When Cheryl Strayed arrived in the Mojave Desert 18 years ago to begin her 1,100-mile journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, her backpack was so heavy she could barely lift it. A novice hiker, she took her lead from sales associates at REI, bringing everything they suggested, and then some.
The “foldable saw” was one of the first useless items to go. And the books — hundreds and hundreds of pages of books — she eventually burned chapter-by-chapter as she read them. Like she told a standing-room-only crowd at her recent Squaw Valley Institute lecture, she really had no idea what she was doing.
In a region like Tahoe, where a heavy pack is passé, Strayed’s adventures might sound pretty tame (one chick I know shouldered her own body weight on Aconcagua, which, at almost 23,000 feet, is Argentina’s contribution to the world’s “Seven Summits”). But Strayed is a born storyteller, and what makes her bestselling memoir “Wild” such a page-turner, even for backcountry veterans, is her capacity to plumb the emotional depths of her adventure and present that personal truth in such a way that it speaks to the universal human quest.
She told the diverse crowd at Plumpjack this month that her hope is that you “will recognize yourself in this work.”
The backpack, unthinkably heavy as it was for her, ripened in time into a metaphor for the death of her mother, the loss she could not confront.
“I had to bear the unbearable,” she said. “Really, the question I was asking was: How can I live in this world without my mom? The decision to move forward with that weight was my way of redeeming myself.”
Strayed is a study in contrasts. She grew up poor in Minnesota, living at times without running water or electricity. But she also went on to graduate from the University of Minnesota with honors. Well after her journey on the PCT, she returned to school to receive her MFA from Syracuse University, a program that’s produced famous writers like Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders and now, well, Cheryl Strayed.
This “muscle of exposing myself on the page,” she said, is something she has worked at since she was a teenager. She’s done such a thorough job of honest exposure in “Wild” that the portrayed promiscuity once inspired an elderly gentleman in the front row of her lecture to ask, “Have you ever had sex with someone in exchange for food?”
“I was so dumfounded, but all I could think to say was, ‘No. But have you had dinner yet?'”
Grandoise, but there’s a kernel of truth to it. As many writers know, the parts of their work that made them laugh out loud or cry so hard they had to remove their glasses for the writing of it are the parts their readers adore. The human condition, when rendered truthfully and poetically, makes a reader realize he or she is not alone in the world. The mere fact that there is one other soul in the world with whom you resonate offers a certain comfort, even if it is the blind face of an author you’ve never met and might never come to know personally.
This is what elevates Strayed’s book from a simple story about the travails of hiking the PCT to a universal story that launched her to the New York Times bestseller list and later, Oprah’s book of the month. And for a writer, that poetic truth telling is a lot harder than hoisting a heavy backpack.
After the lecture, Strayed told Moonshine Ink that her mother was very present for her in much of the writing of “Wild.”
“I certainly shed a lot of tears writing the book for that reason,” she said. “You have to go back to that place emotionally or it’s not going to ring true.”
