October 9, 2015 - 16:19
To Tree
In Wild, Cheryl Strayed explains that her reasoning behind hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was mainly the unexpected death of her mother, along with the subsequent divorce and loss of family. In our class discussion we questioned the role of the PCT in Wild, and whether or not Wild should be considered an environmental text. I came to the conclusion that Wild was not a text about the PCT since it is a book about Cheryl Strayed’s self discovery, and the environment is used within the text to emphasize Strayed’s isolation from human society and her internal journey. Later that day I went to a presentation where Strayed spoke and answered questions. She mentioned that her healing was from being alone, which could be any isolated place, and realizing what really mattered to her. She also spoke about the organic formation of metaphors that emerge from memoir writing. These ideas further support the idea that the PCT is simply a tool used to further Strayed’s own healing as described in her book. Trees are a constant sight on the trail and in the book, and their simultaneously changing and unchanging nature, as well as their structure, often parallels Strayed’s own internal journey. The most common definition of “tree” is a perennial plant with a woody main stem or trunk and branches that grows to a considerable height and size (Oxford). Urbandictionary.com, a website with user submitted definitions, has a definition of “tree” as “something that sits in the ground and remains in the same spot for hundreds of years but manages to jump out in front of you on your way home from the pub.” Lastly, there is an obscure definition of tree meaning to grow into or attain the size of a tree (Oxford). All of these definitions are applicable to Strayed’s memoir.
Elements of a tree’s structure help explain Strayed’s healing from loss of family and self. After the death of her mother, Strayed felt her family drift apart as if her mother was the force that kept the family together, “Without my mother, we weren’t what we’d been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope” (Strayed 35). Strayed’s mother is like the trunk of a family tree, with Strayed and her siblings as the branches, all falling apart without a strong foundation. On the PCT, Strayed realizes her powerlessness in contact with the wilderness, humbling her and pressuring her to depend on herself and work with nature rather than against it. In a sense, she had to become her own tree with a trunk and branches, rather than a branch that fell off the trunk of her mother. The setting of the PCT is used by Strayed to emphasize her own transition, from being fragile to strong, from a loss of family to an acceptancce of self. Strayed also said in her presentation that she got married and had children in her life after the hike, and she saw it as getting her life back together. The self dependence that Strayed developed on the trail is what allowed her to start a new family, or grow branches. She was like her own mother, but with a more stable family. The cyclical nature of trees is another characteristic that applies to Strayed’s story.
The coexistence of the unchanging and still nature of trees along with their continual growth and cycling is also applied to Strayed’s discovery of self on the PCT. Strayed’s downward spiral was similar to the issues her mother had during Strayed’s upbringing, including unstable and unhealthy relationships with men, neglect of family, and drug problems (Strayed 34). But Strayed’s issues were not exactly the same as her mother’s; she was able to maintain meaningful friendships with the men she was with, such as Paul and Joe, despite the problematic romantic and sexual relationships she had with them. The abortion she had before hiking the PCT allowed her to live for herself before having children, unlike her mother (Strayed 272). Despite Strayed saying, “‘I’d spent my childhood planning not to become her,’” (Strayed 272) the cyclical nature of Strayed and her mother’s lives parallel the life cycles of trees, while the changes Strayed made to her own life learning from her mother’s experience reflects the growth of trees with every cycling through the seasons. Strayed also addresses in her presentation how there was no single epiphany moment when she realized her own self discovery on the PCT, and that it was a series of small and gradual realizations. This parallels the cyclical yet growing nature of trees, their growth so slow and gradual it goes unnoticed at the moment but its growth in height and size is often realized in the long term. The setting of the PCT emphasizes this notion in Wild, as nature often seems still and unchanging at a small moment but is often full of surprises, leaving humans powerless. Strayed also goes back and forth between feeling comfortable and confident on the PCT to feeling completely lost and regretful, reflecting the cyclical rather than completely transitional nature of her self discovery.
Cheryl Strayed is an embodiment of the verb “tree” in Wild, by breaking off of her mother’s branch and creating her own tree, cycling through an entanglement of her mother’s life and her own, and growing and finding herself in the process. The PCT is used by Strayed to reflect her own internal journey, paralleling the structure and life cycle of a tree. By isolating herself from human society, Strayed’s life is put alongside life found on the PCT, away from the distractions that prevented her from seeing her own identity. But the self discovery did not occur because of the trees, just with them in the background.