Wild: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Cheryl tracks the origin of her desire to hike the PCT to her mother’s hospital room at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Her mother, a “forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish […] natural-remedy-using nonsmoker” was diagnosed suddenly with late-stage lung cancer, and doctors advised Cheryl and her mother that she had less than a year to live. Cheryl was only twenty-two at the time—the same age her mother had been when she’d given birth to Cheryl. After the doctor broke the news, Cheryl and her mother wept in separate stalls in the women’s bathroom, then went to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions that would ease Cheryl’s mother’s pain. They waited along with Cheryl’s stepfather, Eddie, shell-shocked and disbelieving. 

Growing up, Cheryl’s mother always told Cheryl and her siblings Karen and Leif that she loved them so much the amount couldn’t be “quantified or contained,” and she compared the ineffable amount to the “ten thousand things” from the Tao Te Ching—a verbal representation of all the things in the world that cannot be named. Cheryl writes that her mother got pregnant with her first child—Cheryl’s older sister Karen—when she was just nineteen, and quickly married. Cheryl’s mother stuck with her father through years of intense physical abuse—abuses which Cheryl and her siblings witnessed often until their father walked out of their lives nearly ten years later.

Though Cheryl and her family were poor, Cheryl’s mother always insisted they were “rich in love.” Cheryl’s mother eventually married Eddie, a kindhearted carpenter eight years her junior. Together with Eddie—using the funds from a work compensation settlement he received following an accident—Cheryl’s mother purchased a plot of land in rural Minnesota. The entire family pitched in to tame the wild land and build a small house upon it, and eventually, Cheryl’s mother, Cheryl, Karen, and Leif moved onto the property full-time while Eddie stayed behind in the city to work.

Even as Cheryl and her siblings complained about roughing it in the wilderness—in a house with no electricity or plumbing—their mother urged them to realize one day they’d be thankful for their rugged, rural upbringing. Cheryl writes that she now realizes her mother’s love of nature grew inside of her over the years, and was ultimately the thing that made her believe that “hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was [her] way back” to the person she’d once been.

When it was time for Cheryl to go off to college, her mother went with her. At forty, her mother was determined to get the college degree she was never able to get as a younger woman, and Cheryl’s acceptance letter informed her that parents of students at her small college could take classes for free. The two of them were both in their final year of school when Cheryl’s mother got her cancer diagnosis—Cheryl was married to a man named Paul and close to graduating, but after the diagnosis, she “folded [her] life down” and put both school and her marriage on the backburner in order to care for her ailing mother while Eddie continued working to pay the bills.

Though Cheryl’s mother was diagnosed on the 12th of February and given a year to live, by the 3rd of March, she was in too much pain to continue living at home. Cheryl helped her mother get dressed and go to the hospital, and as they left the house, Cheryl’s mother bid goodbye to all her things, seemingly aware of the fact that she wouldn’t return home to see them again. At the hospital, Cheryl’s mother was admitted, and Cheryl was stunned to realize that her indominable mother was in fact dying. Cheryl stayed with her mother night and day, though her siblings all but refused to visit, claiming they were unable to see their mother in such a state. In the end, Cheryl writes, her mother lived for only thirty-four days after her visit to Mayo Clinic.

Though Cheryl’s husband Paul tried to provide emotional support and make her feel “less alone,” Cheryl began to realize, as she cared for her dying mother, that “something inside of [her] was dead to Paul.” Cheryl only managed to get Karen to visit once, and could not get Leif to come to the hospital at all. In the last few days of Cheryl’s mother’s life, her mother was sunk “down under” beneath a steady drip of morphine. Cheryl wanted her mother to tell her that she “had been the best daughter in the world,” but when her mother remained mostly asleep and unresponsive, Cheryl asked the question herself. Her mother replied that she had been—but Cheryl remained “ravenous” for her mother’s love.

On the night of Saint Patrick’s Day, Cheryl realized her mother had taken a turn for the worse and became determined to bring her brother Leif to the hospital to say goodbye. Cheryl left the hospital, went home, and began calling friends and acquaintances. She at last managed to track Leif down, and the next morning, the two of them drove to the hospital, though Leif kept insisting it would be too hard for him to see their mother in such a state. When they arrived at the hospital, however, their mother had already died. A hysterical Cheryl “howled” at her mother’s side, clutching at her corpse and crying.

In the wake of her mother’s death, Cheryl began suffering from night terrors in which she was always killing her mother in increasingly violent ways. Paul tried to comfort her when she awoke from the dreams sweating and screaming, but nothing brought Cheryl comfort. Cheryl writes now that it would take years for her to make peace with her mother’s death, and that she would have to suffer intensely on the road to healing. The place Cheryl finally found peace was called the Bridge of the Gods—a landmark along the Pacific Crest Trail.