If you want to find my polar opposite, someone like Cheryl seems a good place to start. She got married at 19 after a short relationship; when she was 22, she watched her mother die of cancer; she dropped out of school one paper shy of a degree; she dabbled in heroin (and possibly other drugs) after that; and she cheated on her spouse. Oh yeah, by 26 she was divorced and setting out on the Pacific Crest Trail, having never gone backpacking before. Despite our complete lack of similarity, I love this book (and I haven’t even finished it yet), which I first heard about from my uncle when we all went backpacking a few months ago. It has, of course, become wildly popular, was included on Oprah’s book club list, and as I write this, is #63 on Amazon’s Books Best Sellers list.
Before diving into why this book is awesome, I want to mention that I love the idea of hiking the PCT. Well, for the most part. The idea of traversing from Mexico to California on foot, covering the High Sierras among others, intrigues me. Less intriguing are details such as having to mail yourself resupply boxes along the PCT and, at least in certain parts, having to carry out your, um, waste (or so I’ve heard, but haven’t verified). I’ve done a lot of short backpacking trips, including lots in the Adirondacks and some in Yosemite, but never more than 2-3 nights. Even as a somewhat experienced backpacker, I wonder how I would survive a multi-month backpacking trip. Could I push through the blisters on my feet that would inevitably appear after a few days? How would I handle doing nothing but hiking day after day after day? The credit goes to Cheryl who, with no idea that most backpackers train intently for the PCT, chooses to make it her inaugural backpacking adventure.
One of my favorite things about this book is how well she blends in her hiking trip with the back stories of why she’s here. For example, early on in the book, she takes a break, removes her sock, and looks down at a black bruise on her ankle. We are transported back to her last trip to Portland, just before leaving for the PCT. She’s met up again with Joe, her heroin partner, and he’s looking for a vein in her arm. He can’t find one, asking for her ankle instead. The result of her final dance with heroin is the bruise on her ankle. She continues to do this – equally well, I might add – as the book continues. There’s the part where she talks about the condoms she brought on the PCT (who in the bleep does that?) and then transitions into a conversation with her therapist about how she’s like a guy when it comes to sex –completely “detached.”
Part of the success for her book comes from her ability to weave these stories into her trail experience. Her history is one that I think many would be likely to dismiss (I can see people thinking, “you were an addict, divorced a perfectly good husband, and then decided to hike the PCT with a pack you could hardly lift? Idiot” – and then putting the book down). However, but putting the focus on her experience hiking the PCT, she’s made herself into a character that you sympathize with and keeps her bouts of “woe is me” short and relevant. So yes, I quite liked this book, all except for one thing.
I think she messes up her chronology of the first few days of her hike. I, too, couldn’t believe it, but I’ve been through this a bunch and have no other conclusion. On p49, DAY ONE. She leaves her hotel (I believe midday, although I couldn’t find this referenced again) and hitches a ride with two Coloradoans to the PCT trailhead. She signs into the register. P51-57 is a flashback to when she thinks she’s pregnant (again, well written) and how she buys her copy of Pacific Crest Trail Volume 1: California. On p57 again, she references that she’s in a grove of “Joshua trees, yuccas, and junipers,” and also points out that she’s 1200 ft higher than she was at the start. On p59, she sees a sage plant that reminds her of her mother and gives up for the day at 4pm, even though she had intended to continue on farther. Chapter 5, p61, starts with DAY TWO. She wakes at dawn, stays in bed for an hour. She packs up, as she had done “the day before in the motel” and by noon, is over 6000 ft. She stops for lunch, falls asleep, and wakes up to rain two hours later. On p63, we’re in the “late afternoon and evening”, where she recounts seeing snow and appreciating the significance of climbing a mountain. She mentions that her “existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail,” confirming that we’re still on the second day. Then, on p64, chronological disaster strikes. We’re still on DAY TWO, but she realizes that it’s only been “little more than 48 hours since [her] goodbye to men who had given me a ride to the trail.” But it can’t be more than 48 hours – we’re only in DAY TWO. And we know this, because on p65, she stops for the night at 7pm, still not having reached Golden Oak Springs. She doesn’t reach Golden Oak Springs until a few hours into her third day, where she spends the night before venturing out on her fourth day on p67.
Is this really the end of the world? No, not at all. In fact, given that she took the hike in the mid-90s and the book was only published this year, I can’t imagine that there aren’t at least a few errors in recollection – although I will say that I have no proof of any such errors, and she does say that she kept a journal on her trip. It was mostly just disappointing that no one caught this discrepancy, and I post this mostly hoping that someone will correct me and prove me wrong. Even if it turns out that I’m right, the story is still worth reading, mostly because the many other errors she makes turn the book into an entertaining read. Better yet, rather than laughing at her, you’ll find yourself rooting for her at every turn, encouraging her to keep going and to discover in her journey whatever it is that she needs in order to find a better place than where she’s been since her mother died four years earlier.
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