Wild: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

As Cheryl wakes with the dawn on the second morning of her journey, she reflects on her fitful, restless sleep the night before. The wind whipped her tent all night long, periodically jolting her from rest. Though Cheryl knows that the PCT has only been a single, officially-designated place since 1968—the same year of her own birth—she is overwhelmed by the landscape’s “ancient” indifference. Cheryl forces herself to eat a breakfast of granola and powdered oat milk and drinks some water. She consults her guidebook and sees that she is thirteen whole miles from her next water source—but she is comforted by the remaining amount she has in her bottles.

Cheryl sets off on her second day of hiking. By noon she has reached 6,000 feet. The air is cooler and less oppressive, and when Cheryl stops to rest and eat some lunch, she puts a fleece anorak on against the chill. She rests her eyes after eating—and is surprised when she wakes up nearly two hours later to the feeling of rain on her face. Cheryl hurriedly gets back on the trail, slightly discomfited by how quickly and deeply she fell asleep without even realizing she’d lost consciousness.

As Cheryl hikes the complicated, layered mountains in front of her, she realizes that she is in “entirely new terrain”—nothing has prepared her for the unique experience of climbing an entire mountain. There are many other things about her journey that are unexpected: her shoulders and hips chafe and bleed where her backpack digs into them, and though she planned to average fourteen miles a day on her trip, she finds she can barely cover ten before she is so exhausted that she has to make camp again.

The next day, Cheryl reaches her water source—the Golden Oak Springs—just a few hours into her hike. She uses her purifying pump to draw water into her bottles, and then adds iodine tablets to them to make sure that the water is potable. She refills everything in spite of the weight—her next water source is nineteen whole miles away. Rather than setting off right away, she sits in her camp chair near the cool, shady pond, and takes stock of the bumps, bruises, and blisters she’s incurred so far. One bruise, Cheryl knows, is not from hiking, though—it’s the site where she last injected heroin with Joe just a few days before the start of her journey.

Cheryl spends her day by the pond, relaxing and reading up on a book about navigation. At dinnertime, hungry for the first time in days, she starts to fire up her stove to cook some food—but quickly realizes she’s loaded it with the wrong kind of gas and has clogged the generator. Cheryl eats some dried food and falls asleep shortly after six.

The next morning, Cheryl treats her wounds with 2nd Skin—gel patches meant to treat burns that also work on blisters. She hikes away from the spring feeling refreshed, and realizes for the first time on her hike that she’s having fun. Throughout the day, as she continues along, she remains positive even after she skins her shin, encounters mountain lion tracks, and is forced to throw her pack over a giant felled tree blocking the trail. The next day, Cheryl even encounters a wild bull—she hurts her finger scrambling up a tree to escape it as it charges in her direction. At the top of the tree, Cheryl considers her options: she knows her only options are to double back or move forward.

Over the next several days, Cheryl uses every ounce of strength she has just to cover a measly nine miles a day. She is running low on food due to the mishap with her stove—she hasn’t been able to cook any hot meals and has been subsisting on freeze-dried and nonperishable foods. It is still more than seventy miles to her first rest and resupply stop on the trail, Kennedy Meadows, and Cheryl decides to veer from the trail and try to flag down help—though she hasn’t seen a living soul in over a week.

After walking for over four hours, Cheryl at last spots a yellow pickup truck. Three men are sitting inside of it. Cheryl excitedly runs towards them, disregarding the fact that she is a woman alone in the wilderness approaching three men of “unknown intent.” Cheryl introduces herself to the men who explain that they’re miners working on a demolition project and introduce themselves as Frank, Carlos, and Walter. Frank offers to bring Cheryl home for the night, where she can rest and eat a meal home-cooked by his wife. As the three of them drive back towards civilization, Cheryl explains her PCT hike, and they all admire her bravery and strength.

Frank drops Carlos and Walter off at their cars, but because he still has some work to do, Cheryl stays in the truck while Frank works on a tractor. Cheryl finds some whiskey in the glove box—and a gun below the driver’s seat. When Frank rejoins her in the car, he tells Cheryl that she must be as brave as Tarzan’s wife Jane. Feeling nervous about the gun, Cheryl lies and tells Frank that her husband is hiking the PCT, too, and is supposed to meet her at Kennedy Meadows in a few days. As Cheryl lies, she realizes that in reality, there is no one in her life who’s expecting so much as a call from her when she gets to Kennedy Meadows. Frank reaches beneath the seat where the gun is—and pulls out a plastic bag filled with red licorice, then offers them to “Miss Jane.”