Paying Attention to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild

It’s been a while dear blog, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about you. In all honesty, my writing brain has been filled to the brim these past few weeks, reading and researching and thinking and (get this!) sometimes writing parts of my book. But I wanted to check in. Mostly I wanted to talk a bit about Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, Wild.

Here’s a brief summary for those unfamiliar: Cheryl Strayed lost her mother to cancer when she was 22 years old, her mother just 45. After that, her life shattered. She cheated on her husband, got addicted to heroin, watched the remnants of her family scatter in the wind like so much dandelion fluff. At 26 years old, almost on a whim, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Maybe it was an instinctual reflex to get herself out of a dangerous rut. On the trail, she discovered a lot about herself while she walked and mourned her mother. The book is about this journey, both physical and emotional, but it’s the emotional one I connect to the most, though I can certainly empathize with needing a long, exhausting, sometimes dangerous walk to keep the physical body in balance with a roiling torment within. It makes sense, like pinching another part of your skin to distract your brain from a broken nose.

I first read this book pre-2016; i.e., before my mother died. I know this because I remember renting the 2014 movie from the Redbox at Wal-Mart in Johnstown for a dollar because I had the weird, sentimental, maybe macabre idea to watch it with my mother. I rented a few movies, in my defense, but I knew going in that we’d only make it through one, realistically, before she fell asleep. I also knew I’d make us start with Wild.

It was a Saturday, and I must have been home from college for the summer; I vaguely remember my dad and my brother taking a day-trip somewhere, so my dad had asked me to look after my mother while he was away. In 2014, this had become a necessary asterisk every time my dad left the house for longer than a few hours. In 2014, it was still possible for someone like me to fulfill that asterisk; it didn’t require much heavy lifting (both literally and figuratively). Was she sleeping downstairs in the living room by this point? Perhaps just on the cusp of that. Before the permanent hospital bed on the first floor, there were a few years when my dad helped her onto the double stair-lifts we’d had installed so she could reach their bedroom (two because our staircase was broken in the middle by a landing). And before the stair-lifts, I remember my dad carrying her upstairs to bed each night.

Sometimes it feels like the only way I can distinguish parts of her physical decline so well is because it happened alongside my own formative childhood development. Once I reached college, though, things started blending together. I didn’t keep a journal. I didn’t take notes. Mostly, I tried to pretend my family didn’t exist. That was easy enough when I had new friends to make, classes to study for, parties to get smashed at, etc. Less so when I returned home and saw my mother’s diminishing health with the fresh eyes distance and space had given me. Changes became abrupt, not gradual. The crawl of time blinked by for me in blips. Everything seemed to happen so much faster once I left, but that’s probably because I made a concerted effort not to pay attention.

To pay attention…well, that would have cost me what I wasn’t prepared or able to give at the time. 

Pay attention. It’s what I psychically tried to communicate to my mom as we started watching the movie. I thought it would be something like a bonding experience for the two of us, but I didn’t want to have to orchestrate it all the way. I wanted her to want to watch it, too. For the bonding to happen organically. For us to witness this mother-daughter relationship torn apart by illness – but more importantly, for her to see the aftereffects of that relationship when the mother died. I was 22 years old, just as young as Cheryl at the moment her life changed forever. It was pretty fucked up of me to put up a mirror to my mother without acknowledging it was a mirror for me, too. 

In truth, picking that movie was a lesson in vanity. I wanted to create a moment for me, not for her or even us. I shouldn’t have been surprised when, halfway through, I glanced over and saw that she had nodded off in her electric wheelchair, one of her Word Seek puzzle books lying precariously in her lap, on the verge of falling. I remember being first angry, then disappointed. The movie was ruined. I think I even clicked it off and went upstairs before returning an hour later feeling chagrined, even ashamed. I knew, deep down, that I was being childish and I hated myself for it. When she finally woke up, we started watching one of her favorite shows, Dr. Phil, and I pretended like we’d been watching that the whole time.

In current research for my own book, I’ve been revisiting a few memoirs I’ve already read (in addition to reading new ones). One of them is Wild. I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn’t actually read the book since my mom passed away. I wondered not if the experience would be different for me, but how. Though I’m still growing and learning as a human being (as I hope to always be doing), I’ve learned enough at this point to know that the book would be changed for me. 

This time around, I entered it hoping to explore Strayed’s craft of putting this particular story together – like the structure of the memoir itself, the way she connected past and present events via the PCT as a literal and metaphorical throughline in the book. I learned a lot about effective storytelling, especially when that story is true and takes place years before the writing of it. For everything that Strayed left in, I wondered about the parts left out. Like parts of the PCT she’d had to bypass in order to avoid threatening passages in snow-packed mountains, I wondered which parts of her life’s story she’d also been forced to bypass in favor of a clearer, more emotionally true narrative.

But in addition to that, I paid close to attention to the character of young Strayed – the lost, wandering 22-26 year old trying to piece her life back together after a monumental bereavement – through the lens of the narrator: the older Strayed who already knows what’s going to happen even as she channels young Strayed’s thoughts and feelings. The physical and emotional journey of the book is started by young Strayed, but it’s older Strayed who is able to show the fruits of all that labor: in her wisdom, reflection, and grace toward a younger self.

Older Strayed is also able to show this grace toward her mother, whom young Strayed is equal parts angry toward, hurt by, and longing for. 

In Chapter 16 of Wild, young Strayed is wending her way on the PCT to Crater Lake National Park. Throughout this stretch of the trail, her mother has been “looming for days” because Strayed herself is nearing the date of what would have been her mother’s 50th birthday had she continued living: August 18. But, as Strayed continues:

“She didn’t live. She didn’t get to be fifty. She would never be fifty…Be fifty, Mom. Be fucking fifty… I couldn’t believe how furious I was at my mother for not being alive on her fiftieth birthday. I had the palpable urge to punch her in the mouth” (264).

Young Strayed’s anger is, indeed, palpable in this passage, as it is in other parts of the book. It’s an anger I recognize and have sometimes felt deeply ashamed by. Later on in this same chapter, though, Strayed as narrator describes finally seeing Crater Lake, once a huge volcanic mountain called Mazama that “had its heart removed” in an explosion over 7,000 years ago, becoming an empty bowl that “took hundreds of years to fill,” in order to transform once again into the impossibly deep, impossibly blue Crater Lake:

“But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began” (273).

It’s the acknowledgement of healing that brings out older Strayed to me in this particular passage. Maybe young Strayed, too, is capable of such a poetic revelation but this one feels honed by time in a way that explicates almost perfectly a feeling so intrinsic, young Strayed may not have felt compelled to put it into words – or maybe she didn’t yet have the words or the skill or the space to do it justice. Young Strayed observes and recognizes the destruction needed for Crater Lake to exist. Older Strayed is able to extend and apply that same recognition toward herself and her mother.

There are many such examples of this dual selfhood in the book, and I’m especially interested in the way a narrator is able to commune and empathize, even criticize, a younger self. I’m not necessarily writing a memoir about my life, but I am writing a lot about my life in relation to my mother’s and her experience with illness. It means that I’ve had to confront a lot of unpleasant truths about myself, ones I’d rather turn away from but that ultimately serve their place in the tapestry of my family and its history. 

All that said, the character of my younger self is relatively easy to pin down. It’s the narrator of my story I think I’m still striving to become. Maybe the act of writing will be a bridge between the two. Maybe my narrator is somewhere walking its own trail, and I’m slowly but surely catching up. When I get to the rim of the lake, how will I feel? What metaphor will I choose to say the things I couldn’t say when I had the chance to say them? Who will be listening when I do?

Big questions, my friends.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

x,

Sam