Finished: Wild (Strayed) I've had this book on my reader for a long, long time. I knew it was about a woman who walked the Pacific Crest Trail alone, but I never knew her driving motivation in doing so was getting her life back after losing her mother when she was 22 and her mother only 44. How appropriate, then, for me to finally feel like reading it, at this time when I'm missing my mom so much. Missing talking to her every day. Missing her same old stories and tales about her younger years. Missing being able to ask her any old thing like: What were the names of Grandpa Shorty's horses again? Or, where was that street in Gearhart where your grandparents lived? Or, who in the world did we get our red hair from? Or, explain to me one more time how your turkey dressing turns out so perfect, because I can't seem to replicate your recipe? So, this book, deeply introspective as it is, was also a much needed and appreciated surprise. I went right along with the author on her journey, and am so glad she took me there.

"It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine."

Just one of the few passages from the book that deeply affected me. Cheryl Strayed was raised by her mother, a force of nature, but a loving one, who kept her and her older sister and younger brother all together after finally leaving for good their abusive father. It was not an easy life, but they had each other. Then, Cheryl's mother met Eddie, and he became their step-father, and he loved them. He was a wonderful man and showed them what a father should have been like all those years. It was with great despair that Cheryl, her siblings and Eddie had to watch her mother die from stage four lung cancer at the age of 44 less than two months after being diagnosed. Cheryl's description of those days and hours spent with her mom are so heartbreaking. Cheryl's world fell apart after that. Her siblings each went their own way, and Eddie remarried and didn't maintain the only fatherly relationship Cheryl had ever known. And, even though she was happily married, Cheryl sabotaged her own marriage to Paul, her very loving husband, and started being promiscuous and having affairs with numerous men. She also developed a heroin problem, which went along with her latest boyfriend. Finally, after divorcing Paul, even though they both wept, since they still loved each other tremendously, Cheryl decided that she had to do something to save her own life. She decided that hiking the harrowing Pacific Coast trail, from the Mojave desert in California, all the way to the Bridge of Gods in Oregon, a bridge that connects Oregon to Washington over the Columbia River, was the journey she needed to take. And, take it she did. She had no experience hiking, and basically did very little research. She packed way too much stuff in her barely liftable backpack, and she bought her hiking boots a size too small....a really huge deal when you're going to hike hundreds and hundreds of miles. She mailed herself resupply boxes with more food and money to several outposts, but grossly underestimated the time it would actually take her to hike to each outpost. She met mostly friendly, encouraging people along the way, but also had a few scary instances being a woman hiking alone in the wilderness. She had to divert many times to skirt around impassable mountain passes that had been snowed in, hiking several miles off of the trail to a town to then hitch a ride farther up the road to what she hoped would be a cleared spot. She (and other hikers) relied on reading notes from each other at each trail entry point that were housed in little tin boxes. There were logs signed by everyone, so that if she did catch up with someone, or someone with her, then they'd already know her name! She made lifelong friends, that she never saw again. Try explaining that one. I just mean, they shared a closeness and experience that no one could ever understand but themselves, and she felt close to them for life, even if she never saw them again. Her body was battered and her feet more so, as she lost more toenails than she kept, but she never gave up. Through all the hardships, she knew that this was something she had to complete. It became a life-affirming, cleansing journey, where she was finally able to accept her mother's dead, forgive her mother for dying, forgive herself for her own selfish deeds, and come to terms with the fact that she still had alot of living to do. Once she finally reached the Bridge of Gods in Oregon, she finally let the tears flow that she'd kept at bay for most of the trip.

"Thank you, I thought over and over again. Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn't yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me." 

It was a deeply moving book, and I'm so blessed that my own mother was actually FROM Oregon, and that our parents showed us the importance early on of traveling to that wondrous part of the country and reveling in the mountains, the trees, and the ocean. I could feel the air when Cheryl described it's chill and I could hear the trees when she described their movements. I'm so glad I finally decided to read this book, and that Cheryl's experience is one that will stay with me, much like my own mom does.