Wild

Somebody left this in the supply cache a couple seasons back, dog-eared and a little water-warped, and I finally got around to it this June. Three seasons on trail crew before this job means I read the first fifty pages with a kind of wincing recognition. Strayed packs for the PCT with almost no backcountry experience, straps on a pack she names Monster that’s heavier than she is basically, wears boots a size too small that take her toenails off one by one over a thousand miles. I know men and women who’ve done versions of that same rookie math, loading up on things that felt necessary at the outfitter and turned out to be dead weight by day three. She figures it out the hard way, which is the whole point of the book, not just the trail part.

The hiking itself is grueling and honestly not always that interesting on its own, mile after mile of blisters and rationed water and a stove she doesn’t know how to work. What holds the book together is what she’s walking away from. Her mother dead of cancer at 45, a marriage she ended by sleeping around and then divorcing, a slide into heroin she pulls herself out of right before setting off. Strayed is unflinching about the parts that don’t reflect well on her, which is rarer in this kind of memoir than you’d think. A lot of nature-cure books want you to like the narrator by the last chapter. She’s more interested in being accurate.

What I liked best was how little the trail redeems her in any clean way. She doesn’t finish the PCT enlightened so much as tired and a little more solid than when she started, and the grief for her mother doesn’t resolve, it just gets carried differently, which tracks with how grief actually behaves. There’s a scene near the end at the Bridge of the Gods that could’ve gone sentimental and mostly doesn’t.

Where it drags a little is the middle third, where the flashback structure starts repeating itself, another memory of her mother triggered by another stretch of trail, and you can feel the mechanism working. I’d have trimmed twenty or thirty pages there.

Still a good one to have up here. Days when the fire danger’s low and there’s nothing to do but watch heat shimmer off the rock, a book about a person putting one foot in front of the other for reasons that only partly make sense to her fits the mood fine.