Kelley Calvin Outside Reading #1

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Prologue

This critically acclaimed book opens with Cheryl Strayed on the side of a mountain stopped. It is day 38 on her journey and her left hiking boot tumbles off the side of the mountain onto the canopy below. Strayed is almost un-amused by this happening. She is stunned that the boot did fall into the trees under her but the situation does not shock her. Over the course of 38 days on the trail she had leaned that anything that could possibly go wrong will. We learnt that Strayed is 26 at the time. She sees the boot situation as a metaphor for her life. She is hiking the trail because her life has been falling apart and the boot, to her, was a symbol of her life. 

The reader learns that in the years leading up to her hike her mother had passed, she had gotten a divorce, and watched her family drift from one another. It does evidently seem as if her life were to be falling apart. All this trauma leads t=her to the Pacific Crest Trail. She picked up a book seven months prior to the boot accident and in it, it talked about the PCT. She decided in order to help gain control of her life she would hike the PCT and gain some control of the wilderness. Reflecting on the incident of her boot, Strayed realizes the only thing she can possibly do is to keep walking.