For Tuesday: Strayed, Wild, Chs. 1-4

The author during her trek on the PCT

NOTE: Read as close to the end of Chapter 4 as you can by Tuesday. If you don't completely get there, no problem, but get close, since our quiz on Tuesday will expect you to have read at least 3/4 of this. Here are some questions to consider as you read, one of which will make an appearance on the quiz:

* How is Cheryl a bit like Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild? What problems and personality straits do both of them share? What might both be driven to explore the "wild"?

* Related to the above, what does the PCT represent for her? How is it like her "Alaska"?

* What are the "Ten thousand things"? What does this say about her relationship with her mother, and why she had so much trouble processing her death?

* Throughout these chapters, she throws herself into shallow affairs and eventually, drug addiction, almost as a way of punishing herself. Yet she says that "this is how "it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean" (36). How is this kind of self-mutilation "clean"? 

* Why does she have vivid dreams--which she calls the "documentary films of her subconscious"--of killing her mother in various horrible ways? 

* Is she prepared for her journey on the PCT either physically or mentally? How is she a little like McCandless when he first sets out "into the wild" in Alaska?