I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
I just finished the book “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, which you should read. It’s about a 26-year old woman, Strayed, who decides, rather on a whim, to take off on a hike – and not a short one, but rather the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), one of the three longest trails in the U.S. at 2,663 miles. It runs from the U.S.–Mexico boarder in California to the edge of Manning Park in British Columbia, Canada.
The book begins with the author in crisis, brought on by the death of her mother from cancer. Strayed (not her real name) was 22 when her mother died. The next four years were for her a journey into abysmal temptations afforded in this civilized modern world. Strayed, like many, gave in, and as her life spark dimmed, hopelessness was winning.
Then one day while buying a jacket, she looked down and saw a book about hiking the PCT. She thumbed through the book, and bought it. Before she knew it, she was buying hiking gear; too much, which she crammed into her mammoth backpack named “Monster.”
After leaving her car in Portland, near where she planned to finish, Strayed traveled to the place in the Mojave Desert, in Southern California, where the PCT ran, and began her walk. She had never even been on a day hike.
That’s all I need to tell you – other than the writing is way above average and her honesty is like a roller coaster ride. It might also make you want to get to the woods.
“We need the tonic of wildness... We can never have enough of nature.” - Walden
The PCT, I learned, is the westernmost and second longest component of the Triple Crown of Hiking. The other trails are the Appalachian Trail (AT), which is 2,184 miles long and runs from Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to Mount Katahdin, located in Baxter State Park in Maine.
The third leg, and longest, is the Continental Divide Trail, running from the New Mexico-Mexico boarder to the Canadian border in Montana. It is 3,100 miles.
I’m also reading a book on the AT called “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson. Bryson is hilarious at times. But it’s not new, having been published in 1998. One day after moving his family to a small town in New Hampshire, he discovered a 2,000-mile trail that ran almost in his back yard, and said what any of us guys would say on such a find – “Sounds neat! Let’s do it!”
Strayed’s memoir is a more soulful, honest account of a person attempting the impossible; Bryson’s, more of a funny history lesson. While they’re both very good, and humor goes far with me, “Wild” was the more emotional, and by the end, I was so connected to Cheryl Strayed, those emotions got the better of me. I still find myself thinking back about some part of her difficult journey almost every day, about who she was at the beginning and how she sounded at the end. A great read.
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” - Walden