Cheryl Strayed’s Gone Wild
Last Friday, I ordered two books via next day service from Amazon, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, the latter on a whim.
From the reviews, The Salt Path seemed to be somewhere between memoir and travelog, suggesting in my mind Paul Theroux’s writing. Theroux takes travel stories to another level — not the happiest soul, but he observes people and cultures with a discerning eye.
The Salt Path — hiking the southwestern coast of England — seemed something I needed to read. The story’s about a mid-fifties couple who chose to hike England’s longest hiking trail in order to keep going after losing their farm and their way of life.
I had asked to join Scot Butwell’s book club on The Salt Path, and was behind the curve because, as he explained, they were already on Chapter 10. But I expected to get the paperback parachuted in next day, and I can read fast when on a deadline. Here’s a secret: architects always work to deadlines. Cursed from our days in studio, it’s how we were trained.
Exactly what the drone gods of Amazon (not unlike the nine princes of Amber) delivered next day as promised was Wild by Strayed and an entirely different book by Raynor Winn, The Wild Silence: A Memoir. We’ll have to see about this later one from Winn. But I’ll be late turning in my term paper far as The Salt Path book club is concerned… with apologies to all.
Saturday night, shutting down for the evening, I picked up Strayed’s book. Propped and plumped the bed pillows, petted our loyal husky tucked in beside the bed, and opened the book. It had been on my long list of books to read for several years, so I thought ‘might as well get to it’ while waiting for the drone gods to correct their mistake.
For truth in advertising, I’d already written a piece on Wild in response to another piece on Medium. We can skip that for now.
Let’s just say I didn’t get too far into Wild last Saturday, though not for any reasons other than my own misjudgment. No bad or off the wall writing — her style was as good as the critics said. Nor the book’s structure, starting at the end point, then flashing back in her life, then forward to the start of her journey, building the story. Damn good pacing. Being real, and telling dirt about herself — not salacious but honest, like you’d tell your defense attorney. What stalled my progress happened right at the outset.
The first part was brutal if candidly told. Losing the anchor in her life — the mother who taught her to stand and be counted because she loved her — then dying before Strayed had outgrown her twenties. It went downhill from there. As she says, “there was a hole in my heart.”
It’s agreed we all have holes — or there’d be no reason to write. And little to read.
Strayed had lost her father in childhood — or rather, he lost them. After the struggle to keep from being homeless that many people would just give in to, her mother brought her three children through, and all were hoping to land happy — because her mother swore they would — then she up and died on them.
My mother died quietly in her late 80s; she’d done her work saving her three and seeing them to adulthood.
At age four, I watched my father being buried. One of the few blurred images I have of him is watching at a distance through the trees. So Strayed’s story was ringing that bell I’m so familiar hearing. As a child, I lived in fear our mother would disappear, leaving us orphans, though after awhile I learned to live with it. Because you’re living, that’s what you do.
Seems only so heavy a burden one can carry! Yet like sherpas, maybe yetis, we put on our too-heavy backpacks. Strayed’s backpack had a name; she called it Monster.
Early in the story, Strayed admits her life fell to pieces when her mother died of cancer. She nursed her mother through her dying in a daze of heroin, then lost herself. Oh man. This wasn’t a light tale to read before bed.
People have been going on voyages and trips seeking salvation — or resignation, acceptance at the least —longer than the historical record. The Camino de Santiago was a famous one. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tells of another. The Hajj (journey) to Mecca is another. Spiritual journeys all. Marco Polo, and Thor Heyerdahl. Robert Livingston, anyone? Seems that writers have been marching into the wilderness for a while. Some folks never stop traveling — Paul Theroux being a prime example.
Maybe the reason I admire the long distance migrations — cormorants and monarch butterflies. And cheer for the Syrians and Afghans.
In the first chapters, Strayed didn’t fully explain what drove her to take on her impossible mission. Whether she, the person, knew what was driving her, she, the author, didn’t seem to. She’d done her husband wrong by willfully fucking an impressive number of men she came across in the lead up, got a tattoo matching her husband’s, divorced him and walked out on the settled world. Men have been doing similarly for as long as there have been stories about it, and no one was slut shaming them, at least not to their faces.
Feeling another’s fractured loss wasn’t what I’d sought to read at bedtime. Would Strayed tie this all together? Would I be able to read it? I never finished Angela’s Ashes.
Wild wasn’t a bedtime story, it didn’t seem — at least not for me. Though with an emotional mess welling up to surprise me, still I realized it was largely on account of the woman’s writing skills. Subtle, direct, and it touched me unexpectedly. Nothing over-dramatized, and I didn’t get much sleep come dawn on Sunday.
I’ve done my share of long hikes and camping, though not more than weekend affairs. I can get a good bed of coals ready for the potatoes in foil, and burn bacon with the best of them.
When my oldest son joined the Boy Scouts, his troop was led by several ex-military men — and a couple who were still serving — so we had a reputation for camping year round, below freezing with snow or no. I brought Sean’s younger brother, Ryan — not yet a Cub Scout — with us.
Ryan took to the experience in an amazing way. Neither the weather nor the food prepared by campfire bothered him, he the pickiest of eaters. Ryan was the only one in our family to complete his merit badges, build his community project — prodded and assisted by his mother — and earn his Eagle rank. Sean had lost interest at about the same age as I had. Something about hormones and girls, most likely.
Serious hikes? Yes. The Grand Canyon, White Oaks Canyon, Bryce, Canyonlands, Kauai’s Na Pali coast, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Great Smoky’s Mont Le Conte, Old Rag more times than I can count. But never the Pacific Crest Trail. I ran sixteen miles once up to Maroon Bells from Aspen and back — and would have cried from the altitude except I couldn’t catch my breath.
Well, OK, let’s get to Strayed’s hike of a lifetime — of any lifetime.
The Pacific Crest Trail, like its eastern cousin, the more innocently named Appalachian Trail, is a continuous trail wending from the Mohave desert, then through forested mountain terrain, across the Sierra Nevada mountains and on to the Cascades.
Everything seems impressively larger in the West to me — such a shift in scale. Could be for a decided lack of forests at altitude where I grew up, the swamps and slow turtles, barely seeing a quarter mile ahead. For reference, see Swamp Country — Or How to Love What Can’t Be Avoided.
At one point, Strayed talks of wanting to hike through Tuolumne Meadows. Been there. It impressed me, even if I hadn’t been hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountain range for days. Ours was only a vigorous twenty mile day hike, and we might have gone further except for all the camera shots I was taking.
Did you know they hand out Vaseline on sticks at marathon water stops? If you ever saw men coming into the finish line chutes with bloody nipples rubbed by their T-shirts, it would make sense. One poor fool at a ‘middle distance’ ten-miler, thinking he’d go without socks on account of the summer downpour, discovered the blisters were even made worse. Live and learn.
Lesson №1 for competing in road races: never wear a brand new pair of shoes. Just say no. It’s not a fashion show. Except for that one woman in tiny racing shorts Lee and I had a hard time passing… Lord, what a view.
Lesson №1 for hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: Try testing your REA backpack before striking out on a three month hike through the wilderness. Who in her right mind — OK, she already admitted she wasn’t — would buy so much gear at REA that she could barely fit it in the pack, the pack she’d never worn on a practice hike... And forgot her dang [1] to boot. She hadn’t even taken any prep hikes to get in shape. Her wrestling on the 80 pound pack makes a funny scene beginning the hike, but at the writer’s expense quite literally.
The over-packed backpack is at least as old as the Jack London tale of the Klondike gold diggers shedding their gear as they were being ground down by just reaching the prospecting fields. Funny how that scene, long buried, was invoked by Strayed’s story.
[1] Dang — hiking stick. See the bit about Rory Stewart in Dead Catting for a definition.
The Perfect Life was a piece on Medium I’d written a year and a half ago about Cheryl Strayed — a very long time before I began reading her book. I wrote it in response to another Medium post, Why Do People Hate Cheryl Strayed? by A. Nonymous. The link no longer works, though back when I wrote my response, it did. When I searched, what showed on Medium was: “This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.”
When I searched for it, my article didn’t show up under my published stories either, though I’ve heard nothing from Medium like that ominous bit above. If mine was caught up in the same algorithm, I never got word. Instead, I found it on Google.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised the author of the piece didn’t want to be known, given the slander slung in Strayed’s direction. Like calling out the sole survivor of a multi-car traffic accident as you drive by leering. Who are these people? Though from what I could glean, A. Nonymous was on Strayed’s side.
My own impression of Cheryl Strayed is she would have done anything, given anything, to keep her mother alive and her family together. Would it have kept her marriage together? Kept her from straying? Who the hell cares! Go read Matthew 7:1–3: Judge not, that ye be not judged, OK?
At the time, I couldn’t say why I reacted so strongly to Why Do People Hate Cheryl Strayed? when I hadn’t even read her book, except that the shit being flung at a first-time author was pure vituperative hate.
My sister, who’s dealing with her own version of cancer roulette, sent me this article: What to Say When You Meet the Angel of Death at a Party — After years of living with stage IV cancer, I have some suggestions.
“It feels impossible to transmit the kernel of truth. I am not dying. I am not terminal. I am keeping vigil in the place of almost death. I stand in the in-between where everyone must pass, but so few can remain.” from What to Say When You Meet the Angel of Death at a Party. By Kate Bowden, NY Times
My sister and I were talking on the phone, Monday evening catching up, when she quoted that last sentence from memory: I stand in the in-between where everyone must pass, but so few can remain. Being in the same room as Death greatly clarifies things — gives a conclusion to it all, even when it wasn’t asked for. Bowden’s words could well be a proverb drawn from the Bible. Another followed:
“A tragedy is like a fault line. A life is split into a before and an after, and most of the time, the before was better.” from What to Say When You Meet the Angel of Death at a Party. By Kate Bowden, NY Times
Going back twenty years this fall, if you had asked my sister, who’d come in late October to celebrate my birthday, standing next to me when I received that nightmarish phone call from my ex-wife, screaming that our son Ryan had killed himself at Virginia Tech, I imagine who my sister saw was a person who had lost his future. Ryan’s death was my personal fault line. It didn’t separate me so much as I was replaced by another version of myself, a “broken” version Strayed would call it.
Had I talked to my sister before beginning Wild, I wouldn’t have made it even as far as I did. And when I finish reading Strayed’s story, which I intend to do, I expect she won’t be summing it up by looking back philosophically on her life so much as insisting, “I will not be broken.” What my sister said in so many words later when we talked. What I need to keep telling myself.
It may be true some people don’t think you should talk about the major fractures in your life. Like, perhaps they’re contagious? Infectious? Or simply too dark to acknowledge. We all choose our ways of coping. Losing her mother, Strayed went crazy. Then she hiked an amazing length of mountain trail on grit alone. Insisted on doing it alone. Then wrote leaving little out. Nothing of that might seem normal — or even appropriate — to some folks. To my mind nothing of it is inexplicable.
