Cheryl Strayed - Wild

I limped back to my camp and examined my tortured big toes. To so much as graze against them had become excruciating. I could literally see them throbbing — the blood beneath my flesh pulsating in a regular rhythm that flushed my nails white then pink, white then pink. They were so swollen that it looked as if my nails were simply going to pop off. It occurred to me that popping them off might actually be a good idea. I pinched one of the nails, and with a solid tug, followed by a second of searing pain, the nail gave way and I felt instant, almost total, relief. A moment later, I did the same with the other toe.

It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails, I realized.

The score was 6–4, and I was just barely hanging on to my lead.

By nightfall four other PCT hikers joined my encampment. They arrived as I was burning the last pages of A Summer Bird-Cage in my little aluminum pie pan, two couples about my age who’d hiked all the way from Mexico, minus the same section of the socked-in Sierra Nevada I’d skipped. Each couple had set out separately, but they’d met and joined forces in southern California, hiking and bypassing the snow together in a weeks-long wilderness double date. John and Sarah were from Alberta, Canada, and hadn’t even been dating a year when they’d started to hike the PCT. Sam and Helen were a married couple from Maine. They were laying over the next day, but I was heading on, I told them, as soon as my new boots arrived.

The next morning I packed up Monster and walked to the store wearing my sandals, my boots tied to the frame of my pack. I sat at one of the nearby picnic tables waiting for the mail to arrive. I was eager to hike away not so much because I felt like hiking, but because I had to. In order to reach each resupply point on roughly the day I’d anticipated, I had a schedule to keep. In spite of all the changes and bypasses, for reasons related to both money and weather, I needed to stick to my plan to finish my trip by mid-September. I sat for hours reading the book that had come in my box — Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita —while waiting for my boots to arrive. People came and went in waves, sometimes gathering in little circles around me to ask questions about the PCT when they noticed my pack. As I spoke, the doubts I had about myself on the trail fell away for whole minutes at a time and I forgot all about being a big fat idiot. Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

“I advise you to put this on your résumé,” said an old woman from Florida adorned in a bright pink visor and a fistful of gold necklaces. “I used to work in HR. Employers look for things like this. It tells them that you’ve got character. It sets you apart from the rest.”

The mailman pulled up around three. The UPS guy came an hour later. Neither one of them had my boots. My stomach sinking, I went to the pay phone and called REI.

They hadn’t yet mailed my boots, the man I spoke to politely informed me. The problem was, they’d learned they could not get them to the state park overnight, so they wanted to send them by regular mail instead, but because they hadn’t known how to contact me to tell me this, they’d done nothing at all. “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I’m hiking the PCT. I’m sleeping in the woods. Of course you couldn’t have gotten in touch with me. And I can’t wait here for — how long will it take for my boots to come in the regular mail?”

“Approximately five days,” he replied, unperturbed.

“Five days?” I asked. I couldn’t exactly be upset. They were mailing me a new pair of boots for free, after all, but still I was frustrated and panicked. In addition to maintaining my schedule, I needed the food I had in my bag for the next section of the trail — the eighty-three-mile stretch that took me to Castle Crags. If I stayed in Burney Falls to wait for my boots, I’d have to eat that food because — with little more than five dollars left — I didn’t have enough money to spend the next five days eating from the park’s snack bar. I reached for my pack, got my guidebook, and found the address for Castle Crags. I couldn’t imagine hiking another blistering eighty-three miles in my too-small boots, but I had no choice but to ask REI to send them there.

When I hung up the phone, I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen anymore.

I stared at my boots with a pleading expression, as if we could possibly work out a deal. They were dangling from my pack by their dusty red laces, evil in their indifference. I’d planned to leave them in the PCT hiker free box as soon as my new boots arrived. I reached for them, but I couldn’t bring myself to put them on. Perhaps I could wear my flimsy camp sandals for short stretches on the trail. I’d met a few people who switched off between boots and sandals while they hiked, but their sandals were far sturdier than mine. I’d never intended to wear my sandals to hike. I’d brought them only to give my feet a break from my boots at the end of the day, cheap knockoffs I’d purchased at a discount store for something like $19.99. I took them off and cradled them in my hands, as if by examining them up close I could bestow on them a durability they did not possess. The Velcro was matted with detritus and peeling away from the black straps at the frayed ends. Their blue soles were malleable as dough and so thin that when I walked I could feel the contours of pebbles and sticks beneath my feet. Wearing them was just barely more than having no shoes on at all. And I was going to walk to Castle Crags in these?

Maybe I shouldn’t, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t . This far was far enough. I could put it on my résumé.

“Fuck,” I said. I picked up a rock and whipped it hard as I could at a nearby tree, and then another and another.

I thought of the woman I always thought of in such moments: an astrologer who’d read my natal chart when I was twenty-three. A friend had arranged for the reading as a going-away gift just before I left Minnesota for New York City. The astrologer was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman named Pat who sat me down at her kitchen table with a piece of paper covered in mysterious markings and a quietly whirring tape recorder between us. I didn’t put much faith in it. I thought it would be a bit of fun, an ego-boosting session during which she’d say generic things like You have a kind heart .

But she didn’t. Or rather, she said those things, but she also said bizarrely specific things that were so accurate and particular, so simultaneously consoling and upsetting, that it was all I could do not to bawl in recognition and grief. “How can you know this?” I kept demanding. And then I would listen as she explained about the planets, the sun and the moon, the “aspects” and the moment I was born; about what it meant to be a Virgo, with a moon in Leo and Gemini rising. I’d nod while thinking, This is a bunch of crazy New Age anti-intellectual bullshit , and then she’d say another thing that would blow my brain into about seven thousand pieces because it was so true.

Until she began to speak of my father. “Was he a Vietnam vet?” she asked. No, I told her, he wasn’t. He was in the military briefly in the mid-1960s — in fact, he was stationed at the base in Colorado Springs where my mother’s father was stationed, which is how my parents met — but he never went to Vietnam.

“It seems he was like a Vietnam vet,” she persisted. “Perhaps not literally. But he has something in common with some of those men. He was deeply wounded. He was damaged. His damage has infected his life and it infected you.”