I finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail on the weekend. It’s been on my list of books to read about walking for a while now, but about a month ago I saw a trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation, starring Reese Witherspoon, and decided to get to it before the movie came out.
I’ve noticed a couple of things about memoirs of hiking or walking trips. The narrative interest is directly related to the incompetence, at the beginning of the trip, of the walker. That gives him or her something to overcome and it makes it easier for a sedentary reader to relate to the story. After all, most people who read these things will never attempt anything similar themselves. It’s certainly true that the most interesting books about the Camino, and the funniest, are the ones like Hape Kerkeling’s I’m Off, Then! or Jack Hitt’s Off the Road, where the protagonist is completely unprepared for the journey and makes all kinds of mistakes–at least at the start. Part of what the narrative chronicles is how the protagonist learns, his or her journey from innocence to experience. And the protagonist’s account of his or her incompetence creates comedy.
Wild is like that. I’m not an expert backpacker by any means, but I laughed at Strayed’s account of the heaviness of her backpack when she set out to walk the PCT. True, she’s hiking solo, which means she has to carry everything herself; if you’re hiking with someone else, you can share some of the burden (you’ll only need one tent, for instance, or one water purifier). But Strayed is completely out of her depth at the start. She’s done no training. She hasn’t read the manual that came with her compass. She hasn’t figured out what’s essential to carry and what can be left behind. She hasn’t even tried to get all of her gear into her backpack. You have to admire her determination as she overcomes the obstacle of her own inexperience as well as the obstacles the trail throws at her.
The other thing I’ve realized about these memoirs is that the greater the emotional burden of the protagonist is–the more broken he or she is at the beginning of the journey–the more powerful the narrative becomes, because the protagonist has more healing to do. Wild is like that, too. At the beginning of her journey, Strayed is lost. Her mother has died, she’s divorced her husband, and she’s been having affairs with random strangers–and with heroin–in misguided attempts to come to terms with these losses. She’s also carrying a deeper pain with her–the pain of her father’s abuse of her mother and his abandonment of the family. As she walks the PCT–and this isn’t a spoiler, because it’s an obvious feature of the subgenre–she comes to terms with these losses and overcomes, to some extent, her pain. She doesn’t quit her hike, even when everything goes completely wrong, and perhaps its that dogged determination to carry on that helps her to heal emotionally. Maybe it’s just the act of walking that heals her–walking despite the way her feet constantly hurt. (She’s one of those unlucky people whose feet never get used to walking.) I don’t know–it’s probably both her courage and determination and something about the act of walking itself that matter.
So this is a very gripping story of a long, long walk (some 1,100 miles) and I’m glad I read it. It’s made me start to think about what it might be like to hike the PCT myself. Not right away, of course, and not without a lot of preparation–it’s one thing to read about the comedy of inexperience, but it would be something else to live through it.