The following book review was originally published in edited form in the Sep/Oct 2003 issue of the Pacific Crest Trail Communicator. "Walking Down a Dream," Natasha Carver, 2000 PCT thru-hiker. To learn more about the author's hike along this trail, and to order her book, visit www.trek2000.org.

Laughing Through a Lively Dream

A Book Review

Brett Tucker

"Stuffy.”

For this word my computer’s desktop dictionary offers the following definitions: 1) lacking fresh air; 2) excessively conventional and unimaginative and hence dull.

Free software as it is, the dictionary fails to provide antonyms, for example. However if I were its editor and feeling romantic, I’d offer two: a) the Pacific Crest Trail and b) a year 2000 PCT thru-hiker called “Chrysalis.”

The Pacific Crest, with its inspiring mountain air and human legacy of bold, creative conservation, is wildland America’s answer to the woes of stuffiness. So too, a new book by British walker Natasha Carver (aka Chrysalis) is apparently England’s answer, a tall order given the often stale American predisposition toward all things British. In a word though, turns out it’s a bloody good read.

Walking Down a Dream is the self-told story of a young woman’s journey from Mexico to Canada on foot. Presented in the style of a trail journal, the book is based largely on the author’s well-recorded observations and impressions during her 5½ month thru-hike of the PCT. Natasha comes to the trail inexperienced at long-distance hiking, but with a great enthusiasm for wilderness adventures far from home—prior social activism in rural Bolivia brought her face-to-face with new people and big mountains. Open-minded and unconventional, she found herself drifting from the harbor of social expectation back home in England, finally running aground on the unlikely shores of Campo, California, USA and the southern terminus of the PCT. Walking with her is a like-minded twenty-something named Kris, their common goals the 2,700 mile trek to Canada and a successful charity for sustainability projects in South America.

Almost from the first mile the two hikers experience friction. The hot, dusty trail takes its toll on untested feet, and soon blisters emerge, to say nothing of the rattlesnakes and skin-piercing cactus spines. Then, on Day 11 of the journey, “Kris has a strained tendon in her ankle. Heel to be precise. ‘Don’t think about it and it will go away,’ is my best advice. Shrewdly, she’s not really paying this much attention and is bandaging it.” A rift slowly forms between the two protagonists, ostensibly from the newfound discrepancy in their abilities; Kris’ condition, though not debilitating, nonetheless demands a slower-than-expected pace, jeopardizing their schedule-heavy trip. Yet Natasha is driven to succeed and her sharp wit and often wry humor offer inadequate consolation. Ultimately Kris opts to return home to her native Canada, and following an emotional parting Natasha continues her hike, sympathetic but contentedly free of the stifling air surrounding their partnership.

“The last few days I have been traveling with Hobbit,” she later writes. “Hobbit saw me in my bug cocoon and said, ‘It’s a butterfly about to emerge!’ And hence I am now named Chrysalis.”

Her trail name is apt, for the author undergoes an intriguing transformation in the second half of her story. For one, she now uses building wrap as her only shelter from the elements, sandwiching herself into it at night, burrito-style. And when she misplaces her trousers and her bug repellant, she heroically plies the mosquito-plagued high country armed only with shorts, running and swatting to keep sane. In many ways her separation from Kris, the hike’s organizer and voice of experience, allows Natasha’s true personality to emerge. The results are often comedic, always entertaining.

Young and unattached, she finds herself on the lonely trail, “ensconced in the delicate art of flirting by e-mail” with a would-be boyfriend from LA, when suddenly she stares up from her pocket-sized gadget to find a bear snuffling close by—her first ever bruin sighting. In turn she becomes the reluctant object of male hikers’ attention.

“In between the pants for breath, while I speed-walk up the hill, he struggles to declare his undying love.”

But Natasha emerges unscathed, eventually falling into a co-ed group called “the Wolf Pack,” who form an inseparable bond after finding themselves in the midst of a high-stakes wilderness rescue in cold, rainy Washington. Together they suffer the weather, and weather triumphantly the accumulation of mental and physical challenges that so often deny thru-hikers their victory at the Canadian border.

An “actress of sorts” in her pre-trail life, Natasha is a keen story-teller who takes full advantage of her naivety along the way. She becomes the stage, allowing herself to be acted upon by the serendipity of events that besets all thru-hikers to varying degrees. The author also plays the part of Crest Historian, enriching her chronicle with well-researched insight that ranges from the plight of displaced Native cultures (victims of progress and gold) to the blight of a once green and fertile Owens Valley (victim of progress and thirst).

Readers familiar with the PCT will smile in recognition as “Chrysalis” relates her rites of passage along the way. Veteran and prospective walkers alike will discover much about the trail that is elsewhere untold. And it seems ironically fitting that Walking Down a Dream should come to us from Great Britain, of all places. Natasha Carver, our secret admirer, delivers with the kind of awe, honesty, and pointed humor that only an outsider could muster.

“Imagine coming from the grime of wet cold industrial London to this paradise,” she unstuffily reminds us. “The mountain air gives you a wash of euphoria.”

Brett Tucker is a freelance writer and editor who currently lives in New Hampshire. He has hiked the full length of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails, and met Natasha on the PCT in northern California during their respective hikes in 2000.