Wild

    Bill McKibben references nature in his novel Wandering Home stating, "Enough to reorient their compass in a new direction, too. Most of the time we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of a consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half truth at best-you don't need to look very hard at our culture to see that deep happiness is not it's hallmark, " (136). This passage struck me on a similar chord that the recent film Wild did. Wild tells the story of Cheryl Strayed a young women crushed by her mother’s death at just 45 who spirals into drug addiction.

Wild captures Strayed’s last ditch effort to find herself as she embarks on a solo trek through the 1,100 mile Pacific Coast Trail. As Strayed struggles with the difficulties of such a long journey she begins to reorient her life and depicts the appeal of escaping from civilization for a short time. There may have been films more technical than "Wild" this year or even more ambitious but I find it hard to believe any were as raw. It touches at a part of society worth examining, “My mother used to say something that drove me nuts. There's a sunrise and a sunset every day, and you can choose to be there for it -- you can put yourself in the way of beauty,”(Strayed).

McKibben and Strayed take very different journeys as they walk through nature but they certainly both come out on the other side better for having done so. Wild may win Reese Witherspoon the Oscar but more importantly the film has garnered a 300% increase in hikers on the PCT.  The interaction of humans and nature is necessary for survival on a physical level, that much is obvious, but it has become apparent to me that nature plays an important role in mental sanity as well. It became clear Strayed thought so as well as she ended her book with, “It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way,” (Strayed).

Texts
Wandering Home Bill McKibben
Wild Cheryl Strayed