Eight years ago, I sat in a dark theater expecting to watch a film about a woman going on a hike. I don’t particularly remember when I stared crying—perhaps it was the final scene where Reese Witherspoon took a few fawn-like steps across a vacant bridge overlooking swaths of bluish grey sky and towering pines interwoven with thick fog as El Cóndor Pasa by Simon & Garfunkel echoed in the distance. Maybe it was earlier on, when I started noticing that this was no mere movie about a long walk. I felt as though I had gone on the journey with Cheryl, so much so that once the fluorescent lights cascaded against us voyeurs, I was struck with a deep longing. Immediately after, I picked up the memoir by Cheryl Strayed.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is a story about redemption and the healing power of nature. After losing her mother, her marriage, and any last lingering hope for a better future, Cheryl spent the early half of her twenties drowning in grief and making poor life decisions. Four years later, something changed. Blinded by her own sorrows, and with nothing more to lose, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Mojave Desert up the coast to Washington state, with no training and no travel companions—a desperate last reach upwards to haul herself out of the dark water.
This was both cathartic and suspenseful, brimming with potent imagery of the west coast and all of the dangers hiding beneath its grandeur beauty. Untrained and lost in more ways than one, the protagonist not only faces lethal creatures and possible stumbles off the side of a cliff, she walks the path of a lonely woman on a trail championed mostly by men. As depicted in both the novel and the film, there is a slight anxiety mentioned of what occurs when a woman is alone in the middle of the nowhere, yet Cheryl finds that the people on this trail are similar to her in that they are hiking to heal, or to experience the euphoria of completing such a strenuous plight. It is a heartwarming notion that evokes a sense of community found amongst fellow wanderers, and it provided Cheryl with the push she needed to start breaking down her guarded heart. Nature does that, it seems. The laborious efforts that go into conquering the PCT can bring a person to breaking point, and it is then that nature begins to heal. Some people might find it crazy to want to push one’s body and mind to such extremes, although there is a massive payoff that does not get enough attention. Being alone, submersed between mountains, streams, and desserts, with nothing but your own inner turmoil to conquer and the trail ahead, people find that reaching the end of the hike is gratifying in more than just a show of physical strength—it’s a mental strength too. You can cry and scream as much as you want on the trail, so long as you leave it behind, pick yourself up, and carry on. That is the essence of this memoir, and that is why this book has become so dear to me as a novice hiker myself (side note: I’ll be heading back to Washington state next week to hike Mount Storm King, so maybe I should drop the novice title).
The final shot of the film reflects the last passage of the novel. Overlapping the song, flitting like birds between the canopy, Witherspoon’s voice recites the last words:
What if all those things I did were the things that got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?
It took me years to be the woman my mother raised. It took me 4 years, 7 months and 3 days to do it, without her. After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods. And I didn’t even know where I was going until I got there, on the last day of my hike. Thank you, I thought over and over again, for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know.
How in 4 years, I’d cross this very bridge. I’ll marry a man in a spot almost visible from where I was standing. Now in 9 years, that man and I would have a son named Carver and a year later, a daughter named after my mother, Bobbi. I knew only that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. That seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water would be enough…that it was everything. My life, like all lives, mysterious, irrevocable, sacred, so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be?
Anthology of V. 