Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Goddamn
it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1)
well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of
the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods
meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how
hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and
his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters
by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole
book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away
nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David
Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See
checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable
"finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of
lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing
center.
I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the
passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of
the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism
that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the
trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved
for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then,
pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably
doomed to perpetual disappointment.
Wild is one of those
special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to
accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick
of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs
fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild
is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring
tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different
genre altogether.
I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to
people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want
to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines
about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your
mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a
sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some
sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some
extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a
spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four
years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups
about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not
understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life
known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an
adult understood people who go into existential crises because their
parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the
emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of
their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are
separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of
self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn
codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do
anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit
about a parent.
That's not even getting to Strayed's description
of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom
would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while
reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.
All that
whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the
only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the
acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail
friends died a few years later.
I can see how, on technical
grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even
as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail
narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was
before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed
her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all
the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a
month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral,
though, those weren't a good fit for me.
Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.
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