by Cheryl Strayed
Rating: 3/5 315 pages, 2012
More opinions:
Sep 13, 2020
Wild
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail
Adventuresome memoir by a woman who felt herself at a loss and at odds when her mother died suddenly of cancer. She freely admits that her life was rather a mess- she cheated on her husband and got into drug use, among other things. Then upon seeing a guidebook for the PCT in an outdoor equipment store, she spontaneously decided to hike it. All the way from the Mojave Desert in southern California to the border of Oregon and Washington - eleven hundred miles. I liked how honest the telling was. From the embarrassment and weight of her inexperience, to the tedium of freeze-dried meals, frequent discomfort and injuries, camaraderie with other hikers, spontaneous generosity of people who gave her lifts, meals, showers and sometimes a bed to sleep in, and the wonder of vistas and sights along the way. A lot of it is musing on her past as she walks- her troubled family, issues with her mother, poor choices... I did see the film a while back, so a lot of this was familiar. In particular I had remembered when a man stopped her on the road for an interview because he was writing an articles on hobo and thought she was a hobo- it made me laugh, and of course the scene where she lost a boot. I found two parts rather shocking- no, not all the stuff about men- I knew that about her personality going into this- one involved a horse that used to belong to her mother, the other what she did with her mother's remains after cremation... My older sister hiked the PCT several years ago, so I also enjoyed comparing what she's told me of it, to what I read here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Strayed certainly is very honest in this book! I admired her fearlessness and how she told herself that she was brave and capable and able to do this big scary thing alone. And then she did it.
ReplyDeletePretty amazing, especially considering how she was rather unprepared for some of it. I don't think I'd ever have the guts to do the same.
Delete