How To Write An Argumentative Essay On Wild

A Stray on the Pacific Coast Trail

The cold, the heat, the loneliness, the pain, the fear; all faced alone. One can hardly imagine doing this solo, but Cheryl Strayed can bring it to life. Strayeds descriptive mode of discourse in the adventure story, Wild, portrayed her feelings vividly, made the audience feel more involved, and provoked emotion in the reader to make it feel more real.

Cheryl Strayed did not leave any emotions out from her readers. For Example, she said, “I felt a spark of light travel through me that had everything to do with the fact that I’d be done hiking the trail in about a week…I'd spent hours imagining how it would feel to be back in the world where food and music, wine and coffee could be had” (Staryed 290). Staryed

expressed longing for the normal life again. She missed the simple luxuries that were offered every day. Also, when her mother passed she explained, “I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal. She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more” (Staryed 26). She was lost that her mother was gone; she did not know what to do. Her feelings of being lost were shown when she was rooting her face through her mother’s body, desperately trying to find herself in her; trying not to lose her mother.
In addition, Strayed made sure the audience visualized everything the way she had. For instance, Strayed described a man she encountered only once, “He was a big, red haired guy, gregarious and thirty-eight years old. He struck me as the kind of person who gave a lot of bear hugs” (Staryed 198). Even though he was not a major character, Strayed felt the importance of making him known to the reader. His description was short but precise to make sure the reader both visualized and stayed interested. Also, she described a simple fox in a very beautiful way. “He was barley knee high, though his strength was irrefutable; his beauty dazzling, his superiority to me was apparent down to his ever pristine hair” (Strayed 144). Strayed described such a simple creature so intensely to make the reader feel as if the fox were standing in front of them. She did not have to go into such detail but it helped the reader step into Staryeds shoes and walk this adventure with her.
Finally, to make everything feel real, Cheryl Strayed provoked emotion to help the audience understand.

For example, “Blood gushed from her nostrils in a sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She coughed and coughed, tremendous budgets of blood coming each time, her back legs, buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her” (Staryed 161). Staryed made the audience feel the horror of this scene. She made the audience understand the pain she endured when her and her brother had to put their mother’s horse down. On the same token, in the years that followed, one of her fellow trail mates passed away, Strayed explains, “I didn’t know that I’d read the he’d died nine years after we said goodbye on the PTC…or how, after I cried remembering what a golden boy he’d been, I would go to the farthest corner of my basement, to the place we’re monster hung on a pair of rusty nails, and I’d see that the raven feather that Doug had given me was broken and frayed now, but still there- wedged into my packs frame, where I placed it years ago” (Staryed 311). The impact that Doug had on her was made very apparent. She wanted the audience to feel the love she had for Doug; how she still had the feather he had given her in her past life on the Pacific Coast

Trail.
Over all, Wild was a very vivid and descriptive story. Cheryl Strayed made the audience feel exactly what she was feeling and described everything that she was seeing at the time so clearly. Strayed brought the descriptive mode of discourse to a whole new level.