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Excerpt by Cheryl Strayed The trees were tall but I was taller standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California Moments before I d removed my hiking boots and the left one had fallen into those trees first catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it then skittering across the gravelly trail and flying over the edge It bounced off a rocky outcropping several feet beneath me before disappearing into the forest canopy below impossible to retrieve I let out a stunned gasp though I d been in the wilderness thirty eight days and by then I d come to know that anything could happen and that everything would But that doesn t mean I wasn t shocked when it did My boot was gone Actually gone I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby though of course it was futile What is one boot without the other boot It is nothing It is useless an orphan forevermore and I could take no mercy on it It was a big lug of a thing of genuine heft a brown leather boot with a red lace and silver metal fasts I lifted it high and threw it with all my might and watched it fall into the lush trees and out of my life I was alone I was barefoot I was twenty six years old and an orphan too An actual stray a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before when I d told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world My father left my life when I was six My mother died when I was twenty two In the wake of her death my stepfather morphed from the person I considered my dad into a man I only occasionally recognized My two siblings scattered in their grief in spite of my efforts to hold us together until I gave up and scattered as well 37 In paragraph 4 what led up to her being in this current predicament She lost her mother She did not connect with her family She was upset with her father She was alone A B C 38 The shoes are important in the excerpt because they symbolize the A feeling of loneliness she is dealing with

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