Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found

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When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. We were swarmed by mosqui- toes as we worked, but my mother forbade us to use DEET or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming chemical. I loved him, but I’d been impetuous and nineteen when we’d wed; not remotely ready to commit myself to another person, no matter how dear he was. I had beloved friends whom I sometimes referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and intermittent, more familial in word than in deed.

In the rugged Pacific Northwest of the United States lies the Olympic National Forest – a vast expanse of impenetrable darkness and impossible beauty. We played it while planting and maintaining a garden that would sustain us through the winter in soil that had been left to its own devices throughout millennia, and while making steady progress on the con- struction of the house we were building on the other side of our property and hoped to complete by summer’s end. Trees that had once looked like any other to me became as recognizable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. The author refers at several points to issues with weight that dogged her past, and to her confused attitude to her own physical appearance. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that.A Chinese publisher had typeset it, though with certain cuts of the parts relating to Mao, but then the censor said no . I’d spent the previous weeks compil- ing them, addressing each box to myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. Set in the early and mid-1990s, Wild touches on several important cultural touchstones from the era of grunge music, Gen X, and the dawn of the internet. Like so much else, when I’d purchased the world’s loudest whistle, I hadn’t thought it all the way through.

We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep. Our forty acres were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses, swampy ponds and bogs clotted with cattails. Strayed's journey begins in the Mojave Desert and she hikes through California and Oregon to the Bridge of the Gods into Washington. And yet, here was my mother at the Mayo Clinic getting worn out if she had to be on her feet for more than three minutes.

I’d meant to take everything from the bags and fit it into my backpack before leaving Portland, but I hadn’t had the time. One of the nurses was a man, and I could see the outline of his penis through his tight white nurse’s trousers. Karen and Paul would be driving up together from Minneapolis the next morning and my mother’s parents were due from Alabama in a couple of days, but Leif was still nowhere to be found. It wouldn’t show you how in the months after my mother died, I attempted—and failed—to fill in for her in an effort to keep my family together. At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.