In this hugely entertaining book, Cheryl Strayed takes the redemptive nature of travel — a theme as old as literature itself — and makes it her own. For three months she hiked 1,100 miles (1,770 km) alone along the Pacific Crest Trail, a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges — the Laguna to the Cascades. She did it, she says, "in order to save myself."
An American raised in rural Minnesota, Strayed lost her beloved mother when she was 22. An abusive father had long ago vanished, and in the wake of their bereavement, Strayed's siblings and stepfather scattered and her marriage to a rather wonderful man collapsed as a result of her serial infidelities ("I'd smashed up my marriage over sex"). She was waitressing, servicing a student debt for a degree she failed to complete (she reckoned she would pay off the debt when she was 43), and then came Planet Heroin. In the wake of her divorce, she invented a new name for herself: Strayed.
Four years after her mother's death, still "unmoored by sorrow," she packed a rucksack and flew to California. "Hiking the PCT," she writes, "was my way back to the person I used to be."