Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Part 2 stresses the challenges and rewards of hiking the PCT. Strayed addresses the physical difficulty of long-distance hiking, describing in minute detail her pain, discomfort, and exhaustion. Her struggles start at the outset of her journey as soon as she lifts Monster: “I sat down in the dirt in front of my pack […] wrested it onto my shoulders, and then hurled myself onto my hands and knees and did my dead lift to stand. Elated, nervous, hunching in a remotely upright position, I buckled and cinched my pack and staggered the first steps down the trail” (49). Unsurprisingly, walking with the enormous backpack causes Strayed severe pain, which she describes in colorful terms: “I had never walked into desert mountains in early June with a pack that weighed significantly more than half of what I did strapped onto my back. Which, it turns out, is not very much like walking at all. Which, in fact, resembles walking less than it does hell” (50). Strayed starts panting and sweating within moments. Her calves burn as she ascends the trail. Descending is no easier. Indeed, she describes the short descents as “not so much a break in the hell as it was a new kind of hell because I had to brace myself against each step, lest gravity’s pull cause me, with my tremendous, uncontrollable weight, to catapult forward and fall” (50). Strayed is so spent after her first day of hiking that she foregoes dinner and sleeps for 12 hours.

Strayed's pain and exhaustion worsen in the days that follow. Monster feels heavier than ever as she pushes into the mountains, the pack’s frame pressing into her back: “The muscles of my upper back and shoulders were bound in tense, hot knots. Every so often, I stopped and bent over to brace my hands against my knees and shift the pack’s weight off my shoulders for a moment of relief before staggering on” (62). Strayed's mind is sharp and intact but her body is “a bag of broken glass” (63). Particularly painful are the raw patches of flesh that emerge on her hips, where Monster rubs against her skin. Worse are the blisters dotting her feet. Strayed uses gel patches made to treat burns to cover her wounds, sticking them to her toes, heels, hip bones, and across her shoulders and lower back. Adding to her pain is the gash in her shin from the fall and the injury she sustained when she tried to scare a moose away: “When I opened my eyes, the bull was gone. So was all the skin on the top of my right index finger, scraped off on the manzanitas’ jagged branches in my frenzy” (69). By Day 8, Strayed is hungry, filthy, and in excruciating pain:

I hadn’t bathed in over a week. My body was covered with dirt and blood, my hair, dense with dust and dried sweat, plastered to my head underneath my hat […] My feet hurt both inside and out, their flesh rubbed raw with blisters, their bones and muscles fatigued from the miles […] For long stretches I tried to imagine that I didn’t actually have feet, that instead my legs ended in two impervious stumps that could endure anything (70-71).

The environment adds to Strayed's discomfort on the PCT. The Mojave is scorching during the day but extremely cold at night. Strayed is surprised the first time it rains in the desert. The rain not only leaves her cold and wet but also slows her progress on the trail: “I was engulfed in a cloud, the mist so impenetrable I couldn’t see beyond a few feet. I cinched on my pack and continued hiking through the light rain, though my whole body felt as if it were pushing through deep water with each step” (63). High winds also present challenges for Strayed, keeping her up at night and making simple tasks difficult: “The wind blew so fiercely that when I removed my first aid kit from my pack and opened it up, all of my Band-Aids blew away. I chased them uselessly across the flat plain and then they were gone, down the mountain and out of reach” (57).

Strayed describes the mental challenges of long-distance hiking as vividly as the physical challenges. The PCT elicits a range of emotions from joy to despair. At the start of Chapter 6, for instance, Strayed marvels at the view from a highpoint between Mount Owens and Mount Jenkins: “I was at an elevation of 7,000 feet, the sky everywhere around me. To the west I could see the sun fading over the undulating land in a display of ten shades of orange and pink; to the east the seemingly endless desert valley stretched out of sight” (82). The awe-inspiring beauty of nature, however, does not ward off moments of fear, loneliness, sadness, and despair. Ten days after embarking on her adventure, Strayed is so strained mentally and physically that she considers quitting: “I was done. I wanted off […] Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested” (84). Strayed's guidebook addressed the mental challenges of long-distance hiking. Strayed stresses, however, that nothing can prepare hikers for this aspect of their journey: “How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must prepare for … the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition, which are the real things that must be planned for? No words can transmit those factors” (58).

Strayed uses positive thinking to help her through hard moments on the PCT. For example, in Chapter 4, she describes using self-affirmation to conquer her fears: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me” (51). Every time Strayed hears a strange sound or feels her imagination run wild on the trail, she pushes away the fear. Before long, she is no longer afraid. In Chapter 6, Strayed employs a similar strategy to push through her physical pain:

When I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one (90).

Nature plays a central role in Strayed's memoir. In Chapter 5, she describes a patch of sage that reminds her of her mother. The smell of the sage is particularly suggestive: “Inhaling it now, I didn’t so much smell the sharp, earthy scent of the desert sage as I did the potent memory of my mother. I looked up at the blue sky, feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother’s presence, remembering why it was that I’d thought I could hike this trail” (59). Strayed also derives strength from nature: “Occasionally, I passed through shady meadows thick with grass. The grass and the reasonably large trees were a comfort to me. They suggested water and life. They intimated that I could do this” (68). Whenever Strayed experiences physical or mental pain, she practices mindfulness by focusing on nature: “In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the sky as the sun faded over the mountains” (67).

For Strayed, hiking the PCT is a journey back to herself after four years of self-destructive behavior. Her life began spiraling out of control after her mother’s death. In addition to sabotaging her marriage, Strayed started abusing heroin, a drug to which she was introduced by Joe. She did not hesitate to try it: “I didn’t just say yes to heroin. I pulled it in with both hands” (52). Heroin numbed her pain, making her “dumb and distant” from herself (55). Heroin took away all her problems not just those associated with losing her mother: “It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world […] Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain, where it was unfortunate but essentially okay that my mother was dead and my biological father was not in my life and my family had collapsed and I couldn’t manage to stay married to a man I loved” (53). Heroin quickly became a daily habit for Strayed and Joe:

I moved into his [Joe’s] apartment above an abandoned drugstore, where we spent most of the summer having adventuresome sex and doing heroin. In the beginning, it was a few times a week, then it was every couple of days, then it was every day. First we smoked it, then we snorted it. But we would never shoot it! we said. Absolutely not. Then we shot it (53).

Paul and Lisa confronted Strayed about her drug use, but it was her pregnancy and subsequent abortion that served as her wake-up call. On the way to Minneapolis immediately after finding out she was pregnant, Strayed stopped at REI and purchased The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California. In the following months, she read the book, bought hiking gear, took a refresher course on basic first aid, and saved money for her trip. Her aim was to become the person she was before her mother died: “I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be” (57). Although Strayed lacked hiking experience, she was steadfast in her belief that hiking the PCT was the answer to her problems: “There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous” (57). In the end, the hardships of the PCT taught Strayed that she could bear the unbearable, a lesson that allowed her to heal after experiencing immense grief.