I figure it's about time for me to weigh in on this Into the Wild bullshit that everyone keeps talking about. For the record, and initially, I actually really like Jon Krakauer's specific brand of somewhat-sensationalist writing; his book on Everest is incredible, I think.
But Christopher McCandless, people, should not, NOT, NOOOTTT be a martyr. He should not be idealized. And I'll tell you why.
Christopher McCandless ventured forth into what most term the wilderness with absolutely nothing of value. A .22 caliber rifle is good for very little save bagging small to mid-sized game, and even then, only if you know how to aim and how to shoot. Although he apparently gained some skill (no doubt through trial and error) in killing small game such as grouse, ptarmigan and squirrels, this is not, as anyone who's attempted a subsistence lifestyle knows well, enough to sustain the body of someone ranging long distances to find food in the first place. A 10-lb bag of rice without a camp stove or even the intent of building a fire to cook it on is useless, not to mention woefully poor nutrition against cold and extreme bodily hardship.
Most important, I suppose, is the fact that McCandless, whether through design or through sheer bad timing, attempted to begin this journey in the early spring. Most plants are not yet blooming, let alone edible at this time, and so his little plant hand book would have been of little use but for its information on what NOT to eat. Attempting to bury or smoke an entire caribou (which, in fact, the large game animal he killed was) carcass is, of course, a surefire way to ruin the meat, invite in bacteria and let it all go to rot, never mind that it violates possibly the most essential rule of subsistence-and even, perhaps, sport-hunting: do not let any part of the animal that can be used go to waste.
McCandless trekked into the park in the passenger seats and with the advice of the greatest resource there is: other people. Had he penned down any of the tips given him by those with experience in Alaska's backcountry, or bothered to utilize the answers to his few practical questions, he may have survived.
In his article for "Men's Health", Matthew Power quotes someone he met while researching the filming of Into the Wild, a movie I couldn't even sit through the opening credits of: "Carlson, a barrel-chested Athabascan who worked as a tribal liaison on the shoot, shows me around the bus. He chuckles through a handlebar mustache and offers an unburnished appraisal of McCandless: Another fool bit the dust. "We grew up here. You learn how to make a campfire when you're a kid. This, I didn't think much of it at the time. That kid's mistakes started a long time before he got here."
At its core, this statement is so true it hits you in the face: The mistakes that led to McCandless's death were unavoidable; he had made up his mind and begun down this path long before he even reached Alaska, long before he shouldered the too-meager pack he brought with him and started hitchhiking. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who's lived here for any substantial amount of time who wouldn't have packed more, asked more questions, thought more about what was in store for them. A little utility to go with the asceticism. It's been debunked by a study incited by Krakauer himself that the seeds McCandless ate were poisonous, and so the hapless plant (possibly wild potato, possibly sweet pea) is no longer to blame, and when there is no one to blame but the tragic hero himself, blame goes sneakily under the rug, by the wayside, to save what's been crafted around someone who was, as Carlson said to Power, just 'a kid'.
What is there, then, to idolize about what most of us consider a complete lack of common sense? In many cases, there are folks who think McCandless was pure-D crazy! I'm inclined to agree. Is the true aim of what McCandless seemed to think of as spiritual liberation, as transcendence and escapism-escape from materialism, from the bonds of human limitation-to overthrow one's mind in order to loose the traps of one's body? McCandless wished to venture further than he ever had before into the wild, into places where he must have thought men had never been-only to find A BUS waiting there. A bus. One is not bound, then, by the walls around them, nor by the objects they hold in their hands, but by the confines of what's in the mind, what insurmountable difficulties are presented them as they lie awake at night. How trapped must Chris McCandless have been by himself to have chosen this kind of a fate.
"I'm not trying to romanticize him," insists Penn, who has little patience for McCandless's critics. "There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did. We're not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs, hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty damn well. Did he make mistakes? Sure. A lot of people do. But however many miles he needed to walk to become a man was up to him. So I think he did very well by any standard, including Alaskan."(-Matthew Power)
Holy jesus. Sean Penn, you idealist, blind asshole. Let's name a "few" Alaskans who have done far more than Chris McCandless ever did, and lived to tell about it, and contributed in major, major ways to not only the history and health and progress of this state, but also lived to tell about it:
Dick Proenneke: http://www.dickproenneke.c
Noel Wein: http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
Rusty Heurlin: http://www.askart.com/aska
Sinrock Mary
Capt. Michael Healy
Clara Goddard
And the list goes on, and on, and on...Men and women who, for reasons economic or adventurous or yes, even spiritual, have come here not to conquer or be conquered by the land, but to become a part of it, taking only what they need, exploring and living to relay their wealth of love and knowledge to the rest of the world. Chris McCandless, yes, was selfish. His expedition robbed his family of their brother and son, but it also robbed the rest of the world of the opportunity to learn what he learned, to see what he saw, through his eyes. Chris McCandless might be a legend now, yes, but in a vastly different and much more polarizing way than he could have been.
While we're at it, those people who don't exist, who've never done what Christopher McCandless attempted to do? They're everywhere, actually. If Sean Penn had bothered to travel downriver on any major waterway in the state, he'd have found thriving homesteads, fish camps, and encampments for subsistence hunters, inhabited by people who have forged their living from the land and continue to do so, in perfect health and in perfect harmony with that which they subsist upon. If he had spent more time actually talking to local people, especially in Fairbanks, he'd have encountered farmers, truckers, fishermen, guides-dozens of them, still alive and well and reaping the benefits of their adventures in the great North, who all began here with little more than dreams and ideals and have carved from those and with their hands and minds lives extraordinary.
I have lived here, give or take, for 27 years of my life. Not as thoroughly as some, but more than many others, my siblings and I were taught practical skills and knowledge to live by: which berries are edible and which are not; how to navigate using the river; the best way to start a fire in the rain. This place is full to bursting with those of us who want to, and do, exactly as McCandless did: find a release of the self and the burden of the everyday here. Do we all run around giving out false names and dismissing the kindness of strangers in order to pursue some insane notion of self-sufficiency? No. I would have burned an entire goddamn stand of birch down to signal a plane, no matter the bleeding-heart moralism that led McCandless not to, yes, out of desperation, but also because it comes to this: I love this land, the entire place, down to the smallest least-smashable mosquito. But I would not die for it. I would die to save it, to protect it. I would die in defense of its people and their rights and to stop some injustice being done against them, or against its flora or fauna. Would I die to preserve McCandless's type of spiritualism? To further an agenda that pointed more toward selfishness and narcissism than toward Thoreau's brand of solitude and freedom? What, I ask, would be the use in that when, at its end, that brand became nothing but a series of cryptic journal entries, an urban legend outside urbania?
Outsiders are astounded by these things. That you may go outside to check the mail on a particularly snowy, cold day, and never come back. That if your vehicle breaks down, you might easily be two, even three, maybe four hours from the nearest small town. That bears and moose and wolves come straight into town, pick through your garbage, eat from your garden, prey on cats and little dogs at will. That there's a very real chance that your pipes might burst, your electricity go out, your phone service suddenly cut out in a blizzard. You prepare for it. Growing up, we got so used to the power going out all the time that my father invested in a generator and one Thanksgiving, we simply moved the partially-cooked meal from the oven to the top of the wood stove and waited it out. I cannot admire what was McCandless's insatiable need for removal, not from creature comfort or convenience, but from practicality, from the base and undeniable will to LIVE. For what is willful about refusing rescue from starvation?
Of McCandless, Matthew Power says, "McCandless clearly believed in self-mythologizing, in the power of storytelling and self-invention. Had he lived, perhaps he would have gained enough perspective to tell the story himself, rather than leaving it for others to tell. As it is, he has entered the realm of myth, and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them." Can we make use of this? It seems we can, whether to frighten grandiose dreams out of our children, or to attempt the pilgrimage ourselves: hundreds of people every year now flock to Denali to see the bus where McCandless died, to cry, to worship him like the be-all-end-all of some cult of wilderness escapism. To become the 'masters of their own destiny', experiencing life as a series of cathartic and utterly unbounded moments. To somehow prove that everyone else is a mere pawn of some materialist, capitalist, inadequate culture, that no one else is 'living'. McCandless's myth, such as it is, may not be much of a myth at all. The facts remain: he was young, intelligent, idealistic, and full of hubris. He died. He has nothing left to offer us but what will eventually become nothing more than a debate at a diner counter: Christopher McCandless-hero or clueless greenhorn?
But you're missing the point, you'll say. The point was not whether he lived or died, ate this or that, did it right or wrong. The point was in the doing. And I say the point is this:
Christopher McCandless could have taught us all so much more, could have added to the annals of wilderness traversed and loved and documented. Somewhere in all of this mess, the piles of mattress stuffing in a bus, the stupidity of having cut off contact with loved ones to travel (some think purposefully) to his death, I see Chris McCandless's mother, left with nothing but these old and useless photographs, these tiny bits penned in his journal, and I think what a stupid and tragic and sad, sad waste it has been that he is not alive still, painting these stories himself, his hands making the lines of maps and compass roses in the air for the world to see.
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