Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Why is it that a book about how hard it is to backpack, about the misery and the pain and the fear, makes me so desperately want to do it? Maybe because there are parts like this:

“Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off.” (p. 267)

In other words, she tells me my own life.

And she talks about backpacking, which seems to be extreme hiking and camping, which I actually love to do.

Strayed's ego manages to outsize even the magnificent Pacific Crest Trail. She's a self-absorbed asshole who manages to use her mom's death as an excuse to spread her selfishness over everyone she knows. She survives her partial hike of the PCT only due to the amazing generosity of fellow hikers who are actually competent.

Are you wondering if she's pretty? Oh my, yes! Never mind that on the back flap she looks like someone's daffy aunt. Strayed never tires of relating the unending river of compliments she receives about her beauty and sexiness. Her appearance is a constant concern, even when she's on the verge of reaching her goal.

Maybe it shouldn't bother me so much that at one point she mentions snorting tar heroin, a task that is impossible due to tar heroin's, well, tarriness. It comes up when she tells of her brief trist with the drug while shacked up with a fellow florid-tongued dipshit in Portland, Oregon – another situation from which she ends up requiring rescue, this time by her generous ex-husband. That obvious lie makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of her tale (except her stunning beauty, of course).

She appears to think she's somehow developed spiritually or emotionally by the book's close, but it's unclear how. She seems like just as much of a thoughtless ass as she did on page one.

She writes eloquently and there must some truth throughout, for why would someone fabricate a story that makes herself look like such a dick?

I wish I'd abandoned this one. Honestly, I just don't get what all the hype is about with Cheryl Strayed. Maybe I disliked this because I read Torch first - and I wish I'd abandoned that one as well (I only finished it to see if Bruce would follow through).

Positive point: it's very admirable that she writes so truthfully and seemingly without regrets. I can see this as a reason for people to like her writing so much.

The reasons I didn't like this book: reading some sections felt like I was re-reading Torch, only it was worse since Torch is supposed to be a novel and this was a memoir. And I couldn't believe she actually survived the trail, given her naive and lackadaisical attitude towards a long-haul hike and all the accompanying danger of doing it on your own. As a hiker and a once wilderness ranger, some of her descriptions made me cringe. Overall, it was like watching a train wreck and being surprised that there were hardly any casualties . Granted, some of her attitude changed over the course of the hike, but I came away from the book feeling like she missed her own point of hiking the PCT.

And finally, I do wonder if I ran into her out there - I was working as a wilderness ranger then and the PCT was part of my patrol...at least I didn't have to go out looking for her!