On the ‘Wild’ Movie Trail in Oregon, This was not how Reese Witherspoon did it, but this is how you must: You hike. Up and up you go, boots pounding on fallen huckleberry leaves for three miles and 1,900 vertical feet up into the ferny Oregon Cascades. The Zigzag Valley below looks exactly like its name. Mount Hood, so close but invisible, is just a gut feeling in the fog. Then, there, in the pestering wind and angry rain, a spiny ridge, and beyond it, a very steep chute. That’s where almost exactly one year ago the actress sat down and ripped off her toenails.
Ms. Witherspoon hadn’t hiked up for more than an hour, as I had, from the Mirror Lake trailhead near Government Camp, about 50 miles southeast of Portland. She had taken a chairlift at Mount Hood Skibowl, a small ski area on a Mount Hood foothill, opposite the better-known Timberline Lodge. From the top of the Upper Bowl chairlift Ms. Witherspoon would have hiked about a half mile along a ridge of a 5,066-foot three-summit peak called Tom Dick and Harry Mountain to reach the chute where I now stood shivering. Her way made more sense, after all. She was acting in the new movie “Wild,” and there were cameramen and sound guys and fake blood and prosthetic toenails to put in place. Audiences needed only to believe she had arrived there the hard way.
Continue reading the main story
I huddled under a small, scraggly pine and took a moment to think. I was alone. My thin hiking pants felt clammy against my thighs, which steamed like dumplings from the exertion. This trail can get busy with Portlanders on sunny weekends, but on this rainy weekday I’d shared it only with chipmunks. There were no views. No snacks. No sun-broiled rocks to sit on. It was what it was, and so I thought of things that make me warm — my family, old friends at home and a new one in New York.
I pulled out my phone and broke the spell.
“@CherylStrayed On the Wild trail again,” I tapped, knowing I had no signal to tweet. “Rain outside but internal landscape abuzz.”
After the message went out later that night, Cheryl Strayed, the best-selling author whom I had met a few months earlier near Portland, never replied. But I knew she’d appreciate what I meant.
In 1995 Ms. Strayed, then 26 years old, set out on a 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile ribbon of dirt and rock that runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon and Washington. She had never hiked before but believed the hardships of a relatively simple idea — a walk in the woods from A to B — would help her find her way out of the “sick mire” her life had become. A few years earlier her mother had died rapidly of cancer at age 45. Her marriage had collapsed under her own adulterous ways. She’d fallen into a world of scuzzy mattresses and heroin use.
“I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly,” Ms. Strayed wrote years later in her memoir, “Wild,” which isn’t a hiking story so much as a chronicle of her inward journey toward acceptance. Ms. Witherspoon read the book one weekend and optioned the movie rights before its release in March 2012. Since then “Wild” had spent 87 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list as of Nov. 30, spawned legions of first-time hikers to take to the trail and brought countless others to towns like Cascade Locks, Ore., where Ms. Strayed ended her hike at the Bridge of the Gods, which spans the Columbia River into Washington.The movie “Wild,” which opened a few days ago, is raw and brutal, and the director Jean-Marc Vallée does a masterful job of using natural light to bring Nick Hornby’s screenplay to life with a warts-and-all honesty. Ms. Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, Laura Dern plays Bobbi, her mother, and the very first scene — a gruesome one involving those toenails and ill-fitting boots — takes place right where I was huddled on Tom Dick and Harry Mountain.
Hollywood has to fudge it all the time, of course, and in real life, this scene, which culminates with Ms. Strayed losing her boots off the edge of a cliff, never happened anywhere near this peak, which isn’t even on the Pacific Crest Trail. It happened hundreds of miles south, in California, on a particularly remote stretch of trail near Lassen Volcanic National Park.
In fact, while “Wild” the book has story lines in Minnesota, California and Oregon, all but seven of the movie’s scenes were filmed in Oregon, and only two of them were actually on the Pacific Crest Trail. “This wasn’t ‘Into the Wild,’ where we were ready to backpack into places to get some shots,” said Nancy Haecker, the location manager for “Wild,” who also worked with Sean Penn on the film version of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.” “Most of the time you just can’t send a movie crew out into some of these places. You need locations that are accessible, cinematic and can serve several purposes so the crew doesn’t have to pack up each day.”
I live in central Oregon, where much of the movie was shot in the fall of 2013. Crews did spend time shooting in Ashland and Crater Lake National Park, which proved complicated as a government shutdown closed the park before the filmmakers could capture the scenes they needed. It was the areas around my home in Bend that piqued my curiosity the most. The Oregon Badlands Wilderness, east of town, becomes the Modoc Plateau in California, thanks to some strategically placed Joshua trees. A convenience store where Ms. Witherspoon’s character buys some fuel for her stove isn’t in the Mojave, but in Alfalfa, a small farming community 15 miles east of my driveway.
“Reese walked in and said, ‘Hi, y’all! How you doin’?’ ” recalled Claudia Green, the Alfalfa Store owner for 27 years. “I didn’t recognize her at first. She’s tiny!”
I spent two days on set last November, when I befriended Ms. Haecker, who helped me plot out some of the film’s locations near Bend and Portland that anyone could see. Reaching this spot on Tom Dick and Harry without a chairlift demanded plenty of sweat, but nearly all of the other “cheats,” as Ms. Haecker called them, were just steps away from a car — the perfect way points for a road trip. In contrast to the hundreds of “Wild"-the-book fans who have taken off on their own Pacific Crest Trail hikes looking for purpose, “Wild"-the-movie fans can leave their backpacks at home and find some fun.Like Ms. Strayed’s hike, my journey had several beginnings, too. Over the past year I cobbled together my own “Wild” trail to combine hiking and outdoorsy pursuits that might offer some moments of self-reflection that I could then reward with pampering in homage to all the suffering that Ms. Strayed and other long-distance hikers must endure. There were the nights of poring over the list of 68 places where the movie was shot and the detours I took on other trips just because I could. I drove to Cascade Locks on the Columbia and ate ice cream at the Eastwind Drive-In, where Ms. Strayed ultimately ended her hike. I spent a few days in Portland. I hit places I’d seen in a screening of the film in Los Angeles but didn’t shun the chance to explore beyond them either.
Months before I hiked up Tom Dick and Harry Mountain, my wife, Heidi, and I loaded up my truck with camping chairs, bicycles and fly-fishing gear and rolled down Highway 97 south of Bend to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, which sits on a volcanic shield the size of Rhode Island. You can drive right into the caldera, fish for trout in the crater’s two lakes, East Lake and Paulina Lake, and ride a mountain bike for about 19 miles around the rim. There are lava flows and waterfalls. Once I used my hands to dig a small depression in the gravelly shore and watched as magma-warmed water seeped into the hole. For a moment I had my own natural hot tub.
“I can’t believe we got a campsite,” Heidi said, beaming, as we pulled into the East Lake Campground, a shaded loop near a boat ramp. Campgrounds here fill up fast in summer but we’d lucked out. Kids rode bicycles around the black pavement while our 5-year-old daughter waded into the cool water to net tiny fish that darted around her legs. I strung up my fly fishing rod and inflated a float tube — a small, personal raft of sorts for fishing in deep water without a boat — and slipped into the lake, weightless and free.
Early in her story, Ms. Strayed hikes the trail feeling anything but weightless and free. Her backpack, an old Gregory model, is so heavy that she calls it Monster, and eventually it becomes a symbol of her learning to bear the unbearable. About 135 miles into her hike, more experienced hikers help her lighten her load at a place in California called Kennedy Meadows, which is “more of a high-elevation base for hunters and hikers and fishers,” she writes. So is Paulina Lake Lodge, mostly, a 14-cabin retreat just out of my sight that stands in for Kennedy Meadows.
“They were all here for about 10 days. Really nice people,” Karen Brown, an owner, said later about the film crew. The lodge’s green metal roof and log-cabin walls are instantly recognizable in the film. “They were a little bit worried at first,” Ms. Brown said. “It snowed and this was supposed to be summer, but then it melted pretty fast. You just never know what it’s going to do up here.”
That is certainly true. The lodge sits at about 6,400 feet, high by Oregon standards, and I’ve been caught in sudden storms exploring its surrounds. Winter is a fine time to be there, too, though. You can ride snowmobiles along a road to the top of 7,989-foot Paulina Peak for views of the caldera and the Cascades to the west, or rent a cabin and head over to the lodge in snowshoes for Saturday prime rib dinners.That day last summer, though, I used swim fins to kick the float tube toward a rocky cliff where I cast a small fly about 30 feet out. I let it sink and then stripped it in slowly to mimic a nymph floating toward the surface. My line suddenly went taut, and I caught a glimpse of the fish, just the silvery wink of a coin in a well, before it sounded. The fish ran hard and dragged me around like a slow-motion scene out of “The Old Man and the Sea.” I reeled. He ran. I’ve spent so much of my life tugging on strings hoping for something on the other end, but then there was nothing. The fish was gone before I knew what I had.
The June before Ms. Strayed hit the Pacific Crest Trail she packed up her 1979 Chevy LUV pickup and rumbled out of the Midwest toward Portland. Nineteen years and four months later, I was headed that way, too, but in a BMW, the last car on the Enterprise lot, which I got for the price of a Chevy I’d reserved. Loretta Lynn and Jack White blasted from the stereo.I drove north from Bend, past Smith Rock, over the Crooked River and through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation before the dusty steppes of central Oregon rose into the temperate rain forest that covers the southern flanks of 11,250-foot Mount Hood, Oregon’s highest volcano. I hiked up Tom Dick and Harry Mountain, found the toenail/boot scene, and then ran most of the way back to the car just to stay warm. One of the prop guys from the film, Greg McMickle, an avid hiker who helped carry Ms. Witherspoon’s pack between takes, rang me with tips on where to go in Portland. “Mississippi Avenue,” he said.
Of all the locations used for the film, Oregon’s largest city, Ms. Strayed’s hometown these days, probably gets the most screen time. Portland stands in for California, Nevada and Minnesota as well as being itself. You’ll see the Interstate 5 bridge in an argument-while-driving scene. The Mexican restaurant in which Ms. Witherspoon’s character reveals she’s pregnant with a junkie’s child is actually the Casba Mediterranean Cafe on Northwest Davis Street, where $10 buys a combo plate of hummus, baba ghanouj and foul mudamas. The Overlook Family Restaurant with its video gambling machines on North Skidmore Street, “a weirdo 1960s lounge,” as one Yelp reviewer put it, doubles for a casino in Reno.
But if any place could symbolize Ms. Strayed’s path from dark past to gritty redemption, an approximately six-block stretch along Mississippi Avenue in north Portland could very well be it. “It used to be full of drugs, gangs, just really edgy,” Katie Burnett, a marketer for Imbibe magazine, told me over drinks at a lively Mississippi Avenue bar called Interurban. She and her husband, Kristopher Hutchison, live two blocks away.
From the 1930s until as recently as the 1990s, Mississippi Avenue in the Boise-Elliot area of the city formed a de facto border for what essentially became an urban reservation for minority ethnic groups. It was a slum by design. Back in the day, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and lenders literally drew red lines on maps around neighborhoods where residents — mostly African Americans — were readily denied loans and simultaneously discouraged from moving out. Predictably, the results of redlining were disastrous.These days Mississippi Avenue is “sleepily trendy,” as a Serious Eats blogger wrote in a review of Interurban when it opened in 2011. The mhoo tom yum soup with flat rice noodles at Mee-Sen Thai Eatery is alone worthy of a date-night. I spent an hour one morning in the Sunlan light bulb shop, where the owner, Kay Newell, rhapsodized on the virtues of rare-earth neodymium and greeted customers with phrases like, “Are you here to get lit?” Just below an apartment occupied in the film by Ms. Strayed’s ex-husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski), sits a barbershop called the Modern Man, where I sipped Burnside bourbon and got a straight razor shave from a guy named Chachi.
I said goodbye to Ms. Burnett and wandered a few doors down from Interurban to Mississippi Studios, a music venue used in the film for when Ms. Strayed arrives in Ashland, Ore., and meets a handsome guy named Jonathan (Michiel Huisman), who invites her to a Jerry Garcia tribute soon after the death of the Grateful Dead musician. The night I visited, tickets were all sold out for Asgeir, an Icelandic singer-songwriter, so instead I stood near the bar, which affords a perfect view of the stage anyway, drank black ales and listened to the melodic folk music.
Originally I’d hoped to stay at the Hotel deLuxe, one of the city’s finest hotels, used for a quick scene when Ms. Witherspoon’s character picks up a guy in a bar, the Driftwood Room, just off the main lobby. It was booked solid, so I ate a plate of charcuterie six seats down from where the actress sat, and did a 180 for the Courtesy Inn, a dive off Northeast Sandy Boulevard that doubles in the film as a hotel in both Ashland and the Mojave. It was exactly the kind of place you’d stay if you were a poor hiker living off $20 a month 20 years ago. Two of the lamps in my room had no bulbs. The third had a shade that looked as if it had been through a blender. I paid a $5 deposit to get a TV remote.
But as disgusting as this place felt, I liked it. I am who I am thanks to the times I had no money but hit the trail anyway. When I was Ms. Strayed’s age at the time of her hike, I could dance all night in Cuzco with three soles in my pocket. I lived for months on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in La Paz, Bolivia, for $1.25 a day. Six hundred dollars got me 59 days of snorkeling and sun in the Philippines. There will always be a reason you can’t travel but rarely is money one of them, at least not at 26.On my way back to Bend I took a detour and headed down some winding country lanes to 170-acre Eagle Fern Park, where the movie’s climax unfolds. The rain had started again, but I parked under a massive cedar tree, bundled up and took a short hike.
There wasn’t much of a trail, just a gravel road with some picnic tables under big trees dripping with old man’s beard. But at the far end of the park I found a gap in a white fence and a trail leading beyond it into a small clearing. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the spot where Ms. Witherspoon’s character collapses on her knees, sobs and begins to accept herself, her past and her pain. “It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred,” Ms. Witherspoon says in a voice-over, borrowing directly from the book. “So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.”
I found a log and sat down next to a large fern. The wood was soft and wet and so rotten that new, bright green plants had already taken root in its innards. A small creek tumbled by, but this time I didn’t fish for what I might find. Instead I pointed the car south to what I already had.
