How did cheryl strayed meet brian lindstrom

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2012 by Cheryl Strayed

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strayed, Cheryl, [date] Wild / Cheryl Strayed. — 1st ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-95765-8 1. Strayed, Cheryl, [date]—Travel—Paci!c Crest Trail. 2. Authors, American—21st century— Biography. 3. Pacific Crest Trail—Description and travel. I. Title. PS3619.T744Z46 2012 813′.6 [B] 2011033752

Map by Mapping Specialists Jacket photograph: iStockphoto Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson

v3.1

For Brian Lindstrom

And for our children, Carver and Bobbi

CONTENTS

Cover Other Books by This Author

Title Page Copyright

Dedication Author’s Note

Map Prologue

PART ONE. THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS 1 The Ten Thousand Things

2 Splitting 3 Hunching in a Remotely Upright Position

PART TWO. TRACKS 4 The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California

5 Tracks 6 A Bull in Both Directions

7 The Only Girl in the Woods

PART THREE. RANGE OF LIGHT 8 Corvidology

9 Staying Found 10 Range of Light

PART FOUR. WILD 11 The Lou Out of Lou

12 This Far 13 The Accumulation of Trees

14 Wild

PART FIVE. BOX OF RAIN 15 Box of Rain

16 Mazama 17 Into a Primal Gear 18 Queen of the PCT

19 The Dream of a Common Language

Acknowledgments Books Burned on the PCT

Reading Group Guide About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

To write this book, I relied upon my personal journals, researched facts when I could, consulted with several of the people who appear in the book, and called upon my own memory of these events and this time of my life. I have changed the names of most but not all of the individuals in this book, and in some cases I also modi!ed identifying details in order to preserve anonymity. There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.

PROLOGUE

The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed my hiking boots and the left one had fallen into those trees, !rst catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then skittering across the gravelly trail and #ying over the edge. It bounced o$ of a rocky outcropping several feet beneath me before disappearing into the forest canopy below, impossible to retrieve. I let out a stunned gasp, though I’d been in the wilderness thirty-eight days and by then I’d come to know that anything could happen and that everything would. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked when it did. My boot was gone. Actually gone.

I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile. What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore, and I could take no mercy on it. It was a big lug of a thing, of genuine heft, a brown leather Raichle boot with a red lace and silver metal fasts. I lifted it high and threw it with all my might and watched it fall into the lush trees and out of my life.

I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I’d told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world. My father left my life when I was six. My mother died when I was twenty-two. In the wake of her death, my stepfather morphed from the person I considered my dad into a man I only occasionally recognized. My two siblings scattered in their grief, in spite of my e$orts to hold us together, until I gave up and scattered as well.

In the years before I pitched my boot over the edge of that mountain, I’d been pitching myself over the edge too. I’d ranged and roamed and railed—from Minnesota to New York to Oregon and all

across the West—until at last I found myself, bootless, in the summer of 1995, not so much loose in the world as bound to it.

It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I’d once been. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles long.

A world called the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d !rst heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in

Minneapolis, sad and desperate and on the brink of divorcing a man I still loved. I’d been standing in line at an outdoor store waiting to purchase a foldable shovel when I picked up a book called The Paci!c Crest Trail, Volume 1: California from a nearby shelf and read the back cover. The PCT, it said, was a continuous wilderness trail that went from the Mexican border in California to just beyond the Canadian border along the crest of nine mountain ranges—the Laguna, San Jacinto, San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Liebre, Tehachapi, Sierra Nevada, Klamath, and Cascades. That distance was a thousand miles as the crow #ies, but the trail was more than double that. Traversing the entire length of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, the PCT passes through national parks and wilderness areas as well as federal, tribal, and privately held lands; through deserts and mountains and rain forests; across rivers and highways. I turned the book over and gazed at its front cover—a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags against a blue sky—then placed it back on the shelf, paid for my shovel, and left.

But later I returned and bought the book. The Paci!c Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a map.

I would walk that line, I decided—or at least as much of it as I could in about a hundred days. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Minneapolis, separated from my husband, and working