[B]RATTLEBORO — Susan Parris may head Brattleboro Area Hospice, but she believes in promoting a good life as well as a good death. So with her organization marking its 40th anniversary, she decided the perfect cover-all-the-bases speaker would be Cheryl Strayed, who channeled her mourning for her late mother into a 1,000-mile hike turned best-selling memoir turned Oscar-nominated movie, “Wild.”
The West Coast author’s agent wasn’t as sure.
“She rarely travels east,” Parris recalls her representative saying, “but there’s this one little window.”
And so after Strayed dropped off her son at a Vermont camp this past week, she stopped by the Latchis Theatre to address a crowd of more than 700 people on how to traverse life’s peaks and valleys by practicing what she learned hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
“It was harder than I thought it was going to be — it was more beautiful, it was more solitary, it was more brutal, it was more life-affirming,” she said. “And what it was most of all was me teaching myself how to go on.”
Strayed, having traded her hiking boots for sandals with heels, told how she was raised by a single mother who survived an abusive husband, only to die of cancer at age 45.
“I’m going to show the world my mom mattered,” the author remembered thinking at the time.
That’s why Strayed became sexually promiscuous and shot heroin.
“I’m going to destroy myself so that people pay attention,” she sums up her warped reasoning. “It took me years to consciously realize that’s what was going on.”
Then Strayed saw a guide about the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico through California, Oregon and Washington to Canada. She hadn’t backpacked before. But soon she was hiking from the Mojave Desert to the Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia River.
The result was a 2012 memoir selected by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and a 2014 movie nominated for several Academy Awards.
“There are so many gifts that I received from the experience, like having Reese Witherspoon play me or having Oprah call,” Strayed said. “But the greatest of all is people walking up to me and saying, ‘You put words to my experience. You spoke my grief, my loss, my journey. In you telling the truth, I saw my own.’”
Her Brattleboro audience, for its part, inquired about how to deal with death.
“Everyone has had to bear something he or she couldn’t bear, but that is the joy of life,” Strayed said. “I always say grief really is love, and how lucky are we that we love someone so much it hurts so much to lose them. It does end up being true that the way you recover from any kind of loss is the same way you hike a long trail: you just put one foot in front of the other.”
One hiker asked how to stay strong when feeling weak.
“You’re going to have those moments where you’re like, ‘This is hard, I’m miserable, why am I even here at all?’ What’s happening right then is just a moment. There’s the beauty and the light, and there’s the sorrow and the difficulty in the struggle. You want them both. You want to have the hard moments, because those will be the things that teach you who you are and what you’re capable of.”
Others questioned how to stop using heroin or start writing. Strayed’s answer to each was the same.
“Sometimes you can’t actually imagine the beautiful river you’re going to come to or the waterfall that’s going to be there,” she said. “The only way to do it is a very simple thing: Sometimes all you can do is take the next step.”
