The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
This Is Why You Should Just Pee Right On the Trail In the story “The girl who loved Tom Gordon” it works with the theme man vs. nature. It demonstrates the unimportance of a single human life, while at the same time shows the limits of a person’s strength and motivation to exist. Trisha’s experience shows her struggle against the strength of nature and her potential to live pleasantly with nature by her will to keep on moving forward, using what she had around her, going delusional, and the wasp god/ beast following her. Trisha wasn’t sure if moving every day was a good and bad thing.
The bad part about her moving was the fact that if she hadn’t moved on the first day and just stayed in the area she might have been found and rescued by the search group that was sent out a while later. The good thing about Trisha staying on the move was that is kept the beast at a fair amount of distance away from her. She couldn’t just sit and wait to be found, she had to go off and try and find civilization herself because for all she knew, no one would ever find her. Trisha had used her surroundings exceptionally well.
After she ran out of food from her lunch she had to find another source of food. She was able to find certain leaves, nuts, and berries that are edible. As another source of food, she had done some fishing, because she got really hungry. She swore to never talk about it with anyone once she was out of the woods because she was so disgusted by it. She would use the streams and rivers she was near as her drinking and cleaning water, even though the water got her really sick. She was also able to use her surroundings to make small shelters as she traveled.
Trisha used twigs and branches to either put on top of her as she slept or made a fort out of it. This was to try and keep her partially warm, block off the wind and rain, and to keep animals out. She also used her rain poncho as a blanket to try and keep herself warm on cold nights. During most of the time while Trisha was lost in the wood she began talking to the voice in her head, Tom Gordon, or her best friend, Pepsi. Too bad neither of them are actually there. Tom Gordon and Pepsi are part of Trisha going delusional so she’s not alone.
Tom Gordon is Trisha’s favorite baseball player on the Red Sox’s team and the person she has a crush on. He is there for most of the time while she’s in the woods. An example of a place that he is seen by Trisha is when it’s night time and their in the open clearing where she was about to go to sleep for the night. Pepsi is seen when Trisha is getting closer to finding the road. The voice in her head that she talks to is her own conscience telling her the truth of what she was really thinking. By her seeing and talking to these people makes her delusional.
While in the woods she met three cloaked people; two with white cloaks and one with black. The one in black was known as the wasp god and he was coming from the beast within the woods warning her that she was being followed by “it”. Toward the end of the story, this so called wasp god had turned out to be a black bear following her. The bear made Trisha scared, cautious, and even a little crazy throughout the story. In the very end, Trisha showed her bravery by standing up to the bear, staring it straight in the eyes, pitching her walkman, and startling it.
She was saved by the hunter scaring the bear off with a gun shot and getting Trisha out of there and to safety. In conclusions, the story “The girl who loved Tom Gordon” worked with the theme man vs. nature. It showed her struggle against the force of nature and her capability to live melodiously with nature by her motivation to keep on moving forward, using what she had around her, going delusional, and the wasp god/ beast following her. Work Cited King, Stephen. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Pocket Books: New York, 1999.
