Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Strayed's mother died of lung cancer at the age of 45, approximately one month after receiving her diagnosis. She was a loving wife to Eddie, whom she met in Minnesota after divorcing her abusive first husband (the father of her three children). Strayed's mother loved her children more than she could quantify. Her last word to Strayed before dying was “love,” which she interpreted as “I love you.”

Despite working long hours as a waitress, Bobbi relied on government assistance to make ends meet. She did her best to shield her children from the realities of poverty: “‘We aren’t poor,’ she repeatedly said, before adding, ‘Because we’re rich in love’” (14). Strayed describes her mother as kindhearted, generous, forgiving, cheerful, optimistic, and naïve. She believed in alternative treatments to repel mosquitoes. She was also tenacious as evident by her enrollment in college alongside Strayed. Bobbi remained upbeat during her illness. She was the glue that held the family together. After her death, the family grew apart, which exacerbated Strayed's grief.

Strayed's father was largely absent from her life. He physically abused his wife in addition to emotionally abusing and neglecting his children. She remembers her father straddling her mother’s chest while choking her and banging her head against a wall. She also remembers her father waking her and her sister in the middle of the night and threatening to take them away while their mother stood bleeding with Leif in her arms. During a particularly bad tirade, Strayed's father threatened to throw her and her siblings naked into the street in the middle of winter. She describes her father as a liar, a charmer, a heartbreaker, and a brute. Her parents were divorced when she was six years old, after which her father sent vitriolic letters to his children once or twice a year. Being abandoned by her father deeply wounded her. She hated him as a teenager, but her feelings toward him grew ambivalent in adulthood. Strayed once confessed to her therapist that she was the one who ended all her romantic relationships, concluding that this pattern had everything to do with being abandoned by her father.

Eddie is Bobbi’s second husband. He worked as a carpenter until he fell from a roof and broke his back while on the job. Eddie used the settlement he received from his employers to buy a plot of land, where he built a house for the family. Eddie embraced Strayed and her siblings from the start of his relationship with their mother, playing with them, teaching them how to canoe, and taking them camping. He and Strayed were particularly close. Even after his injury, Eddie continued to teach her about the woods where they lived. Eddie helped her take care of Bobbi during her illness. He and Strayed remained close until the funeral, after which he pulled away and acted more like a friend than a father. He soon fell in love with another woman and moved her and her children into the family home. Strayed was angry and hurt by Eddie’s behavior. Four years later, however, she realized that Eddie was there when it mattered and that without him she never would have hiked the PCT.