Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Box of Rain”

Part 5, Chapter 15 Summary: “Box of Rain”

Chapter 15 opens with a violent rainstorm. It is Cheryl’s second-to-last night on the California portion of the PCT. She puts the rain cover over her tent, getting soaked in the process, and spends the night shivering in her anorak. She wakes earlier than usual the next morning to hike her final miles in California. Along the way, she loses the bracelet Aimee gave her but decides she no longer needs it. Minutes later, she is elated to reach the border of California and Oregon. That night, Cheryl thinks about the festivities and resupply box awaiting in Ashland, her original endpoint before bypassing the High Sierra. She arrives in Ashland the next day to find it full of people mourning the death of Jerry Garcia, the leader of the band the Grateful Dead. Panic ensues when the post office clerk cannot find her resupply box. Cheryl goes to the co-op and marvels at the quantity and variety of food on offer. A worker notices Cheryl’s necklace, which spells her last name in silver letters. The clerk misreads it and thinks it spells “starved.” Cheryl buys a Snapple lemonade and chats with passersby, including a couple who invite her to a memorial for Jerry Garcia at a local club. The woman, who is from Switzerland, rubs Cheryl’s feet and misreads her necklace.

Cheryl returns to the post office later that day to retrieve her box. The clerk hands it to her without apologizing, even though the box was there all along. Cheryl checks in to the local hostel with Stacy, showers, and enjoys a big dinner. She then attends the Jerry Garcia memorial party, where she dances with a club worker named Jonathan to the song “Box of Rain.” He invites her to see another band the following night. A trucker offers Cheryl chewable opium, which she puts in her mouth before spitting it out. Jonathan takes her to the organic farm where he lives, and they kiss under the stars. Cheryl regrets leaving her condom at the hostel. She pulls away when Jonathan unzips her pants because she is self-conscious about the rough patches on her hips, but Jonathan reassures her. The following day, Jonathan takes Cheryl to the beach in Brookings. Cheryl realizes that she and Paul visited the same beach years earlier. She writes Paul’s name in the sand and erases it before forgiving herself for their divorce. Jonathan pulls out a bag of food and a box of condoms. They have sex. On her way out of Ashland the next day, Cheryl gives a homeless man food, reprimanding him when he calls her baby.

Part 5, Chapter 16 Summary: “Mazama”

Chapter 16 describes Cheryl’s hike to Crater Lake, a volcanic formation formerly called Mount Mazama. Cheryl is armed with a new guidebook, The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington. The air gets cooler the further north she hikes. On August 18–her mother’s birthday–she wakes to snow on her tent and frozen water in her bottles. Cheryl makes a mental list of all things her mother did wrong: 1) Smoking pot in front of her children; 2) Leaving her children home alone when they were very young because she couldn’t afford a babysitter; 3) Spanking her children with a wooden spoon; 4) Telling her children to call her by her first name; 5) Being so cold and distant with friends that none of them stayed in touch with the children after her death; 6) Being overly optimistic and minimizing their problems, especially their poverty; 7) Not supporting Cheryl academically in high school or guiding her through the college application process. Cheryl curses her mother and wails in grief, wishing she’d had the opportunity to grow apart from her naturally. Her anger dissipates when she sees a patch of pink crocuses, a word her mother taught her.

When she resumes hiking, she is free of anger and certain of her mother’s love. She thinks of the words her mother repeated during her illness, the same words etched into her tombstone: “I’m with you always” (269). Cheryl mentions her mother’s name for the first time–Bobbi–as she sits by the fire on what would have been her mother’s 50th birthday. She realizes that Bobbi had an identity that was separate from her identity as a mother. Cheryl finally sees her mother as a whole person. She is grateful to be hiking the PCT, despite the uncertainty that awaits after her journey. She reaches Crater Lake, an appalling tourist complex. Cheryl’s disgust turns to awe when she sees the lake itself. She thinks about her abortion nine months earlier. Her due date would have been the same week as her mother’s birthday. Unlike her mother, who had a baby when she was 19, Cheryl knew she needed to become a woman before becoming a mother. Cheryl tries to imagine the mountain that was Mount Mazama, but all she sees is the lake.

Part 5, Chapter 17 Summary: “Into a Primal Gear”

Chapter 17 begins with Cheryl hiking to Shelter Cove Resort, the location of her next resupply box. Cheryl’s feet still hurt, but they are no longer bloody and blistered. Although Cheryl is stronger than ever, she is nevertheless exhausted at the end of each day. She arrives at Shelter Cove Resort and immediately buys a Snapple lemonade and a bag of chips. The store clerk informs her that the post office is closed but that she can camp for free at a nearby site. Cheryl pays to use the shower, inspecting her coarse hair in a scratched mirror. Afterward, she puts her dirty clothes back on and goes to the store, where she meets three young male hikers, who call themselves the Three Young Bucks. The men tell Cheryl that they have been reading her notes in the trail registers and had long hoped to catch up with her. Cheryl admires the fortitude of the Three Young Bucks, who hiked from the Mexican border without skipping the High Sierra. The four have dinner together and sleep under the stars. The next morning, Cheryl worries when she collects her box from the post office but cannot find the $20 bill she put inside. She sets off with the Three Young Bucks, parting ways with them late that afternoon. She camps alone near a pond and basks in the joy of having met them. That evening, she falls asleep reading Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand Things.

Cheryl’s hike to the Three Sisters the next day is especially grueling. Each of the three peaks is more than 10,000 feet high. Cheryl approaches them singing songs and reciting poetry in her head. She takes a detour to Elk Lake Resort, a small store that caters to local fishermen. The resort also has a café. Cheryl spends nearly all her money on a cheeseburger, fries, and a coke, leaving the waiter stamps in place of a tip. Having only two pennies in her pocket prompts Cheryl to think about her family, whose poverty emboldened her to tackle the PCT with limited funds.

The Three Sisters trail is full of day hikers and short-term backpackers. Cheryl encounters Boy Scouts who are fascinated by her journey. Two Iraq War veterans share their beer with her. The next day, Cheryl hikes over McKenzie Pass toward the Mount Washington Wilderness. The trail becomes rockier and the landscape desolate. The days are hot and the nights frigid. Cheryl meets two bowhunters in the dense forest on her way to Olallie Lake. She lends them her water filter, which they break as they try to pump water into empty Pepsi cans. Cheryl gives them iodine pills and explains that she is hiking the PCT. The hunters make suggestive comments about her body. Feeling uneasy, Cheryl tells them she is heading out but instead hides and waits for them to leave. One of the hunters comes back as she is setting up her tent. He hits on her again and gets annoyed when she objects. She asks him to leave, but he refuses. His friend appears and insists they leave. Cheryl packs Monster and runs away.

Part 5, Chapter 18 Summary: “Queen of the PCT”

Chapter 18 picks up the morning after Cheryl’s unsettling run-in with the hunters. As she hikes in the rain, she thinks about what might have happened. Although she is shaken, miserable, and wet, she appreciates the majestic beauty of the forest. It is still raining when she arrives at the deserted resort of Olallie Lake. Cheryl makes camp, cooks dinner, and crawls into her damp sleeping bag. The thought of leaving the trail the following week is bittersweet. Cheryl will miss hiking, but she is excited to move to Portland and pursue her dream of becoming a writer.

The next morning, Cheryl retrieves her resupply box from a ranger and is thrilled to find two $20 bills and letters from Aimee, Paul, and Ed, the man she met at Kennedy Meadows. Ed’s words of congratulations fill her with pride. Cheryl spends the day trying to dry her belongings and then encounters The Three Young Bucks. The ranger invites Cheryl for a drink. Cheryl politely declines before changing her mind and asking if she can bring friends. The ranger is unhappy when she shows up at his door with the Three Young Bucks. He hits on Cheryl in the kitchen, but she retreats to the living room with her friends. They dry off by the fire while the ranger tells them gruesome stories about suicides and murders in the area.

At camp, the Three Young Bucks tell Cheryl they have a trail name for her: The Queen of the PCT. She thinks about all the questions she fielded about being a lone female hiker. She wasn’t preyed upon; rather people showed her kindness. The store clerk offers her a free cabin. Cheryl accepts and brings along the Three Young Bucks. She goes back to the store for snacks and is stunned to run into her friend Lisa from Portland. Along with the Three Young Bucks, they drive to Bagby Hot Springs and spend the evening in hot tubs. Cheryl’s mood dampens when she thinks of Paul on the drive back to Olallie Lake. Although she still loves Paul, she no longer feels an allegiance to him. She spends the night with the Three Young Bucks on her old futon, which Lisa brought from Portland. Their friendship fills Cheryl with gratitude.

Part 5, Chapter 19 Summary: “The Dream of a Common Language”

Chapter 19 focuses on Cheryl’s final days on the PCT. She receives chocolate and a bottle of red wine from a friend before running into Doug, who is pleased she still has the feather he gave her. Cheryl and Doug hike to Warm Springs River and enjoy the wine as coyotes yip in the distance. Feeling a special closeness to Doug, Cheryl offers him The Ten Thousand Things, which he declines. She burns the book after Doug goes to bed, thinking of Eddie as she watches the flames grow. Eddie was a father to Cheryl. He taught her how to build a fire, pitch a tent, and tie knots during family camping trips. Cheryl realizes that she would not have ended up on the PCT without him. She also realizes that Eddie loves her even though their relationship changed after her mother’s death. Before bed, Cheryl reads from The Dream of a Common Language, a book she hadn’t opened since her first night on the trail.

A few days later, Cheryl and Doug hike to Timberline Lodge. They encounter Tom and other hikers along the way, stopping to swim in icy lakes. The hikers play cards and drink while Cheryl walks through the lodge alone. The clear day offers views of more than 100 miles. The next day, Cheryl says goodbye to her friends and hikes toward the Bridge of Gods, the final stop on her journey. She passes the ski lift at Mount Hood and enters the forest, relishing the solitude. Cheryl is delighted to splash cold water on her face directly from a creek. As she does, she wonders where her mother is before finally releasing her.

The following days are spent descending the mountains to the Bridge of Gods. Cheryl stops hiking six miles short of her destination. Her body is sore. New blisters have formed on her feet. Another toenail is hanging on by a thread. Cheryl sleeps on her tarp under the stars. She reaches the Columbia River the next day, walking past mossy trees and glittery spiderwebs. In the distance, the sound of car engines roars. She emerges from the forest at Cascade Locks. The Bridge of God’s appears in the distance, linking Cascade Locks in Oregon to Stevenson in Washington. Cheryl touches the bridge, but she doesn’t cross it. Her journey has come to an end two days before her 27th birthday. A man in a BMW pulls up and offers Cheryl a ride to Portland. She turns him down, wanting to prolong her journey. Cheryl closes her eyes, thankful to have hiked the PCT. In the years that follow, she remarries, has two children, and writes a book about her journey. She also experiences heartbreak when Doug dies in a kite-sailing accident in New Zealand. However, the future is unknown to Cheryl as she sits alone, at peace, in Cascade Locks.

Part 5 Analysis

Part 5 focuses on Cheryl’s emotional growth after three months on the PCT. Chapter 16 is particularly important because it addresses Cheryl’s feelings toward her mother. Her breakthrough comes on what would have been her mother’s 50th birthday. Cheryl used to feel sad on her mother’s birthday. On the PCT, however, she allows herself to be angry and directs her rage at her mother: “She didn’t live. She didn’t get to be fifty. She would never be fifty, I told myself as I walked under the cold and bright August sun. Be fifty, Mom. Be fucking fifty, I thought with increasing rage as I forged on. I couldn’t believe how furious I was at my mother for not being alive on her fiftieth birthday” (264). Indeed, Cheryl’s anger is so intense it borders on violence: “I had the palpable urge to punch her in the mouth” (264).

Sadness and regret underlie Cheryl’s rage. She laments not having had the chance to grow apart from her mother gradually, the way other mothers and daughters do: “I didn’t get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I’d wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again” (267). Losing her mother thrust Cheryl into adulthood before she was ready, but it simultaneously stunted her development, keeping her mired in childhood: “[Her death] 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” (267). Cheryl describes the emptiness of not having a mother, stressing her inability to fill the void: “She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again” (267). After making a mental list of all the mistakes her mother made, including smoking pot and spanking her children, Cheryl swears at her mother for being a bad parent: “She had failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me. Fuck her, I thought, so mad that I stopped walking” (267).

Cheryl’s rage soon turns into grief. Her sadness is so profound that inhuman sounds come from her mouth: “I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up” (267). The grief then turns to anger again, prompting Cheryl to curse her mother repeatedly as she hikes: “Fuck her, I chanted as I marched on over the next few miles, my pace quickened by my rage” (267). It is not until Cheryl sees a patch of pink crocuses that her emotions level off. The flowers remind Cheryl of the place where she scattered her mother’s ashes. They also remind Cheryl of how wonderful her mother was and how much she had loved her children:

The truth was […] she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who—no matter how long they lived—would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered that love her greatest achievement. It was what she banked on when she understood that she really was going to die and die soon, the thing that made it just barely okay for her to leave me and Karen and Leif behind (268).

The night of her mother’s birthday on the PCT, Cheryl sits outside burning the pages of one of her books. She says her mother’s name out loud as she watches the flames grow, finally seeing her mother as a whole person: “Saying Bobbi instead of Mom felt like a revelation, like it was the first time that I truly understood that she was my mother, but also more. When she’d died, I’d lost that too—the Bobbi she’d been, the woman who was separate from who she was to me” (269). Seeing Bobbi as a complete person–and not just as her mother–changed Cheryl. She explains this shift in perspective with a poignant metaphor: “She seemed to come at me now, the full perfect and imperfect force of her humanity, as if her life was an intricately painted mural and I could finally see the whole thing. Who she’d been to me and who she hadn’t. How it was she belonged to me profoundly, and also how she didn’t” (269). Cheryl hears coyotes howling after her fire goes out, but she is not afraid. The sounds remind her of home, where she felt safe in her mother’s arms.

Cheryl not only comes to terms with her mother’s death, but she also forgives herself for the mistakes she made in the throes of grief. In Chapter 15, for example, she comes to accept her role in the disintegration of her marriage. Cheryl hurt Paul repeatedly with her extramarital affairs and drug use. On the PCT, she decides to forgive herself for these mistakes: “What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do?” (258). Cheryl no longer feels guilty about her behavior toward Paul, nor does she wish she could change the past. Instead, she accepts her affairs and drug use as necessary parts of the healing process: “What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? […] What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here?” (258).

Toward the end of her journey, Cheryl also comes to terms with her relationship with Eddie, who was like a father to her. He embraced her and her siblings from the start of his relationship with Bobbi, which made the distance between them now more painful. As she burns the last pages of The Ten Thousand Things, Cheryl realizes that Eddie is the reason she is on the PCT. Eddie was the first person who took Cheryl camping. He taught Cheryl how to pitch a tent, tie knots, and use a jackknife to open cans. Eddie also showed Cheryl how to paddle a canoe and skip rocks on water. Eddie took Bobbi and her children camping and canoeing nearly every weekend from June to September for three consecutive years. Even after his workplace injury, Eddie continued to teach Cheryl about the woods on their plot of land in the countryside. Although Cheryl’s unresolved feelings for Eddie sit “like a boulder in [her] throat” (304), she is nonetheless grateful to have had him in her life: “He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered” (304).

Like previous sections, Part 5 of Cheryl’s memoir emphasizes the physical strain of long-distance hiking. In Chapter 17, Cheryl provides a vivid description of the pain in her feet despite her new boots: “My feet stopped bleeding and blistering, but they still hurt like hell […] They hurt deep. Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain” (274-75). Although Cheryl’s body is stronger toward the end of her journey than it was at the start, hiking is nevertheless exhausting: “I was stronger than ever […] though at day’s end I was still pretty much shattered” (275).

In contrast to earlier chapters, which underscore Cheryl’s string of extramarital affairs and one-night stands, Chapter 15 describes her meaningful sexual relationship with Jonathan. The episode serves as a foil for Cheryl’s casual sex experiences, demonstrating how far she has come on her journey of self-discovery. Cheryl describes wavering between self-confidence and self-doubt in the presence of Jonathan:

I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-muscle ass and thighs […] a feeling which lasted for about the length of one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips (249).

Unlike the brief, crude descriptions of Cheryl’s one-night stands, her experiences with Jonathan are detailed and gentle: “We recommenced kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands running everywhere over my clothes, my hands running everywhere over his” (255). Jonathan is respectful of Cheryl. He seeks Cheryl’s consent before engaging in sexual activity. Further, he doesn’t pressure her when he realizes they don’t have a condom: “‘It’s okay,’ he whispered, taking both of my hands into his. ‘We can just hang out. There are a lot of things we can do, actually’” (255). Jonathan is not only respectful of Cheryl but also quick to reassure her when she becomes self-conscious about the rough patches of skin on her hips:

He sat up, his naked chest against me, pushing my hair aside to kiss my neck and shoulders until I turned and pulled him down onto me as I wriggled out of my pants while he kissed his way down my body from my ear to my throat to my collarbone to my breasts to my navel to the lace of my underwear, which he nudged down as he worked his way to the patches over my hip bones that I hoped he would never touch. ‘Oh, baby,’ he whispered, his mouth so soft against the roughest part of me. ‘You don’t have to worry about a thing’ (257).

Cheryl is completely at ease with Jonathan when the two finally have sex at the beach in Brookings the following day. The experience is so heady Cheryl forgets that they are outside. They drive back to Ashland in peaceful silence, sated after 22 hours in each other’s company.

Cheryl’s experiences with Jonathan contrast starkly with her encounter with two hunters in Chapter 17. The hunters’ suggestive remarks make Cheryl uncomfortable: “I can’t believe a girl like you would be all alone up here. You’re way too pretty to be out here alone, if you ask me” (285), one of the hunters says. “I wouldn’t let you come out here if you were my girlfriend, that’s for shit shock sure” (285), remarks his companion. Cheryl’s discomfort grows as the conversation wears on, as evidenced by her visceral reaction when one of the hunters compliments her figure. Her stomach clenches and her throat becomes “clotted suddenly with fear” (285). The situation worsens when one of the hunters returns and realizes she lied about leaving the area: “You tried to trick us” (286), he says, growing angry when Cheryl stands up for herself. Cheryl does not experience sexual violence on the PCT, despite hiking alone most of the time. The episode with the hunters, however, draws attention to her vulnerability. The experience is a sobering one: “No matter how tough or strong or brave I’d been, how comfortable I’d come to be with being alone, I’d also been lucky, and that if my luck ran out now, it would be as if nothing before it had ever existed, that this one evening would annihilate all those brave days” (286).

The hunters are the exception that proves the rule. Cheryl’s encounters on the PCT are overwhelmingly positive. Kind strangers give her food, rides to and from the trail, and places to sleep, while fellow hikers offer her friendship and encouragement. Cheryl’s experiences with the Three Young Bucks are nothing but joyful; her encounters with Jonathan are both tender and passionate; and she feels a sense of solidarity in the company of Stacy and Trina. Cheryl’s closest bond, however, is the one she shares with Doug, the jovial young man who gave her a feather in Chapter 7. Doug is not simply a friend to Cheryl. By the end of her journey, she thinks of him as family: “He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder and I put my hand on his and squeezed it. He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again” (302). The people Cheryl encountered on the PCT changed the course of her life. She is overwhelmed when she finally arrives at the Bridge of Gods: “I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once” (309). By the time she reaches Cascade Locks, however, she is decidedly at peace.