I think it is entirely to Cheryl Strayed’s credit as a writer and as a human being that she can write a book which one reviewer – admittedly, not a very observant one – can reduce to the question “What do you have to say now, God?” while I find it religious in outlook and reminiscent of Dante. This is possible because she has captured something real – and consequently, to a religious person her book will feel religious, while to an irreligious person it will feel the opposite – the same divergence in reaction found in all things real.
Several people I know put the book down because they found Strayed unsympathetic as a figure: she went off on a major wilderness excursion utterly unprepared, and she paints a painfully honest portrait of what she was, which can seem very entitled, perhaps to a degree Strayed the author may not have even realized. She uses curse words in the Pacific Northwest style, to make it clear to the reader that she’s “keepin’ it real,” and you have to wade through a fair amount of “fuck her” and “fuck him” and “fuck them” as she deals with other people, many of whom seem genuinely good and not deserving of her wrath. You have to deal with her complaining that her (seemingly lovely) mother never told her to apply to Harvard and Yale. But I was terribly moved by the book – moved to tears again and again, at how terribly we treat each other, at how strange and marvellous our spiritual life is, in which the horrors of the way we treat each other find some kind of transformation which makes it almost worth it. Almost. There is always some horrible remainder, some kind of marring of whatever goodness there is; and always some goodness blossoming out of the evil. In the end, any true, fully conscious acceptance is hard-won. I have so much to say about the book that I’ve decided to divide my comments into two parts, with this first section dealing with the emotional experience she had on her trip, and a second part dealing with the aftermath of that experience – how it changes us, as people. Because I think her experience was an Everyman experience, with broad human relevance.
The book serves as a kind of textbook of how to set the stage for spiritual transformation (or conversion, or maturation, or whatever you want to call it) – though admittedly, any genuine transformation ingenuously told could serve as a template. The first thing she does is recognize the need for transformation: and realizes it desperately, like a beggar. “I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning” (57). The second thing is to create a space where the transformation can take place. She ties up the rest of her life and puts it in a bundle, throwing it aside for awhile. She moves out of her apartment, divorces her husband, resolves herself of all responsibilities and cuts all ties. The book contains no descriptions of having to take two days off from the trip to renew her car registration. She had put herself in a place where only one thing matters. In our normal lives, ten thousand things matter every day, and for some reason or other, it is exceptionally difficult – almost impossible – to take dramatic steps forward in such circumstances. Dramatic steps are probably only necessary in personal crisis, but Strayed certainly was in such a crisis. And she managed to create a new, temporary way of living, where only one thing mattered: the life of a through-hiker.
I wasn’t thinking, I’m hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn’t even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward. My mind was a crystal vase that contained only that one desire. My body was its opposite: a bag of broken glass. Every time I moved, it hurt. (63)
I love the bag of broken glass metaphor: that is another joy of this book, so many of the metaphors are marvellously apt. And we know what it is like to be in that position, hiking or biking or whatever it may be, when the pain and exhaustion are so intense that they drive away all other thoughts. This too is a traditional element of the mystics’ discipline, the use of pain to clear the mind. Ironically, Strayed, when discouraged by the rigors of the trip, uses this very fact as a reason to quit:
As the notion of quitting settled in, I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea. I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering. Since I’d begun hiking, the struggles of my life had only fluttered occasionally through my mind. Why, oh why, had my good mother died and how is it I could live and flourish without her? How could my family, once so close and strong, have fallen apart so swiftly and soundly in the wake of her death? What had I done when I’d squandered my marriage with Paul – the solid, sweet husband who’d loved me so steadfastly? Why had I gotten myself in a sad tangle with heroin and Joe and sex with men I hardly knew?
These were the questions I’d held like stones all through the winter and spring, as I prepared to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The ones I’d wept over and wailed over, excavated in excruciating detail in my journal. I’d planned to put them all to rest while hiking the PCT. I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips. And also, during that second week on the trail – when spring was on the very cusp of turning officially into summer – because I was so hot I thought my head would explode. (84-5)
I quote so much of it because I think it quite brilliantly describes the actual mental state of the hiker, and of the pilgrim too. What you are trying to do is to get yourself back into your senses. We spend so much time literally out of our senses: in our heads, in our thoughts, in our plans, in the past, in the future, whatever it might be. God/transformation/perspective (whatever you want to call this leap in consciousness – mystics do not sweat semantics) is almost never easy to find there. And for many people only great exertions, and really great physical suffering, will return us to our senses. Danger works well also: Strayed talks about reaching another level when she had to cross a sloping field of ice, where a bad step could send her sliding down the mountain. That is the sort of thing which will clear your mind.
Of course I should note that many people do not realize that this is the way actual spiritual practice works. An actual spiritual practice makes the practitioner very skeptical of the mind. God is greater than your conceptions – obviously. Even if you look at your room and then close your eyes and picture it in your mind, you can see immediately how many details, how much richness your mind immediately abridges, even of the most pedestrian things. Any kind of spirituality limited to the carrying capacity of the mind will not, in the end, satisfy a human being. A close friend of mine is pregnant for the first time, and was telling me how amazed she was to see an x-ray (or sonogram, or whatever they are doing nowadays) of her child’s skeleton in her womb – made by her, she supposed, but certainly not by her mind: no mind could assemble a child and make it work. It was an entirely different kind of knowing that was inside her, and was her, an order of intellect that dwarfed the one in her mind, and possessing an intimacy with life compared to which her mind was just a spectator. When we are astray – when our conscious minds have utterly failed us – safety is in that deeper self. The spiritual practice is an attempt to reach into that deeper knowledge which is inside us, and which makes our conscious minds seem paltry.
Hence you really cannot think your way to transformation. You cannot think about spiritual problems by pondering them harder. You think about them by living, and oddly enough, by living more like an animal. You have to go down the ladder of being, and operate on the same level a woman’s womb does, which (thank goodness) is not taking orders from the brain, which would be utterly incompetent for the work of generating new life. When we live more like animals, we are living in a way we were designed to live, with concerns we were designed to handle, instinctually: what to drink, what to eat, where to sleep. As we let our instincts take over those small details, they gain strength for other things: where to go, whom to trust, when to make love and when to be silent and when to say something and what to say. Those are spiritual tasks for a whole lifetime. But the simple life of the wilderness is where those seeds of life can grow:
I realized that in spite of my hardships, as I approached the end of the first leg of my journey, I’d begun to feel a blooming affection for the PCT. My backpack, heavy as it was, had come to feel like my almost animate companion. No longer was it the absurd Volkswagen Beetle I’d painfully hoisted on in that motel room in Mojave a couple of weeks before. Now my backpack had a name: Monster.
I meant it in the nicest possible way. I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn’t help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn’t spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I’d begun my hike, I hadn’t shed a single tear. (92)
I have already written about how her pack – which was far heavier than her trip required – seems to have been a psychic self-punishment mechanism. She was, early on, aware of its symbolic element. And that is one of the amazing things: when you put yourself in a position where only one thing matters, the details around you seem to stand out more clearly as symbols.
It always amazes me how necessary the wild is for this process; it seems to me that civilization cannot offer anything comparable. One of the first things it does is create wonder, or a beginner’s mind: an awareness that you do not know, that you are confronted by something great, inexplicable, and mysterious. Strayed hits this theme perfectly as well:
As I ascended, I realized I didn’t understand what a mountain was, or even if I was hiking up one mountain or a series of them glommed together. I’d not grown up around mountains. I’d walked on a few, but only on well-trod paths on day hikes. They’d seemed to be nothing more than really big hills. But they were not that. They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top of the mountain or the series of mountains glommed together, I was wrong. There was still more up to go, even if first there was a tiny slope that went tantalizingly down. So up I went until I reached what really was the top. I knew it was the top because there was snow. Not on the ground, but falling from the sky, in thin flakes that swirled in mad patterns, pushed by the wind.
I hadn’t expected it to rain in the desert, and I certainly hadn’t expected it to snow. As with the mountains, there’d been no deserts where I grew up, and though I’d gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn’t really understand what deserts were. I’d taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail.
I was in entirely new terrain. (63)
“My new existence was beyond analogy” – this is a place where wonder can grow, and where the sacred can take root.
Besides creating a beginner’s mind – “here I do not know, here I must shut up and learn” – nature is important in the process because it contains an implicit cosmology. It is large; it is incomprehensibly vast and powerful. That is important, because it changes the relative importance of you, or your ego. Nature’s vastness implies your smallness. This is the first stage of the experience, a fear before it: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning [but only the beginning] of wisdom.” Strayed’s first reaction to the vastness is to cower before it (which is fine, and indeed necessary):
Before I began hiking the PCT, I’d imagined that I’d sleep inside my tent only when it threatened to rain, that most nights I’d lay my sleeping bag on top of my tarp and sleep beneath the stars, but about this, like so much else, I’d been wrong. Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night. (93)
I will pull one other bit of emotive cosmology from the book, to wit:
I prayed fervently, rabidly, to God, any god, to a god I could not identify or find. I cursed my mother, who’d not given me any religious education. Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn’t even have God. I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn’t find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother’s life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. (23)
Which is, I want to point out, a good, solid, fifty-percent consonant with the Christian conception. God has his good side too, of course, but one can’t forget the old saw, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.” Or “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” – presumably because God loves him an occasional opportunity to stick it to people.
But you transition off of this fear, to becoming more at home in this world. This fearful cosmology ultimately contains you – with all your badness – and for that reason we wear it far better than some immaculate purity.
The trigger I’d pulled in stepping into the snow made me more alive to my senses than ever. Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me. (143)
You begin with a recognition that you are part of this larger thing; and then the feeling grows as you see your similarity to the other lives around you. She sees a deer and says, spontaneously, the words which she will later apply to herself:
“It’s okay,” I whispered to the deer, not knowing what I was going to say until I said it: “You’re safe in this world.” (233)
The boundaries between the world and us, macrocosm and microcosm, fuzz somewhat as we contemplate the bare facts of nature: we see ourselves eating the berries like the birds and bears, drinking the water like the deer and fish, drawing in even the lifeless air each second to sustain us. The lifelessness we see around us is in fact flowing into and out of us, constantly: it is within us as much as anything else. And this is precisely what Strayed sees, again, delineating the steps quite clearly, and experiencing it on an evening when she symbolically did not need her tent, and concomitantly broke with her own sense of aggrievement:
One night I made camp in a grassy spot from which I could see the evidence of those fires: a hazy scrim of smoke blanketing the westward view. I sat in my chair for an hour, looking out across the land as the sun faded into the smoke. I’d seen a lot of breathtaking sunsets in my evenings on the PCT, but this one was more spectacular than any in a while, the light made indistinct, melting into a thousand shades of yellow, pink, orange, and purple over the waves of green land. I could’ve been reading Dubliners or falling off to sleep in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, but on this night the sky was too mesmerizing to leave. As I watched it, I realized I’d passed the midpoint of my hike. I’d been out on the trail for fifty-some days. If all went as planned, in another fifty days I’d be done with the PCT. Whatever was going to happen to me out here would have happened.
“Oh remember the Red River Valley and the cowboy who loved you so true…” I sang, my voice trailing, not knowing the rest of the words. Images of Kyle’s little face and hands came to me, reverberations of his flawless voice [a small child she met on the trail, who had family troubles]. I wondered if I would ever be a mother and what kind of “horrible situation” Kyle’s mother was in, where his father might be and where mine was. What is he doing right this minute? I’d thought occasionally throughout my life, but I was never able to imagine it. I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke.
That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have had always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore.
There were so many other amazing things in this world.
They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.
I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn’t feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too. (233-4)
I have to admire, again and again, Strayed’s ability to fuse the images of the trail with her own personal story: the way she sits admiring the sunset just as she earlier dreamed she had, then thinks of the small child she had just met that day and segues seamlessly into thinking about motherhood and fatherhood, then to her father, who is related to the fire in the distance. It is brilliantly done, and utterly convincing. And the conclusion makes sense to me as well: a sense of safety, ultimate safety despite pain, despite death, despite sin, despite failure.
To be at home in this world: of course this is a horribly, horribly difficult task. In fact it never fully happens. At times it is truly awful to think of how terrible we all are to each other, the suffering it causes, generation before generation, all way backwards in time. Strayed’s father was hideously abusive:
It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. I hate him, I’d said during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy. There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by, bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we were all going to die right then and there.
Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running through the icy snow. (131-2)
There is a tremendous tension between these two scenes: the grown-up woman watching the sunset and deciding that she doesn’t have to worry anymore about the way her father failed her; and the actual facts of her father’s abuse. There is an asymmetry here, which Strayed is, I am sure, quite aware of, and it poses a real theological problem. There is always that remainder, that sense that maybe the transcendence is not worth the having, if bought at this horrible price. Of course all the other options are even worse – they are all just variants of being caught in the hatred forever – but still, the horror of it is so palpable that I can understand how other readers can find Strayed’s writing fundamentally irreligious. Ivan Karamazov declares that he rejects God because the whole universe is not worth the suffering of one child.
Strayed does not take her book into realms of philosophy and theology: hers is an account of her experience on the trail, where somehow the balance of her life tipped finally to the positive side. And it is marvellously done – really one of the very few travel books which really tells a tale of transformation. not just escapism or therapy. The closest she comes to the theological problem of actually accepting monotheism – which ultimately makes God responsible for all the evil as well as all the good – is in her use of the term “wild.” That is what “wild” means to her – wild means beyond good and evil, irreducible, incomprehensible, hidden, unknown, transcendent: the condition in the Garden of Eden, when God tells Adam and Eve not to bother with questions of “good” and “evil” – as soon as you drop into dualism, all will be lost. And her last name – a name she took after her divorce – is an image of how lostness is a precondition of all deeper knowledge. The word Dante uses to describe this condition – smarrito, usually translated “astray” – he later uses to describe his condition when he sees God face to face – he was “smarrito,” dazzled, stupefied. And to go from one meaning of the word to another, as Strayed does, means seeing it all: heaven, purgatory, and hell. “God hath consigned all men to unbelief, that he might have mercy on them all.” For Strayed the dictionary definition of the word strayed sums it up:
To wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. (96)
I would like to dwell further on the remainder that I have been talking about, the sense that the suffering utterly corrupts the joy. This is not the actual fact: the light wins, in actuality, for most of us, but the line is fine. For every person there come days when it would seem to be better to be dead than alive, or best never to have been born. This is the problem that comes after the experience: you feel at last at home in the world, but the world in fact offers the same quantity and quality of suffering it always has. You come from your experience better; but the world is much the same. Strayed does not deal with this problem directly, but the book’s perspective – it was written a decade and a half after the actual trip – and certain comments Strayed makes, show the existence of the problem in Strayed’s mind as much as in everyone else’s. I will deal with that problem in the next essay.
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