When everything fell apart, Cheryl Strayed left, alone, to hike.
She covered 1,100 miles, from California’s Mojave Desert and across the Range of Light — the Sierra Nevada — up onto the spine of the Cascades, past Crater Lake and finally to Oregon’s Bridge of the Gods.
Her path was the Pacific Crest Trail, her companion a pack that at first felt like a Volkswagen Beetle on her shoulders.
Now, her story, Wild, is taking her places she never expected.
The memoir of Strayed’s 26th year, culminating in her June-to-September 1995 walk across California and Oregon, is not “I’m a long-distance hiker, hear me roar.”
Instead, it’s Strayed’s unflinching, unflagging account of a journey infused with quiet joy. The Wild subtitle sums it up: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Strayed, of Portland, Ore., has added the North Olympic Peninsula to her book tour — actually a road trip with friend and fellow author Pam Houston.
Strayed, 43, will read from Wild — which is camped atop The New York Times best-seller list — in Port Angeles on Wednesday, then give a free lecture on writing in Port Townsend on Thursday afternoon and finally another reading Friday night in Port Townsend.
For a writer at this juncture in her career, it’s an unusual thing to come to towns this size.
Strayed’s Wild, you see, isn’t just a best-seller, nor is it her only much talked-about book to come out this year.
Wild was just chosen by Oprah Winfrey to launch Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, so Strayed has been doing near-nonstop television interviews and videos to go with that.
Then Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her “Dear Sugar” advice columns in the online magazine TheRumpus.net, was released last week.
So life has changed for Strayed, but “the main thing that’s interesting to me is that the actual things haven’t changed,” she said in an interview from her home in Portland.
“To my kids, I’m still the exact same person,” she said. “To my husband, I’m exactly the same person.”
The difference is in the way other people treat her, say at a party: They want to meet Cheryl Strayed. The famous writer.
People are devouring Wild and raving about it. Hundreds of readers pack rooms where she is to speak, everybody has just read her book, and “that still blows me away,” she said.
Strayed’s self-reliant trek on foot across two mountain ranges has her at first in a pair of too-small boots, then in duct-taped sandals, then in new, right-size boots shipped to her as she walks to Castle Crags, Calif.
It’s about true grit, about doing what she did not and could not prepare for.
It’s on confronting danger and beauty, slipping and sliding on a snow-obliterated trail, and finding peace while walking toward a high blue sky.
Strayed has a tough time, and not just because of the rattlesnakes.
She walks through memories, both horrific and sweet, of her mother, who died of cancer at 45.
She runs out of money more than once.
Things go awry because of Strayed’s mistakes; for a few hours she feels like an “Amazonian queen,” then descends to the miserable belief that she is the world’s biggest idiot.
When she set out, Strayed was seeking to leave behind a lot that had gone wrong in her life.
The time had come, Strayed said, to do something completely new — and to finish it.
All these years later, she still says fervently: “It was an amazing journey.”
Many a reader has emailed to say, “You’ve inspired me to go hiking. What are your words of wisdom?”
The whole book is a testament, Strayed replies — though she says the wisdom is in the form of “what not to do.”
Strayed has been Port Townsend to teach at Centrum’s writers’ conference before, but she’s never come to Port Angeles.
More than once, she said she’s excited about the trip, to this rural place not so unlike the Minnesota woods where she grew up.
When she was a girl, Strayed adored books, but never got to go hear an actual author give a reading.
She remembers being awestruck by writers. So it moves her when a reader comes to her table, Wild in hand, opened for her inscription.
“I feel like I’m on the other side of the equation. People walk up to me, they say, ‘I’m so nervous.’ Sometimes they start to cry. I want to say: ‘I know exactly how you’re feeling. I’m that way too . . .’”
Strayed wants her readers to know: “I’m not that ‘other person’ on the ‘other side.’ I’m with you.”
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
breakout precedes and follows story
CHERYL STRAYED, AUTHOR of Wild, and Pam Houston, author of many books, including Cowboys Are My Weakness and most recently Contents May Have Shifted, will read from their books at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St. Listeners are advised to come early.
At the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Strayed will give a free lecture on writing at 4 p.m. Thursday and then a reading with writer Dana Levin at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden State Park, 200 Battery Way.
Admission to all three events is free.
For details about the Port Angeles event, phone sponsor Port Book and News at 360-452-6367; for information about the Port Townsend events, phone Centrum at 360-385-3102.
