⭐⭐⭐⭐
Non-Fiction
📖 281 / 🎧 13
Wild is a story of a woman who hikes 1,100miles/1770km of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) after a series of emotionally challenging events storm through her personal life.
It is many things, as memoirs tend to be, but I feel it most strongly identifies with grief. Afterall, Cheryl Strayed is grieving her mother, her marriage, and in many ways, herself. I doubt many people who decide to hike from the Mexican to the Canadian boarder in the Pacific US are searching for something they feel is missing.
It was a good and inspirational story with a rewarding conclusion. I don’t recommend the audiobook, either read the physical or save yourself some time and watch the movie.
The gist of Wild is that Strayed goes solo on the PCT and is an absolute rookie hiker and camper. Just incredibly unprepared for the physical demands and over-geared. But like life tends to do, she grows into herself. She overcomes the emotional obstacles within, and the physical obstacles along the trail. Its a cliché, but its cute.
One thing I hadn’t considered about hiking the PCT - and I have considered it - is that despite the isolation, there is still so much humanity encountered along the way. I have to think while the connections and little interactions with others would be grounding, there must also be something ethereal about it.
Wild is a story with many people but is truely an adventure of one, full of lonesome and memories, a person trying to find internal resolve along the thick of it.
"It seemed to me that whatever has existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve."
In many ways, this book reminded me of Eat, Pray, Love, although the connections weren’t obvious at first. They are stories of the personal journeys only someone with real chutzpah could experience but lies somewhere within all of us. Journeys rooted in a desire to understand the past, for personal peace, and certainty.