The Hero's Journey

                                    

                                     The Ups and Downs of Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail

By: Elysha Charyk

The hero’s journey, is a concept that was developed by Joseph Campbell. The hero’s journey is where a man or woman decide to set out on an epic quest to find one’s self or prove their worth. Like any journey the hero, must pass through these steps just like anyone would, when we meet the hero and then the call to adventure. In the stage the call to adventure, this is when the hero decides to embark on the adventure.

Cheryl Strayed meets the characteristics necessary for it to be considered a hero’s journey. Her mother passes away, her father is absent in her life, she is getting divorced, and now she is becoming a drug addict. She knows that in order to save herself, and become the person that she once was, she needs to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in order to find herself once again.

The hero’s journey starts with the ordinary world, where we meet our hero, and the problems that are going on. The author knows that her life is going south ever since her mom died. Her family is very distant, and busy with their own lives. She cheats on her husband, which leads her to do drugs with him, which ultimately leads to her divorce. Strayed knew that she only had one choice and that was to answer the call to adventure, and to hike the PCT trail. At the very beginning of her hike, before she even starts, she reaches the refusal of the call, she has doubts about actually being able to hike the PCT trail for three months without much training and is thinking that it’s not the best idea, but then she decides to push through her doubts and to start hiking. Along her journey she meets many allies and enemies. One enemy that she faces is backpack that she calls “monster", I believe this to be one of her enemies, because during her hike it causes her many problems due to the fact that she’s hiking alone and has to carry everything on her own. Albert one if the hikers that she met, had commented on her pack. “Jiminy Cricket,” Albert drawled when he saw Monster. “What you got in there, girly-o? Looks like everything but the kitchen sink.”(Strayed, 93) Strayed was on her own so it looked like her had more stuff then the rest of them. Later on she met up with Albert, and some other people that she had met on the trail, and he helped her remove some of the unnecessary weight that she had. “Looks to me like you could stand to lose a few things,” he said. “Want some help?” “actually,” I said, smiling ruefully at him, “yes”.”(Strayed, 106)

The next stage that the author came across is the ordeal, this stage happens near the middle of the story, when the hero confronts death, or faces his or her greatest fear. At this point in the story the author is walking through a desert “I spent the morning weaving my way through dry creek beds and bine-hard gullies, pausing to sip water as seldom as I could.”(Strayed, 191) Strayed was hiking a desert in a very hot and dry part of California where the temperature was already in the triple digits.  There was a water halfway through her hike and she already running out of water, not even close to the water. Trying to preserve her water until she reaches the next water source. “I forced myself not to drink the last two until I had the water tank in sight and by 4:30 there it was: the stilted legs of the burned fire lookout on a rise in the distance.”(Strayed, 193) “It wasn’t until I got up close that I saw they were tiny scraps of water… They said in various ways, but they all bore the same message: NO WATER.”(Strayed, 194) Now Cheryl Strayed only half way though her hike left with only two ounces of water, walking in desert, where the temperature is in the triple digits, she continued to hike.  She later found a dirty pond that had some water, and pumped it so that later on she could filter the water, and put an iodine pill in so that the water was safe enough to drink. I believe that his was a turning point for her in her hike, because if she could get through this obstacle, then she would be able to get through any other obstacle that came her way in order to fish the hike.

At one point during her hike she comes across a fox “This was his world. He was certain as the sky. “Fox,” I whispered… He raised his fine-boned red head, but remained standing… “Come back,” I called lightly and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did. And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.”(Strayed, 144) I believe that at this point, because a fox is a spirit animal, that maybe she felt a connection with the fox and that the fox could possibly be her mother watching over her. I believe that this is very symbolic to the story because it means that she is not entirely alone.