Page Sixty-Three

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver "The Summer Day"

"It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
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 let like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. . . . It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me" (207).

Highly recommended.