Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Setting out on a strenuous 1100-mile wilderness trek as a means of finding oneself seems a rather capricious thing to do. If nothing else one will find out things about oneself. Muscles you didn’t know you had, blisters and calluses, and aches that shouldn’t appear until decades hence. As one who walked for a living it amazes me that people who have never walked any distance on flat ground or camped in other than an organized park set out on these challenging treks. Little wonder emergency staff frequently have to rescue these less than intrepid hikers.
The book begins by introducing us to the writer’s family and spends the first chapter describing her Mother’s death from Cancer. A 22-year-old doesn’t expect to be burying her 44-year-old mother. The next four years it would seem disappeared in a haze before jumping off in the Mojave Desert. Five hundred miles on and 70 pages from the end of the book the lass is at a rest area along the trail tarted up and looking for casual sex.
The author rages at her mother for dying, for the mistakes she made in life, all the while making many of the same. These passages are not the strongest sections of the book. She looks at a handsome male and can’t seem to resist fantasizing sex with him. The fact that men find her attractive seems to re-enforce her sense of self-worth. Or to put it another way her self-esteem is at a low ebb.
The 323-page book is well-edited and for the most part eminently readable. Once the reader gets started the text seems to flow. Your personal feelings about casual sex will colour your opinions about the book, I expect my own are obvious.
Setting out on a strenuous 1100-mile wilderness trek as a means of finding oneself seems a rather capricious thing to do. If nothing else one will find out things about oneself. Muscles you didn’t know you had, blisters and calluses, and aches that shouldn’t appear until decades hence. As one who walked for a living it amazes me that people who have never walked any distance on flat ground or camped in other than an organized park set out on these challenging treks. Little wonder emergency staff frequently have to rescue these less than intrepid hikers.
The book begins by introducing us to the writer’s family and spends the first chapter describing her Mother’s death from Cancer. A 22-year-old doesn’t expect to be burying her 44-year-old mother. The next four years it would seem disappeared in a haze before jumping off in the Mojave Desert. Five hundred miles on and 70 pages from the end of the book the lass is at a rest area along the trail tarted up and looking for casual sex.
The author rages at her mother for dying, for the mistakes she made in life, all the while making many of the same. These passages are not the strongest sections of the book. She looks at a handsome male and can’t seem to resist fantasizing sex with him. The fact that men find her attractive seems to re-enforce her sense of self-worth. Or to put it another way her self-esteem is at a low ebb.
The 323-page book is well-edited and for the most part eminently readable. Once the reader gets started the text seems to flow. Your personal feelings about casual sex will colour your opinions about the book, I expect my own are obvious.
No comments:
Post a Comment