Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Long-distance hiking is hard on the body. Strayed's pain on the PCT is acute because she is an inexperienced, out-of-shape hiker. She emphasizes the physical strain of hiking from the start of her memoir. The book opens with Strayed losing a boot on a steep trail and throwing its counterpart down after it. Part of her is relieved to see them go because the boots were sources of intense pain: “Those boots had blistered my feet and rubbed them raw; they’d caused my nails to blacken and detach themselves excruciatingly from four of my toes” (5). This brief description is a prelude to more vivid accounts of the pain in her feet. In Chapter 5, for instance, she writes: “My feet hurt both inside and out, their flesh rubbed raw with blisters, their bones and muscles fatigued from the miles” (70). In Chapter 8, she describes losing a toenail while taking a bath at a lodge in Truckee: “I examined my feet. They were blistered and battered, a couple of my toenails entirely blackened by now. I touched one and saw that it had come almost entirely loose from my toe […] When I tugged on the nail, it came off in my hand with one sharp shot of pain” (130). The pain in her feet continues even after she orders new boots. For example, in Chapter 12, she provides a frank assessment of their condition: “My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked. My two big toes had never recovered from the beating they took on the merciless descent from Three Lakes to Belden Town. Their nails looked near dead. My pinky toes had been rubbed so raw I wondered if they’d eventually just wear clean away from my feet” (190).

It is not just Strayed's feet that suffer during her months-long hike, the rest of her body is also battered. Monster strains her back from the outset of her journey. Bloody welts appear on her body after only a few days of hiking. By the time she reaches Reno three weeks after setting off, she no longer recognizes herself:

I did not so much look like a woman who had spent the past three weeks backpacking in the wilderness as I did like a woman who had been the victim of a violent and bizarre crime. Bruises that ranged in color from yellow to black lined my arms and legs, my back and rump, as if I’d been beaten with sticks. My hips and shoulders were covered with blisters and rashes, inflamed welts and dark scabs where my skin had broken open from being chafed by my pack. Beneath the bruises and wounds and dirt I could see new ridges of muscle, my flesh taut in places that had recently been soft (129).

Strayed's emphasis on physical pain not only provides insight into the rigors of long-distance hiking but also underscores the emotional pain of losing her mother. She hiked alone, just as she dealt with her mother’s illness and death. She cried alone in a bathroom stall immediately after learning that her mother had terminal cancer. Distanced from Eddie and her siblings, she pushed Paul away and turned to one-night stands and drugs to distract from the pain of losing her mother. The year before her hike, Strayed went to a therapist who tried but failed to help her: “I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate” (134). It wasn’t until she hiked the PCT that her emotional pain began to subside.

The solitude and physical demands of hiking gave her the time and space she needed to accept her mother’s death and forgive herself for losing her way in the years that followed. Her breakthrough came on what would have been her mother’s 50th birthday. Cold and exhausted, Strayed's thoughts drifted to her mother. The more she thought about her, the angrier she became: “Be fifty, Mom. Be fucking fifty, I thought with increasing rage” (264). After expressing her anger, she was able to forgive her mother and heal. That night, she saw her mother as a complete person for the first time. At the end of her journey, alluding to the burden of Monster, she finally let her mother go: “Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released” (306).