Hiking In The Pacific Crest Trail By Cheryl Strayed

Hiking is something that many people do as a leisure activity, but some do it for the challenge. The latter is what author Cheryl Strayed describes in her novel Wild. The Pacific Crest Trail is a mountainous path that travels over many different mountain ranges and goes from Mexico to Canada, but Strayed only followed it from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of Gods in Oregon. Her book was written to illustrate this trying time of her life, and to show how her hike helped her to move past the problems of her past.

The larger occasion Strayed had for writing her novel was the huge emotional impact that the trip had on her existence. Those three months she spent out in the wilderness taught her how to deal with damaged things in

The boots she purchased were too small, and caused her an extensive amount of grief as she hiked long days. Her boots wore her feet raw; she even lost over half of her toenails. Strayed wrote about the situation with levity, keeping track of her injuries as a score between herself and the trail. The final toenail score was “4-6, advantage trail.” (307) She had done extensive research and the people at the store had check the boots to make sure that they weren’t going to cause excessive blisters and that her toes wouldn’t smash up against the toe of the boot when hiking downhill. Despite all of her planning, these things happened anyways. The other hikers she met on the trail all seemed mildly amused yet sympathetic to her plight. About halfway through her hike she receives a new pair of boots in the mail, and this could be viewed as a metaphor for how she traded her previous bad life for a better one. Of course she still had to break in these new boots and Strayed still had some pain from those, but it was not as bad as before. She had

She brought them for entertainment and read them on the nights that she wasn’t horribly exhausted. She read in her Pacific Crest Trail guidebook that people tore up the book so they would only have to carry the parts they need while they were on the trail. After she had this revelation, she began to do this with each book she had with her. She literally burned her way through eleven books during her three months on the trail. Only two of her books survived the trip, The Dream of Common Language by Adrienne Rich and The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, because she couldn’t bear to part with the first and traded the second for a different novel, coincidentally titled The Novel. These books were her ties with her normal life, and she burned all of the pages that she read as she moved through the story. This is symbolic of her only moving forward. Once she burned the pages she could no longer go back and read them, just like after she completed the trail she could no longer return to her old life. At the conclusion of the novel, she doesn’t even return to her old apartment, instead settling down in Oregon, the state she finished the trail