Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0 Digital Edition): From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I was crying because I was full.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.O

“Oh I could drink a case of youuuuu, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” I crooned loudly.

In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true.

Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.

Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.

The silence was tremendous. The absence felt like a weight. This is what I came for, I thought. This is what I got.

Adrienne Rich’s book of poems, The Dream of a Common Language.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to