underwent.  The trail's physical demands forced so much focus on the physical and basic needs of life that the petty, irrelevant issues of Cheryl's past life were cast away, easily rolled off the side of one of the many mountains she traversed.  Hiking also built up her confidence to deal with the issues of her mom passing away and her wandering lifestyle.  

Things I think I'll remember most about this book:

(and things that will make more sense after reading the book:)

2nd skin

Boots and puffy toes

Boxes waiting at secluded post offices 

Literally living on next to nothing

Monster

Camaraderie from fellow trail mates

Food.  Fresh.  And cold Snapple

Cold sweat

Just keep going. 

While I naturally paint a picture of the scenes and events Cheryl depicts in the novel, there are some places she describes that seem absolutely beautiful.  Because they are actual places, I wanted to look a few of them up:

Crater Lake
(http://planetoddity.com) 

Mt. Hood
(http://www.discovernw.org)

Thanks, Luke, for recommending this book!  I loved reading it!!