My solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail—three months, 1,100 miles—had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting of my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce from a man I still loved and selling almost everything I owned and visiting my mother’s grave one last time. There was the driving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon, and, a few days later, catching a flight to Los Angeles and a ride to the town of Mojave.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and ridiculously difficult and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.

And then there was the real live truly doing it.

Before I began my hike, I’d thought myself somewhat ready. I was someone who could be described as outdoorsy. My family vacations had always involved some form of camping. As an adult, I’d slept in the back of my truck in national forests more times than I could count. Plus, I’d spent my teen years in the Minnesota northwoods in a house my mother and stepfather built that didn’t have an indoor toilet, electricity, or running water. My mother planted a garden and pickled vegetables, baked bread and carded wool, and made half the clothes my siblings and I wore.

My mother and I were college seniors when we learned she had cancer. She’d begun college when I did, pursuing a dream after years of setting it aside. Her college was in Duluth, mine in Minneapolis. We’d always been close—her love for me and my sister and my brother was all-encompassing and full-throttle—but in my college years we became even closer, talking almost every night on the phone. I was married by then, to a man named Paul I’d wed in our woods, wearing...