Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

In Part 1 of Wild, Cheryl introduces themes that recur throughout her memoir, key among which is maternal love. Cheryl embarks on her hike after losing her mother at the age of 22. Her recollections of her mother center on love. In Chapter 1, for example, Cheryl describes her mother’s unquantifiable love for her and her siblings, comparing it to Dermoût’s novel, The Ten Thousand Things: “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” (13). Although Cheryl grew up certain of her mother’s love, she seeks reassurance as her mother lies dying in the hospital: “Have I been the best daughter in the world?” she asks. Her mother tells her she has, but Cheryl remains dissatisfied: “I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me. I was ravenous for love” (23).

Losing her mother alters Cheryl. She describes this change in striking terms in Chapter 2: “There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise” (34). In the years before her mother’s death, Cheryl was a popular high school cheerleader and homecoming queen. She also attended college. Her life derailed the moment her mother received her cancer diagnosis. The news was so tremendous that Cheryl remembers every detail, including what she was wearing. She also recalls her visceral reaction to the diagnosis: “I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe” (12). Cheryl uses evocative imagery to capture her and Eddie’s fragility immediately after receiving the news: “Eddie sat on my other side, but I could not look at him. If I looked at him, we would both crumble like dry crackers” (12). Her mother’s passing left Cheryl grief-stricken and confused. Her life became chaotic, prompting her to compare it to “a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center” (28).

Cheryl engaged in self-destructive behavior in the four years between her mother’s death and her hike on the PCT. She did drugs and had extramarital affairs, despite loving Paul. Cheryl’s affairs began approximately a year after her mother’s death after she, Karen, Leif, and Eddie grew apart and Paul dropped out of graduate school. Cheryl describes her affairs in vulgar terms, her crass language mirroring the destructiveness of her actions: “I stayed behind in Oregon and fucked the ex-boyfriend of the woman who owned the exotic hens. I fucked a cook at the restaurant where I’d picked up a job waiting tables. I fucked a massage therapist who gave me a piece of banana cream pie and a free massage. All three of them over the span of five days” (36). Cheryl explains her behavior as a form of purging, comparing her feelings to those of people who self-harm: “It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself” (36).

Nature plays a central role in Cheryl’s life before and after she embarks on her hike. As a child, she lived on an undeveloped plot Eddie purchased after breaking his back at work: “Our forty acres were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses, swampy ponds and bogs clotted with cattails. There was nothing to differentiate it from the trees and bushes and grasses and ponds and bogs that surrounded it in every direction for miles” (15). The family eventually built a house on the lot, but before they did, they spend months walking around it until every part was familiar. The act of walking on and around the family plot alludes to long-distance hiking:

Together we repeatedly walked the perimeter of our land in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on the two sides that didn’t border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Trees that had once looked like any other to me became as recognizable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us (15).

The Prologue offers readers a glimpse of what lies ahead for Cheryl on the PCT, underscoring the beauty of nature, as well as the dangers of hiking alone. Cheryl first learns about the PCT from a book at REI, whose front cover depicts “a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags against a blue sky” (4). When she returns to buy the book, she is struck by the mysterious character of the wilderness, tracing the route of the PCT with her finger in a gesture that mimics hiking: “The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a map. I would walk that line, I decided—or at least as much of it as I could in about a hundred days” (4).

Long-distance hiking is not easy as Cheryl lays bare at the outset of the book. She opens her memoir at one of the lowest points on the hike–the moment when she loses a boot. Cheryl’s enormous backpack topples over, knocking the boot over the edge of a cliff: “It bounced off of a rocky outcropping several feet beneath me before disappearing into the forest canopy below, impossible to retrieve […] I was alone. I was barefoot” (3). This incident offers a glimpse into the physical and mental suffering Cheryl experiences on the trail. From the outset, readers know she lacks proper footwear to hike the PCT. In Chapter 2, she describes the challenging climate of the Mojave, where she begins her journey: “The hot air tasted like dust, the dry wind whipping my hair into my eyes” (30). In Chapter 3, she confesses that she can barely lift her backpack: “My pack rose up like a mantle behind me, towering several inches above my head, and gripped me like a vise all the way down to my tailbone. It felt pretty awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker” (43). Chapter 1 most evocatively describes the hardships Cheryl experiences on the PCT: “I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods” (27).