The story of her past, and in particular her mother's harrowing death, unspools as a counter-narrative alongside the blisters and the bulky backpack she calls Monster. It is the inner landscape that captures this unusual author. The seasons change, and so does the landscape, but these pages contain little in the way of topographical description. When a branch snapped in the night outside her lonely tent, she made herself say out loud, "I am not afraid." For weeks she does not wash or wear knickers and, as a result, a shower at a lonely campsite turns into "an almost holy experience". The terrain was rarely easy: "Sometimes," writes Strayed, "it seemed that the Pacific Crest Trail was one long mountain I was ascending." Her boots died (she had already lost most of her toenails) and she made "duct-tape bootees" out of a pair of sandals while waiting for fresh boots to arrive in the middle of nowhere in a courier's box.
On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the Modoc plateau and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. "Hiking the PCT," she writes, "was my way back to the person I used to be." Four years after her mother's death, still "unmoored by sorrow", she packed a rucksack and flew to California. In the wake of her divorce, she invented a new name for herself: Strayed.
She was waitressing, servicing a student debt for a degree she failed to complete (she reckoned she would pay off the debt when she was 43), and then came Planet Heroin. An abusive father had long ago vanished, and in the wake of their bereavement, Strayed's siblings and stepfather scattered and her marriage to a rather wonderful man collapsed as a result of her serial infidelities ("I'd smashed up my marriage over sex"). She did it, she says, "in order to save myself".Īn American raised in rural Minnesota, Strayed lost her beloved mother when she was 22. For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the Pacific Crest Trail, a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the Laguna to the Cascades.
I n this hugely entertaining book, Cheryl Strayed takes the redemptive nature of travel – a theme as old as literature itself – and makes it her own.
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