Book 11: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I don't know why exactly I decided that I needed to read this book now, since it's not exactly a new book. It's also a style of book that was once dominant in publishing (memoir of How Someone Dealt with Trauma) that's become less common, and I had the thought that maybe when it felt less like the entire world was in one constant state of trauma, we had more space for equally real and valid individual traumas. Do we have the capacity for a memoir about how someone dealt with the unexpected death of a parent to cancer, given the global pandemic and failing democracy and climate change and war?

Possibly I don't have the capacity for that, but I still found this book fascinating. It's a book about a woman leaving her marriage, selling everything she owns and flying to California to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, despite the fact that she had done very little hiking (and no thru hiking), because it felt like it was what she had to do to process her mother's death. The author is so extraordinarily lucky; the degree to which she was unprepared for the reality of this task was very stressful for me just to read about, let alone experience. But it also made me think about how infrequently I do anything without doing everything I can in my power to be as prepared as possible, in order to not appear like I don't know what I'm doing (even when I don't), and how exhausting that is, too. It's also a book about a time that's totally different in many ways; it was published in the early 2010s, but her trek took place in 1995, when if you left for a hike like this, you were simply out of contact except for when you pick up your supply boxes at the small towns in between multiday hikes. 

It made me weirdly nostalgic for the '90s, an era which had its own laundry list of Bad Institutional Things (and which contain the seeds of many of the worst aspects of today's problems), but which also feels like a time when it was more possible to just do things! Anything! Try something else! This is less a "boy weren't things better in the '90s" reflection, because while I'd rather not live in a pandemic, I don't actually think that things were better or simpler or whatever. Maybe I'm just reflecting on the fact that I was never the kind of young adult that Cheryl Strayed was, for better or for worse, and it feels less and less likely that I will ever be that kind of adult in any age, and sometimes that feels like my own loss. 

(Also, I reread part of A Walk in the Woods, which is a book by Bill Bryson about his own ill-planned hike on the Appalachian Trail that same year, and which was undertaken for wildly different reasons, and boy is that a great compare and contrast of what it was to be a young white woman in the '90s and a middle age white man in the exact same time period.) 

Grade: A