ABAW: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

A Book A Week, the Unintentional Mother’s Day Edition.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, Alfred A. Knopf 2012 (library copy)

I don’t read much memoir and biography. I don’t read much (wo)man versus wilderness. And I don’t usually read advice columns. But I love love love Sugar. I found Dear Sugar at The Rumpus when she told one of her readers to “Write Like a Motherfucker.” Sugar delivers a kind of gritty, tender, nonjudgmental, pragmatic, tough love, interspersed with bits and pieces of her own real, raw, regular life. I love her. I love being called one of her sweet peas. 

So when Sugar’s real identity was revealed to be Cheryl Strayed, and that Strayed had a new memoir about her extraordinary hike of the Pacific Crest Trail from Southern California to the Oregon/Washington border, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I had to read it and I was not disappointed.

Suffering from the consequences of grief over the loss of her mother to cancer, Strayed set out on a solo hike across California. On the hike she hoped to have a lot of time to contemplate her feelings and her troubles and to sort out the worst tangles. Inexperienced and ill-prepared, the struggle to even stand upright under the weight of her enormous backpack (“Hunching in a remotely upright position”), among other physical challenges, left little time for direct contemplation.

Strayed’s relationship with her mother was positive, but in loss, her grief turned to self-destruction. Her family drifted apart and her marriage fell apart and she found herself seeking solace and sensation and numbness in sex and drugs. Strayed was not responsible for her mother’s death, and did everything she could to care for her mother in her final weeks. Yet Strayed’s grief was so overwhelming, so heavy, that she could not seem to move forward under its weight.  

Her hike was a primal grab for a cure. In her memoir, she speaks in an intimate voice, honest and unflinching. It is not faith or religion that guides her, but the strength she finds inside herself, and support from favorite books, memories, and strangers. I could feel her physical pain. She has created a picture that allows readers to inhabit her sore and blistered body fully. As the story progresses, readers can feel her body getting harder, her emotions shifting as she walks each difficult step.

Wild thumped a drum inside me. Tapped one tender, calloused finger against a scarred place. At the end I was left with a proud, happy, throbbing, shattered, feeling — emotionally like Strayed’s blistered toes. I could not help but contemplate my own relationship with my mother reading this book, could not help contrasting my experience with Strayed’s. My emotional scars still hurt sometimes, the feelings still get heavy. But Cheryl Strayed’s story has been cathartic for me, opening channels for grief and understanding that had waited behind latched gates. On her hike, Strayed learned that she could bear that weight, and she writes about it in the same way she dishes advice as Sugar. Patiently, honestly, with pain and joy and complexity. Plus a little happy sex and ice cream.