Cheryl Strayed - Wild

When I wasn’t internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I’d heard over the course of my life — bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad. I spent hours trying to push ads for Doublemint Gum and Burger King out of my head, an afternoon trying to recall the next line to an Uncle Tupelo song that went “Falling out the window. Tripping on a wrinkle in the rug.…” An entire day was spent trying to piece together all the words of Lucinda Williams’s “Something About What Happens When We Talk.”

My feet on fire, my flesh rubbed raw, my muscles and joints aching, the finger that had been denuded of its skin when the bull charged me throbbing with a mild infection, my head broiling and abuzz with random bits of music, at the end of the blistering tenth day of my hike I practically crawled into a shady grove of cottonwoods and willows that my guidebook identified as Spanish Needle Creek. Unlike many of the places my guidebook listed that had falsely promising names that included the word creek , Spanish Needle Creek truly was one, or at least it was good enough for me — a few inches of water shimmered over the rocks on the creek’s shaded bed. Immediately, I shed my pack and my boots and my clothes and sat naked in the cool, shallow water, splashing it over my face and head. In my ten days on the trail, I’d yet to see another human, so I lounged without concern for anyone coming along, dizzy with ecstasy as I laboriously pumped the cold water through my water purifier and guzzled bottle after bottle.

When I woke the next morning to the soft sound of Spanish Needle Creek, I dallied in my tent, watching the sky brighten through the mesh ceiling. I ate a granola bar and read my guidebook, bracing myself for the trail ahead. I rose finally and went to the creek and bathed in it one last time, savoring the luxury. It was only nine in the morning, but it was hot already, and I dreaded leaving the shady patch along the creek. As I soaked in the four-inch-deep water, I decided I wasn’t going to hike to Kennedy Meadows. Even that was too far at the rate I was going. My guidebook listed a road the trail would cross in twelve miles. On it, I’d do what I’d done before: walk down it until I found a ride. Only this time I wasn’t going to come back.

As I prepared to depart, I heard a noise to the south. I turned and saw a bearded man wearing a backpack coming up the trail. His trekking pole made a sharp clicking sound against the packed dirt with each step.

“Hello!” he called out to me with a smile. “You must be Cheryl Strayed.”

“Yes,” I said in a faltering voice, every bit as stunned to see another human being as I was to hear him speak my name.

“I saw you on the trail register,” he explained when he saw my expression. “I’ve been following your tracks for days.” I’d soon become used to people approaching me in the wilderness with such familiarity; the trail register served as a kind of social newsletter all summer long. “I’m Greg,” he said, shaking my hand before he gestured to my pack: “Are you actually carrying that thing?”

We sat in the shade talking about where we were going and where we’d been. He was forty, an accountant from Tacoma, Washington, with a straitlaced, methodical accountant’s air. He’d been on the PCT since early May, having started where the trail begins at the Mexican border, and he planned to hike all the way to Canada. He was the first person I’d met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn’t need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

As we spoke, I felt both elated to be in his company and flattened by my growing awareness that he was an entirely different breed: as thoroughly prepared as I was not; versed in trail matters I didn’t even know existed. He’d been planning his hike for years, gathering information by corresponding with others who’d hiked the PCT in summers before, and attending what he referred to as “long-trail” hiking conferences. He rattled off distances and elevations and talked in great detail about the pros and cons of internal versus external pack frames. He repeatedly mentioned a man I’d never heard of named Ray Jardine — a legendary long-distance hiker, Greg told me in a reverent tone. Jardine was an expert and indisputable guru on all things PCT, especially on how to hike it without carrying a heavy load. He asked me about my water purifier, my daily protein intake, and the brand of the socks I was wearing. He wanted to know how I treated my blisters and how many miles I was averaging a day. Greg was averaging twenty-two. That very morning he’d hiked the seven miles I had agonized over the entire previous day.

“It’s been harder than I thought it would be,” I confessed, my heart heavy with the knowledge that I was even more of a big fat idiot than I’d initially reckoned. “It’s all I can do to cover eleven or twelve,” I lied, as if I’d even done that.

“Oh, sure,” Greg said, unsurprised. “That’s how it was for me at the beginning too, Cheryl. Don’t worry about it. I’d go fourteen or fifteen miles if I was lucky and then I’d be beat. And that was with me training ahead of time, taking weekend trips with my pack fully loaded and so on. Being out here is different. It takes your body a couple of weeks to get conditioned enough to do the big miles.”

I nodded, feeling enormously consoled, less by his answer than by his very presence. Despite his clear superiority, he was my kin. I wasn’t sure if he felt the same way about me. “What have you been doing with your food at night?” I asked meekly, afraid of his answer.

“Usually I sleep with it.”

“Me too,” I gushed with relief. Before my trip I’d had notions of diligently hanging my food from trees each night, as every good backpacker is advised to do. So far I’d been too exhausted to even consider it. Instead, I’d kept my food bag inside my tent with me — the very place one is warned not to put it — using it as a pillow upon which to prop my swollen feet.

“I pull it right into my tent,” said Greg, and a little something inside of me flared to life. “That’s what the backcountry rangers do. They just don’t tell anyone about it, because they’d catch hell if some bear came along and mauled someone because of it. I’ll be hanging my food in the more touristy parts of the trail, where the bears have become habituated, but until then I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I nodded confidently, hoping to communicate the false notion that I knew how to correctly hang a food bag from a tree in such a way that would thwart a bear.

“But then of course we might not even make it up into those areas,” said Greg.

“We might not make it?” I said, blushing with the irrational thought that he’d somehow divined my plan to quit.

“Because of the snow.”

“Right. The snow. I heard there was some snow.” In the heat I’d forgotten about it entirely. Bud and the woman from the BLM and Mr. Todd and the man who tried to give me the bag of bread and bologna seemed like nothing now but a far-off dream.

“The Sierra’s completely socked in,” Greg said, echoing Bud’s words. “Lots of hikers have given up entirely because there was a record snow-pack this year. It’s going to be tough to get through.”

“Wow,” I said, feeling a mix of both terror and relief — now I’d have both an excuse and the language for quitting. I wanted to hike the PCT, but I couldn’t! It was socked in!