Wild: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, Cheryl sets out from Kennedy Meadows. Doug and Tom accompany her for a little while, but after less than a mile, she urges them to go on ahead of her. As she watches Doug and Tom hike on, Cheryl feels grateful to be alone. Before the PCT, Cheryl valued her alone time already—now, though, with a new conception of the “world’s vastness,” she has developed a new appreciation for the intimacy she shares with nature and with herself. It is the last week of June, and Cheryl’s third week on the PCT. In the next forty miles, she’ll climb from her current 6,000 feet up to 11,000. Cheryl is firmly in the Sierras now, and is grateful for the cool breeze. That evening, Cheryl makes camp with Doug and Tom after catching up with them, but in the morning, they go their separate ways again.

The next day, Cheryl encounters a huge patch of snow in the middle of a steep incline. She knows she has to try to cross it, and she gets out her ice axe to test Greg’s lessons. Slowly but surely, Cheryl makes her way over the icy patch—but on the other side, she feels much more daunted and frightened of what lies ahead. That evening, as she makes camp with Doug and Tom again, she tells them she wants to get off at Trail Pass up ahead and bypass the snowy Sierras. Doug and Tom say they’ve decided to push on, and suggest Cheryl hike forward with them—together, the three of them will be safer and more capable. Cheryl, however, insists she can’t join them—the point of her trip, she tells the men, is that she’s out here to hike alone. 

The next afternoon, as Cheryl approaches Trail Pass, the route off of the PCT, Greg catches up with her. He tells her that he’s bypassing, too, and together they descend down the trail, meet up with Doug and Tom, and hitch to the nearby town of Lone Pine. Cheryl restocks food at the grocery store, then calls Lisa to inform her of the change in schedule and to ask her to hold on to Cheryl’s care packages until further notice. Cheryl then bids goodbye to Doug and Tom, wishing them well on the trail. Doug asks Cheryl if she still has her good luck charm, and she tells him she’s wedged it into her backpack frame for safekeeping.

Greg and Cheryl buy tickets for a Greyhound bus to Reno, Nevada, where they’ll have to transfer to a second bus to Truckee, California before hitching the rest of the way to Sierra City, where they’ll rejoin the trail. On the bus ride, Greg falls asleep almost immediately, but Cheryl is too wired to sleep. She stays awake, fretting about how little money she has to get her to her next stop. Cheryl identifies a homesick feeling inside—but she isn’t sure if she misses her old life, or the trail.

During their layover in Reno, Cheryl uses the restroom in a casino adjoining the Greyhound station. At the sinks, another woman admires Cheryl’s feather—her gift from Doug—and invites her to the Rainbow Gathering at Toad Lake in Northern California. Cheryl says she went to the Gathering the previous year, in Minnesota, and tells the woman she’ll try to make it for this year’s.

Cheryl and Greg arrive in Sierra City. They find a cheap set of rooms for the night connected by an adjoining bathroom, but even with the good price, Cheryl is down to only 13 dollars. Nevertheless, when Greg asks her if she wants to eat dinner in a restaurant, she can’t help but say yes. She takes a bath to make herself presentable, and as she runs the water for the tub, she looks at herself in the mirror for the first time in weeks. She is covered in bruises, scabs, and dirt, and as she gets into the tub, the water becomes so dark with dirt and blood that she’s forced to drain and refill it. Halfway through her second soak, Cheryl notices that one of her toenails has grown black. She pulls on the nail and it comes off in her hand.

At dinner, Cheryl and Greg order tons of food and drinks. Cheryl tells Greg about her toenail, and he responds that her boots are probably too small. Cheryl is embarrassed by her lack of PCT knowledge—and, after the meal, she is embarrassed by the fact that she has only sixty-five cents left. That night, after dinner, Cheryl makes a new list of stops and care package schedules for Lisa, then turns over to go to sleep. She can hear Greg shifting in his bed through the wall, and thinks back to a session with her therapist back in Minneapolis during which she discussed her reckless sexual adventurousness.

Cheryl has long known, deep down, that part of her desire to continually create and sabotage new relationships with men is tied to her absent father—and the physical and verbal abuses he perpetrated against herself, her mother, and her siblings during the short time their family lived together. Cheryl can barely remember a single good thing her father ever did for her—even the nice memories of him are “marred” by the knowledge that he was only kind when trying to “woo” Cheryl’s mother back.

Unable to sleep, Cheryl wraps a towel around herself and goes back into the bathroom for another luxurious soak. She considers knocking on Greg’s door, but decides to avoid disaster and simply take a bath instead. When someone knocks on the door after a while, Cheryl calls back, “Someone’s in here,” and the innocuous statement connects her with the self inside of her—the self who deserves to take up space in the universe.