Wild: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In the years after her mother’s death, Cheryl ran around the country from place to place—she lived in Texas, New York City, California, Oregon, and Wyoming, among other places. All the while, she was “dooming” her marriage with lies, failing to keep her fractured family together, and harming herself.

Four years after her mother’s death, in the middle of the first week of June, Cheryl leaves Minnesota behind forever and sets out to hike the PCT. After a final visit to the place where Cheryl laid her mother’s ashes to rest, she sets off for Portland in her old pickup truck with only backpacking supplies in tow. After leaving her truck in Portland with her friend Lisa—who is in charge of sending pre-packed care packages to stops along the PCT for Cheryl to collect—Cheryl boards a flight to Los Angeles, then travels to a town on the edge of the Mojave desert.

Cheryl checks into a small motel to spend the night and prepare for the start of her journey the next day. She is flummoxed when the motel owner asks her to fill out a form including the address of her next of kin. Cheryl writes down Eddie’s address, though her connection to her stepfather has grown frayed and distant in the years since her mother’s death. She rarely sees Leif or Karen and has divorced Paul recently “after a harrowing yearlong separation.”

As Cheryl settles into her room, she feels the urge to go out drinking and bring a man back to her hotel room—or to call Paul, whom she still views as her “best friend.” She resists both temptations, though, and starts focusing on getting ready for the trip ahead. All winter, she saved money waitressing in order to buy necessities for life on the PCT. Cheryl reflects on how many of her friends tried to dissuade her from undertaking such a large journey with such little backpacking experience—and on how bullheaded she was in insisting she was ready for the hike.

As Cheryl considers her bright yellow emergency whistles, a sense of anxiety and aloneness floods her. She remembers one of the last things Paul said to her when she left Minneapolis ten days earlier: that she had finally found a way to get what she wanted. When Cheryl asked Paul what that was, he replied simply, “To be alone.” Cheryl begins reflecting on the breakdown of her marriage to Paul, and wondering whether being “alone” is what she really wants. 

A week after Cheryl’s mother died, Paul received an acceptance letter to a PhD program at The New School in New York City. Cheryl was unsure that she could leave her fraying family behind and go to New York with Paul, and she became determined to get him to leave to go to the city without her. Cheryl began kissing other men, determined not to actually have sex with anyone outside the bonds of her marriage but unable to resist doing something that would both push Paul away and numb the pain of her mother’s passing. Though Paul deferred his admission for a year and Cheryl spent the time attempting to keep her family together, she was forced to confront that her mother had been “the apparently magical force at the center of [their] family”—and that without her, they were doomed to drift apart.

Cheryl and Paul moved to New York a year later, but after only a few months of school, he dropped out. Cheryl and Paul took a road trip around the country and eventually stayed in Portland a while. Cheryl, having found a nomadic kind of bliss with Paul, convinced herself that she could settle into the role of a wife again—but when Paul went back to Minnesota for work, Cheryl stayed behind on the West Coast and, within a week of Paul’s departure, had slept with three other men. Looking back, Cheryl realizes that she was trying to cure herself of her grief through serial cheating.  

Three years after the death of her mother, Cheryl had returned to Minneapolis to live with Paul—but her affairs had gone on. One day, she finally confessed the truth to Paul and he moved out. They embarked on an official separation, but Cheryl and Paul both struggled to decide whether they should officially divorce or stay together. Cheryl’s friend Lisa called her and urged her to come to Portland for a while, and Cheryl agreed, packing up her life and traveling the same route she’d take exactly a year later, on her way to hike the PCT. As Cheryl drove across the country, she felt as if she was leaving her troubles behind—but now, she reflects, she was only on her way to finding even more.