Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/25/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

I had high expectations and Cheryl Strayed’s memoir still blew me away. She’s such a wonderful writer. She reflects on her own truth and struggles in a way that gives a voice to an experience that so many other people can relate to. The book details her solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail and the painstaking miles where she was able to reflect on everything that had left her broken and begin to make herself whole again. It’s a wonderful story of letting go, finding yourself, persevering, and choosing gratitude despite it all.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Adventure:
Solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)

“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.” 

“But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.”

“I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.”

“I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.” 

What mattered was utterly timeless: “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.”

Tragedy:
Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and told she had a year to live. But she only lived 49 days after her diagnosis. During that time, each day was an eternity. 

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her. Without her, Eddie slowly became a stranger. Leif and Karen and I drifted into our own lives…we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief.”

Fear:
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”

Doubt:
“I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps….I was going to quit. Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten, five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the driver who picked me up was going to.” 

Letting go:
“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. I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I’d lost, the new one I was spinning…”

The void: the place where things are born, where they begin. Black holes absorb energy and then release something new and alive. 

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true.”

“How wild it was, to be let be.”

Rediscovering yourself:
“Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.”

Perseverance:
“So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.”

“Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate struggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched….The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

Gratitude:
“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.”