I’d heard of hiking the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail—made famous in Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild—along with various smaller-though-still-long-ass trails, but I’d never heard of the Pacific Northwest Trail, despite having spent hiking time at its beginning (Glacier National Park) and end (Olympic National Park). Dyana Carmella’s A Walk Thru NeverLand comes as a pleasant surprise, both for knowledge of the trail, but also as an equally-engaging hiking memoir as Wild. Comparisons to Wild are inevitable—and there wouldn’t be NeverLand without Wild—but in the small sub-genre of memoirs about trail-hiking A Walk Thru NeverLand rises to the top.
Carmella starts readers with her life in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular. She grew up in California, and unlike Strayed, has a background in outdoors activities. And, also unlike Strayed, Carmella has a great relationship with her parents. Neither is she experiencing a divorce, and her last relationship gets a one-sentence mention. What she’s experiencing is angst: she’s decently successful as a photographer and doing behind-the-scenes gigs in the movie industry. But it lacks meaning. She seems to just be reacting to everything, rather than being proactive and willing a meaningful life. She has friends—good ones. She acts her part well, and mostly seems likable to people on her job—except for the assholes.
Surprisingly, it’s when she’s depressed and randomly looking at Instagram videos that she comes across posts from a hiker on the Pacific Northwest Trail, which at that point she’d never heard of. But the posts haunt her. She doesn’t contemplate any other trail for a life-changing adventure, just that one, in the Pacific Northwest, which she’s never explored before. With help from her friends, she decides to hike it, though she knows it seems crazy. And this is the most important lesson from book: to have a calling, which may be frightening, and to answer it. As a friend counsels, “The secret to living is mastering the art of dancing with your fears, not running from them.” I think many of us have had callings, maybe not to hike months-long trails, but to do something out of the ordinary. I have, and I’ve changed my life that way.
I’ve done plenty of backpacking. No thru-hiking, but one 13-day jaunt in Australia. Five- or six-day trips are plenty, sometimes filled with both the misery and the glory. And Carmella captures both well, like this early experience in Glacier National Park. First the misery:
I eventually make my way along a section of trail that I can only classify as a “damn nightmare.” I have to lift my legs up and over large rocks. Wet brush whacks me in the face... hard, ice-cold pellets of hail pounding me head... A thick layer of mist develops, making it hard to see five feet in front of me. If I stop, even for a moment, my body temperature will quickly drop.
After 30 minutes of battling, I hit the top of the pass. The hail lets up but the heavy rain is unyielding... I finally drill my poles into the soft ground, lean my chest against the cork tops, and stare at the ground as raindrops pound the deep puddles at my feet.
Then the glory:
A minute later, I feel the rain lightening up on the back of my head. The heavy bullets turn into soft pieces of cotton that float down and land ever so tenderly. I open my eyes and see water particles dancing in the air.
What is happening? I look up and down the trail. About 15 feet away, I see a long, vibrant beam of sunlight that can’t be more than a half inch in diameter. This single ray of sunlight miraculously blazes through the dense trees. I hobble over to it and raise my hand toward the light. I feel a sliver of heat on my stiff, cold palm. I take a step closer and stand in the light strip to feel the heat on my face.
With so much time and space for an adventure, the choice for a writer is what to include, what not, what to focus on, what not. For Strayed, it was half hiking description, half flashbacks to her relationships with her mom and ex-husband. For Carmella, the emphasis is on the fleeting relationships she forms with people at various stopping points along the way, a lot of them off the trail, in the small towns where she gets a motel room for night. In this, as a young attractive woman probably helps. Once a dirtbag hitchhiker myself, I’d never dream of hitting it off with complete strangers the way she does, though it did sometimes happen. That’s one of her lessons, which she teaches by example. As that same friend later says, “Travel is not about you… We meet people who have an everlasting impact on us, but we rarely come to realize the impact we have on others.” And Carmella does have an impact: Mostly she seems like a great listener, willing and always curious to hear people’s stories. And she has a willingness to accept invitations to party with stranger in small-town bars.
As the night progresses, Jake, Bill, Jim and I knock back pink pussies at a rapid pace. I feel like I’m blending into the culture. I soon find myself collaborating on a synchronized dance with the busty ladies on the dance floor. It resembles an Irish job mixed with karate chops and Rockette kicks. Hints of cheap cologne, wood and grease fill the air. And the banjos are on fire, more in sync than the Chinese Gold Medal-winning synchronized divers. The musicians are battling as if their lives depend on it. Sweat sprays off their faces and into the crowd. More pink pussies are being passed around. It’s chaos and it’s glorious.
Style-wise, Carmella’s personality comes through. Whereas Strayed is more serious and even gloomy, Carmella never loses her sense of humor, even breaking her rule about never messing with park rangers. The most human parts are when she’s alone on the trail, experiencing some kind of misery brought on by the weather, when she yells out to herself, and/or this Her she starts to address, which is never clear if she means Nature, or more likely the Trail itself. In any case, in the most miserable of situations, Carmella will yell out, “Is this all you’ve got?”
Also, her Hollywood background dominates throughout. While Strayed was reading the poet Adrienne Rich, Carmella, on about every page, mentions a Hollywood movie, or tv show. Example taken by randomly opening the book, when she’s staying in Yaak, Montana:
I’m immediately thrust into the world of Deadwood as a weary traveler in search of something warm to guzzle down and a hopefully clean bed to sleep in. A bath? I’ll take it. Maybe I can befriend a prostitute and she can take me to the hotspot on the river, the spot she overheard that settler talking about, the spot that’s overflowing with gold. Wait, Deadwood takes place in South Dakota. Still, this is an authentically rustic frontier town. I’m digging it.
The interesting thing about her comparisons, and where Carmella reveals her mindset, is that comparing every experience she has to something in a movie elevates the movies to reality and what she’s experiencing as only a comparison. This isn’t a complaint—I get every reference she makes—just an observation. And—minor spoiler you might not even notice—by the end of her journey the comparisons stop. At one point, a woman she meets asks Carmella what she thinks about while doing all that hiking. Her answer is: “I think about nothing.”
I’ve experienced that too. A long hike becomes walking meditation. You have thoughts, emotions, or feelings, but they’re just that. Rather than react to them, you keep walking and they go away and become unimportant. This experience can be achieved in other activities—like running, mediation, gardening, or playing a musical instrument—but it needs the body in activity to override our “monkey mind’ of distraction. I can’t imagine how cleansing a two-and-a-half-month hike would be, though with A Walk Thru NeverLand I get close.
There’s a point later in her hike when Carmella and the Pacific Northwest Trail intersect for a bit with the Pacific Crest Trail, which now, apparently thanks to the Wild book and movie, gets up to 6000 people hiking it every year. But after being with Carmella so long on her journey, I found myself wanting her to get back to “her” trail, away from all those people. She does, but makes some PCT friends and gives them all her food for dinner. That’s trail generosity. Carmella’s full of generosity. I’d like to be more like her in that way.