With its layered definition the word spoke directly to her heart. It struck a poetic chord; it resonated. "To wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress." She became Cheryl Strayed. And with the signing of the divorce papers and the claiming of a new name she identified with, she began her trek of the Pacific Crest Trail, a trail that she had just learned of months before. In a sense she strayed onto the trail because of her intense sorrow.
The history of the PCT goes back to a retired teacher from Bellingham, Washington named Catherine Montgomery. In a conversation with mountaineer and writer Joseph T. Hazard, she suggested that there should be a border-to-border "high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains." It was 1926. Though a small group of hikers immediately embraced Montgomery's idea, it wasn't until Clinton Churchill Clarke took up the cause six years later that a clear vision of the PCT began to coalesce. Clarke was an oilman who lived in leisure in Pasadena, but he was also an avid outdoors-man, who was appalled by a culture that spent "too much time sitting on soft seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies." Clarke lobbied the federal government to set aside a wilderness corridor for the trail. His vision went far beyond the PCT, which he hoped would be a mere segment of a much longer "Trail of the Americas" that would run from Alaska to Chile. He believed that time in the wilderness provided "a lasting curative and civilizing value," and he spent 25 years advocating for the PCT, though when he died in 1957 the trail was still only a dream.
Perhaps Clarke's most important contributions to the trail was making the acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was 24 when the two met in 1932. Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Thought initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail's creation and he spend the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished.
Cheryl Strayed didn't hike the whole PCT from Mexican border to Canadian border, and which actually extends beyond those borders. She started in southern California with a volkswagon of a backpack, much too heavy to lug and she was too inexperienced to know it, or even know how to part with some of it. She met people who encouraged her, a man who helped her repack her volkswagon which she was calling "monster" by this time, because it was so much larger and heavier than her contemporary hikers. At some point she had to get off the trail and avoid the snowy summits as the year she hiked there had been a particularly heavy snowfall. But she reconnected beyond the particularly snowy heights and slowly, ever so slowly, hiked northward, culminating her hike at Bridge of the Gods, near Portland, Oregon.
She healed considerably in her three months of climbing, frequently alone, on her 1,100- mile personal journey. Two months into the trek, she even observed that she hadn't cried once since getting on the trail, something that had been a daily inevitability since her mother had been so abruptly taken from her more than four years before.
The book was written in hindsight, 15 years after she returned to pick up the pieces of her life. In the many intervening years, she had gotten remarried, had a son and a daughter, and she had taken them to the culminating point of the trail and eaten ice cream with them like she had done when she had finished her personal PCT hiking journey. Hers was a cathartic journey, a shattering journey of emotions, and at the end of the trail she realized that she no longer needed to reach for ungraspable things with her bare hands. Just seeing fish below the surface of the water was enough to know that they were there. She had discovered truths of life on the trail, that life was mysterious ... and irrevocable ... and sacred. She knew more than before she began the hike, accepted more, and felt a sense of belonging that had escaped her when she had begun. The understanding was wild, her connection to everything was wild, and knowing this, she could let what she didn't understand be.
