Mind Picker: Wild : From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

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 is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life -- like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.

To begin at the ending, the above quote is what author Cheryl Strayed learned from her 3+ month, 1000+ mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, and to the extent that a reader would find any meaning in that passage at all, is the extent to which I think a reader would enjoy this book. For me, it's not so much. For me, I didn't realise that Wild : From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was an Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Selection until I downloaded the audiobook, and had I known, I would have expected a story of a girl with a tough childhood who grows into a woman of gritty determination, and like all of Oprah's favourite books, that's exactly what this is.

Strayed (the name she gave herself) certainly did have a tough childhood, but so far as such things go, it wasn't the worst. Her father was abusive and her mother left him by the time Strayed was 7; eventually finding and marrying a good man who lovingly took on her three kids as his own. Being hippy types, Strayed's parents built a home in the woods without power or indoor plumbing, and although that might seem a horrifying existence to my kids today, Strayed describes it as idyllic and adventure-filled, with acres of woods and gardens and a couple of beloved horses. And no matter how upsetting the memories of the now absent father were, her mother's love was an unquestioned force and more than plenty of kids get:

I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif. KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother’s mouth all my life. She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

Of course it would be a huge blow then when Strayed's mother was diagnosed with cancer and died a short seven weeks later, and while it's never a good time to lose one's parents, she was an adult by then, married and living on her own. (How deeply did it affect her? As they buried her mother's ashes, Strayed writes, "I kept a few of the largest chunks in my hand…I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.") But as much as I feel like a jerk for thinking this, Strayed's tragedies weren't the worst I've ever heard, and the very worst things that happened to her were all self-inflicted. When I read Tiny Beautiful Things (a collection of Strayed's "Dear Sugar" advice columns from therumpus.com), I found it off-putting that her main philosophy seemed to be, "If it feels good, do it", and that's the way she lived her own life as described here: sleeping around (even while married to a man that she loved deeply); using heroin for kicks; deciding to embark on a highly dangerous hiking trip for which she was utterly unprepared.

I preferred the parts of Wild that depict Strayed's PCT hike -- it would be an amazing accomplishment even if she hadn't made it twice as hard on herself as she needed to. And while sentence-by-sentence Strayed is a fine writer, the weaving in of the stories of her past with her daily hiking experiences just wasn't organic or natural to my ear (I could feel my horse tattoo beneath my fingers --> my Mom bought a horse when I was little --> I had to put the horse down after she died) and I just couldn't ever connect with her: I felt no particular empathy for Strayed's losses, tutted that she only had herself to blame if her pack was too heavy or her boots too small, and didn't enjoy the reading experience of the way the two threads ran together. HOWEVER, there is something alluring about a months' long hike and there's a great literary tradition of the long walk as transformative experience (from The Stand to The Road), and to this genre, Strayed adds a strong voice. I wonder how many readers (like me) finished Wild and thought, "Well, if she could do that, I bet I could, too"? And the thing is that I know I couldn't: I would never be that brave or self-confident -- especially as a woman in the wilderness alone -- but Strayed finishes with a contagious enthusiasm that makes such an accomplishment sound entirely doable (and I suspect that was the appeal for Oprah; what she hoped readers would come away with). This is a very weak three stars for me, and as an aside, I watched the trailer for the upcoming movie version of Wild and suppose that it will be the nail in the coffin for the PCT as a true wilderness trail (with only a couple hundred hikers attempting it per year in Strayed's time) as everybody and their mother will now be heading out to test themselves. And as a further aside: I thought Reese Witherspoon would be playing the dying mother -- I mean she looks great and everything, but can she still play 25?

And now for something I wasn't brave enough to put as part of my official review: As I say all the time, as a mother of daughters, I am definitely pro-choice but am still put off by a statement like this:

I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink.

As if each of those items on her list carried equal weight; just one more box to tick off to get ready for the big hike. From sleeping around to the drug use to if it feels good do it, Cheryl Strayed never seemed to care much for consequences, and since she slept around and continued to engage in drug use on her hike, that obviously wasn't part of her growth; probably not behaviours that she thought needed to be changed. As I am only a year older than Cheryl, I couldn't help comparing our lives and was aware that as she was hiking the PCT, I was getting ready to have our first baby. It wasn't until she pointed out that August 18th, her mother's birthday, was around the due date of the baby she aborted that I realised that was about Kennedy's birthdate, too (August 15th), and that made her cavalier attitude even more off-putting to me -- I couldn't help but personalise it.

And on another note: I really did finish this book and began to daydream about making a big hike. As I really am frightened by a true wilderness experience (and more scared of danger from humans -- à la Deliverance -- than from animals), I could rule out the PCT. Looking closer to home, I googled the Bruce Trail and it's an interesting option: 900 km from Niagara Falls to Tobermory (where we just were this summer), people can hike it in about a month. The downside is that, since it crosses such a populous area, it doesn't look like it's ever truly wilderness, and at some points, you're walking along roads and highways. (But that's also an upside since you're unlikely to run out of water like Strayed did.) Also, each stretch of the trail has a club that organises weekends for group hikes, and they cover each stretch over 2 or 3 days, giving each hiker a badge at the end. In this way, a person could take years to hike it end to end, and then get the overall badge. I don't know if that's cool or not, though. Dave and the girls at least pretended interest in the Bruce Trail -- everyone agreeing that a person would feel strong and accomplished at the end of walking 900 km in 30 days -- so I'm still daydreaming about it.

And that reminded me of the big walk Lolo's mother went on a few years ago after she became widowed. As a Catholic, it was a long held dream for Barb to do the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. She went with a group of her friends from Ottawa, and I remember her telling me beforehand that, since it's a pilgrimage with a thousand year history, people who live along the 800 km road open their homes to offer shelter and food to the pilgrims. I never did ask her about it afterwards, but Ken had a moment of schadenfreude regarding his little-loved mother-in-law when he told me that on day one, there was Barb, about to start on a month long journey, and she hoisted her pack onto her back, took three steps, tripped on a stone and went down hard, skinning her chin and palms. I don't wish that on anyone, but the irony is savoury.

With Barb's experience, the Bruce Trail, and Wild in mind, I remembered that Martin Sheen did a movie about the Camino de Santiago, and when I saw The Way was on Netflix yesterday, I curled up and watched it. The movie is okay, in the way that this book was okay, but once again, it sparks the imagination and makes a person want to walk and walk. What I found most intriguing was that, yes, the Spanish do open their homes to Pilgrims -- for a price. And that price gets you a questionable meal and a bunk in a dodgy looking dorm.