The Wilder Way

Eva zu Beck's memoir recounts how she abandoned a carefully constructed life of corporate success and marriage in London to spend years traveling the world solo, shedding conventional expectations and forging a life defined by adventure, solitude, and wildness. The book opens in the Mongolian wilderness, where Eva crouched alone on a hillside, struggling to repair a broken packsaddle, a saddle used to secure gear on a horse, while her satellite messenger had stopped working. She was in over her head but resolved that she chose to be out there for a reason.

The narrative then traces the roots of her departure. At twenty-six, she stood at Heathrow Airport about to board a flight to Nepal. Born in Poland, Eva endured an unstable childhood: her parents divorced, her father emigrated abroad, and her mother's career as a traveling saleswoman forced Eva through six schools by age twelve. After the family moved to England, Eva struggled to fit in, and by sixteen she was regularly self-harming. She excelled academically, earned admission to Oxford University, and at twenty-one, while about to graduate, met Leo, a lawyer eight years her senior. Together they built an affluent life in Brussels, and Leo proposed in an Oslo art gallery.

During wedding planning, Eva realized she did not want children and could not reconcile her vision for the future with Leo's desire to start a family. She journaled in London bars, unearthing secret dreams of adventure incompatible with their stable life. On the wedding day, she walked down the aisle in tears but went through with the ceremony. After a year of marriage, she confessed to cheating on Leo. Consumed by guilt, she spiraled into substance use, self-harm, and daily fantasies of suicide. A trip to Lisbon, where a fado singer's lament moved her to tears, cracked open the possibility of leaving. Eva quit her job on January 1, 2018, and boarded a flight east.

In Nepal, Eva attempted the Everest Base Camp trek with her friend Maxime despite having never hiked more than a day. The rhythm of walking calmed her mind for the first time, and the sight of Ama Dablam, a Himalayan peak whose name translates to "mother's necklace," triggered a moment of awe. She reached base camp on day nine and recognized that the true achievement was not the destination but the journey itself, echoing her late paternal grandfather, a passionate traveler whose typed chronicles had inspired her love of exploration. She also launched a YouTube channel, hoping to fill a gap in female adventure content online.

Eva's travels took her to Pakistan, where she drove the Karakoram Highway into the remote north and lived with the Posh family of the Wakhi ethnic group, learning their language and customs. She began dating Nadir, a Pakistani musician in Islamabad. Her social media posts went viral, but a meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan sparked backlash: Critics accused the foreign vloggers of benefiting from white privilege. While filming a documentary in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas near the Afghan border, a local man told her that Western armies had destroyed his region and killed his family, and that if his people went to her country, they would not be welcomed. The encounter forced Eva to confront how her passport and skin color granted her freedoms unavailable to those around her.

After a year in Pakistan, Eva's relationship with Nadir deteriorated into jealous arguments and codependency. She ended things and traveled to Mongolia, her "soul spot," for a solo horseback trek. She bought two horses, learned basic horsemanship, and rode alone into the wilderness. Atop a hill overlooking the vast taiga, a boreal forest stretching toward Siberia, she perceived the interconnectedness of all life and felt overcome by what Mongolians call khiimori, or wind horse, a concept describing the human spirit. But a week in, her horse bucked her off. She sustained a head injury, and with her satellite messenger still broken, she reluctantly ended the trek.

Eva later traveled to Socotra, a remote Yemeni island in the Gulf of Aden, where she met Hamid, a fisherman who had lived alone in a driftwood shelter for decades. His contentment reinforced her belief that aloneness need not mean loneliness. When she returned in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic stranded her on the island for seventy-nine days. Clashes with fellow stranded foreigners drove her to strike out alone. With help from Sadeq, a young Yemeni mechanic, she bought a motorbike and began what she calls "radicalizing herself into living more wildly": going barefoot, sleeping outdoors, and abandoning her razor. During this period, a local businessman named Seif sexually assaulted her, grabbing her head and forcing a kiss. She managed to pull away but did not report it. When passage on a cargo ship became available, Eva left the island, processing her trauma during seven days at sea.

Back in Poland, Eva obtained a formal annulment of her church marriage to Leo and submitted a letter of apostasy to leave the Catholic Church. She purchased a 2006 Land Rover Defender she named Odyssey and, with help from her uncle Andrzej, a professional carpenter, converted it into a home on wheels. She reconciled with her father, learning he had been watching every YouTube video she posted. She conceived a plan to drive the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina.

After shipping Odyssey to Mexico and driving north, Eva endured a harrowing detention at the US border: Her passport stamps from Yemen, Pakistan, and other conflict zones raised suspicion, and FBI agents interrogated and handcuffed her before ultimately granting entry. In Montana, she picked up Vilk, a German shepherd puppy whose name comes from the Polish word for wolf. Severe "puppy blues" nearly broke her, but she committed to their partnership. With travel companions Mathilde and Nick, a couple from Brussels, she reached Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and plunged into the Arctic Ocean.

The intensity of years of nonstop travel caught up with her. Eva burned out, quit the Pan-American Highway, and felt relief rather than regret. She fell in love with Noah, an American she met in Baja California, and they moved to a cottage in the Italian mountains. But sedentary life felt like a cage. When Noah revealed he wanted the comforts of a house rather than the wilderness life Eva craved, she recognized the incompatibility and left.

In Poland, Eva entered therapy for the first time. The therapist told her nothing was wrong with her: She did not need a romantic partner to be happy. Emboldened, Eva took a vow of celibacy on her thirty-third birthday and purchased fifteen acres of wild Carpathian land, the very meadow she had once walked through with her friend Kasia. She erected a canvas bell tent and began living close to nature with Vilk. But two male intruders, including a stalker who had tracked her to Africa during a National Geographic shoot, shattered her sense of safety. She obtained a gun permit and fled her property in darkness.

To find clarity, Eva entered a 320-mile self-sufficient footrace in the Swedish Arctic Circle, a ten-day ordeal of subzero temperatures, sleep deprivation, and physical agony. She nearly quit repeatedly. On the eighth night, warming herself by a woodstove in a remote cabin, the answer arrived: By abandoning her land out of fear, she was letting strangers define the life she had fought so hard to create. She resolved to return and fight for her home. Five miles from the finish line, Vilk appeared in the snow, brought by a friend, and Eva cried with joy. In the epilogue, the book finds Eva on the deck of her tent at dusk, Vilk beside her, the snowcapped High Tatras visible beyond her meadow. She concludes that the notion of finding oneself is fiction. Her way, she writes, is a wilder way.