Wild

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Or rather, my mother, Leif, Karen, and I did, along with our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of ten baby chicks my mom got for free at the feed store for buying twenty-five pounds of chicken feed. Eddie would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then stay come fall. We were twenty miles away from two small towns in opposite directions: Moose Lake to the east; McGregor to the northwest. We fought and talked and made up jokes and diversions in order to pass the time.

Are you a man? Are you Charles Manson? We were swarmed by mosqui- toes as we worked, but my mother forbade us to use DEET or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming chemical. Instead, she instructed us to slather our bodies with pennyroyal or peppermint oil.

In the evenings, we would make a game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight. The numbers would be seventy-nine, eighty-six, one hundred and three. There had always been a television in our house, not to mention a flushable toilet and a tap where you could get yourself a glass of water. In our new life as pioneers, even meeting the simplest needs often involved a grueling litany of tasks, rig- orous and full of boondoggle.

Our kitchen was a Coleman camp stove, a fire ring, an old-fashioned icebox Eddie built that depended on actual ice to keep things even mildly cool, a detached sink propped against an outside wall of the shack, and a bucket of water with a lid on it. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped and primed and stoked and monitored. Karen and I shared a bed on a lofted platform built so close to the ceiling we could just barely sit up. Leif slept a few feet away on his own smaller platform, and our mother was in a bed on the floor below, joined by Eddie on the weekends.

Every night we talked one another to sleep, slumber-party style. There was a skylight window in the ceiling that ran the length of the platform bed I shared with Karen, its transparent pane only a few feet from our faces. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be. All through my teen years, Eddie and my mom kept building it, adding on, making it better. My mother planted a garden and canned and pickled and froze vegetables in the fall. She tapped the trees and made maple syrup, baked bread and carded wool, and made her own fabric dyes out of dandelions and broccoli leaves.

I grew up and left home for college in the Twin Cities at a school called St. Thomas, but not without my mom. My acceptance letter men- tioned that parents of students could take classes at St. Much as she liked her life as a modern pioneer, my mother had always wanted to get her degree. We laughed about it together, then pondered it in private. Thomas was a three- hour drive away. We kept talking and talking until at last we had a deal: Thomas but we would have separate lives, dictated by me. I would live in the dorm and she would drive back and forth. If our paths crossed on campus she would not acknowledge me unless I acknowledged her first.

She replicated my worksheets, wrote the same papers I had to write, read every one of the books. I judged her a shaky student at best. She went to college and earned straight As. Sometimes I hugged her exuberantly when I saw her on campus; other times I sailed on by, as if she were no one to me at all. We were both seniors in college when we learned she had cancer. I was married by then, to a good man named Paul. After she got sick, I folded my life down.

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I told Paul not to count on me. I wanted to quit school, but my mother ordered me not to, begging me, no matter what happened, to get my degree. She herself took what she called a break. She only needed to complete a couple more classes to graduate, and she would, she told me. She would get her BA if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at each other darkly. She would be strong enough to start in on those last two classes soon, she absolutely knew.

I stayed in school, though I convinced my professors to allow me to be in class only two days each week. As soon as those two days were over, I raced home to be with my mother. Plus, I was needed. Eddie was with her when he could be, but he had to work. Someone had to pay the bills. I cooked food that my mother tried to eat, but rarely could she eat. I took everything from the cupboards and put new paper down. My mother slept and moaned and counted and swallowed her pills.

On good days she sat in a chair and talked to me. There was nothing much to say. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates.

Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table while her much younger sister played. I wanted to know. But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too. A little more than a month. The idea that my mother would live a year quickly became a sad dream. By the third of March, she had to go to the hospital in Duluth, seventy miles away, because she was in so much pain.

She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be. They went on crooked. I became furious with my mother, as if she were purposely holding her foot in a way that made it impossible for me.

She sat back, leaning on her hands on the bed, her eyes closed. I could hear her breathing deeply, slowly. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood, delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was. It was this very acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending optimism and cheer.

Her movements were slow and thick as she put on her coat. She held on to the walls as she made her way through the house, her two beloved dogs following her as she went, pushing their noses into her hands and thighs. I watched the way she patted their heads. The words fuck them were two dry pills in my mouth.

Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind.

And then the one of my mother in August and another in May.

Each day that passed, another month peeled away. On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she refused. She slept and woke, talked and laughed. She cried from the pain. I camped out during the days with her and Eddie took the nights. She was preoccupied with nothing but eradicating her pain, an impossible task in the spaces of time between the doses of morphine.

We could never get the pillows right. He was young, perhaps thirty. He stood next to my mother, a gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in the bed. And also I wanted to take pleasure from him, to feel the weight of his body against me, to feel his mouth in my hair and hear him say my name to me over and over again, to force him to acknowledge me, to make this matter to him, to crush his heart with mercy for us. When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything.

He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants. My mother begged and whimpered then. She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed.

She lived forty-nine days after the first doctor in Duluth told her she had cancer; thirty-four after the one at the Mayo Clinic did. But each day was an eternity, one stacked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze. I was in heartbroken and enraged disbelief. One friend told us he was stay- ing with a girl named Sue in St. Another spotted him ice fishing on Sheriff Lake.

Mostly, I watched her sleep, the hardest task of all, to see her in repose, her face still pinched with pain. But it was just me. My husband, Paul, did everything he could to make me feel less alone. What did he know about losing anything? His parents were still alive and happily married to each other. My connection with him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: In the mornings, I would sit near her bed and try to read to her.

I had two books: So I started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air.

Cheryl Strayed

It was the same when I tried to pray. I prayed fervently, rabidly, to God, any god, to a god I could not identify or find. I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. The last couple of days of her life, my mother was not so much high as down under. She was on a morphine drip by then, a clear bag of liquid flowing slowly down a tube that was taped to her wrist.

Sometimes when my mother woke she did not know where she was. She demanded an enchilada and then some apple- sauce. During this time I wanted my mother to say to me that I had been the best daughter in the world. I did not want to want this, but I did, inexplicably, as if I had a great fever that could be cooled only by those words.

But this was not enough. I was ravenous for love. My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window.

The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had to work.

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And then more quietly she said: I wanted to take her from the hospital and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I watched my mother. Outside the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy edges of the snow. It would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently lucid and hallucinatory.

The nurses and doctors had told Eddie and me that this was it. I took that to mean she would die in a couple of weeks. I believed that people with cancer lingered. I decided to leave the hospital for one night so I could find him and bring him to the hospital once and for all. I looked over at Eddie, half lying on the little vinyl couch. None of us will leave. I rode the elevator and went out to the cold street and walked along the sidewalk. I passed a bar packed with people I could see through a big plate-glass window.

They were all wearing shiny green paper hats and green shirts and green suspenders and drinking green beer. A man inside met my eye and pointed at me drunkenly, his face breaking into silent laughter. I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap.

I called everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some said. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that this was it.

Wild Reviews - Metacritic

I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep.

I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. We listened intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the snow on the sides of the road.

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This was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. An engaging, emotionally resonant piece of filmmaking. Check this movie here http: A very well made and often times heartfelt film. Director Jean-Marc Vallee once again delivers with another great film.

While it didn't quite live up to last year's Dallas Buyers Club for me, he still managed to make a genuine-feeling film full of life. The story was a little slow at times, A very well made and often times heartfelt film. The story was a little slow at times, but was easily made up for thanks to Reese Witherspoon's honest and soulful performance. Her Oscar buzz is very deserving and I have to agree with everyone else that it's her best performance since her Oscar win for "s Walk the Line. I also really enjoyed Laura Dern, who also gave a worthwhile performance.

Overall, while the story and pacing didn't quite live up to my expectations, it's Witherspoon's performance that made the film memorable for me and made it worth it in the end. Mancunian Jan 30, I'm a little bit surprised that no one has mentioned that Wild is very much a movie about challenges unique to women that Male Privilege otherwise excuses - continual vigilance at being propositioned for sex; disbelief or "concern praise" that a woman gets for doing something men typically I'm a little bit surprised that no one has mentioned that Wild is very much a movie about challenges unique to women that Male Privilege otherwise excuses - continual vigilance at being propositioned for sex; disbelief or "concern praise" that a woman gets for doing something men typically do; experiencing sexist assumptions made about a lone female versus a lone male; "favours" done so that a woman will "come around".

Despite the physical isolation and potential dangers in nature, Cheryl must still face these realities and Wild makes an admirable attempt to highlight a female-centred experience amidst all the other problems in Cheryl's life. True, the whole feat of completing the trail as heroically as Cheryl had in spite of here initial inexperience is not entirely realistic.

I also didn't see what original quirks Reese Witherspoon brought to the role. However, I am convinced that the intention of Wild was display of the greater messages behind Cheryl's thousand-mile saga: Wild succeeds and makes an unforgettable statement. The true story of a woman walking the Pacific Crest Trail in order to find her way back to the woman her mother always thought she could be, sounds like a hippy dippy 60's throwback that would try the patience of the average moviegoer.

In actual fact it's a heart-warming character study of a The true story of a woman walking the Pacific Crest Trail in order to find her way back to the woman her mother always thought she could be, sounds like a hippy dippy 60's throwback that would try the patience of the average moviegoer.

In actual fact it's a heart-warming character study of a woman trying to get het life back on track that works because of a standout performance from Witherspoon and a smart script from Nick Hornby. What the film does lack is a certain amount of dramatic weight, with the arduous journey passing with little incident, the characters past never seeming that terrible and her drug rehabilitation coming across as a little too easy.

Beowulf Dec 19, After finding out she was pregnant, Strayed got an abortion and resolved to hike the trail to redeem herself. Strayed begins her trek in the Mojave Desert in Southern California with her backpack. On the first night, she discovers she has brought the wrong type of gas for her stove and is therefore unable to cook food. After a few more days, Strayed meets Frank W. Earl Brown , a farmer and construction worker who takes her in for the night and with his wife offers her a home-cooked meal and a warm shower. Upon arrival, she meets a camper named Ed Cliff DeYoung who helps Strayed strategically lighten her overweight backpack and convinces her to replace her undersized hiking boots with a new pair, to be delivered to a future stop on the trail.

Strayed continues her hike into Northern California despite Greg's warnings of deep snowfall. After removing a boot to remove a loose toenail, the boot accidentally falls down an inaccessibly deep slope, forcing her to continue the journey wearing sandals reinforced with duct tape. Strayed's best friend Aimee sends her provisions to stops along the trail, including letters that congratulate her on her progress.

Strayed also receives letters from her ex-husband Paul along the way. On the morning of Day 58, Strayed is out of water and desperately licks the dew off her tent. Dehydrated and near exhaustion, she siphons water from a muddy puddle. While she waits for her water to disinfect, two hunters approach, one making suggestive remarks that leave Strayed feeling threatened and vulnerable.

This causes her to quickly leave and run away. Strayed makes her way out of California and arrives in Ashland, Oregon , where she meets a man named Jonathan Michiel Huisman , with whom she attends a tribute concert to Jerry Garcia and later spends the night. Days later, Strayed arrives at Mount Hood National Forest and encounters a friendly group of young hikers who share their experiences.

The hikers recognize her from the signatures she's been leaving in the hiker's record books along the PCT. Strayed frequently leaves quotes or poems that are meaningful to her along her journey. One rainy day, Strayed finds a llama that escaped from a young boy hiking with his grandmother. Strayed chats with the boy, who asks her about her parents.

After she mentions her mother's death, the boy sings " Red River Valley " to Strayed, saying it is a song his mother used to sing to him. As the boy leaves, Strayed breaks down and cries. On September 15, after hiking for 94 days, Strayed reaches the Bridge of the Gods on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington, ending her journey. At various points along the trail, including at the end of the bridge, Strayed encounters a red fox, which she interprets as carrying the spirit of her mother watching over her. She reflects that, four years in the future, she will remarry at a spot in view of the bridge, five years after that have a son and one year after that have a daughter named Bobbi, after Strayed's mother.

Principal photography began on October 11, , with shooting occurring on location in Oregon and California. By far, this is the hardest movie I've ever made in my life. I didn't hike a thousand miles, of course, but it was a different kind of physical rigor. I'd run up a hill with a pound backpack on, and they'd say, 'Wait, that backpack doesn't look heavy enough. Put this pound backpack on and run up the hill nine or ten times.

It was crazy, but it was so wonderful. It was complete immersion, and I've never felt closer to a crew. We literally pulled each other up the mountains and carried each others' equipment. The film's soundtrack, supervised by Susan Jacobs, [15] was released by Sony 's Legacy Recordings on November 10,

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