Book Review: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

In order to find yourself, sometimes you have to lose something. Or, in Cheryl Strayed’s case, someone very dear—her mother, who dies of cancer. The loss leaves her distraught and sets off a chain of difficult events in her life: estrangement from her stepfather and younger siblings, extramarital affairs and drug use, the painful decision to put down her horse, and a divorce from the man who truly loved and cared for her.

Cheryl is lost in the wilderness of her life. And it is the wilderness she turns to, hoping to find herself again or, as she puts it, “to save myself.”

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is an engaging and entertaining memoir filled with vivid details of her journey.

Four years after her mother’s death, Cheryl sets out on an epic and deeply personal journey—all alone—hiking the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. Her own route begins in the Mojave Desert, then moves through California and Oregon, finally reaching the Bridge of the Gods—a cantilever bridge—and into Washington state.

It takes her over three months to complete the hike, across mountain ranges, forests and plateaus, through extreme heat, record snowfall, and encounters with wildlife like bears and rattlesnakes. The journey, shadowed by fear and self-doubt, is as intimidating as it is absorbing. The land as hostile as it is hospitable. In the end, she comes out changed, grateful to the PCT—the “long walk”—for helping make her whole again.

Throughout her journey, Cheryl recalls, with a tinge of pain and sadness, the life she left behind—her childhood, the abusive father who abandoned them, the stepfather who admirably filled his shoes, remorse over her failed marriage, and finally, the one person who meant the world to her—her mother, and the illness that took her away. The frequent flashbacks, however, do not take away from the joy of reading about her hike, which Cheryl tells in the first person, in a candid, engaging, and almost conversational style.

Wild struck a chord because I had read similar journeys of self-discovery, undertaken for different reasons. Notably Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, where Peace Pilgrim (Mildred Lisette Norman) walked over 25,000 miles on a personal journey for peace; the classic Walden, where Henry David Thoreau lives in the woods of Massachusetts; and, In Quest of God and In the Vision of God by Swami Ramdas, the monk who walked the length and breadth of undivided India in search of spiritual salvation.

Nearly all of us must, at some point, step onto some kind of trail—not necessarily a physical one—and try to find ourselves.