Brief Summary Of Wild By Cheryl Strayed

The book “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed is a story about the author herself, and how she walks the Pacific Crest Trail. The trail goes from the border of Mexico all the way to the border of Canada. Her journey into the wilderness was led due to the fact that she lost her mother to cancer. She watched her family and siblings fall apart and even divorced her husband. In the four years between the death of her mother and the start of her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed traveled all over the country. The morning she began her hike, Strayed put on her hiking outfit then she opened the compartments of her pack and looked over her belongings. These items included a sleeping bag, a camp chair, a water purifier, a stove, a tarp, a first-aid kit, and other necessities.

She also carried lots of water and later realized how much water actually weighed.

The bag was so difficult to carry that Strayed could barely get it on her back. Strayed walked to a nearby gas station, where she tried to hitch a ride to the Pacific Crest Trail. She observed a lot of people but everyone had a full car or she feared might be rapists. Finally she had the guts to ask two men traveling in a minivan for a ride. She began to walk and within 40 minutes she was already regretting it. The backpack was so heavy she could barely tolerate it. Hiking on a trail was so much different then what Cheryl expected six months earlier when she decided to go on the journey for real. She was driving with her friend Aimee when Cheryl first saw the Pacific Crest Trail guidebook. That same trip, she had discovered she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion. The father of the child was Joe, a man she had met the last summer in Oregon. Joe introduced Cheryl to heroin and she moved in with him right away. That summer she began using heroin on the daily until her friend Lisa confronted her about it. Her ex-husband Paul drove all the way to Oregon just to try to talk her out of doing heroin

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3 hours into her hike and she felt exhausted so she stopped to camp. The next morning her muscles were sore from the previous day but she didn’t want to give up. Cheryl ate breakfast and started towards the trail again. She had planned to walk an average of 14 miles a day. She was already behind the second day and too tired to keep walking so she set up her tent and went to sleep. On the eight day she felt weird not seeing people for that long. She came across two men in a pickup and they warned she had walked into a mining site. One of the men decided she would stay the night with him and his wife. His wife, Annette, fed her and let her shower. The next morning Cheryl hitchhiked again with a man named Troy who drove a truck that distributed chips. The next morning she decided to call Paul from a payphone. They talked for nearly an hour and as she hung up, she realized she missed Paul and her old life. By this time, Strayed had been on the PCT for a little over a month, and she realized that she was incredibly alone, but that she was okay.