Strayed hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. There was the driving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon, and, a few days later, catching a flight to Los Angeles and a ride to the town of Mojave and another ride to the place where the PCT crossed a highway. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. For a good number of years shed mostly been a vegetarian. We were finally on our way up to see the last doctor. The one who would gather everything that had been gathered about my mom and tell us what was true. Our names blurred into one in my mothers mouth all my life. We received government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and medical assistance cards, and free presents from do-gooders at Christmastime. She would mix food coloring into sugar water and pretend with us that it was a special drink. She would spread her arms wide and ask us how much and there would never be an end to the game. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mothers grave one last time. Duluth was a freezing hick town where doctors who didnt know what the hell they were talking about told forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish, garlic- eating, natural-remedy-using nonsmokers that they had late-stage lung cancer, thats what. I followed behind, not allowing myself to think a thing. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs. She worked and worked and worked, and still we were poor. in a snooty British voice that made us laugh every time.
Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. We fought and talked and made up jokes and diversions in order to pass the time. wed ask one another over and over again, playing a game in which the person who was it had to think of someone, famous or not, and the others would guess who it was based on an infinite number of yes or no questions: Are you a man? Instead, she instructed us to slather our bodies with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. Eddie would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then stay come fall. Or rather, my mother, Leif, Karen, and I did, along with our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of ten baby chicks my mom got for free at the feed store for buying twenty-five pounds of chicken feed.With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington Stateand she would do it alone. In the evenings, we would make a game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight.Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. The numbers would be seventy-nine, eighty-six, one hundred and three.