Wild: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Cheryl is nervous about the prospect of hitchhiking from a gas station near the motel to the entrance to the PCT, but her guidebook—The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California—has told her that hitchhiking is often the most “practical solution” for hikers when it comes to getting to the many post office and resupply shops just off the trail. Cheryl summons her courage and asks two kindly-looking men in a van for a ride. They agree to take her, and Cheryl arduously climbs into the van while trying not to let the men see how intensely she’s struggling beneath the wait of her pack.

Cheryl removes her pack during the car ride, but when the men bring her to her stop, she knows it’s time to put it back on. As Cheryl gets out of the van, her backpack falls to the ground. One of the men tries to help her lift it off the highway shoulder—and is shocked by its heft. Cheryl insists the pack is a cinch to lift, and urges the men to drive onward, insisting she’ll be fine to take things from here. The men drive off, leaving Cheryl standing alone at an elevation of 3,800 feet, surrounded by sagebrush and Joshua trees. The mountain ranges before her—the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range—will be her home for the next three months.

Cheryl wants to take a photograph of her starting point but knows that digging her camera out of her monstrous backpack will be too much of an ordeal. She struggles to put her backpack back on and begins heading down the trail. She spots a brown metal box on a fencepost near the start and opens it to find a notebook and pen inside: the trail register. Cheryl adds her name and the date to the list of hikers who have been at this point on the trail before her, feeling intensely emotional. 

As Cheryl begins walking, she is exuberant—but within half an hour, straining under the weight of her backpack, begins to feel as if she’s in “hell.” She tries to ignore the “clamor” of her own brain as she wonders what she’s gotten herself into. As she pushes herself forward and tries to focus only on putting one foot in front of the other, she begins to reflect on the past December—when she first decided to hike the PCT.

Cheryl spotted a guidebook for the Pacific Crest Trail while waiting in line at REI to buy a shovel. A friend had borrowed her car to drive to Sioux Falls, but the car had broken down. Cheryl and her friend Aimee went to Sioux Falls to retrieve the car from an impound lot—only to find it buried in show, thus necessitating the shovel. After Cheryl and her friend Aimee dug out Cheryl’s car out of the snow and went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Sioux Falls, Cheryl commented on an odd feeling in her stomach and wondered aloud if she might be pregnant.

Cheryl realized she’d had sex a few weeks ago with a man named Joe. Cheryl had first met Joe a year ago while living in Portland—he’d introduced her to heroin three months after her breakup with Paul. Cheryl and Joe spent months together snorting and then later shooting heroin, until Cheryl’s friend Lisa intervened and warned Cheryl about the danger she was getting into. Cheryl reminded Lisa that Lisa had been the one to urge her to come to Portland and “escape” her grief. Weeks after Lisa’s failed intervention, Paul called Cheryl to tell her he’d driven to Portland to help Cheryl get away from Joe.

Cheryl met up with Paul to discuss the state of things but ultimately rejected Paul’s help, feeling it would be “impossible” to give up heroin. That very afternoon, after her meeting with Paul, a junkie mugged Cheryl at knifepoint, and she swiftly reversed her decision to stay in Portland with Joe. Paul drove her back across the country to Minnesota to help her get clean.  Though Cheryl briefly relapsed several weeks later when Joe came to visit—and though she had sex with Joe several times—after he left, she decided she was done with heroin and didn’t follow him back to Portland.

Sitting in the restaurant with Aimee, Cheryl worried that she was indeed pregnant. Aimee helped Cheryl buy and take a pregnancy test after their meal—it was positive. The next day, Aimee accompanied Cheryl back to Minneapolis, though the two women drove in separate cars. Halfway through the drive, Cheryl broke down in tears as she realized what she had done to her own life in the time since her mother’s passing. Cheryl thought of the guidebook she saw in the REI checkout line—and decided that there was something she must do. Cheryl drove to a different REI, purchased the guidebook, and stayed up all night that night reading it.

After clearing her head, securing an abortion, and delving more deeply into the PCT guidebook, Cheryl realized that she had to change into “the person [she] used to be.” She decided that hiking the trail would “make [her] that way” again—that on her walk, she’d be able to think about her entire life, find her strength again, and get back on track. Now, though, as she sets off onto the trail, Cheryl feels nothing but “ridiculous.”

Cheryl stops to rest, taking her backpack off and walking freely in circles, happy to be rid of its weight. She scrapes her arm on a nearby Joshua tree, and as she struggles to get her first-aid kit out of her backpack, all of the Band-Aids in her possession fly away on the breeze. Cheryl is more profoundly exhausted than she’s felt in her entire life. She turns to her guidebook for comfort, and as she flips through its pages now, she realizes there are parts she overlooked before—namely, passages about “the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition.”

Cheryl tucks her knees up to her chest and puts her head down in an attempt to calm herself. When she looks up, she notices a sage plant nearby and remembers something her mother once told her and her siblings—that smelling sage gives one a “burst of energy.” Cheryl rips off some sage, inhales the scent of its leaves, and is calmed more by the memory of her mother than by the plant itself. She reminds herself that no matter what happens to her on the trail, the worst thing that has ever happened to her is already over.

Exhausted, Cheryl pitches her tent even though she has only traveled a few miles and it is only four in the afternoon. She gets cozy in her tent and begins reading a favorite book of poetry—The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, which Cheryl has nearly memorized over the years. She flips her way to a poem called “Power” and recites it over and over to herself.