'Wild': 8 stories from Cheryl Strayed's bestselling memoir

Author Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail has become one of the most popular reads of the summer. Here are 8 stories from 'Wild.'

8. The end of the trail

A dam in Cascade Locks, Ore., where the Bridge of the Gods is located Andy Nelson

Strayed wrote that she later married her husband at a spot near the Bridge of the Gods, where her Pacific Crest Trail journey ended, and she brought back her husband and their two children to have ice cream at the spot at the end of the trail so she could tell them about her trip. But she said that at the moment she had finished her trip, it was enough for her that she didn't know what the future held. "I didn't have to know," she said. "It was enough to trust that what I'd done was true."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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