In a comical scene, a reporter for a journal called The Hobo Times mistakes her for one of his tribe and attempts to interview her. Physically, she was unprepared for this adventure, and she recounts a great deal of physical pain: that of setting off with a ridiculously overstuffed backpack she comes to refer to as Monster losing most of her blackened toenails to ill-fitting boots having her feet become “a throbbing mass of pulp.” After a few weeks on the trail, she writes, “my stench was magnificent.” No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.” What felt profound, she says, “was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. Strayed went walking in search of what she calls “radical aloneness.” She had no cellphone and no credit card often she had only a few coins in her pocket to last a week.
“Wild” is thus the story of an unfolding. “Every day she blew through her entire reserve.” When her mother became ill, the author says, “I folded my life down” to care for her. “Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned,” Ms. Strayed went away to college, her mom came along and enrolled too. There were very frightening moments, but nothing particularly extraordinary happened to her. Strayed spent, during the summer of 1995, when she was 26, hiking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song.
Strayed a bit of a disservice, because there’s nothing cloying about “Wild.” It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. I like to read in coffee shops, and I began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of looks that said, “Oh, honey.” It was a humiliation. I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. Turning pages, I’m practically Steve McQueen.Ĭheryl Strayed’s new memoir, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” however, pretty much obliterated me. Luckily, perhaps, books don’t make me cry very often - I’m a thrice-a-year man, at best. Yet for a book critic tears are an occupational hazard. It’s not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading.
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