Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too.”

Strayed's marriage starts to unravel when her mother becomes sick. Paul is kind and supportive, but she is so envious of his unfractured life that she pushes him and everyone else away.

“I had to finally speak the words to Paul that would tear my life apart. Not that I didn’t love him. But that I had to be alone, though I didn’t know why.”

This quote addresses an important theme in the memoir: solitude. She hikes the PCT alone to gain perspective and rediscover the person she was before her mother died. She sabotaged her marriage to Paul because, even amid grief and addiction, she knew solitude was the only way back to herself.

“Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.”

In this passage, Strayed uses the powerful simile of a thundering god to describe her moments of clarity. Her pain is rooted in loss. She alludes to this loss with imagery related to absence and voids, specifically, by referencing the hole in her heart.

“Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”

Strayed copes with fear on the PCT by repeating self-affirming mantras. She tells herself that she is strong and brave as she hikes. She does this so often that her fears eventually dissipate.

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do.”

Strayed faced constant challenges on the PCT, including pain, boredom, loneliness, the elements, and rough terrain. She persevered despite these obstacles because the only alternative was to quit. As this quote indicates, options are few for long-distance hikers.

“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”

The speaker of this quote is Frank, who gives Strayed a ride to the PCT. Frank confesses that he feels trapped in his 17-year marriage. He envies Cheryl her freedom and longs to trade places with her but knows he lacks the courage to do so.

“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”

Monster is a constant presence in Strayed's journey. She struggles under the weight of the oversized backpack, which rubs and chafes her skin. She pushes through the pain surprising even herself.

“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.”

The author changed her surname to Strayed during her divorce. The various definitions of the word “stray” resonated with her, as evidenced by this quote.

“It was violent and self-possessed, ice-cold and raging, its might clear evidence of the heavy snows higher up the mountains. The current was too fast to go in even ankle-deep.”

This description of the powerful South Fork Kern River provides insight into the obstacles Strayed faced on the PCT. She persevered through ever-changing elements and rough terrain even as her pain and exhaustion grew.

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

Solitude is a key aspect of Strayed's journey. Although she occasionally envies people hiking in pairs or groups and enjoys spending time with other hikers at rest stops, she is committed to hiking the PCT alone. Solitude gives her the space she needs to find herself after four years of straying.

“I wanted to sleep, but my legs and arms were streaked with dirt; my stench was magnificent.”

Strayed often went for weeks without bathing and washing her clothes on the PCT. The results are vividly described in this quote, allowing readers to imagine the unglamorous reality of long-distance hiking.

“In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

Strayed was an aspiring writer when she hiked the PCT. Thus, she focused on the narrative sections of her guidebook, not on the graphs and charts. An inexperienced hiker, she navigated the PCT by reading the descriptions in her guidebook repeatedly and matching them to her maps.

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated.”

Strayed showed remarkable tenacity and determination on the PCT. Her desire to find herself after four years of straying allowed her to persevere, even in the face of hardships. As this passage indicates, she hoped to be cleansed of her mistakes amid nature’s unspoiled beauty.

“Her illness had initially brought the two of us closer than we’d ever been. We’d become comrades in the weeks that she was sick—playing tag team at the hospital, consulting each other about medical decisions, weeping together when we knew the end was near, meeting with the funeral home director together after she died.”

This passage is about Strayed's relationship with Eddie. Eddie was a father to her and a good husband to Bobbi, even after she got sick. After Bobbi’s death, Eddie and Strayed drifted apart. She also grew distant from Karen and Leif. Losing her family had a profound impact on Strayed, who engaged in self-destructive behavior for four years before hiking the PCT.

“I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”

This quote is about self-acceptance. Strayed accepted the mistakes she made after her mother’s death because, without them, she never would have hiked the PCT. Even at this early stage in her journey, she recognized the transformative power of her hiking experience.

“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”

Strayed consulted an astrologer about a year after her mother died and was moved by the woman’s words about fatherhood. Without a father, she had to teach herself to be strong. Hiking the PCT alone was the ultimate act of self-empowerment.

“The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.”

The universe took a lot from Strayed. In addition to taking her boot (the incident referenced in this quote), it took her father away from her as a child and her mother at the age of 22. Hiking the PCT allowed her to heal from these and other losses.

“I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke.”

Strayed's abusive father abandoned her when she was six years old. Despite his absence, he deeply influenced her life. Being abandoned by her father helps explain why she sabotaged all her romantic relationships, including her marriage to Paul.

“I needed things to be easy. Just for a few days. Please.”

Hiking the PCT was an arduous experience for Strayed. Receiving resupply boxes was one of the few things that made the experience easier. After more than 60 days on the trail, she is disappointed when the post office clerk in Ashland cannot find her box. She prays the rest of her time in Ashland will go smoothly so she can rest before resuming her hike.

“There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.”

This quote describes Crater Lake, the site of a former volcano called Mazama. A volcanic eruption created the crater, which gradually filled with water. In this quote, Strayed compares the crater to an empty bowl and the lake that replaced it to healing, a central theme in her memoir.

“The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.”

Strayed's time on the PCT was transformative. After months of carrying Monster over rough terrain, she became physically stronger. As this quote reveals, however, at no time was hiking the PCT easy.

“I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step. And then I ran.”

Gender-based violence is an underlying threat throughout Strayed's journey, as evidenced by the many comments she fields about hiking alone. The threat of gender-based violence comes to the fore when she meets two hunters who make sexually suggestive remarks. This quote describes her flight instinct after this incident, a common coping mechanism for people in dangerous situations.

“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”

Strayed's grief after her mother’s death was so acute that she sought to escape it with drugs. From the outset of her journey, her goal was to find her way back to herself. She accomplished this goal by her journey’s end.