Cheryl Strayed's Walk on the Wild Side

  Disclaimer: It’s tough to dispassionately review a book when someone else seems to be writing your life. When you share so much geographical and emotional common ground that it becomes both compelling and a bit scary to read the evidence. You’ve been their shadow—or have they been yours? But shared experience is a tricky thing. What if they tell the tale all wrong? Arrive at distinctly different conclusions? Botch the job? Conversely… what if this stranger seems to shoulder the very thing you thought was yours alone to bear? What if they uncover something you’ve never realized? Shine a light on the most painful part of your past such that you recognize your own strength in having endured it? This may be the ultimate goal in reading: to find a kindred spirit who helps you better understand your own journey. And while not everyone has shared this particular junket, I’m sure that its major themes will resonate for many.

Wild. The very word connotes the primordial ooze, a place where ideas are born in the midst of the natural world, where there’s freedom to go places we wouldn’t in everyday life. Where we are released into something that frees us to explore parts of ourself we hadn’t known before, and in the process stand eye-to-eye with many things that scare us. Indeed, wilderness is the land of the real, not the land of the metaphorical challenge. And for most of us framed into the workaday world, it’s a place in which we spend little time, as life seems to demand riding the conveyor belt of familiarity.

From this world, author Cheryl really did stray, changing her name for a reason: a determination to depart from the life she was given and to shape hers in radically different ways than what seemed her fate. This passage began when she lost the mother she adored to cancer at the age of 22. My own mom died of breast cancer when I was about the same age, and it remains the single most painful event of my life. After 9 years of caring for her, I can well-relate to the psychic chaos that descends when Strayed realizes how very different life will look without her mother’s anchoring presence. As I did, the author spends several years feeling completely adrift, wandering. She attempts to assuage her grief through a marriage to which she can’t commit, affairs, heroin, and frequent “geographical cures.” Nothing seems to ease the anguish. But as she spirals downward, a book about thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) appears, and she reads it cover-to-cover.

While this might not sound odd to an REI geek, Strayed is no veteran hiker. At the age of 26, she’s young, passably fit, acquainted but not intimate with the outdoors—and motivated to believe that several months on the trail could give her perspective on her life and a literal path forward.

Strayed embraces her solo-hike the way any young adult might: heavy on enthusiasm, light on practicality. For starters, there’s her pack, “Monster,” which must have tipped the scales at 75-80 pounds when Strayed began straying. In fact, she spends many pages describing how exceedingly difficult it was just to carry the Monster on her back. While this scenario bleeds metaphor, and readers her parents’ age will find it annoyingly short-sighted, it becomes a significant part of her proving her mettle. What she lacks in executive function, she seems to make up for in raw tenacity. And her ability to endure misery reacquaints her with her own inner resources.

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

In the summer of 2008, when I was working through my seemingly doomed relationship with a person I deeply loved, I bounded into the Pacific Northwest with the tempest of my confusion. And as echoes of our endless fights rang in my ears, I distinctly remember walking the PCT craving healing, wanting to give all the words I’d misspoken and things I’d done wrong to the redwoods that bathed me in their consoling, ancient presence. Like Strayed, I welcomed the uncomplicated clarity that walking in nature conferred on me, the simplicity of trees that had weathered so many storms and yet still stood upright, keening toward the summer sky.

As a writer, Strayed does many things well, and her technique is so subtle that readers might not realize just how skilled she is. She seamlessly weaves flashbacks to the specifics of her mom’s death with present-day narrative, which is hard to do well. It feels like the reverie a hiker enters when a tree, rock, or cloud evokes memory recalled to the rhythm of foot touching dirt.

Of the many evocative scenes in the book, one stands out as one of the saddest and most poignant I’ve ever read. In it, Strayed realizes her mother’s favorite horse must be put down, and her family must be the ones to do the deed. But when the aged horse refuses to succumb, Strayed’s fantasy of her mother’s riding Lady to the other side devolves into the harsh light of killing a beloved family pet. After I read it, I literally threw the book across the room. One of death's many aftershocks is realizing that you’re still earthbound, and need to deal with the things that were so precious to the person you loved.

But Wild is not emotionally overwrought or desperate, in the ways that Eat, Pray, Love can be every now and then. And while the female body count on the PCT may increase in the next few years, the book is not as overtly feminist, or urging, in its tone. God willing, there will be no commercial tours following in the author’s footsteps, as there have been with EPL. And though I adore EPL, I find Strayed’s comparative restraint a good thing. Though not as gooey and effusive as Gilbert’s can be, her insights are spot-on.

I like this passage:

“I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke. That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have and always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world.”

Like Gilbert, Strayed ultimately derives a profound sense of self-acceptance from her long journey. In one revelatory paragraph, she begins to get that she can forgive herself for betraying her husband. “What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all of those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was also what had got me here?”

This was the graf that took the 500-pound backpack of guilt I’d also been shouldering and left it by the side of the road. Because, of course, it’s true. We only get to where we are by living through what we do, and making choices we believe at the time are right. And their rightness extends to an existential level, as they are the chips of the chisel that shape us into the people we are meant to become.

My own walkabout took me to a town Strayed also knows: Ashland, Oregon. In addition to being overtly quirky and magical, Ashland plays temporary host to many PCT thru-hikers, whom you’ll often see at the post office, retrieving their resupply boxes (the value of which can’t be underestimated).  I stayed in the same room Strayed did at the Ashland Hostel, and encountered plenty of thru-hikers, who dazzled me with their filthy roguishness and earthy charm. One morning I overheard a phone conversation between a skirt-clad hiker and her parent, and as she begged for another month’s subsidy to finish the trek. And when she hung up, after fighting for this like a mother bear defending her cubs, I apprehended her completely differently: I knew what a significant, all-encompassing journey she was enveloped in. How we both were undertaking a quest away from civilization that would shift our paradigms for the rest of our lives.

Though my own trip was not as strenuous as that of a PCT hiker, after it my life did indeed change, and I found some of the strength and context and meaning I’d been craving. Like Strayed, I understood how to ride out the many obstacles that come when traveling and camping. And how enduring them and finding solutions and making it to the other side gets you very familiar with how strong and tenacious a mofo you can be. When you’re left early without a mother, these are facts that it takes time to learn--and taking care of yourself goes from being a great mystery to a necessity to a point of pride.

Strayed is at her best when she shows us not only this painful part of her life, but the path that brought her insight into and transcendence over it.

**********

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Alfred A. Knopf; 315 pages; $25.95)

For a followup on this piece, about the 2012 thru-hiking season in OR and the influence of this book, please see my 7/13 entry.

Covert Hostel-ity

During my battle with the H word, I have spent numerous nights at various hostels. One of my favorites had always been the Ashland Hostel, a rambling Victorian on the main drag in downtown Ashland.

As a female requesting a private room, I was generally assigned to the attic floor. Here I’d huddle into one of the small rooms under the eaves, where, stooping and crouching, I’d somehow manage to make my bed and run my book business off my laptop.

The hostel, especially in high season, served up a plate of characters straight out of casting central. I could have brought them all with me to Oakwood. Though it would have bummed their bliss. In the warmer weather, Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers lined the basement with their gritty beards, dirty laundry, and food pick-up packages. Sundry other longhairs, thespians couch surfers, progressive families, and organic farm workers headed to New Zealand for the avocado crop hung out to get stoned, do their laundry, burn bacon in the kitchen late at night, take whizzes off the deck, and generally make themselves quite at home.

On this particular evening, I had slept very little the night before, as a couple had entered the room adjacent to mine at midnight and stridently proceeded to bring 4 new lives into the world before daybreak. So I was looking forward to nothing more than curling up in bed for 8 full hours of sucking face with my pillow. As I made for the memory foam, I realized that my room was completely dark—undoubtedly the fuse had blown for the 17th time this stay. The night before, the same thing had happened, and I’d recruited the assistance of Buck, a rough’n’tumble sort who looked like the proverbial graying ranchhand in any John Wayne film, with a moustache and gums for teeth and a method of mastication that spilled food out both sides of his lips like toothpaste from a tube. Though I could tell that he didn’t much cotton to my kind, Buck had gone and flipped the switch for me, filling my attic room with a dim bulb’s full of light that just seemed to make all the difference. So, instead of trying to play “let’s pretend we’re camping,” I figured I’d just go downstairs and ask ol’ Buck if he wouldn’t mind flipping my switch again.

I checked for him in all the usual spots, but everyone with any authority over fuse boxes had apparently hit the down-low. Finally, I tried the basement catacombs, where the TV blasted and Buck sat gluey-eyed before it, watching a loud crime show with a serial-murder theme. “Hi, Buck,” I said. Nothing. “Hey, Buck!” I tried again. Still nada. “EXCUSE ME!” I yelled. He grunted. I told him about lights out. Baretta pointed a gun at me through the screen.

Suddenly, Buck swirled around and glared, “I couldn’t help you with that last night, and I can’t help you with that tonight! There is a general manager here. His name is Manny. You need to go knock on his door and leave me out of it!”

I walked upstairs to Manny the manager’s room, where I knew he was stoned-sleeping, so hadn’t wanted to disturb him. I knocked, knocked, and knocked again, with little effect. Finally, I gave up, considered if I wanted the Robinson Crusoe experience, considered how fierce an advocate I was trying to be for my own needs, and said, “By God, I need to make those lights go on!” I marched straight on down to the basement, screwed up my chutzpah, and asserted toward the kaleidoscope-eyed ranchhand, “I really need your help. Manny is asleep.” Buck turned to me with sheer venom in his eyes. I could tell I had interrupted the crime drama at a very key point, or perhaps he couldn’t tell where the TV fantasy left off and reality with the woman before him began….

“I TOLD you, I can’t help you!!!”

Just then, out of one of the other catacombs stumbled another rancherly type, whose hostility and meth levels were just a notch lower. He glared at me and said, “You need to go find Greg, the night manager here. He’ll know something.” When I asked him where Greg might be found, he told me to look on the top floor. “But watch it…,” he cautioned, with a dire warning in his eyes, “he’s entertaining his guests.”

“Well, I don’t want to bother him, then,” I said. The man took a few steps and careened toward the fuse box, which turned out to be on the wall immediately in front of both of them. As I began to walk away, I heard him tinkering with it. When I reached my room, the light had come on, and I attempted to plug in the space heater to take the chill out of this backwater room the heat never seemed to reach.

A few minutes later, I laid down to sleep. From the adjacent chambers—the scene of last night’s sex marathon—I heard the sounds of three people talking. One voice I recognized as Greg’s. The previous summer we had had several long conversations. Greg was a newly divorced man in his late 50s who resembled a New England college professor. All that was missing was the natty green sweater with the patches on the pockets and the pipe. Smart and likable, nevertheless he seemed at heart craggy and conservative, and I’d wondered what he was doing in hippiesville in the first place. The other two voices sounded husky and female, like those of the 2 bulldykes I’d seen earlier in the day tramping the halls and giving me the eye. (In lesbian lingo, this is a cross between, “I could take you,” “keep your hands off my girlfriend,” and “I think you’re kinda cute, maybe we can sleep together later.”) So I’m thinking, Maybe he just likes lesbians. Maybe the guy is just a major lesbo-hag. I tune in again, to confirm my theory. There’s low, sexy, loverly laughing, chatting, long silences, and a particular little smacking sound that faintly resembles…? Nahhhhh!!!! Couldn’t be.

Grabbing a book, I try to read, thinking that since it’s already well after midnight, their whatever will surely be ending soon. The clock ticks away…my exhaustion grows…but when I lay down to sleep, all I can hear is the sound of three people talking. And talking. And talking. Finally, I give a few raps to the wall. “Would you guys mind taking your conversation somewhere else? I’m trying to sleep.”

I hear giggling and hushed conversation. Finally, Greg says, “I’m sorry. But we’re visiting and will most likely be up all night. How ‘bout if I come over and find you another room?” Next I hear the sound I didn’t want to hear, the sound no one wants to hear when it’s an AARP-aged man and two young females: Greg pulling up his pants and buckling his belt. Alrighty then. A few minutes later, in walks Greg, grey hair piled in messy clumps, sweater on backwards, smiling, tired, confused, yet ardent. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Heidi. But you have to understand.”

I gave him the look of the exhausted and unamused. I would understand just about nothing at 1 a.m.

“You have to understand that I’m visiting with my significant others. And I don’t think we’ll be going to sleep any time soon.” He looked at me with grave sincerity, as if surely I was Earth's most heartless bitch if I didn’t grasp this simple premise.

My general philosophy in such situations is, “Never let ‘em see you sweat.” I find it works well with at-risk children, teens catapulting toward me on skateboards, NJ Turnpike drivers, and 59-year-olds thinking they’re Jack Kerouac in a Paris bordello. And of course, who was I to interfere with the vagaries of love, whatever its permutations? “That’s fine, Greg,” I said, sighing a bit.

Just then, the lights on the whole floor went dark again. Greg suddenly sprung into action. “I will run down and fix those for you. Thank you! I'll get those lights working!”

He had already illuminated so much.

I will say that things were quieter in my new digs: the top bunk, nestled between 2 gentlemen who dared not wake as I had psychically glued them to their beds. We passed an agreeable night, as I tried to neither shake nor stir the cocktail of mental images of what was undoubtedly occurring a few doors down.

I didn’t see Greg for awhile after that. But I did hear that he was “entertaining guests” for several days hence. If nothing else, I admired his stamina. I guess I should be looking forward to my late 50s—and grasping just how significant others can be.