Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Why is it that a book about how hard it is to backpack, about the misery and the pain and the fear, makes me so desperately want to do it? Maybe because there are parts like this:

“Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off.” (p. 267)

In other words, she tells me my own life.

And she talks about backpacking, which seems to be extreme hiking and camping, which I actually love to do.