Wild

by

Cheryl Strayed

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Nature and Humanity Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Loss and Grief Theme Icon
Healing vs. Redemption Theme Icon
The Kindness of Strangers Theme Icon
Nature and Humanity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wild, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature and Humanity Theme Icon

When Cheryl sets off on an 1,100-mile hike through the wilderness, she is an amateur camper and an inexperienced hiker. Along the Pacific Crest Trail, she encounters fallen trees, snowfall, bears, deer, foxes, armies of frogs and black ants, and inhospitable weather. Cheryl is full of uncertainty at the beginning of her journey, but by the end, she feels strong and empowered. Wild uses one woman’s journey of taming—or at least existing within—nature and wilderness as a metaphor for the laborious, uncharted journey that is learning to tame and inhabit one’s own personal, inner wilderness. Ultimately, Strayed suggests that while conquering one’s “wild” soul is a daunting task, it can be done.

At the start of her hike, Cheryl is overwhelmed by the arid, hostile terrain of the Mojave desert. Plunged onto the PCT at one of the most unforgiving points on the entire trail, Cheryl must start her journey at maximum difficulty with a decided dearth of experience. This harsh entry into the physical landscape of her hike mirrors her sudden, swift entry into the psychological landscape of grief—and Cheryl has been unprepared for both. Just as Cheryl powers through the Mojave too tired to do much reading or thinking and too focused on the task of staying in motion to feel hungry, she is too close to her experiences to reckon with them yet. The unforgiving desert landscape mirrors Cheryl’s raw, desolate emotional state. In terms of the physical and psychological, there’s nowhere for Cheryl to go but up.

Another significant point in the book where the physical challenge before Cheryl reflects the deeper challenge within herself is when she decides to bypass the Sierra Nevada due to heavy snowfall. Cheryl is loath to go around a part of the PCT—especially such a beautiful section—but once she decides to bypass the treacherous mountain range, she feels more capable of conquering what lies ahead. This physical decision reflects an emotional decision that is going on below the surface within Cheryl’s healing process. She hasn’t yet had any of the “cathartic” emotional experiences she thought would define her trip—no cleansing tears, no deep soul-searching, no penitent regret over her checkered recent past. To delve into these moments of catharsis at this point in the trip would be to sideline not just her physical progress, but her emotional progress as well. Cheryl is learning, growing, and healing in other ways—and indeed, when she gets to the other side of the Sierras, she has an emotional moment with an elusive fox which allows her to begin to delve into the feelings of loss and loneliness created by her mother’s death. Cheryl “bypasses” a reckoning she isn’t ready with, and slowly starts to get to the emotional part of her journey in other ways that are less emotionally violent and demanding. 

When Cheryl stops at Crater Lake in Oregon, she uses the history of the landmark to turn the place into a potent metaphor for the process of healing one’s own inner turmoil and wildness. Crater Lake is a gorgeous and brilliant blue lake situated in a basin formed out of a large, bowl-shaped crater—the result of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption some 7,000 years ago. Cheryl writes that, in the wake of the eruption, there was only devastation and barrenness—but as the site of the eruption cooled and the scars of the earth healed, the basin filled with rainwater and became the stunning landmark it is today. Crater Lake is a metaphor for the ways in which people heal—not always in the ways they expect to, and often in ways that make evident the cratering losses they’ve suffered. Nevertheless, as the metaphor of Crater Lake teaches, beauty, bounty, and healing can come of great suffering. Cheryl’s encounter with this particular natural wonder reflects her inner emotional state and suggests that, just as Crater Lake formed out of devastation, so too will something wonderful within Cheryl come of all the pain she’s suffered.

By weaving a metaphor in which the unpredictability and hostility of nature gives way to beauty and peace—just as a journey into the interior of the human spirit can—Strayed illustrates how within each individual there is a vast wilderness waiting to be explored. Cheryl sets out on her hike determined to become the master of both the Pacific Crest Trail and the woman within. By the end of her physically and emotionally intense journey along the PCT, Cheryl is stronger in both body and soul—she has a new sense of understanding and trust when it comes to the once-unfamiliar terrain within herself. She has confronted the “wild” parts of both the world around her and her inner nature, and has found freedom and beauty along the way. Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail doesn’t ever really become easy, Cheryl notes at one point—but it does get easier, and the same can be said of her reckoning with the mountains within.

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Nature and Humanity ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Nature and Humanity appears in each chapter of Wild. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Nature and Humanity Quotes in Wild

Below you will find the important quotes in Wild related to the theme of Nature and Humanity.
Prologue Quotes

I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and an adulteress. A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer who hopped form one meaningless job to the next while dabbling dangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many men. […] But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now. […] It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Cheryl’s Mother/Bobbi
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:

It took me years […] to be the woman my mother raised. […] I would suffer. […] I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Cheryl’s Mother/Bobbi
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

[Monster] looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do. I sat down on the floor beside it and pondered my situation. How could I carry a backpack more than a thousand miles […] if I couldn’t even budge it an inch? […] The notion was preposterous and yet I had to lift that pack.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Related Symbols: Monster
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer […] was how few choices I had. […] How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. There were only two [options] and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. […] And so I walked on.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. […] But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Cheryl’s Mother/Bobbi
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did.

And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Cheryl’s Mother/Bobbi
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.”

I looked at him in the dark. […] “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. […]

“Well then, you’re lucky.” He said. “Not everyone gets a horse.”

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Brent (speaker)
Related Symbols: Cheryl’s Boots
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

There were so many […] amazing things in this world.

They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker), Cheryl’s Mother/Bobbi , Paul
Page Number: 234
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498 MILES—no mention of Oregon itself.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 238-239
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland. […] This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 275
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. […] How wild it was, to let it be.

Related Characters: Cheryl Strayed (speaker)
Page Number: 311
Explanation and Analysis: