Wild – Cheryl Strayed // book review
The other day I found myself on an unplanned trip to Burma, which meant hours in the back of van full of strangers on both sides of the glass window. I had been meaning to read Wild for a while now, so I got the audio book and prepared for a journey across the Pacific Crest Trail.
Wild is a memoir by Cheryl Strayed about her walk over 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which follows the crests of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. But this book is so much more; it is about grief and fear, power and change. It was not so much about the hike itself, but about Cheryl and her need to need to both escape this world and find it.
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. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long. A world called the Pacific Crest Trail.
- Prologue
I had read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and other journey memoirs that made me want to go hiking, get out into nature, and find myself in hours of silence. However, I finished this book not wanting to visit the PCT, but to visit Cheryl herself, to have a beer together and talk about all the crazy spirals of life and how to make it through. The book focuses not so much on the outer landscape, but on Strayed’s inner landscape. Her raw voice is inspiring in it's strength and determination.
She is brutally honest. There is no sugar quoting the fact that she was a novice hiker, the 100-degree weather, the chaffing. She details the confusion of grief after the loss of her mother and her own dangerous dabbling with drugs and sex. She digs herself out of a hole, and lets us see all the sweat along the way.
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.
- Chapter 14
I loved this book, I want to buy the hard copy so that I can read it again someday and be inspired anew by the strength and safety this book brings.