Cheryl Strayed - Wild

I looked around, drunk with the sight of the packaged food and drinks, feeling a combination of anticipation over the things I’d consume in the coming hours and relief over the fact that my pack was no longer attached to my body, but resting now on the porch of the store.

I was here. I had made it to my first stop. It seemed like a miracle. I’d half expected to see Greg, Matt, and Albert at the store, but they were nowhere in sight. My guidebook explained that the campground was another three miles farther on and I assumed that’s where I’d find them, along with Doug and Tom eventually. Thanks to my exertions, they hadn’t managed to catch up with me. Kennedy Meadows was a pretty expanse of piney woods and sage and grass meadows at an elevation of 6,200 feet on the South Fork Kern River. It wasn’t a town but rather an outpost of civilization spread out over a few miles, consisting of a general store, a restaurant called Grumpie’s, and a primitive campground.

“Here you go,” the woman said, returning with my box and setting it on the counter. “It’s the only one that’s got a girl’s name on it. That’s how I knew.” She reached across the counter to me. “This came too.”

In her hand was a postcard. I took it and read it: I hope you made it this far , it said in a familiar scrawl. I want to be your clean boyfriend someday. I love you. Joe . On the other side was a photograph of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, where we’d stayed together once. I stared at the photograph for several moments, a series of feelings washing over me in waves: grateful for a word from someone I knew, nostalgic for Joe, disappointed that only one person had written to me, and heartbroken, unreasonable as it was, that the one person who had wasn’t Paul.

I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade, a king-sized Butterfinger, and a bag of Doritos and went outside and sat on the front steps, devouring the things I’d purchased while reading the postcard over and over again. After a while, I noticed a box in the corner of the porch stuffed full with mostly packaged backpacker food. Above it there was a handwritten sign that said:

PCT hiker FREE box!!!

Leave what you don’t want!

Take what you do!

A ski pole was propped behind the box, precisely the thing I needed. It was a ski pole fit for a princess: white, with a bubble-gum-pink nylon wrist strap. I tested it out for a few steps. It was the perfect height. It would help me across not only the snow, but also the many stream fords and rockslides that no doubt lay ahead.

I walked with it an hour later as I made my way along the dirt road that went in a loop around the campground, looking for Greg, Matt, and Albert. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, but the place was mostly empty. I passed by a man preparing his fishing gear and a couple with a cooler of beer and a boom box and eventually came to a campsite where a shirtless gray-haired man with a big tan belly sat at a picnic table reading a book. He looked up as I approached.

“You must be the famous Cheryl of the enormous backpack,” he called to me.

I laughed in agreement.

“I’m Ed.” He walked toward me to shake my hand. “Your friends are here. They all just caught a ride up to the store — you must have missed them as you were coming — but they asked me to watch for you. You can set up your tent right over there if you’d like. They’re all camped here — Greg and Albert and his son.” He gestured to the tents around him. “We were taking bets who’d arrive first. You or the two boys from back east coming up behind you.”

“Who won?” I asked.

Ed thought for a moment. “No one,” he said, and boomed with laughter. “None of us bet on you.”

I rested Monster on the picnic table, took it off, and left it there, so when I had to put it on again I wouldn’t have to perform my pathetic dead lift from the ground.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Ed said, gesturing to a little pop-up trailer that had a tarp roof extending out its side with a makeshift camp kitchen beneath it. “You hungry?”

There were no showers at the campground, so while Ed made lunch for me, I walked to the river to wash as best as I could with my clothes still on. The river felt like a shock after all that dry territory I’d crossed. And the South Fork Kern River wasn’t just any river. It was violent and self-possessed, ice-cold and raging, its might clear evidence of the heavy snows higher up the mountains. The current was too fast to go in even ankle-deep, so I walked down the bank until I found an eddying pool near the river’s edge and waded in. My feet ached from the cold water and eventually went numb. I crouched and wetted down my filthy hair and splashed handfuls of water beneath my clothes to wash my body. I felt electric with sugar and the victory of arriving; filled with anticipation of the conversations I’d have over the next couple of days.

When I was done, I walked up the bank and then across a wide meadow, wet and cool. I could see Ed from a distance, and as I approached I watched him move from his camp kitchen to the picnic table with plates of food in his hands, bottles of ketchup and mustard and cans of Coke. I’d known him only a few minutes and yet, like the other men I’d met, he felt instantly familiar to me, as if I could trust him with close to anything. We sat across from each other and ate while he told me about himself. He was fifty, an amateur poet and seasonal vagabond, childless and divorced. I tried to eat at his leisurely pace, taking bites when he did, the same way I’d attempted to match my steps to Greg’s a few days before, but I couldn’t do it. I was ravenous. I devoured two hot dogs and a mountain of baked beans and another mountain of potato chips in a flash and then sat hungrily wishing for more. Meanwhile, Ed worked his way languidly through his lunch, pausing to open his journal to read aloud poems that he’d composed the day before. He lived in San Diego most of the year, he explained, but each summer he set up camp in Kennedy Meadows in order to greet the PCT hikers as they passed through. He was what’s referred to in PCT hiker vernacular as a trail angel , but I didn’t know that then. Didn’t know, even, that there was a PCT hiker vernacular.

“Look here, fellas, we all lost the bet,” Ed hollered to the men when they returned from the store.

“I didn’t lose!” Greg protested as he came close to squeeze my shoulder. “I put my money on you, Cheryl,” he insisted, though the others disputed his claim.

We sat around the picnic table, talking about the trail, and after a while, they all dispersed to take naps — Ed to his trailer; Greg, Albert, and Matt to their tents. I stayed at the picnic table, too excited to sleep, pawing through the contents of the box I’d packed weeks before. The things inside smelled like a world far-off, like the one I’d occupied in what seemed another lifetime, scented with the Nag Champa incense that had permeated my apartment. The ziplock bags and packaging on the food were still shiny and unscathed. The fresh T-shirt smelled of the lavender detergent I bought in bulk at the co-op I belonged to in Minneapolis. The flowery cover of The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor was unbent.

The same could not be said of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying , or rather the thin portion of the book I still had in my pack. I’d torn off the cover and all the pages I’d read the night before and burned them in the little aluminum pie pan I’d brought to place beneath my stove to safeguard against errant sparks. I’d watched Faulkner’s name disappear into flames feeling a bit like it was a sacrilege — never had I dreamed I’d be burning books — but I was desperate to lighten my load. I’d done the same with the section from The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California that I’d already hiked.