We were asked to choose a keyword as a lens through which to analyze Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. The word alone stuck out to me as while I was reading the memoir because I felt like it was deeply connected with her emotions and motivations. The etymological definition of alone is “unaccompanied, all by ones self” stemming from the words “all, wholly” and “one.” In Strayed’s memoir, the meaning behind “alone” is a catalyst for her decisions to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and her decisions during her journey on the trail. Strayed believes that she is alone, and thus undertakes this grueling journey on the Pacific Crest Trail partially because she feels she has nothing left to lose.

Warmth is interesting to me because it can have so many varied manifestations, and come from so many sources, but it is almost always a feeling of comfort, of relaxation. Being cold is tense, being hot is restless. Even being cool, often not unpleasant, is evocative of aloofness and distance. But there’s something languid and easy about warmth, something one wants to continue returning to. Cheryl Strayed’s novel Wild is one in which she undertakes an uncomfortable trek to begin finding comfort within herself again; by analyzing the story through a lens of looking for where she feels warm, emotionally or physically, I hope to explore how her sense of comfort, belonging, and ease develops over her journey.

Two years before I was born, in the summer of 1995, Cheryl Strayed sat in a hotel room, filled a gigantic pack, and began her journey.

The book opens as Strayed has just lost one of her boots—it’s catapulted into the air and disappeared into the wilderness below. Realizing the futility of keeping only one boot, she throws the other after it and comes to another realization as well; she has to keep walking. As Strayed concludes, “It didn’t matter… I was in this alone” (6).

Alone.

To Tree

Alison
ESem Paper #6
October 9, 2015

A Step Forward in Life

Forward is an objective word describing a motion or intention “towards a place or position that is in front” in English, and it includes more positive emotions nowadays. “Forward” is always used to indicate that things are happened in a promising way or things are in progress. The memoir “Wild," written by Cheryl Strayed, is a story about going forward.

Home in the Wild

In her memoir Wild, Cheryl Strayed is a young woman consumed by grief after her mother’s death and lacks direction in her life which leads her to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Setting out alone, Strayed’s only companion is a backpack fondly called Monster. As an inexperienced hiker, she packs what she thinks she needs, which astonishes fellow hikers that she encounters because she has too much. Her heavy pack inhibits her ability to move forward, just as she returns again and again to the pain of losing her mother and family and divorcing her husband. Strayed’s grief and desperation overwhelms her, turning her into a monster and in carrying the pack, she is able to accept and move on from the weight of her physical and emotional burdens rather than battle against them.

I chose the word “green” for the keyword as I read through the book Wild written by Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl mentioned “green” several times trough her story from part 1- the story of her past to the very ending part when she had finished her journey on PCT.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “green” has many origins such as Old Frisian “grene”, Middle Dutch “groene” and Old Saxon “groni” and more. It means the color green, vegetable, Neptune, minerals, grass, the color of signal, fresh, nature, environment, tender, young, safety, unripe, healthy and so on.

“Justice, Justice, Justice,” I remember Julia proclaiming her lines as Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure (v.i.29). My mind jumped to these words when I read Antigone’s line in The Burial at Thebes: “Justice, Justice” (Heaney 29). Both Isabella and Antigone are bold female characters that stand up for what they believe in, Isabella for chastity and Antigone for divine law and her brother’s body. Both women have a strong voice despite their inferior social status as women. Like them, I aspire to loudly proclaim, “Justice,” to fight for what is right and to not be afraid of death or fear.

A hue that can be as intense as malachite extracted from the earth, as muted as the flesh of a honeydew, or as alive as the chlorophyll encased in the leaves of a plant, green is a highly emotive and versatile color. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is full of imagery centered around green, and the plot is inexplicably tied to the symbolic meanings of it.