Wild: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, Cheryl packs Monster for the last stretch of her hike. The ranger brings Cheryl a package, addressed to her from her friend Gretchen—it is full of chocolate and wine. Cheryl scarfs the chocolates, but then begins walking the wine back over to the ranger station, unwilling to lug it. As she goes, she hears a voice call out her name—she turns around and finds herself face-to-face with Doug. They greet one another excitedly and catch up on how they’ve both fared along the trail. Doug says he’s just stopping for a moment and is going right back out—Cheryl agrees to wait so they can go together. Doug is charmed to see that Cheryl still has the feather he gave her attached to Monster, and offers to carry the wine on their hike.

That night, the two of them make camp and open the bottle of wine, enjoying it as they cook their dinners. They discuss their summers, and Cheryl gives Doug a novel called The Ten Thousand Things to read, but he says he doesn’t want to add it to his pack’s weight. After Doug turns in early, Cheryl sits by the fire and burns the novel as she thinks about Eddie—the person who taught her how to make her first campfire, paddle a canoe, and skip a rock. Eddie was the one to instill a love of the woods and camping in Cheryl. Cheryl pulls out The Dream of a Common Language next, and though she knows she should burn it too, she can’t bring herself to do so.

A few days later, Cheryl and Doug—plus Tom and a lesbian ex-couple, who have joined up with them—arrive at the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, which is Oregon’s highest mountain at 11,240 feet. Portland is only sixty miles away, and to Cheryl, the majestic Mount Hood feels like home. She still has fifty miles to go to reach the Bridge of the Gods, and the next morning, she sets out early without the rest of her crew in order to reach it alone. As she realizes how truly close she is to the end of her journey, she begins to feel melancholy—but also relieved as she realizes that she is no longer carrying the “staggering” weight of her mother’s loss.

Over the next several days, Cheryl passes several landmarks, such as the imposing Mount St. Helen and Mount Rainier. On her last full day of hiking, she is on a downward tilt as she descends 4,000 feet in only six miles. As darkness falls, she decides to stop and make camp though she’s only six miles from Cascade Locks and the Bridge—she wants to see them both in the full light of day. That night, as she makes camp, she pulls off yet another toenail—the PCT officially has more of her toenails than she does.

The next morning, Cheryl feels like she is floating as she hikes the remaining few miles to Cascade Locks. It is Friday morning, and she feels a unique energy in the air as she arrives in town and passes houses, businesses, and cars. The Bridge of the Gods comes into view, and Cheryl walks halfway across it on foot before stopping to look down at the Columbia River—the fourth-largest in the nation—rushing past below her. The feeling of having arrived at her destination is at once small and “tremendous,” and Cheryl lingers in the moment—before heading off to go get some ice cream in town at a spot her fellow hikers have been telling her to check out.

As Cheryl eats her ice-cream, she thinks about how, by later today, she’ll be in Portland. She’ll be back to her regular life—she’ll be able to eat and drink what she wants, wear normal clothes, and drive anywhere her truck can take her. Cheryl makes some light, flirtatious conversation with a businessman who approaches her to ask her about hiking, and though they make a plan to meet up in Portland, the plan never comes to fruition.

Four years after that moment, Cheryl writes, she would cross the Bridge of the Gods all the way at last with another man—the man who would become her husband. In fifteen years, Cheryl writes, she would bring her daughter Bobbi and her son Carver to get ice cream at this very spot, and tell them about her journey along the PCT. Years after that, she’d begin writing the story of her hike, and in the process would discover that Doug had died in an accident in New Zealand—but as she mourned him, she would look up at the frayed feather he gave her so many years ago, suspended above her desk.

Cheryl writes about how sitting on the bench eating ice cream on the last day of her hike, she still didn’t fully understand its meaning—but was able to trust that what she’d done in hiking the PCT was something “true” and “sacred.” Though she didn’t yet grasp the enormity of what she’d done, she thought to herself: “How wild it was, to let it be.”