A Book about Hiking the Pacific Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Reflections and Random Thoughts
Started Sept 29th and finished Oct 5, 2023
I started this book in December 2022; my brother Connor gave it to me. I can’t imagine how I put it down without finishing it. This time around, I couldn’t put it down. At the age of 26, the author hiked 1000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I was hooked after reading the opening paragraph of the prologue – here it is.
“The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed my boots and the left one had fallen into those trees, first catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it … I let out a stunned gasp, though I’d been in the wilderness thirty-eight days and by then I’d come to know that anything could happen and that everything would.”
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
This book has almost 73,000 Amazon reviews, 2% of which are passionately negative. The negative reviews range from accusing her of fabricating her story to complaints that she “probably only actually hiked three or four hundred miles of the 2600-mile trail.”
I found the accusation that she is “more interested in showing off her writing skill than telling her story” particularly galling. Perhaps more authors should give us less than their very best – lest we feel they are “showing off.”
Personally, if I manage to get my three-mile walk on the paved hills (not mountains) around my neighborhood completed more than twice a week, I congratulate myself quite heartily. And when I manage to write even a few sensible words about anything and have anyone at all interested in reading them, I feel like I’ve managed to do something.
She walked somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 miles in the wilderness and wrote an engaging and beautiful recounting of it.
Leave a Reply