[pct-l] Oprah and low snow provide a record year?

[Anthony Biegen]

Rachel wrote:
>Hello Norseman, seems like you have some fears about the PCT and the
>future. ?Firstly, I think some fresh air and a walk out in the woods might
>calm your soul. ?I know it's fun to "dig up" up some drama but it's more
>fun to hear the crunch of the dirt under your shoes and to feel the sun on
>your face.

>The author, Cheryl Strayed, was young woman when she walked the trail and
>the book is her memoir about her life. ?Her long walk on the PCT was her
>way of processing her life events. ?I think she walked on the trail in the
>early 90's, about 17 years ago. ?I'm not a fan of memoirs but I do read
>anything related to the PCT so I gave it a try. ?She's an honest and open
>author, which might offend some people. ?I appreciated her honestly and her
>lack of "rose tinted glasses" about her life and experience walking.

Piper and I had the honor of going to a reading and talk by Cheryl. She is
a wonderful person and a great writer. Right off the bat in the talk she
states that her book is NOT a guide to hiking the PCT. If anything, she
said, it is a study on what NOT to do.

In the Q&A session at the end, one young woman asked Cheryl about her
craft, which of course is writing, not trekking. She asked, Did you really
think those things at the time you wrote in your book. Chery answered
honestly as one writer to another hopeful writer. She chose to write about
the PCT because it is an excellent framework for some things that she had
been wanting to say for a long time. The PCT has a beginning, middle and
end. It has a built in learning process and maturation. It has high points
and low points.

She said that she was thinking about all those things as she was hiking but
not necessarily in the order they appear in the book. Some things were told
at exactly the time that she was thinking about them. Others were
repositioned in time to be more dramatic or more understandable to the
reader. She gave an example of one of what I felt was one of the three
shocking scenes in the book. I won't reveal what that was here but she said
that if she had inserted it earlier in the book, the reader wouldn't have
had time to get to know her in a way that they could accept what she was
revealing. So yes, she did rearrange the thoughts she had on the trail and
I'm sure that those thoughts are colored by the years that have past since
she hiked the trail. It's a book.

So while I agree that the book wasn't a journal of the trail or an
education on the PCT, and it wasn't high literature such as Tolstoy or
Steinbeck, it is a very enjoyable read.