Cheryl Strayed - Wild

It hurt to do it, but it had to be done. I’d loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When I made camp in the evenings, I rushed through the tasks of pitching my tent and filtering water and cooking dinner so I could sit afterwards inside the shelter of my tent in my chair with my pot of hot food gripped between my knees. I ate with my spoon in one hand and a book in the other, reading by the light of my headlamp when the sky darkened. In the first week of my hike, I was often too exhausted to read more than a page or two before I fell asleep, but as I grew stronger I was reading more, eager to escape the tedium of my days. And each morning, I burned whatever I’d read the night before.

As I held my unspoiled copy of O’Connor’s short stories, Albert emerged from his tent. “Looks to me like you could stand to lose a few things,” he said. “Want some help?”

“Actually,” I said, smiling ruefully at him, “yes.”

“All right, then. Here’s what I want you to do: pack up that thing just like you’re about to hike out of here for this next stretch of trail and we’ll go from there.” He walked toward the river with the nub of a toothbrush in hand — the end of which he’d thought to break off to save weight, of course.

I went to work, integrating the new with the old, feeling as if I were taking a test that I was bound to fail. When I was done, Albert returned and methodically unpacked my pack. He placed each item in one of two piles — one to go back into my pack, another to go into the now-empty resupply box that I could either mail home or leave in the PCT hiker free box on the porch of the Kennedy Meadows General Store for others to plunder. Into the box went the foldable saw and miniature binoculars and the megawatt flash for the camera I had yet to use. As I looked on, Albert chucked aside the deodorant whose powers I’d overestimated and the disposable razor I’d brought with some vague notion about shaving my legs and under my arms and — much to my embarrassment — the fat roll of condoms I’d slipped into my first aid kit.

“Do you really need these?” Albert asked, holding the condoms. Albert the Georgia Daddy Eagle Scout, whose wedding band glinted in the sun, who cut off the handle of his own toothbrush, but no doubt carried a pocket-sized Bible in his pack. He looked at me stone-faced as a soldier, while the white plastic wrappers of a dozen ultrathin nonlubricated Trojan condoms made a clickety-clack sound as they unfurled like a party streamer from his hand.

“No,” I said, feeling as if I was going to die of shame. The idea of having sex seemed absurd to me now, though when I’d packed my supplies it had struck me as a reasonable prospect, back before I had a clue of what hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would do to my body. I’d not seen myself since I was at the motel in Ridgecrest, but after the men had gone off to nap, I’d taken the opportunity to gaze at my face in the mirror attached to the side of Ed’s truck. I looked tan and dirty, despite my recent dunk in the river. I’d become remotely leaner and my dark blonde hair a tad lighter, alternately flattened and sprung alive by a combination of dried sweat, river water, and dust.

I didn’t look like a woman who might need twelve condoms.

But Albert didn’t pause to ponder such things — whether I’d get laid or not, whether I was pretty. He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each time before tossing another item I’d previously deemed necessary into the get-rid-of pile. I nodded almost every time he held an item up, agreeing it should go, though I held the line on both The Complete Stories and my beloved, intact copy of The Dream of a Common Language . I held the line on my journal, in which I recorded everything I did that summer. And when Albert wasn’t looking, I tore one condom off the end of the fat roll of condoms he’d tossed aside and slid it discreetly into the back pocket of my shorts.

“So what brought you out here?” Albert asked when his work was done. He sat on the bench of the picnic table, his broad hands folded in front of him.

“To hike the PCT?” I asked.

He nodded and watched as I pushed the various items we’d agreed I could keep back into my pack. “I’ll tell you why I’m doing it,” he said quickly, before I could answer. “It’s been a lifelong dream for me. When I heard about the trail I thought, ‘Now there’s something I’d like to do before I go to meet the Lord.’ ” He rapped his fist gently on the table. “So how about you, girly-o? I’ve got a theory that most folks have a reason. Something that drove ’em out here.”

“I don’t know,” I demurred. I wasn’t about to tell a fifty-something Christian Georgia Eagle Scout why I decided to walk alone in the woods for three solid months, no matter how kindly his eyes twinkled when he smiled. The things that compelled me to hike this trail would sound scandalous to him and dubious to me; to both of us, they’d only reveal just how shaky this whole endeavor was.

“Mainly,” I said, “I thought it would be something fun.”

“You call this fun?” he asked, and we both laughed.

I turned and leaned into Monster, threading my arms into the straps. “So let’s see if it made a difference,” I said, and buckled it on. When I lifted it from the table, I was amazed at how light it felt, even fully loaded with my new ice ax and a fresh supply of eleven days’ worth of food. I beamed at Albert. “Thank you.”

He chuckled in response, shaking his head.

Jubilant, I walked away to take my pack on a trial run on the dirt road that made a loop around the campground. Mine was still the biggest pack of the bunch — hiking solo, I had to carry things that those who hiked in pairs could divvy up, and I didn’t have the ultralight confidence or skills that Greg did — but in comparison to how my pack had been before Albert helped me purge it, it was so light I felt I could leap into the air. Halfway around the loop I paused and leapt.

I made it only an inch off the ground, but at least it could be done.

“Cheryl?” a voice called out just then. I looked up and saw a handsome young man wearing a backpack walking toward me.

“Doug?” I asked, guessing right. In response he waved his arms and gave out a joyous hoot, and then he walked straight up to me and pulled me in for a hug.

“We read your entry in the register and we’ve been trying to catch up to you.”

“And here I am,” I stammered, taken aback by his enthusiasm and good looks. “We’re all camped over there.” I gestured behind me. “There’s a bunch of us. Where’s your friend?”

“He’ll be coming up soon,” Doug said, and hooted again, apropos of nothing. He reminded me of all the golden boys I’d known in my life — classically handsome and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered otherwise. As I stood next to him, I had the feeling that any moment he’d reach for my hand and together we’d parachute off a cliff, laughing as we wafted gently down.

“Tom!” Doug bellowed when he saw a figure appear down the road. Together we walked toward him. I could tell even from a distance that Tom was Doug’s physical and spiritual opposite — bony, pale, bespectacled. The smile that crept onto his face as we approached was cautious and mildly unconvinced.

“Hello,” he said to me when we got close enough, reaching to shake my hand.

In the few short minutes it took for us to reach Ed’s camp, we exchanged a flurry of information about who we were and where we were from. Tom was twenty-four; Doug, twenty-one. New England blue bloods , my mother would have called them, I knew almost before they told me a thing — which meant to her only that they were basically rich and from somewhere east of Ohio and north of D.C. Over the course of the coming days, I’d learn all about them. How their parents were surgeons and mayors and financial executives. How they’d both attended a tony boarding school whose fame was so great even I knew it by name. How they’d vacationed on Nantucket and on private islands off the coast of Maine and spent their spring breaks in Vail. But I didn’t know any of that yet, how in so many ways their lives were unfathomable to me and mine to them. I knew only that in some very particular ways they were my closest kin. They weren’t gearheads or backpacking experts or PCT know-it-alls. They hadn’t hiked all the way from Mexico, nor had they been planning the trip for a decade. And even better, the miles they’d traversed so far had left them nearly as shattered as they’d left me. They hadn’t, by virtue of their togetherness, gone days without seeing another human being. Their packs looked of a size reasonable enough that I doubted they were carrying a foldable saw. But I could tell the instant I locked eyes with Doug that, despite all his confidence and ease, he had been through something . And when Tom took my hand to shake it, I could read precisely the expression on his face. It said: I’VE GOT TO GET THESE FUCKING BOOTS OFF MY FEET .