58 pages • 1-hour read
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Range of Light”
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Corvidology”
Chapter 8 describes Strayed's experiences en route to the High Sierra, the tallest peaks on the PCT. She struggles on the trail, despite her lighter backpack and being fitter than she was at the start of her journey. Three weeks have gone by since she started hiking. The season and terrain have changed. Gone is the arid landscape of the Mojave Desert. The Sierra Nevada are cooler, more verdant, and so full of water sources that Strayed no longer needs to fill her dromedary bag. She catches up with Doug and Tom. The following day brings ice-covered hills. Strayed uses her ice ax during this part of the hike. She then learns that the trails ahead are covered in record levels of snow. Concerned about the conditions, Strayed decides to bypass the High Sierras and rejoin the trail in Sierra City. Bypassing will allow her to hike through Oregon instead of stopping in Ashland as she planned. Strayed learns that Greg is also bypassing when she runs into him the next day. The two grow closer as they descend the trail and hitchhike to the resupply station at Lone Pine. During a stop in Reno, Strayed encounters a woman who tells her the feather Doug gave her comes from a corvid—a raven or crow—and symbolizes the void.
The next day, Strayed and Greg hitchhike to Sierra City. They rent rooms with a shared bathroom, leaving Strayed with $13. She bathes for the first time in nearly two weeks and is shocked at the sight of her body, which is covered in bruises, bumps, welts, and blisters. A blackened toenail falls off in the bath. Greg informs her that her toenails are black because her boots are too small. The two have dinner, leaving Strayed with only 65 cents. Afterward, she arranges to have her resupply boxes forwarded to reflect her new itinerary. She also asks a friend to send her Volume 2 of the PCT guidebook.
Strayed saw a therapist a year after her mother died. She recalls speaking to him about her promiscuity and sabotaging all her romantic relationships. She and her therapist also discussed her father, who abandoned her as a child. Strayed's father was neglectful, as well as physically and verbally abusive. Despite the abuse, Strayed begged her mother not to get divorced. Her father sent Strayed and her siblings letters once or twice a year, all of which contained hateful words about their mother. Back in her room in Sierra City, Strayed contemplates the symbolism of her corvid feather, recalling that her mother described her as a seeker. After only three weeks of hiking, Strayed already feels changed.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Staying Found”
Chapter 9 focuses on Strayed's journey after bypassing the High Sierra. Strayed is excited to resume her hike after parting ways with Greg at the trailhead. She climbs a series of rocky buttes on muddy ground. Before long, she is ankle-deep in snow. Worried she has veered off the trail, Strayed pulls out her topographical map, dropping a nickel in the snow in the process. Shivering in her shorts and t-shirt, Strayed gets her bearings using a map, a compass, and Staying Found. She is relieved to see a sign for the PCT an hour later. That afternoon, Strayed comes to a snow-covered ridgeline and calls Greg’s name. Three skiers wave their arms from an adjoining ridge. Strayed asks where they are, to which they respond “California!” Strayed finds a place to camp after assuring the skiers she isn’t lost. Her tent is so cold she keeps her water bottles by her side to keep them from freezing. Strayed contemplates turning back the next morning but chooses to press on. She takes countless falls on the slippery trail, bracing herself with her ski pole so hard she develops blisters on her hands. Her progress is slow. She worries she has veered off the trail. To stay calm, she sings silently as she hikes. She also thinks of Paul, who expressed disgust when he learned she was taking heroin. For Strayed, hiking the PCT is the opposite of drugs. Heroin is death while the PCT makes her feel alive. The Fourth of July comes and goes. The following day, Strayed encounters a fox as she climbs over a fallen tree. She fights the urge to run and calls out to it. The next thing she knows, she is calling out for her mother. Strayed sees signs for the town of Quincy the next day. She quickens her pace, realizing she is on the right path. She comes across an SUV whose driver offers to give her a ride to Packer Lake Lodge. She accepts, even though the lodge is in the wrong direction.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Range of Light”
Chapter 10 opens with Strayed at Packer Lake Lodge. She is hungry, but she cannot afford to buy food. A woman takes pity on her and invites her to the cabin she shares with her husband and two daughters. The couple makes Strayed a sandwich, allows her to shower, and gives her The Novel by James Michener, an author her mother loved. The woman tells Strayed how brave she is to hike alone. Strayed then gets a ride to the PCT from two young women who work at a local summer camp. They ask what Strayed's parents think of her decision to hike alone. She tells them that her mother is dead and that her father is not in her life. Strayed then feels guilty for not mentioning Eddie, who loved Strayed and her siblings throughout his relationship with their mother. She recalls how Strayed grew distant after the funeral, acting like a friend rather than a father. He soon fell in love with another woman, who moved into the family home with her children. It is dark when the women drop Strayed off two miles away from the PCT. She pitches her tent at a campground, but the couple who run the site demand payment and threaten to call the police. Strayed packs her things and hikes in the dark. She pitches her tent 20 minutes later and rubs her tattoo, a representation of Lady, the horse her mother bought after leaving her abusive marriage. Strayed recalls the traumatic day three years after her mother’s death when she, Eddie, and Leif put down the aging horse. At the time, Strayed imagined her mother crossing a river on Lady’s back and finally leaving the family.
Strayed makes her way to the PCT on foot the next morning. As she follows the road to the trailhead, she thinks about the money awaiting in her resupply box in Belden Town and the food she will be able to buy. Later that afternoon, at Three Lakes, she meets two firemen from Sacramento who are camping with their families. The firemen are stunned when Strayed explains she is hiking the PCT alone. She shows them her battered feet and spends the evening answering their questions. Later, while smoking a joint, she tells one of them that John Muir called the Sierras the “Range of Light.” The fireman calls Strayed's hike a “spirit walk” and gives her a t-shirt with a picture of Bob Marley on the front.
Strayed wears her new t-shirt to hike the next day. The trail goes down as she exits the Sierra Nevada. Her feet slide with every step. She is limping in agony by the time she enters Belden Town. The first thing Strayed does after retrieving her resupply box is to buy and drink two Snapple lemonades. She then meets a woman named Trina who is hiking the PCT with her friend Stacy and their dog. Strayed is elated to meet female hikers. Later that day, she meets a handsome man named Brent who takes one look at her feet and declares that her boots are too small. Strayed learns that Greg left the PCT because of the snow. She, Brent, Trina, and Stacy eat dinner at a local restaurant where Strayed orders two inexpensive items—salad and French fries—both of which satisfy deep cravings. An attractive bartender offers her a free drink. After returning to camp, she writes a letter to Joe asking about his life. The bartender reappears and invites her to his place. She declines even though she is attracted to him. She sees Brent at the campsite and spends the night with him gazing at the stars. The chapter ends with Strayed making a wish and bidding farewell to the Sierra Nevada.
Part 3 Analysis
Friendship is a recurring theme in Strayed's memoir, coming to the fore in Part 3, which describes her interactions with a range of hikers along the PCT and beyond. For example, Chapter 8 underscores her deepening friendship with Doug and Tom, whom she first encountered at the beginning of her journey. She is sad and concerned when the men decide to hike the High Sierra, which is covered with snow: “My chest felt tight as I hugged him [Doug] and Tom goodbye. I’d come to feel a sort of love for them, but on top of that, I was worried” (124). Strayed develops an even closer friendship with Greg when the two travel together from Kennedy Meadows to Sierra City. Their conversations initially focus on the PCT and backpacking gear, but it soon shifts to personal matters. Although she feels lonely during their travels, she resists the urge to start a romantic relationship with Greg because she doesn’t want to jeopardize their friendship (and because she wants to break her pattern of promiscuous behavior). In Chapter 10, Strayed becomes fast friends with two female hikers, Trina and Stacy: “At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives” (168). Chapter 10 also introduces readers to Brent, with whom she feels an instant connection: “Once he introduced himself I greeted him like an old friend, though I’d never met him” (169). Brent’s resemblance to Leif initially draws Strayed to him: “I’d been savoring the company of the women all day […] but it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar. As I stood next to him, I realized he reminded me of my brother, who, in spite of our distance, I loved more than anyone” (174). Later, she and Brent develop a deeper bond while gazing at the stars.
The kindness of strangers is another important theme in the memoir. Part 3 describes a woman in Reno who compliments her feather. The woman notes that the feather comes from a corvid and explains its symbolism: “It’s either a raven or a crow, a symbol of the void […] It’s the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive” (127). The woman’s explanation resonates with Strayed, whose goal on the PCT is to rediscover the person she was before her mother’s death. Strayed also encounters kind strangers at Packer Lake Lodge. A woman invites Strayed to her cabin for lunch. Sensing she is starving, the woman piles food on her plate: “I ate [the Havarti] so fast she went back to the counter and sliced more without saying anything about it. She reached into the chip bag and put another handful on my plate, then cracked open a can of root beer and set it before me. If she’d emptied the contents of the entire refrigerator, I’d have eaten every last thing” (148). The woman not only feeds her but also allows her to take a shower. Her husband, moreover, gives Strayed a copy of The Novel by James Michener, one of her mother’s favorite authors. After lunch, the woman drives her to the ranger station, where she meets two young women who work at a local camp. The women agree to drive Strayed to the PCT.
A few days later, at Three Lakes, Strayed meets two firemen who give her drinks and share a joint with her. The firemen express their admiration for her, which boosts her self-esteem: “‘You’ve got to be kidding me! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ the firefighters took turns exclaiming when I explained to them what I was doing and showed them my battered feet with their eight remaining toenails” (166). Over a bowl of guacamole, one of the firemen remarks that women are braver than men: “‘Women are the ones with the cojones […] We guys like to think we’re the ones, but we’re wrong’” (166). The same fireman later calls her journey on the PCT a “spirit walk” and gives her a Bob Marley t-shirt: “That is a sacred shirt […] I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky” (167). Strayed cherishes the gift and wears it the following day.
The kindness of the strangers on the PCT comes into sharper focus in Chapter 9 when Strayed encounters two decidedly hostile strangers. She pitches her tent at a campground near the PCT one night only to be confronted by the couple who run the site. “If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay” (155), the woman says. She and her husband are unsympathetic when Strayed explains that she is a long-distance hiker and doesn’t have any money: “None of that changes the fact you have to pay, young lady,” the man says. “If you can’t pay, you’ve got to pack up and leave,” the woman adds (155). She tries to reason with them by pointing out that it is dark and that there is no one at the campsite. “Them are the rules,” the man says, before the woman adds, “We’d hate to have to call the police” (155). Strayed packs her gear, stunned by their hostility:
I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands, and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by now (156).
Getting evicted from the campground stirs up a traumatic memory of having to put down Lady, her mother’s horse, three years after her mother’s death. Lady was so important to Strayed that she had an image of the horse tattooed on her left deltoid after her divorce. Lady was old and sick. Putting her down was supposed to be an act of kindness. However, rather than hiring a veterinarian to euthanize Lady, Strayed, Eddie, and Leif decided to do it themselves to save money. Strayed told Lady she loved her before leading her out to pasture. She then tied Lady to a birch tree. Leif raised his shotgun and pulled the trigger, hitting Lady right between the eyes. What was supposed to be a quick, painless death, however, turned into a horrifying bloodbath. Lady did not die after the first shot or after the second. It took a total of four bullets and many agonizing minutes for her to die. Strayed describes the incident in painful detail comparing her mother’s horse to a sinking ship:
Lady took one wobbling step and then fell onto her front knees, her body tilting hideously forward as if she were a great ship slowly sinking into the sea. Her head swayed and she let out a deep moan. Blood gushed from her soft nostrils in a sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She coughed and coughed, tremendous buckets of blood coming each time, her back legs buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her. She hovered there, struggling to stay grotesquely up, before she finally toppled over onto her side, where she kicked her legs and flailed and twisted her neck and fought to rise again (161).
When it was over, Strayed imagined her mother crossing a river on Lady’s back. The image was far more comforting than the truth, which made her even more willing to believe it: “I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make. Not that my mother would ride back to me—though, of course, I wanted that—but that she and Lady would ride away together. That the worst thing I’d ever done had been a healing instead of a massacre” (162-63).
Strayed hopes that hiking the PCT will allow her to heal from the grief of losing her mother, her role in killing Lady, the end of her marriage, and other traumas. Speaking to a therapist did not help. Seeing a fox on the PCT, however, marked a pivotal moment in her journey: “‘MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!’ I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did. And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent” (144). This breakdown, and other experiences on the PCT, set Strayed on the path to healing.
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