‘Wild,’ a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed

In the summer of 1995, a 26-year-old woman who had never been backpacking before set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. She had already separated from her husband, quit her waitressing job and sold most of her belongings. Now she went to the outdoors store REI to purchase almost everything she could possibly think of for her three-month journey: fleece pants and an anorak, a thermal shirt, two pairs of wool socks and underwear, a sleeping bag, a camp chair, a head lamp, five bungee cords, a water purifier, a tiny collapsible stove, a canister of gas and a small pink lighter, two cooking pots, utensils, a thermometer, a tarp, a snakebite kit, a Swiss Army knife, binoculars, a compass, a book called "Staying Found" to teach herself how to use the compass, a first-aid kit, toiletries, a menstrual sponge, a lantern, water bottles, iodine pills, a foldable saw ("for what, I did not know"), two pens and three books in addition to "Staying Found": "The Pacific Crest Trail, Vol. 1: California," William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and Adrienne Rich's "Dream of a Common Language." She also bought a 200-page sketchbook to use as a journal.

Illustration by Daniel Horowitz

WILD

From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

By Cheryl Strayed

315 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $ 25.95.

People with any hiking experience (I am not one) will know that this is the backpack of a rank amateur, that setting out on a 1,100-mile trek from the Mojave Desert to the Cascades outfitted in brand-new hiking boots — a size too small, it turned out — and with 24.5 pounds of water in a dromedary bag is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for the reader, it's also a recipe for a spectacular book. "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail" is at once a breathtaking adventure tale and a profound meditation on the nature of grief and survival.

To begin to understand something about Cheryl Strayed, know that Strayed is not her given name. We never find out the name she was born with, but we are made to understand with absolute clarity why she chose to change it, and just how well her new name suits her. Contemplating divorce, she realized that she couldn't continue to use the hyphenated married name she'd shared with her husband, "nor could I go back to having the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. . . . I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl. . . . Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. . . . I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before."

Cheryl Strayed's load is both literal and metaphorical — so heavy that she staggers beneath its weight. Her mother has died (lung cancer, age 45); her father is long gone ("a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute"). In what is for her a stunning act of filial betrayal, her brother and sister find it too painful to come to the hospital as Strayed's mother is fading, leaving her, then 22, to prop up the pillows so that her mother could die, as had been her wish, sitting up. Strayed's stepfather, whom she had loved, disengaged himself from the family and quickly found new love, unwilling even to take care of his late wife's beloved mare, who became so enfeebled that — in one of the book's most harrowing scenes — Strayed and her brother are forced to put her down. They do this the old-fashioned way, by shooting her between the eyes. Beside herself with grief, Strayed abandons her kind and loving husband, gets involved with a heroin addict and becomes an addict herself. Just before leaving for the Pacific trail, even after six months off drugs, she shoots up once more, "the little bruise on my ankle that I'd gotten from shooting heroin in Portland" now "faded to a faint morose yellow." Beneath her wool socks and too-small hiking boots, that bruise was a continuing reminder of her "own ludicrousness."

Dani Shapiro's next book, "Still Writing," will be published in 2013.

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