It was an oddly cold day, but Cheryl, Lord knows, had experienced worse weather.) (How could I talk to this fearless woman indoors? Nope I invited her to my house so we could sit beneath the redwoods in Santa Barbara. 'Keep walking, Sister,' she wrote in the copy of Wild she brought to my home the day we did this interview. Over time she found-somehow, deep down in her miserable, grieving soul-that she was in fact saving herself. She started haltingly, and she made plenty of missteps, but once she got on that trail she refused to turn back. (She did that later Torch was published in 2006.) But the PCT was like a little voice in her head, and as I've come to know, when a little voice talks, you really ought to listen.Ĭheryl talks in Wild about the difference between deciding to do something and really having to do it for some of us, that can be a very big leap. I suppose she could have gone off backpacking in Europe, or taken up cooking, or started writing a novel.

To take on the PCT all by herself was crazy brave or maybe just.well, wild.īut Cheryl was desperate to halt her downward spiral, and she was searching for insight. Though she wasn't a stranger to the wilderness (she'd grown up on 40 acres in Minnesota, with no electricity or running water), she'd never hiked more than a day at a time, and usually with other people.

This would be a huge decision even for an experienced backpacker-which Cheryl definitely was not. Six months later, she'd started her hike from the Mojave Desert to Oregon. Cheryl had never heard of the PCT-neither had I until I read Wild-but something compelled her to go back and buy the book. While waiting in line to pay, she saw a guidebook to the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. So she stepped into a camping store to buy a shovel to literally dig out of trouble. On a snowy night three and a half years later, Cheryl lent a friend her truck, which promptly broke down. Crazed with grief, Cheryl began doubting her marriage, sleeping with other men and eventually even doing heroin with one of them.īut then something happened. Her beloved A mother, who was only 45 years old, had died of cancer. At the age of 22, in 1991, Cheryl Strayed fell into an abyss.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed