VENICE BEACH, CA (2013) Cheryl Strayed and the "Purifying Journey" Memoir

Cheryl Strayed 1995

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You know a book has you hooked, when you get out the maps.

That’s what I did about a quarter of the way through Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012).

The book was about Strayed’s 1995 solo backpacking trip from the Mohave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods at the Oregon/Washington border. She was 27 at the time.

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Besides the actual trip, Wild described Strayed’s upbringing and troubled early adulthood, which helped explain what drove her to undertake such a journey.

But the hiking parts were what I most enjoyed. Her day to day life in the wilderness. Plus, the people she met, the funny pitfalls she faced, the not so funny dangers she encountered.

I became so captivated by Strayed’s story, I found maps to follow her progress. I first consulted an ordinary road map. Then a detailed forest map, I got from the library. And then maps from my computer. And eventually an actual guidebook like the ones people took with them on the trail.

I spread all this stuff out on my bed—there in my sun-drenched Venice, California apartment—and dreamed about walking through the deep, satisfying forests of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

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Through Strayed’s story, I got to experience the mystique of the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d heard about it in passing, but I’d never felt the gravitas of it before. Hiking the PCT was like a pilgrimage. Some considered it a “purifying journey”.

It was like the Camino de Santiago, in Spain. But harder. And more dangerous. And more varied, since the PCT started in the deserts of Southern California (hell) and ended in the northern rain-forests at the Canadian border (heaven).

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As a native Portlander, I enjoyed the sense of “homecoming” as Cheryl entered Oregon from the south and slowly made her way into the orbit of Eugene and Portland.

Here she began to encounter Oregonians of a type I remembered from my own youth. Grateful Dead listening, tofu eating, Tom Robbins reading post-hippy types. Or in some cases pickup driving, gun toting, slightly menacing roughnecks.

These people were so accurately described, it was like the best and worst of my childhood, coming back to life in my mind again. It made me miss my home state in a way I never had previously.