Good morning all,

I’ve been reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which inspired today’s Fem Friday. Important note, my actual favourite “woman in the wilds” book is Tracks by Robyn Davidson, which I strongly recommend. You can buy it now if you want! It’s an easy read and you’ll be done with it over the weekend.

By way of context for what follows, Cheryl Strayed walked a significant chunk of the Pacific Crest Trail, which looks like this on a map:

Let’s start with Catherine Montgomery, who first had the idea for the Pacific Crest Trail. She came from a time when women could be spinsters and hiking was called ‘tramping’, as this charming article details. She made things happen. I like her:

Montgomery found a fellow tramper in Ida Baker, another of the founding faculty. Baker was Montgomery’s best friend, and one of the very few who ever called the stern Montgomery “Kate.” When Baker died in 1921, Montgomery wrote a eulogy for the paper titled “Tramping Together.” “Memories of financial struggle, of trans-continental trips, of farming together, come to me as I recall the locking of Ida Baker’s life with mine, but above all comes the memory of tramping together,” she wrote.

https://www.pcta.org/2017/mother-pacific-crest-trail-catherine-montgomery-48060/

Longtime subscribers will know of my fondness for Margery “ye arn no good wyfe” Kempe, but did you know that she was also a prolific pilgrim, traveling to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Italy and Germany? In the medieval age, this too would have involved a lot of hiking, and in much worse shoes even than Catherine Montgomery wore. Margery also made things happen, over a timeline of 500 years:

"The story goes that when Colonel W Butler Bowdon was looking for a ping-pong bat in a cupboard at his family home near Chesterfield in the early 1930s he came across a pile of old books. Frustrated at the disorder, he threatened to put the whole lot on the bonfire the next day so that bats and balls would be easier to find in future. Luckily a friend advised him to have the books checked by an expert and shortly afterwards Hope Emily Allen identified one as the Book of Margery Kempe," said Sarah J Biggs, from the British Library's medieval team.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/20/margery-kempe-first-autobiographer-digitised-british-library

Another big thing that Margery Kempe did was cry a lot, and – to bring us back to the Pacific Crest Trail – this is a lovely description of not only the trail itself but the cleansing power of having a massive cry:

There were days when I cried for 10 miles in anger; days when I cursed myself for not standing up for myself and letting myself be treated poorly. I cried in sadness over putting my family member through rehab. I cried for family I had lost, for relationships I could not salvage, and for all the mistakes I had ever made. And, after all those tears, I felt light and relieved. A huge weight had been lifted from my heart and everything going forward was new.

https://www.pcta.org/wild/stories/the-pct-saved-my-life/

Happy weekend,

Alex xx.