The Pacific Crest Trail.
When you are in nature for extended periods, especially when alone, the membrane between yourself and the outside world gets thinner. The vocabulary of the forest and the wild starts to suggest itself in your dreams, and the sensory force of it begins to unlock your memories. The more extended the trip, the more thoroughly intimate it becomes; to go out, you find, is really to go in.
I think it was the dramatic presentation of this fact which made me love the movie Wild so much. The movie immediately calls to mind the movie Into the Wild, which is thematically similar, but this movie is effective at very different things. Into the Wild made American life on the road, in the form of its characters, seem appealing, and made me want to go out there and see it for myself, but when it got to real wilderness all it could offer were some postcard images overlaid with Eddie Vedder spirit-music, as if embarrassed, afraid that the image itself, and the silence itself, could hardly attract a modern person.
Wild is quite the opposite: it makes most human beings seem troubled, or annoying, or superficial, or dangerous, or boring; necessary sometimes for companionship, but hard to be around for long and certainly worth escaping. But that inner journey into aloneness – there, something worth having can be found. It is not misanthropic: it simply suggests that if you go off on a long hike, to the “Bridge of the Gods” (a real place, and the actual destination of the hike, which is wonderful) with an acknowledgement in your heart that you simply cannot solve your own problems and you need help – that if you go on a pilgrimage, in short – and give it enough time, you will find something.
The transformation comes about in part through encounters with people, but the movie is honest about the fact that for the most part people are just good companions for a little while, and not gurus placed by Providence at key points to offer the next piece of the Enlightenment Puzzle. For the most part the method in the movie is memory.
Memory fascinates me in many ways. It is so wildly selective – out of all the impressions that flit past one’s senses in a lifetime, only a tiny percentage leave any enduring trace. But the psyche often has its own reasons. The vocabulary of our memories is restricted to certain people or certain feelings the way the vocabulary of our dreams is restricted. But this may have a rationale, and a long period of time for reflection may help release the lessons implicit in our memories.
Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov, “You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.” Preeminent among all good memories are the memories of joy: real, wholehearted joy, standing utterly beyond both happiness and pleasure, either our own joy or someone else’s.
In the case of Cheryl Strayed, the author whose memoir Wild is a depiction of, those joyous memories were of her mother’s joy, who is radiantly played by Laura Dern. Dern’s acting beautifully renders a woman who fits the basic facts Strayed offers: a mother who had married a physically abusive man, but defended herself by leaving him and ultimately did not regret marrying him because of her abounding love for the two children of the union; who raised her children always near poverty, waiting tables, but who was aglow with her desire for their betterment; and had some simple, unsophisticated pleasures which brought her real joy – dancing in the kitchen to certain popular songs, or pop books (Strayed brought along one of her mom’s potboilers on the hike, even though she had always looked down at them as books before). The screen images of Dern dancing or smiling or laughing are unabashedly beautiful, and utterly sufficient for someone’s salvation.
And the contrast between them and Strayed’s own life feels like a kind of engine pushing her forward. Strayed, after her mother’s early death (she lived only to age 45), found herself utterly joyless: she married a man who is portrayed as good, but she cheated on him again and again and again; leaving him she hooked up with a heroin addict, started taking heroin herself, got pregnant, had an abortion, finalized the divorce, and admitted that her life was out of control and she had to get out of it somehow. Drawn by images she had seen of the Pacific Crest Trail, she decided one spring to go walk the whole 1,500 mile route.
I think this represents a good human instinct. It is an old one: Chaucer talks about how in spring
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes.
When our life gets too difficult and painful to endure, I think one of the very good answers is to leave, and to leave naturally, i.e. best on foot, and bike is maybe acceptable as well. Pilgrimages are very old, and the custom probably comes from precisely this problem in our human natures: somehow we can go astray, and only a return to simplicity can restore us to the path. The focus in the pilgrimage tradition as it exists today is typically on the place, the destination, but this is, I think, a short-circuit in the system which the tradition itself could not have foreseen. I think we all understand intuitively that grabbing the next flight to Compostela is not the way to break through to a higher level of awareness.
What is the way, then? I think we get the answer from another great line of John Muir’s (he is, of course, the patron saint of the Pacific Crest Trail): “Few souls are inhabited by so satisfied a soul that they are allowed exemption from extraordinary exertion through a whole life.” And an extraordinarily unsatisfied soul is condemned, by a law of nature none of us can deny, to incredible exertions.
And so we see Cheryl, again, by an instinct which is notable, underpreparing herself for her trip, overpacking in a way which is in part naivete but also certainly part subconscious self-flagellation. She carries a burden which represents the absolute maximum of her physical abilities, and she does not discard the items until she has completed the first section of the journey, and, figuratively, the burden begins to be lifted. (There is an even more beautiful cinematic portrayal of this in the film The Mission. The DeNiro character, after killing his brother, is employed by a Jesuit to help build a mission. On his way up to the site, he must carry something like two hundred pounds of weapons and armor for days through the jungle, suffering terribly as he tries to move forward. Watching him struggle up a mountainside, one of the Jesuit novices goes to him out of pity and cuts the pack off his back with his knife; the pack goes crashing down the mountainside, hundreds of feet below, and DeNiro, without saying anything, but again, with the look of the greatest suffering, simply limps down the mountain in his bare feet after it, to bring it back up again. There was no setting him free from this terrible burden until it had been worked off, truly and fully and spiritually.)
Wild depicts these kind of exertions over two hours, and the suffering involved is both physical and mental. The result is that the movie is hardly easy watching, and I’m sure for people who just want a little two-hour escape the movie will not please. But I was happy with it, because it represented, cinematically, something which I think really does work for people, as therapy: work, and animal work, i.e. the work of survival. Get out there, and make it to the end a thousand miles later: carry your own pack, feel the hollow of your back sweat against it; learn to long for just a drop of water; learn what you really need and what you can do without; learn to be amazed that human beings can make something so amazing as a Snapple; go need someone else’s help; go put yourself in danger and do something smart to get yourself out of it; go fall into a stream and dry your clothes in the sun; go lay in your tent and ache – ache – for a person to talk to; get a fever and dream about your blankets as a straitjacket of ice or fire; hear the coyotes, see the stars, learn to eat cold mush with relish because of your hunger; throw your pack down at the top of a pass and feel the cold wind start to pick the sweat right off your body; get everything you own soaked in the rain and wonder how you could ever have been unhappy in a place that had a warm, dry bed. All this strikes me as good and healthy and restorative, because I think there is a cosmology implied in all our encounters with our own weakness and the Wild’s vastness, and this returns us to perspective.
I was impressed by how much of this experience the movie captures; and it captures more too. The vulnerability of traveling alone as a woman; the gratitude for people’s kindness; and many of the cameo portraits of people met on the trail are quite lovely in their own right, though never so precious as to be unrealistic. And the narrative structure of the movie is to tell Cheryl’s past in a series of memories, many of them quite convincingly and impressionistically tied together as bundles of similar images. They come in three categories, generally speaking: childhood trauma; adult bad habits; and those radiant childhood memories I spoke of earlier, which in the end help guide Cheryl to “being the woman my mom taught me to be.” They are all convincingly done.
I have read a few other reviews of Wild, and they seem to come in two categories themselves: those which praise it and those which think it’s Hallmark boilerplate and Oscar-bait. I really don’t think any movie with conclusions like “I learned something from heroin,” is Hallmark boilerplate, and if Oscar-bait means narratives with ambition, then of course you can expect me to like Oscar-bait movies. Reese Witherspoon is of course a bit pretty to play almost anything but a Hollywood actress, but since female beauty typically gets along nicely with self-destructive behavior and the kind of desperate sexuality Cheryl was trying to get away from, Witherspoon’s casting is always within a stone’s throw of the plausible, and once you get past the silly scene where she can’t move her pack, the acting afterwards is cinematically convincing. And indeed as a narrative the movie is most unusual: I think so deep a portrait of a middle-class woman (a waitress), one who is not especially competent or funny and not anybody’s mom or wife or anything else, but just a woman alone and out on her own, messed up and trying to get better, is actually quite rare in cinema. I’m glad we have it.
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