вторник, 17 мая 2011 г.

!!!INTO THE WILD!!!

[SEE PIC ‘CHRIS.JPG’]
[See Map1]
Jon
Krakauer
INTO THE
WILD
For Linda
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to
Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months
later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside
magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name
turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, in
an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and
had been an elite athlete.
Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the
summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave
the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity,
abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet.
And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged
margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw,
transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had
become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.
Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran
in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless
remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by
more current journalistic fare. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’s
starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those
in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the
convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of
his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. In trying to understand
McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as
well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk
activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged
bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry
is the book now before you.
I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck
a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible.
Through most of the book, I have tried—and largely succeeded, I think—to
minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt
McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do
so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma
of Chris McCandless.
He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn
idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by
the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the great
novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute.
In college McCandless began emulating Tolstoy’s asceticism and moral rigor
to a degree that first astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to
him. When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions
that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan
renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is what he
found, in abundance.
For most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than
held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly
insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August
1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April. Instead, his innocent
mistakes turned out to be pivotal and irreversible, his name became the stuff of
tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family was left clutching the shards of a
fierce and painful love.
A surprising number of people have been affected by the story of Chris
McCandless’s life and death. In the weeks and months following the publication
of the article in Outside, it generated more mail than any other article in the
magazines history. This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected sharply
divergent points of view: Some readers admired the boy immensely for his
courage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a
wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity—and was
undeserving of the considerable media attention he received. My convictions
should be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his or
her own opinion of Chris McCandless.
JON KRAKAUER
SEATTLE
APRIL 1995
[See Map2]
CHAPTER ONE
THE ALASKA INTERIOR
April 27th, 1992
Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.
Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon
Territory. But I finally got here.
Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time
before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear
from me again I want you to know you ‘re a great man. I now walk into the
wild. Alex. P
POSTCARD RECEIVED BY WAYNE WESTERBERG
IN CARTHAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA
Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the
hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in
the gray Alaska dawn. He didn’t appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteen
at most. A rifle protruded from the young man’s backpack, but he looked friendly
enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing that
gives motorists pause in the forty-ninth state. Gallien steered his truck onto the
shoulder and told the kid to climb in.
The hitchhiker swung his pack into the bed of the Ford and introduced himself
as Alex. “Alex?” Gallien responded, fishing for a last name.
“Just Alex,” the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. Five feet
seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be twenty-four years old and said
he was from South Dakota. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge
of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and “live
off the land for a few months.”
Gallien, a union electrician, was on his way to Anchorage, 240 miles beyond
Denali on the George Parks Highway; he told Alex he’d drop him off wherever he
wanted. Alex’s backpack looked as though it weighed only twenty-five or thirty
pounds, which struck Gallien—an accomplished hunter and woodsman—as an
improbably light load for a stay of several months in the back-country, especially
so early in the spring. “He wasn’t carrying anywhere near as much food and gear
as you’d expect a guy to be carrying for that kind of trip,” Gallien recalls.
The sun came up. As they rolled down from the forested ridges above the
Tanana River, Alex gazed across the expanse of windswept muskeg stretching to
the south. Gallien wondered whether he’d picked up one of those crackpots from
the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack London
fantasies. Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who
think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their
lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or
longing.
“People from Outside,” reports Gallien in a slow, sonorous drawl, “they’ll
pick up a copy of Alaska magazine, thumb through it, get to thinkin’ ‘Hey, I’m
goin’ to get on up there, live off the land, go claim me a piece of the good life.’
But when they get here and actually head out into the bush—well, it isn’t like the
magazines make it out to be. The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat you
alive. Most places, there aren’t a lot of animals to hunt. Livin’ in the bush isn’t
no picnic.”
It was a two-hour drive from Fairbanks to the edge of Denali Park. The more
they talked, the less Alex struck Gallien as a nutcase. He was congenial and
seemed well educated. He peppered Gallien with thoughtful questions about the
kind of small game that live in the country, the kinds of berries he could eat—
”that kind of thing.”
Still, Gallien was concerned. Alex admitted that the only food in his pack was
a ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harsh
conditions of the interior, which in April still lay buried under the winter
snowpack. Alex’s cheap leather hiking boots were neither waterproof nor well
insulated. His rifle was only .22 caliber, a bore too small to rely on if he expected
to kill large animals like moose and caribou, which he would have to eat
if he hoped to remain very long in the country. He had no ax, no bug dope, no
snowshoes, no compass. The only navigational aid in his possession was a
tattered state road map he’d scrounged at a gas station.
A hundred miles out of Fairbanks the highway begins to climb into the
foothills of the Alaska Range. As the truck lurched over a bridge across the
Nenana River, Alex looked down at the swift current and remarked that he was
afraid of the water. “A year ago down in Mexico,” he told Gallien, “I was out on
the ocean in a canoe, and I almost drowned when a storm came up.”
A little later Alex pulled out his crude map and pointed to a dashed red line
that intersected the road near the coal-mining town of Healy. It represented a
route called the Stampede Trail. Seldom traveled, it isn’t even marked on most
road maps of Alaska. On Alex’s map, nevertheless, the broken line meandered
west from the Parks Highway for forty miles or so before petering out in the
middle of trackless wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. This, Alex announced to
Gallien, was where he intended to go.
Gallien thought the hitchhiker’s scheme was foolhardy and tried repeatedly
to dissuade him: “I said the hunting wasn’t easy where he was going, that he
could go for days without killing any game. When that didn’t work, I tried to
scare him with bear stories. I told him that a twenty-two probably wouldn’t do
anything to a grizzly except make him mad. Alex didn’t seem too worried. Til
climb a tree’ is all he said. So I explained that trees don’t grow real big in that
part of the state, that a bear could knock down one of them skinny little black
spruce without even trying. But he wouldn’t give an inch. He had an answer for
everything I threw at him.”
Gallien offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage, buy him some decent
gear, and then drive him back to wherever he wanted to go.
“No, thanks anyway,” Alex replied, “I’ll be fine with what I’ve got.”
Gallien asked whether he had a hunting license.
“Hell, no,” Alex scoffed. “How I feed myself is none of the government’s
business. Fuck their stupid rules.”
When Gallien asked whether his parents or a friend knew what he was up to—
whether there was anyone who would sound the alarm if he got into trouble and
was overdue—Alex answered calmly that no, nobody knew of his plans, that in
fact he hadn’t spoken to his family in nearly two years. “I’m absolutely positive,”
he assured Gallien, “I won’t run into anything I can’t deal with on my own.”
“There was just no talking the guy out of it,” Gallien remembers. “He was
determined. Real gung ho. The word that comes to mind is excited. He couldn’t
wait to head out there and get started.”
Three hours out of Fairbanks, Gallien turned off the highway and steered his
beat-up 4x4 down a snow-packed side road. For the first few miles the Stampede
Trail was well graded and led past cabins scattered among weedy stands of
spruce and aspen. Beyond the last of the log shacks, however, the road rapidly
deteriorated. Washed out and overgrown with alders, it turned into a rough,
unmaintained track.
In summer the road here would have been sketchy but passable; now it was
made unnavigable by a foot and a half of mushy spring snow. Ten miles from the
highway, worried that he’d get stuck if he drove farther, Gallien stopped his rig
on the crest of a low rise. The icy summits of the highest mountain range in
North America gleamed on the southwestern horizon.
Alex insisted on giving Gallien his watch, his comb, and what he said was all
his money: eighty-five cents in loose change. “I don’t want your money,” Gallien
protested, “and I already have a watch.”
“If you don’t take it, I’m going to throw it away,” Alex cheerfully retorted. “I
don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where
I am. None of that matters.”
Before Alex left the pickup, Gallien reached behind the seat, pulled out an
old pair of rubber work boots, and persuaded the boy to take them. “They were
too big for him,” Gallien recalls. “But I said, ‘Wear two pair of socks, and your
feet ought to stay halfway warm and dry.’”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gallien answered. Then he gave the kid a slip of
paper with his phone number on it, which Alex carefully tucked into a nylon
wallet.
“If you make it out alive, give me a call, and I’ll tell you how to get the boots
back to me.”
Gallien’s wife had packed him two grilled-cheese-and-tuna sandwiches and a
bag of corn chips for lunch; he persuaded the young hitchhiker to accept the
food as well. Alex pulled a camera from his backpack and asked Gallien to snap a
picture of him shouldering his rifle at the trailhead. Then, smiling broadly, he
disappeared down the snow-covered track. The date was Tuesday, April 28,
1992.
Gallien turned the truck around, made his way back to the Parks Highway,
and continued toward Anchorage. A few miles down the road he came to the
small community of Healy, where the Alaska State Troopers maintain a post.
Gallien briefly considered stopping and telling the authorities about Alex, then
thought better of it. “I figured he’d be OK,” he explains. “I thought he’d
probably get hungry pretty quick and just walk out to the highway. That’s what
any normal person would do.”
[See Map Page 8]
CHAPTER TWO
THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
Jack London is King
Alexander Supertramp
May 1992
GRAFFITO CARVED INTO A PIECE OF WOOD DISCOVERED
AT THE SITE OF CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S DEATH
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees
had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they
seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A
vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless,
without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of
sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible
than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx,
a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It
was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the
futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozenhearted
Northland Wild.
JACK LONDON, WHITE FANG
On the northern margin of the Alaska Range, just before the hulking ramparts
of Mt. McKinley and its satellites surrender to the low Kantishna plain, a series of
lesser ridges, known as the Outer Range, sprawls across the flats like a rumpled
blanket on an unmade bed. Between the flinty crests of the two outermost
escarpments of the Outer Range runs an east-west trough, maybe five miles
across, carpeted in a boggy amalgam of muskeg, alder thickets, and veins of
scrawny spruce. Meandering through the tangled, rolling bottomland is the
Stampede Trail, the route Chris McCandless followed into the wilderness.
The trail was blazed in the 1930s by a legendary Alaska miner named Earl
Pilgrim; it led to antimony claims he’d staked on Stampede Creek, above the
Clearwater Fork of the Toklat River. In 1961, a Fairbanks company, Yutan
Construction, won a contract from the new state of Alaska (statehood having
been granted just two years earlier) to upgrade the trail, building it into a road
on which trucks could haul ore from the mine year-round. To house construction
workers while the road was going in, Yutan purchased three junked buses,
outfitted each with bunks and a simple barrel stove, and skidded them into the
wilderness behind a D-9 Caterpillar.
The project was halted in 1963: some fifty miles of road were eventually
built, but no bridges were ever erected over the many rivers it transected, and
the route was shortly rendered impassable by thawing permafrost and seasonal
floods. Yutan hauled two of the buses back to the highway. The third bus was
left about halfway out the trail to serve as backcountry shelter for hunters and
trappers. In the three decades since construction ended, much of the roadbed
has been obliterated by washouts, brush, and beaver ponds, but the bus is still
there.
A vintage International Harvester from the 1940s, the derelict vehicle is
located twenty-five miles west of Healy as the raven flies, rusting incongruously
in the fireweed beside the Stampede Trail, just beyond the boundary of Denali
National Park. The engine is gone. Several windows are cracked or missing
altogether, and broken whiskey bottles litter the floor. The green-and-white
paint is badly oxidized. Weathered lettering indicates that the old machine was
once part of the Fairbanks City Transit System: bus 142. These days it isn’t
unusual for six or seven months to pass without the bus seeing a human visitor,
but in early September 1992, six people in three separate parties happened to
visit the remote vehicle on the same afternoon.
In 1980, Denali National Park was expanded to include the Kantishna Hills and
the northernmost cordillera of the Outer Range, but a parcel of low terrain
within the new park acreage was omitted: a long arm of land known as the Wolf
Townships, which encompasses the first half of the Stampede Trail. Because this
seven-by-twenty-mile tract is surrounded on three sides by the protected
acreage of the national park, it harbors more than its share of wolf, bear,
caribou, moose, and other game, a local secret that’s jealously guarded by those
hunters and trappers who are aware of the anomaly. As soon as moose season
opens in the fall, a handful of hunters typically pays a visit to the old bus, which
sits beside the Sushana River at the westernmost end of the nonpark tract,
within two miles of the park boundary.
Ken Thompson, the owner of an Anchorage auto-body shop, Gordon Samel, his
employee, and their friend Ferdie Swanson, a construction worker, set out for
the bus on September 6, 1992, stalking moose. It isn’t an easy place to reach.
About ten miles past the end of the improved road the Stampede Trail crosses
the Teklanika River, a fast, icy stream whose waters are opaque with glacial till.
The trail comes down to the riverbank just upstream from a narrow gorge,
through which the Teklanika surges in a boil of white water. The prospect of
fording this /affe-colored torrent discourages most people from traveling any
farther.
Thompson, Samel, and Swanson, however, are contumacious Alaskans with a
special fondness for driving motor vehicles where motor vehicles aren’t really
designed to be driven. Upon arriving at the Teklanika, they scouted the banks
until they located a wide, braided section with relatively shallow channels, and
then they steered headlong into the flood.
“I went first,” Thompson says. “The river was probably seventy-five feet
across and real swift. My rig is a jacked-up eighty-two Dodge four by four with
thirty-eight-inch rubber on it, and the water was right up to the hood. At one
point I didn’t think I’d get across. Gordon has a eight-thousand-pound winch on
the front of his rig; I had him follow right behind so he could pull me out if I went
out of sight.”
Thompson made it to the far bank without incident, followed by Samel and
Swanson in their trucks. In the beds of two of the pickups were light-weight allterrain
vehicles: a three-wheeler and a four-wheeler. They parked the big rigs on
a gravel bar, unloaded the ATVs, and continued toward the bus in the smaller,
more maneuverable machines.
A few hundred yards beyond the river the trail disappeared into a series of
chest-deep beaver ponds. Undeterred, the three Alaskans dynamited the
offending stick dams and drained the ponds. Then they motored onward, up a
rocky creek bed and through dense alder thickets. It was late afternoon by the
time they finally arrived at the bus. When they got there, according to
Thompson, they found “a guy and a girl from Anchorage standing fifty feet away,
looking kinda spooked.”
Neither of them had been in the bus, but they’d been close enough to notice
“a real bad smell from inside.” A makeshift signal flag—a red knitted leg warmer
of the sort worn by dancers— was knotted to the end of an alder branch by the
vehicle’s rear exit. The door was ajar, and taped to it was a disquieting note.
Handwritten in neat block letters on a page torn from a novel by Nikolay Gogol,
it read:
S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO
HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD,
PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND
SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?
The Anchorage couple had been too upset by the implication of the note and
the overpowering odor of decay to examine the bus’s interior, so Samel steeled
himself to take a look. A peek through a window revealed a Remington rifle, a
plastic box of shells, eight or nine paperback books, some torn jeans, cooking
utensils, and an expensive backpack. In the very rear of the vehicle, on a jerrybuilt
bunk, was a blue sleeping bag that appeared to have something or someone
inside it, although, says Samel, “it was hard to be absolutely sure.
“I stood on a stump,” Samel continues, “reached through a
back window, and gave the bag a shake. There was definitely something in it,
but whatever it was didn’t weigh much. It wasn’t until I walked around to the
other side and saw a head sticking out that I knew for certain what it was.” Chris
McCandless had been dead for two and a half weeks.
Samel, a man of strong opinions, decided the body should be evacuated right
away. There wasn’t room on his or Thompson’s small machine to haul the dead
person out, however, nor was there space on the Anchorage couple’s ATV. A
short while later a sixth person appeared on the scene, a hunter from Healy
named Butch Killian. Because Killian was driving an Argo—a large amphibious
eight-wheeled ATV—Samel suggested that Killian evacuate the remains, but
Killian declined, insisting it was a task more properly left to the Alaska State
Troopers.
Killian, a coal miner who moonlights as an emergency medical technician for
the Healy Volunteer Fire Department, had a two-way radio on the Argo. When he
couldn’t raise anybody from where he was, he started driving back toward the
highway; five miles down the trail, just before dark, he managed to make contact
with the radio operator at the Healy power plant. “Dispatch,” he reported,
“this is Butch. You better call the troopers. There’s a man back in the bus by the
Sushana. Looks like he’s been dead for a while.”
At eight-thirty the next morning, a police helicopter touched down noisily
beside the bus in a blizzard of dust and swirling aspen leaves. The troopers made
a cursory examination of the vehicle and its environs for signs of foul play and
then departed. When they flew away, they took McCandless s remains, a camera
with five rolls of exposed film, the SOS note, and a diary—written across the last
two pages of a field guide to edible plants— that recorded the young man’s final
weeks in 113 terse, enigmatic entries.
The body was taken to Anchorage, where an autopsy was performed at the
Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. The remains were so badly decomposed
that it was impossible to determine exactly when McCandless had died, but the
coroner could find no sign of massive internal injuries or broken bones.
Virtually no subcutaneous fat remained on the body, and the muscles had
withered significantly in the days or weeks prior to death. At the time of the
autopsy, McCandless’s remains weighed sixty-seven pounds. Starvation was
posited as the most probable cause of death.
McCandless’s signature had been penned at the bottom of the SOS note, and
the photos, when developed, included many self-portraits. But because he had
been carrying no identification, the authorities didn’t know who he was, where
he was from, or why he was there.
CHAPTER THREE
CARTHAGE
/ wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted
excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt
in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
LEO TOLSTOY, “FAMILY HAPPINESS”
PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS
FOUND WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS
It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us.
It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and
law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has
always led west.
WALLACE STEGNER, THE AMERICAN WEST AS LIVING SPACE
Carthage, South Dakota, population 274, is a sleepy little cluster of clapboard
houses, tidy yards, and weathered brick storefronts rising humbly from the
immensity of the northern plains, set adrift in time. Stately rows of cottonwoods
shade a grid of streets seldom disturbed by moving vehicles. There’s one grocery
in town, one bank, a single gas station, a lone bar—the Cabaret, where Wayne
Westerberg is sipping a cocktail and chewing on a sweet cigar, remembering the
odd young man he knew as Alex.
The Cabaret’s plywood-paneled walls are hung with deer antlers, Old
Milwaukee beer promos, and mawkish paintings of game birds taking flight.
Tendrils of cigarette smoke rise from clumps of farmers in overalls and dusty
feed caps, their tired faces as grimy as coal miners’. Speaking in short, matterof-
fact phrases, they worry aloud over the fickle weather and fields of sunflowers
still too wet to cut, while above their heads Ross Perot s sneering visage flickers
across a silent television screen. In eight days the nation will elect Bill Clinton
president. It’s been nearly two months now since the body of Chris McCandless
turned up in Alaska.
“These are what Alex used to drink,” says Westerberg with a frown, swirling
the ice in his White Russian. “He used to sit right there at the end of the bar and
tell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours. A lot of folks
here in town got pretty attached to old Alex. Kind of a strange deal what
happened to him.”
Westerberg, a hyperkinetic man with thick shoulders and a black goatee,
owns a grain elevator in Carthage and another one a few miles out of town but
spends every summer running a custom combine crew that follows the harvest
from Texas north to the Canadian border. In the fall of 1990, he was wrapping up
the season in north-central Montana, cutting barley for Coors and Anheuser-
Busch. On the afternoon of September 10, driving out of Cut Bank after buying
some parts for a malfunctioning combine, he pulled over for a hitchhiker, an
amiable kid who said his name was Alex McCandless.
McCandless was smallish with the hard, stringy physique of an itinerant
laborer. There was something arresting about the youngster’s eyes. Dark and
emotive, they suggested a trace of exotic blood in his heritage—Greek, maybe,
or Chippewa—and conveyed a vulnerability that made Westerberg want to take
the kid under his wing. He had the kind of sensitive good looks that women made
a big fuss over, Westerberg imagined. His face had a strange elasticity: It would
be slack and expressionless one minute, only to twist suddenly into a gaping,
oversize grin that distorted his features and exposed a mouthful of horsy teeth.
He was nearsighted and wore steel-rimmed glasses. He looked hungry.
Ten minutes after picking up McCandless, Westerberg stopped in the town of
Ethridge to deliver a package to a friend. “He offered us both a beer,” says
Westerberg, “and asked Alex how long it’d been since he ate. Alex allowed how
it’d been a couple of days. Said he’d kind of run out of money.” Overhearing
this, the friend s wife insisted on cooking Alex a big dinner, which he wolfed
down, and then he fell asleep at the table.
McCandless had told Westerberg that his destination was Saco Hot Springs,
240 miles to the east on U.S. Highway 2, a place he’d heard about from some
“rubber tramps” (i.e., vagabonds who owned a vehicle; as distinguished from
“leather tramps,” who lacked personal transportation and were thus forced to
hitchhike or walk). Westerberg had replied that he could take McCandless only
ten miles down the road, at which point he would be turning north toward
Sunburst, where he kept a trailer near the fields he was cutting. By the time
Westerberg steered over to the shoulder to drop McCandless off, it was ten-thirty
at night and raining hard. “Jeeze,” Westerberg told him, “I hate to leave you out
here in the goddamn rain. You got a sleeping bag—why don’t you come on up to
Sunburst, spend the night in the trailer?”
McCandless stayed with Westerberg for three days, riding out with his crew
each morning as the workers piloted their lumbering machines across the ocean
of ripe blond grain. Before McCandless and Westerberg went their separate ways,
Westerberg told the young man to look him up in Carthage if he ever needed a
job.
“Was only a couple of weeks that went by before Alex showed up in town,”
Westerberg remembers. He gave McCandless employment at the grain elevator
and rented him a cheap room in one of the two houses he owned.
“I’ve given jobs to lots of hitchhikers over the years,” says Westerberg. “Most
of them weren’t much good, didn’t really want to work. It was a different story
with Alex. He was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter what it was,
he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the
bottom of the hole—jobs where you’d get so damn dirty you couldn’t even tell
what you looked like at the end of the day. And he never quit in the middle of
something. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for
him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for
himself.
“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent,” Wester-berg reflects,
draining his third drink. “He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe
part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes
he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad
to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to
get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had
to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
At one point Westerberg discovered from a tax form that McCandless’s real
name was Chris, not Alex. “He never explained why he’d changed his name,”
says Westerberg. “From things he said, you could tell something wasn’t right
between him and his family, but I don’t like to pry into other people’s business,
so I never asked about it.”
If McCandless felt estranged from his parents and siblings, he found a
surrogate family in Westerberg and his employees, most of whom lived in
Westerberg’s Carthage home. A few blocks from the center of town, it is a
simple, two-story Victorian in the Queen Anne style, with a big cottonwood
towering over the front yard. The living arrangements were loose and convivial.
The four or five inhabitants took turns cooking for one another, went drinking
together, and chased women together, without success.
McCandless quickly became enamored of Carthage. He liked the community’s
stasis, its plebeian virtues and unassuming mien. The place was a back eddy, a
pool of jetsam beyond the pull of the main current, and that suited him just fine.
That fall he developed a lasting bond with both the town and Wayne Westerberg.
Westerberg, in his mid-thirties, was brought to Carthage as a young boy by
adoptive parents. A Renaissance man of the plains, he is a farmer, welder,
businessman, machinist, ace mechanic, commodities speculator, licensed
airplane pilot, computer programmer, electronics troubleshooter, video-game
repairman. Shortly before he met McCandless, however, one of his talents had
got him in trouble with the law.
Westerberg had been drawn into a scheme to build and sell “black boxes,”
which illegally unscramble satellite-television transmissions, allowing people to
watch encrypted cable programming without paying for it. The FBI caught wind
of this, set up a sting, and arrested Westerberg. Contrite, he copped a plea to a
single felony count and on October 10, 1990, some two weeks after McCandless
arrived in Carthage, began serving a four-month sentence in Sioux Falls. With
Westerberg in stir, there was no work at the grain elevator for McCandless, so on
October 23, sooner than he might have under different circumstances, the boy
left town and resumed a nomadic existence.
The attachment McCandless felt for Carthage remained powerful, however.
Before departing, he gave Westerberg a treasured 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s War
and Peace. On the title page he inscribed, “Transferred to Wayne Westerberg
from Alexander. October, 1990. Listen to Pierre.” (The latter is a reference to
Tolstoy’s protagonist and alter ego, Pierre Bezuhov—altruistic, questing,
illegitimately born.) And McCandless stayed in touch with Westerberg as he
roamed the West, calling or writing Carthage every month or two. He had all his
mail forwarded to Westerberg’s address and told almost everyone he met
thereafter that South Dakota was his home.
In truth McCandless had been raised in the comfortable upper-middle-class
environs of Annandale, Virginia. His father, Walt, is an eminent aerospace
engineer who designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle and other
high-profile projects while in the employ of NASA and Hughes Aircraft in the
1960s and 70s. In 1978, Walt went into business for himself, launching a small but
eventually prosperous consulting firm, User Systems, Incorporated. His partner in
the venture was Chris’s mother, Bil-lie. There were eight children in the
extended family: a younger sister, Carine, with whom Chris was extremely close,
and six half-brothers and sisters from Walt’s first marriage.
In May 1990, Chris graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, where he’d
been a columnist for, and editor of, the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel,
and had distinguished himself as a history and anthropology major with a 3.72
grade-point average. He was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined,
insisting that titles and honors are irrelevant.
The final two years of his college education had been paid for with a fortythousand-
dollar bequest left by a friend of the family’s; more than twenty-four
thousand dollars remained at the time of Chris’s graduation, money his parents
thought he intended to use for law school. “We misread him,” his father admits.
What Walt, Billie, and Carine didn’t know when they flew down to Atlanta to
attend Chris’s commencement—what nobody knew—was that he would shortly
donate all the money in his college fund to OXFAM America, a charity dedicated
to fighting hunger.
The graduation ceremony was on May 12, a Saturday. The family sat through a
long-winded commencement address delivered by Secretary of Labor Elizabeth
Dole, and then Billie snapped pictures of a grinning Chris traversing the stage to
receive his diploma.
The next day was Mother’s Day. Chris gave Billie candy, flowers, a
sentimental card. She was surprised and extremely touched: It was the first
present she had received from her son in more than two years, since he had
announced to his parents that, on principle, he would no longer give or accept
gifts. Indeed, Chris had only recently upbraided Walt and Billie for expressing
their desire to buy him a new car as a graduation present and offering to pay for
law school if there wasn’t enough money left in his college fund to cover it.
He already had a perfectly good car, he insisted: a beloved 1982 Datsun B210,
slightly dented but mechanically sound, with 128,000 miles on the odometer. “I
can’t believe they’d try and buy me a car,” he later complained in a letter to
Carine,
or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was going
to go.... I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, a
car that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in all
those thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will never
trade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to—yet they ignore what I say
and think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real
careful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will think
they have bought my respect.
Chris had purchased the secondhand yellow Datsun when he was a senior in
high school. In the years since, he’d been in the habit of taking it on extended
solo road trips when classes weren’t in session, and during that graduation
weekend he casually mentioned to his parents that he intended to spend the upcoming
summer on the road as well. His exact words were “I think I’m going to
disappear for a while.”
Neither parent made anything of this announcement at the time, although
Walt did gently admonish his son, saying “Hey, make sure you come see us before
you go.” Chris smiled and sort of nodded, a response that Walt and Billie took as
an affirmation that he would visit them in Annandale before the summer was
out, and then they said their good-byes.
Toward the end of June, Chris, still in Atlanta, mailed his parents a copy of
his final grade report: A in Apartheid and South African Society and History of
Anthropological Thought; A minus in Contemporary African Politics and the Food
Crisis in Africa. A brief note was attached:
Here is a copy of my final transcript. Gradewise things went pretty well and I
ended up with a high cumulative average.
Thankyou for the pictures, the shaving gear, and the postcard from Paris. It
seems that you really enjoyed your trip there. It must have been a lot of fun.
I gave Lloyd [Chris’s closest friend at Emory] his picture, and he was very
grateful; he did not have a shot of his diploma getting handed to him.
Not much else happening, but it’s starting to get real hot and humid down
here. Say Hi to everyone for me.
It was the last anyone in Chris’s family would ever hear from him.
During that final year in Atlanta, Chris had lived off campus in a monkish
room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates,
and a table. He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barracks. And he
didn’t have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him.
By the beginning of August 1990, Chris’s parents had heard nothing from their
son since they’d received his grades in the mail, so they decided to drive down to
Atlanta for a visit. When they arrived at his apartment, it was empty and a FOR
RENT sign was taped to the window. The manager said that Chris had moved out
at the end of June. Walt and Billie returned home to find that all the letters
they’d sent their son that summer had been returned in a bundle. “Chris had
instructed the post office to hold them until August 1, apparently so we wouldn’t
know anything was up,” says Billie. “It made us very, very worried.”
By then Chris was long gone. Five weeks earlier he’d loaded all his belongings
into his little car and headed west without an itinerary. The trip was to be an
odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change
everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to
fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was
unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a
world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt
grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.
Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly
new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered
experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even
adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was
now Alexander Super-tramp, master of his own destiny.
[See Map Page 24]
CHAPTER FOUR
DETRITAL WASH
The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and
physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically
inimical.... Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and
space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The
desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky
above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead
portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest
lands... In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes
grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The
angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the
clouds as well as to the land....
To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and
exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic
and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.
PAUL SHEPARD, MAN IN THE LANDSCAPE:
A HISTORIC VIEW OF THE ESTHETICS OF NATURE
The bear-paw poppy, Arctomecon califomica, is a wildflower found in an
isolated corner of the Mojave Desert and nowhere else in the world. In late
spring it briefly produces a delicate golden bloom, but for most of the year the
plant huddles unadorned and unnoticed on the parched earth. A. califomica is
sufficiently rare that it has been classified as an endangered species. In October
1990, more than three months after McCan-dless left Atlanta, a National Park
Service ranger named Bud Walsh was sent into the backcountry of Lake Mead
National Recreation Area to tally bear-paw poppies so that the federal government
might better know just how scarce the plants were.
A. califomica grows only in gypsum soil of a sort that occurs in abundance
along the south shore of Lake Mead, so that is where Walsh led his team of
rangers to conduct the botanical survey. They turned off Temple Bar Road, drove
two roadless miles down the bed of Detrital Wash, parked their rigs near the
lakeshore, and started scrambling up the steep east bank of the wash, a slope of
crumbly white gypsum. A few minutes later, as they neared the top of the bank,
one of the rangers happened to glance back down into the wash while pausing to
catch his breath. “Hey! Look down there!” he yelled. “What the hell is that?”
At the edge of the dry riverbed, in a thicket of saltbush not far from where
they had parked, a large object was concealed beneath a dun-colored tarpaulin.
When the rangers pulled off the tarp, they found an old yellow Datsun without
license plates. A note taped to the windshield read, “This piece of shit has been
abandoned. Whoever can get it out of here can have it.”
The doors had been left unlocked. The floorboards were plastered with mud,
apparently from a recent flash flood. When he looked inside, Walsh found a
Gianini guitar, a saucepan containing $4.93 in loose change, a football, a garbage
bag full of old clothes, a fishing rod and tackle, a new electric razor, a harmonica,
a set of jumper cables, twenty-five pounds of rice, and in the glove
compartment, the keys to the vehicle’s ignition.
The rangers searched the surrounding area “for anything suspicious,”
according to Walsh, and then departed. Five days later another ranger returned
to the abandoned vehicle, managed to jump-start it without difficulty and drove
it out to the National Park Service maintenance yard at Temple Bar. “He drove it
back at sixty miles an hour,” Walsh recalls. “Said the thing ran like a champ.”
Attempting to learn who owned the car, the rangers sent out a bulletin over the
Teletype to relevant law-enforcement agencies and ran a detailed search of
computer records across the Southwest to see if the Datsun s VIN was associated
with any crimes. Nothing turned up.
By and by the rangers traced the car’s serial number to the Hertz
Corporation, the vehicle’s original owner; Hertz said they had sold it as a used
rental car many years earlier and had no interest in reclaiming it. “Whoa!
Great!” Walsh remembers thinking. “A freebie from the road gods—a car like this
will make a great undercover vehicle for drug interdiction.” And indeed it did.
Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make undercover
drug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national recreation
area, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating out
of a trailer park near Bullhead City.
“We’re still getting a lot of mileage out of that old car even now,” Walsh
proudly reports two and a half years after finding the Datsun. “Put a few bucks
of gas in the thing, and it will go all day. Real reliable. I kind of wondered why
nobody ever showed up to reclaim it.”
The Datsun, of course, belonged to Chris McCandless. After piloting it west
out of Atlanta, he’d arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6,
riding a giddy Emersonian high. Ignoring posted warnings that off-road driving is
strictly forbidden, McCandless steered the Datsun off the pavement where it
crossed a broad, sandy wash. He drove two miles down the riverbed to the south
shore of the lake. The temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The empty
desert stretched into the distance, shimmering in the heat. Surrounded by
chollas, bur sage, and the comical scurrying of collared lizards, McCandless
pitched his tent in the puny shade of a tamarisk and basked in his newfound
freedom.
Detrital Wash extends for some fifty miles from Lake Mead into the mountains
north of Kingman; it drains a big chunk of country. Most of the year the wash is
as dry as chalk. During the summer months, however, superheated air rises from
the scorched earth like bubbles from the bottom of a boiling kettle, rushing
heavenward in turbulent convection currents. Frequently the updrafts create
cells of muscular, anvil-headed cumulonimbus clouds that can rise thirty
thousand feet or more above the Mojave. Two days after McCandless set up camp
beside Lake Mead, an unusually robust wall of thunderheads reared up in the
afternoon sky, and it began to rain, very hard, over much of the Detrital Valley.
McCandless was camped at the edge of the wash, a couple of feet higher than
the main channel, so when the bore of brown water came rushing down from the
high country, he had just enough time to gather his tent and belongings and save
them from being swept away. There was nowhere to move the car, however, as
the only route of egress was now a foaming, full-blown river. As it turned out,
the flash flood didn’t have enough power to carry away the vehicle or even to do
any lasting damage. But it did get the engine wet, so wet that when McCandless
tried to start the car soon thereafter, the engine wouldn’t catch, and in his
impatience he drained the battery.
With the battery dead there was no way to get the Datsun running. If he
hoped to get the car back to a paved road, McCandless had no choice but to walk
out and notify the authorities of his predicament. If he went to the rangers,
however, they would have some irksome questions for him: Why had he ignored
posted regulations and driven down the wash in the first place? Was he aware
that the vehicle’s registration had expired two years before and had not been
renewed? Did he know that his drivers license had also expired, and the vehicle
was uninsured as well?
Truthful responses to these queries were not likely to be well received by the
rangers. McCandless could endeavor to explain that he answered to statutes of a
higher order—that as a latter-day adherent of Henry David Thoreau, he took as
gospel the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and thus considered it his
moral responsibility to flout the laws of the state. It was improbable, however,
that deputies of the federal government would share his point of view. There
would be thickets of red tape to negotiate and fines to pay. His parents would no
doubt be contacted. But there was a way to avoid such aggravation: He could
simply abandon the Datsun and resume his odyssey on foot. And that’s what he
decided to do.
Instead of feeling distraught over this turn of events, moreover, McCandless
was exhilarated: He saw the flash flood as an opportunity to shed unnecessary
baggage. He concealed the car as best he could beneath a brown tarp, stripped it
of its Virginia plates, and hid them. He buried his Winchester deer-hunting rifle
and a few other possessions that he might one day want to recover. Then, in a
gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud, he arranged all
his paper currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fives
and twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal
tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke.
We know all of this because McCandless documented the burning of his money
and most of the events that followed in a journal-snapshot album he would later
leave with Wayne West-erberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska.
Although the tone of the journal—written in the third person in a stilted, selfconsciousness
voice—often veers toward melodrama, the available evidence
indicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was a
credo he took seriously.
After loading his few remaining possessions into a backpack, McCandless set
out on July 10 to hike around Lake Mead. This, his journal acknowledges, turned
out to be a “tremendous mistake... In extreme July temperatures becomes
delirious.” Suffering from heat stroke, he managed to flag down some passing
boaters, who gave him a lift to Callville Bay, a marina near the west end of the
lake, where he stuck out his thumb and took to the road.
McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by
the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law,
savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way.
Allowing his life to be shaped by circumstance, he hitched to Lake Tahoe, hiked
into the Sierra Nevada, and spent a week walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail
before exiting the mountains and returning to the pavement.
At the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself Crazy
Ernie and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California;
photographs of the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded by
goats and chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, old
appliances, and mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven days
with six other vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had no
intention of ever paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutter
in the yard, pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot. Then
he resumed a life of constant motion, riding his thumb north and west through
Red Bluff, Weaverville, and Willow Creek.
At Arcata, California, in the dripping redwood forests of the Pacific shore,
McCandless turned right on U.S. Highway 101 and headed up the coast. Sixty
miles south of the Oregon line, near the town of Orick, a pair of drifters in an old
van pulled over to consult their map when they noticed a boy crouching in the
bushes off the side of the road. “He was wearing long shorts and this really
stupid hat,” says Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old rubber tramp who was
traveling around the West selling knick-knacks at flea markets and swap meets
with her boyfriend, Bob. “He had a book about plants with him, and he was using
it to pick berries, collecting them in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. He
looked pretty pitiful, so I yelled, ‘Hey, you want a ride somewhere?’ I thought
maybe we could give him a meal or something.
“We got to talking. He was a nice kid. Said his name was Alex. And he was
big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been
surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of
it. Said he was tramping around the country, having a big old adventure. He told
us about abandoning his car, about burning all his money. I said, ‘Why would you
want to do that?’ Claimed he didn’t need money. I have a son about the same
age Alex was, and we’ve been estranged for a few years now. So I said to Bob,
‘Man, we got to take this kid with us. You need to school him about some things.’
Alex took a ride from us up to Orick Beach, where we were staying, and camped
with us for a week. He was a really good kid. We
thought the world of him. When he left, we never expected to hear from him
again, but he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years Alex sent
us a postcard every month or two.”
From Orick, McCandless continued north up the coast. He passed through
Pistol River, Coos Bay, Seal Rock, Manzanita, As-toria; Hoquiam, Humptulips,
Queets; Forks, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Seattle. “He was alone,” as James
Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded,
happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and
wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the
seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
On August 10, shortly before meeting Jan Burres and Bob, McCandless had
been ticketed for hitchhiking near Willow Creek, in the gold-mining country east
of Eureka. In an uncharacteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents’ Annandale
address when the arresting officer demanded to know his permanent place of
residence. The unpaid ticket appeared in Walt and Bil-lie’s mailbox at the end of
August.
Walt and Billie, terribly concerned over Chris’s vanishing act, had by that
time already contacted the Annandale police, who had been of no help. When
the ticket arrived from California, they became frantic. One of their neighbors
was the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approached
this man, an army general, for advice. The general put him in touch with a
private investigator named Peter Kalitka, who’d done contract work for both the
DIA and the CIA. He was the best, the general assured Walt; if Chris was out
there, Kalitka would find him.
Using the Willow Creek ticket as a starting point, Kalitka launched an
extremely thorough search, chasing down leads that led as far afield as Europe
and South Africa. His efforts, however, turned up nothing—until December, when
he learned from an inspection of tax records that Chris had given away his
college fund to OXFAM.
“That really scared us,” says Walt. “By that point we had absolutely no idea
what Chris could be up to. The hitchhiking ticket just didn’t make any sense. He
loved that Datsun so much
it was mind-boggling to me that he would ever abandon it and travel on foot.
Although, in retrospect, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Chris was very
much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on
your back at a dead run.”
As Kalitka was trying to pick up Chris’s scent in California, McCandless was
already far away, hitching east across the Cascade Range, across the sagebrush
uplands and lava beds of the Columbia River basin, across the Idaho panhandle,
into Montana. There, outside Cut Bank, he crossed paths with Wayne Westerberg
and by the end of September was working for him in Carthage. When Westerberg
was jailed and the work came to a halt, and with winter coming on, McCandless
headed for warmer climes.
On October 28, he caught a ride with a long-haul trucker into Needles,
California. “Overjoyed upon reaching the Colorado River,” McCandless wrote in
his journal. Then he left the highway and started walking south through the
desert, following the river-bank. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock,
Arizona, a dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway intersects the
California border. While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminum
canoe for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down the
Colorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south,
across the border with Mexico.
This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the gulf, has little in
common with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the Grand Canyon,
some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Emasculated by dams and diversion
canals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to reservoir through
some of the hottest, starkest country on the continent. McCandless was stirred
by the austerity of this landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened the
sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean
slant of light.
From Topock, McCandless paddled south down Lake Havasu under a bleached
dome of sky, huge and empty. He made a brief excursion up the Bill Williams
River, a tributary of the Colorado,
then continued downstream through the Colorado River Indian Reservation,
the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. He
drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked
Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on
eerie pools of mirage. Leaving the river for a day to track a herd of wild horses,
he came across a sign warning that he was trespassing on the U.S. Army’s highly
restricted Yuma Proving Ground. McCandless was deterred not in the least.
At the end of November, he paddled through Yuma, where he stopped long
enough to replenish his provisions and send a postcard to Westerberg in care of
Glory House, the Sioux Falls work-release facility where Westerberg was doing
time. “Hey Wayne!” the card reads,
How’s it going? I hope that your situation has improved since the time we
last spoke. I’ve been tramping around Arizona for about a month now. This is a
good state! There is all kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful.
But apart from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank you
once again for all your hospitality. It’s rare to find a man as generous and good
natured as you are. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is too
easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when 1 was penniless and
had to forage around for my next meal. I couldn’t make it now without money,
however, as there is very little fruiting agriculture down here at this time.
Please thank Kevin again for all the clothes he gave me, I would have froze
to death without them. I hope he got that book to you. Wayne, you really should
read War and Peace. I meant it when I said you had one of the highest
characters of any man I’d met. That is a very powerful and highly symbolic book.
It has things in it that I think you will understand. Things that escape most
people. As for me, I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to
come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One day
I’ll get back to you Wayne and repay some of your kindness. A case of Jack
Daniels maybe? Til then III always think of you as a friend. GOD BLESS You,
ALEXANDER
On December 2, he reached the Morelos Dam and the Mexican border.
Worried that he would be denied entry because he was carrying no
identification, he sneaked into Mexico by paddling through the dam’s open
floodgates and shooting the spillway below. “Alex looks quickly around for signs
of trouble,” his journal records. “But his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed or
ignored. Alexander is jubilant!”
His jubilance, however, was short-lived. Below the Morelos Dam the river
turns into a maze of irrigation canals, marshland, and dead-end channels, among
which McCandless repeatedly lost his way:
Canals break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumbfounded.
Encounters some canal officials who can speak a little English. They tell him he
has not been traveling south but west and is headed for the center of the Baja
Peninsula. Alex is crushed. Pleads and persists that there must be some
waterway to the Gulf of California. They stare at Alex and think him crazy. But
then a passionate conversation breaks out amongst them, accompanied by maps
and the flourish of pencils. After 10 minutes they present to Alex a route which
apparently will take him to the ocean. He is overjoyed and hope bursts back into
his heart. Following the map he reverses back up the canal until he comes upon
the Canal de Independencia, which he takes east. According to the map this
canal should bisect the Wellteco Canal, which will turn south and flow all the
way to the ocean. But his hopes are quickly smashed when the canal comes to a
dead end in the middle of the desert. A reconnaissance mission reveals,
however, that Alex has merely run back into the bed of the now dead and dry
Colorado River. He discovers another canal about 1/2 mile on the other side of
the river bed. He decides to portage to this canal.
It took McCandless most of three days to carry the canoe and his gear to the
new canal. The journal entry for December 5 records,
At last! Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads
south. Worries and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller... Local
inhabitants help him portage around a barrier... Alex finds Mexicans to be
warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans...
12/6 Small but dangerous waterfalls litter the canal.
12/9 All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach the ocean but merely
peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded. Decides he must be
close to ocean and elects to try and work way through swamp to sea. Alex
becomes progressively lost to point where he must push canoe through reeds and
drag it through mud. All is in despair. Finds some dry ground to camp in swamp
at sundown. Next day, on 12/10, Alex resumes quest for an opening to the sea,
but only becomes more confused, traveling in circles. Completely demoralized
and frustrated he lays in his canoe at day’s end and weeps. But then by fantastic
chance he comes upon Mexican duck hunting guides who can speak English. He
tells them his story and his quest for the sea. They say there is no outlet to the
sea. But then one among them agrees to tow Alex back to his basecamp [behind
a small motor skiff], and drive him and the canoe [in the bed of a pickup truck]
to the ocean. It is a miracle.
The duck hunters dropped him in El Golfo de Santa Clara, a fishing village on
the Gulf of California. From there McCandless took to the sea, traveling south
down the eastern edge of the gulf. Having reached his destination, McCandless
slowed his pace, and his mood became more contemplative. He took photographs
of a tarantula, plaintive sunsets, windswept dunes, the long curve of empty
coastline. The journal entries become short and perfunctory. He wrote fewer
than a hundred words over the month that followed.
On December 14, weary of paddling, he hauled the canoe far up the beach,
climbed a sandstone bluff, and set up camp on the edge of a desolate plateau.
He stayed there for ten days, until high winds forced him to seek refuge in a cave
midway up the precipitous face of the bluff, where he remained for another ten
days. He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over the
Gran Desierto—the Great Desert: seventeen hundred square miles of shifting
dunes, the largest expanse of pure sand desert in North America. A day later he
resumed paddling down the barren shore.
His journal entry for January 11, 1991, begins “A very fateful day.” After
traveling some distance south, he beached the canoe on a sandbar far from shore
to observe the powerful tides. An hour later violent gusts started blowing down
from the desert, and the wind and tidal rips conspired to carry him out to sea.
The water by this time was a chaos of whitecaps that threatened to swamp and
capsize his tiny craft. The wind increased to gale force. The whitecaps grew into
high, breaking waves. “In great frustration,” the journal reads,
he screams and beats canoe with oar. The oar breaks. Alex has one spare oar.
He calms himself. If loses second oar is dead. Finally through extreme effort and
much cursing he manages to beach canoe on jetty and collapses exhausted on
sand at sundown. This incident led Alexander to decide to abandon canoe and
return north.
On January 16, McCandless left the stubby metal boat on a hummock of dune
grass southeast of El Golfo de Santa Clara and started walking north up the
deserted beach. He had not seen or talked to another soul in thirty-six days. For
that entire period he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what
marine life he could pull from the sea, an experience that would later convince
him he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush.
He was back at the United States border on January 18. Caught by
immigration authorities trying to slip into the country without ID, he spent a
night in custody before concocting a story that sprang him from the slammer,
minus his .38-caliber handgun, a “beautiful Colt Python, to which he was much
attached.”
McCandless spent the next six weeks on the move across the Southwest,
traveling as far east as Houston and as far west as the Pacific coast. To avoid
being rolled by the unsavory characters who rule the streets and freeway
overpasses where he slept, he learned to bury what money he had before
entering a city, then recover it on the way out of town. On February 3, according
to his journal, McCandless went to Los Angeles “to get a ID and a job but feels
extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately.”
Six days later, camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with Thomas and
Karin, a young German couple who had given him a ride, he wrote, “Can this be
the same Alex that set out in July, 1990? Malnutrition and the road have taken
their toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring.”
On February 24, seven and a half months after he abandoned the Datsun,
McCandless returned to Detrital Wash. The Park Service had long since
impounded the vehicle, but he unearthed his old Virginia plates, SJF-421, and a
few belongings he’d buried there. Then he hitched into Las Vegas and found a
job at an Italian restaurant. “Alexander buried his backpack in the desert on
2/27 and entered Las Vegas with no money and no ID,” the journal tells us.
He lived on the streets with bums, tramps, and winos for several weeks.
Vegas would not be the end of the story, however. On May 10, itchy feet
returned and Alex left his job in Vegas, retrieved his backpack, and hit the road
again, though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera
underground you won’t be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the
story has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991-January 7, 1992. But this
is not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy
of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to
be alive! Thank you. Thank you.
CHAPTER FIVE
BULLHEAD CITY
The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce
conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His
newborn cunning gave him poise and control.
JACK LONDON, THE CALL OF THE WILD
All Hail the Dominant Primordial Beast! And Captain Ahab Too!
Alexander Supertramp - May 1992
GRAFFITO FOUND INSIDE THE ABANDONED BUS ON THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
When his camera was ruined and McCandless stopped taking photographs, he
also stopped keeping a journal, a practice he didn’t resume until he went to
Alaska the next year. Not a great deal is known, therefore, about where he
traveled after departing Las Vegas in May 1991.
From a letter McCandless sent to Jan Burres, we know he spent July and
August on the Oregon coast, probably in the vicinity of Astoria, where he
complained that “the fog and rain was often intolerable.” In September he
hitched down U.S. Highway 101 into California, then headed east into the desert
again. And by early October he had landed in Bullhead City, Arizona.
Bullhead City is a community in the oxymoronic, late-twentieth-century
idiom. Lacking a discernible center, the town exists as a haphazard sprawl of
subdivisions and strip malls stretching for eight or nine miles along the banks of
the Colorado, directly across the river from the high-rise hotels and casinos of
Laughlin, Nevada. Bullheads distinguishing civic feature is the Mohave Valley
Highway, four lanes of asphalt lined with gas stations and fast-food franchises,
chiropractors and video shops, auto-parts outlets and tourist traps.
On the face of it, Bullhead City doesn’t seem like the kind of place that
would appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstoy, an ideologue who
expressed nothing but contempt for the bourgeois trappings of mainstream
America. McCandless, nevertheless, took a strong liking to Bullhead. Maybe it
was his affinity for the lumpen, who were well represented in the community’s
trailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats; perhaps he simply fell in love
with the stark desert landscape that encircles the town.
In any case, when he arrived in Bullhead City, McCandless stopped moving for
more than two months—probably the longest he stayed in one place from the
time he left Atlanta until he went to Alaska and moved into the abandoned bus
on the Stampede Trail. In a card he mailed to Westerberg in October, he says of
Bullhead, “It’s a good place to spend the winter and I might finally settle down
and abandon my tramping life, for good. I’ll see what happens when spring
comes around, because that’s when I tend to get really itchy feet.”
At the time he wrote these words, he was holding down a full-time job,
flipping Quarter Pounders at a McDonald’s on the main drag, commuting to work
on a bicycle. Outwardly, he was living a surprisingly conventional existence, even
going so far as to open a savings account at a local bank.
Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald’s job, he presented
himself as Chris McCandless, not as Alex, and gave his employers his real Social
Security number. It was an uncharacteristic break from his cover that might
easily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts—although the lapse proved to
be of no consequence because the private investigator hired by Walt and Billie
never caught the slip.
Two years after he sweated over the grill in Bullhead, his colleagues at the
golden arches don’t recall much about Chris McCandless. “One thing I do
remember is that he had a thing about socks,” says the assistant manager, a
fleshy, garrulous man named George Dreeszen. “He always wore shoes without
socks— just plain couldn’t stand to wear socks. But McDonald’s has a rule that
employees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times. That means shoes and
socks. Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang!—
the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off. I mean the very first thing. Kind of
like a statement, to let us know we didn’t own him, I guess. But he was a nice
kid and a good worker. Real dependable.”
Lori Zarza, the second assistant manager, has a somewhat different
impression of McCandless. “Frankly, I was surprised he ever got hired,” she says.
“He could do the job—he cooked in the back—but he always worked at the same
slow pace, even during the lunch rush, no matter how much you’d get on him to
hurry it up. Customers would be stacked ten-deep at the counter, and he
wouldn’t understand why I was on his case. He just didn’t make the connection.
It was like he was off in his own universe.
“He was reliable, though, a body that showed up every day, so they didn’t
dare fire him. They only paid four twenty-five an hour, and with all the casinos
right across the river starting people at six twenty-five, well, it was hard to keep
bodies behind the counter.
“I don’t think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or
anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and
weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws.
“When Chris finally quit,” Zarza admits, “it was probably because of me.
When he first started working, he was homeless, and he’d show up for work
smelling bad. It wasn’t up to McDonald’s standards to come in smelling the way
he did. So finally they delegated me to tell him that he needed to take a bath
more often. Ever since I told him, there was a clash between us. And then the
other employees—they were just trying to be nice—they started asking him if he
needed some soap or anything. That made him mad—you could tell. But he never
showed it outright. About three weeks later, he just walked out the door and
quit.”
McCandless had tried to disguise the fact that he was a drifter living out of a
backpack: He told his fellow employees that he lived across the river in Laughlin.
Whenever they offered him a ride home after work, he made excuses and
politely declined. In fact, during his first several weeks in Bullhead, McCandless
camped out in the desert at the edge of town; then he started squatting in a
vacant mobile home. The latter arrangement, he explained in a letter to Jan
Burres, “came about this way:”
One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, and
observing me, asked me if I was “sleeping out.” I told him yes, and it turned out
that he had this old trailer I could stay in for free. The only problem is that he
doesn’t really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on their
land here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep things
toned down and stay out of sight, because he isn’t supposed to have anybody
over here. It’s really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer is
nice, it’s a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets working
and a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name is
Charlie, is something of a lunatic and it’s rather difficult to get along with him
sometimes.
Charlie still lives at the same address, in a small teardrop-shaped camping
trailer sheathed in rust-pocked tin, without plumbing or electricity, tucked
behind the much larger blue-and-white mobile home where McCandless slept.
Denuded mountains are visible to the west, towering sternly above the rooftops
of adjacent double-wides. A baby-blue Ford Torino rests on blocks in the
unkempt yard, weeds sprouting from its engine compartment. The ammonia reek
of human urine rises from a nearby oleander hedge.
“Chris? Chris?” Charlie barks, scanning porous memory banks. “Oh yeah, him.
Yeah, yeah, I remember him, sure.” Charlie, dressed in a sweatshirt and khaki
work pants, is a frail, nervous man with rheumy eyes and a growth of white
stubble across his chin. By his recollection McCandless stayed in the trailer about
a month.
“Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy,” Charlie reports. “Didn’t like to be around
too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a
lot of complexes—know what I’m saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy,
Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered.
Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just
didn’t know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I was
looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy!
“But like I was saying, Alaska—yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybe
to find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway.
Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had ‘em bad. When he left, was
around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for
lettin’ him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him.”
In late November, McCandless sent a postcard to Jan Burres in care of a postoffice
box in Niland, a small town in California’s Imperial Valley. “That card we
got in Niland was the first letter from him in a long time that had a return
address on it,” Burres remembers. “So I immediately wrote back and said we’d
come see him the next weekend in Bullhead, which wasn’t that far from where
we were.”
McCandless was thrilled to hear from Jan. “I am so glad to find you both alive
and sound,” he exclaimed in a letter dated December 9, 1991.
Thanks so much for the Christmas card. It’s nice to be thought of this time of
year... I’m so excited to hear that you will be coming to see me, you’re
welcome anytime. It’s really great to think that after almost a year and a half
we shall be meeting again.
He closed the letter by drawing a map and giving detailed directions for
finding the trailer on Bullhead City’s Baseline Road.
Four days after receiving this letter, however, as Jan and her boyfriend, Bob,
were preparing to drive up for the visit, Burres returned to their campsite one
evening to find “a big backpack leaning against our van. I recognized it as Alex’s.
Our little dog, Sunni, sniffed him out before I did. She’d liked Alex, but I was
surprised she remembered him. When the dog found him, she went nuts.”
McCandless explained to Burres that he’d grown tired of Bullhead, tired of
punching a clock, tired of the “plastic people” he worked with, and decided to
get the hell out of town.
Jan and Bob were staying three miles outside of Niland, at a place the locals
call the Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving a
grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert.
Come November, as the weather turns cold across the rest of the country, some
five thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds congregate in this
otherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun. The Slabs functions as
the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired
culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed.
Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on
the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS,
Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.
When McCandless arrived at the Slabs, a huge flea market-swap meet was in
full swing out in the desert. Burres, as one of the vendors, had set up some
folding tables displaying cheap, mostly secondhand goods for sale, and
McCandless volunteered to oversee her large inventory of used paperback books.
“He helped me a lot,” Burres acknowledges. “He watched the table when I
needed to leave, categorized all the books, made a lot of sales. He seemed to
get a real kick out of it. Alex was big on the classics: Dickens, H. G. Wells, Mark
Twain, Jack London.
London was his favorite. He’d try to convince every snowbird who walked by
that they should read Call of the Wild.”
McCandless had been infatuated with London since childhood. London’s
fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial
world, his championing of the great unwashed—all of it mirrored McCandless’s
passions. Mesmerized by London’s turgid portrayal of life in Alaska and the
Yukon, McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a
Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.” He was so enthralled
by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction,
constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic
sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness.
McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just
a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California
estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a
sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in
print.
Among the residents of the Niland Slabs was a seventeen-year-old named
Tracy, and she fell in love with McCandless during his week-long visit. “She was
this sweet little thing,” says Burres, “the daughter of a couple of tramps who
parked their rig four vehicles down from us. And poor Tracy developed a hopeless
crush on Alex. The whole time he was in Niland, she hung around making goo-goo
eyes at him, bugging me to convince him to go on walks with her. Alex was nice
to her, but she was too young for him. He couldn’t take her seriously. Probably
left her brokenhearted for a whole week at least.”
Even though McCandless rebuffed Tracy’s advances, Burres makes it clear that
he was no recluse: “He had a good time when he was around people, a real good
time. At the swap meet he’d talk and talk and talk to everybody who came by.
He must have met six or seven dozen people in Niland, and he was friendly with
every one of them. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He
did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company
for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”
McCandless was especially attentive to Burres, flirting and clowning with her
at every opportunity. “He liked to tease me and torment me,” she recalls. “I’d
go out back to hang clothes on the line behind the trailer, and he’d attach
clothespins all over me. He was playful, like a little kid. I had puppies, and he
was always putting them under laundry baskets to watch them bounce around
and yelp. He’d do it till I’d get mad and have to yell at him to stop. But in truth
he was real good with the dogs. They’d follow him around, cry after him, want to
sleep with him. Alex just had a way with animals.”
One afternoon while McCandless was tending the book table at the Niland
swap meet, somebody left a portable electric organ with Burres to sell on
consignment. “Alex took it over and entertained everybody all day playing it,”
she says. “He had an amazing voice. He drew quite a crowd. Until then I never
knew he was musical.”
McCandless spoke frequently to the denizens of the Slabs about his plans for
Alaska. He did calisthenics each morning to get in shape for the rigors of the
bush and discussed backcountry survival strategies at length with Bob, a selfstyled
survivalist.
“Me,” says Burres, “I thought Alex had lost his mind when he told us about his
‘great Alaskan odyssey,’ as he called it. But he was really excited about it.
Couldn’t stop talking about the trip.”
Despite prodding from Burres, however, McCandless revealed virtually nothing
about his family. “I’d ask him,” Burres says, “ ‘Have you let your people know
what you’re up to? Does your mom know you’re going to Alaska? Does your dad
know?’ But he’d never answer. He’d just roll his eyes at me, get peeved, tell me
to quit trying to mother him. And Bob would say, ‘Leave him alone! He’s a grown
man!’ I’d keep at it until he’d change the subject, though—because of what
happened between me and my own son. He’s out there somewhere, and I’d want
someone to look after him like I tried to look after Alex.”
The Sunday before McCandless left Niland, he was watching an NFL playoff
game on the television in Burres’s trailer when she noticed he was rooting
especially hard for the Washington Redskins. “So I asked him if he was from the
B.C. area,” she says. “And he answered, ‘Yeah, actually I am.’ That’s the only
thing he ever let on about his background.”
The following Wednesday, McCandless announced it was time for him to be
moving on. He said he needed to go to the post office in Salton City, fifty miles
west of Niland, to which he’d asked the manager of the Bullhead McDonald’s to
send his final pay-check, general delivery. He accepted Burres’s offer to drive
him there, but when she tried to give him a little money for helping out at the
swap meet, she recalls, “he acted real offended. I told him, ‘Man, you gotta
have money to get along in this world/ but he wouldn’t take it. Finally I got him
to take some Swiss Army knives and a few belt knives; I convinced him they’d
come in handy in Alaska and that he could maybe trade them for something down
the road.”
After an extended argument Burres also got McCandless to accept some long
underwear and other warm clothing she thought he’d need in Alaska. “He
eventually took it to shut me up,” she laughs, “but the day after he left, I found
most of it in the van. He’d pulled it out of his pack when we weren’t looking and
hid it up under the seat. Alex was a great kid, but he could really make me mad
sometimes.”
Although Burres was concerned about McCandless, she assumed he’d come
through in one piece. “I thought he’d be fine in the end,” she reflects. “He was
smart. He’d figured out how to paddle a canoe down to Mexico, how to hop
freight trains, how to score a bed at inner-city missions. He figured all of that
out on his own, and I felt sure he’d figure out Alaska, too.”
CHAPTER SIX
ANZA-BORREGO
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were
bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to
be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the
day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a
fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry,
more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and
you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and
values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they
exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality... The true harvest of
my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of
morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow
which I have clutched.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
VFALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS
PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND
WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS
On January 4, 1993, this writer received an unusual letter, penned in a shaky,
anachronistic script that suggested an elderly author. “To Whom It May
Concern,” the letter began.
/ would like to get a copy of the magazine that carried the story of the
young man (Alex McCandless) dying in Alaska. I would like to write the one that
investigated the incident. I drove him from Salton City Calif... in March 1992...
to Grand Junction Co... I left Alex there to hitch-hike to S.D. He said he would
keep in touch. The last I heard from him was a letter the first week in April,
1992. On our trip we took pictures, me with the camcorder + Alex with his
camera.
If you have a copy of that magazine please send me the cost of that
magazine...
I understand he was hurt. If so I would like to know how he was injured, for
he always carried enough rice in his backpack + he had arctic clothes + plenty of
money.
SINCERELY, RONALD A. FRANZ
Please do not make these facts available to anybody till I know more about
his death for he was not just the common wayfarer. Please believe me.
The magazine that Franz requested was the January 1993 issue of Outside,
which featured a cover story about the death of Chris McCandless. His letter had
been addressed to the offices of Outside in Chicago; because I had written the
McCandless piece, it was forwarded to me.
McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during the
course of his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a week
or two at most. Nobody, however, was affected more powerfully by his or her
brief contact with the boy than Ronald Franz, who was eighty years old when
their paths intersected in January 1992.
After McCandless bid farewell to Jan Burres at the Salton City Post Office, he
hiked into the desert and set up camp in a brake of creosote at the edge of Anza-
Borrego Desert State Park. Hard to the east is the Salton Sea, a placid ocean in
miniature, its surface more than two hundred feet below sea level, created in
1905 by a monumental engineering snafu: Not long after a canal was dug from
the Colorado River to irrigate rich farmland in the Imperial Valley, the river
breached its banks during a series of major floods, carved a new channel, and
began to gush unabated into the Imperial Valley Canal. For more than two years
the canal inadvertently diverted virtually all of the river’s prodigious flow into
the Salton sink. Water surged across the once-dry floor of the sink, inundating
farms and settlements, eventually drowning four hundred square miles of desert
and giving birth to a landlocked ocean.
Only fifty miles from the limousines and exclusive tennis clubs and lush green
fairways of Palm Springs, the west shore of the Salton Sea had once been the site
of intense real estate speculation. Lavish resorts were planned, grand
subdivisions platted. But little of the promised development ever came to pass.
These days most of the lots remain vacant and are gradually being reclaimed by
the desert. Tumbleweeds scuttle down Salton City’s broad, desolate boulevards.
Sun-bleached FOR SALE signs line the curbs, and paint peels from uninhabited
buildings. A placard in the window of the Salton Sea Realty and Development
Company declares CLOSED/CERRADO. Only the rattle of the wind interrupts the
spectral quiet.
Away from the lakeshore the land rises gently and then abruptly to form the
desiccated, phantasmal badlands of Anza-Borrego. The bajada beneath the
badlands is open country cut by steep-walled arroyos. Here, on a low, sunscorched
rise dotted with chollas and indigobushes and twelve-foot ocotillo
stems, McCandless slept on the sand under a tarp hung from a creosote branch.
When he needed provisions, he would hitch or walk the four miles into town,
where he bought rice and filled his plastic water jug at the market-liquor storepost
office, a beige stucco building that serves as the cultural nexus of greater
Salton City. One Thursday in mid-January, McCandless was hitching back out to
the bajada after filling his jug when an old man, name of Ron Franz, stopped to
give him a ride.
“Where’s your camp?” Franz inquired.
“Out past Oh-My-God Hot Springs,” McCandless replied.
“I’ve lived in these parts six years now, and I’ve never heard of any place
goes by that name. Show me how to get there.”
They drove for a few minutes down the Borrego-Salton Seaway, and then
McCandless told him to turn left into the desert, where a rough 4-x-4 track
twisted down a narrow wash. After a mile or so they arrived at a bizarre
encampment, where some two hundred people had gathered to spend the winter
living out of their vehicles. The community was beyond the fringe, a vision of
post-apocalypse America. There were families sheltered in cheap tent trailers,
aging hippies in Day-Glo vans, Charles Manson look-alikes sleeping in rusted-out
Studebakers that hadn’t turned over since Eisenhower was in the White House. A
substantial number of those present were walking around buck naked. At the
center of the camp, water from a geothermal well had been piped into a pair of
shallow, steaming pools lined with rocks and shaded by palm trees: Oh-My-God
Hot Springs.
McCandless, however, wasn’t living right at the springs; he was camped by
himself another half mile out on the bajada. Franz drove Alex the rest of the
way, chatted with him there for a while, and then returned to town, where he
lived alone, rent free, in return for managing a ramshackle apartment building.
Franz, a devout Christian, had spent most of his adult life in the army,
stationed in Shanghai and Okinawa. On New Year’s Eve 1957, while he was
overseas, his wife and only child were killed by a drunk driver in an automobile
accident. Franz’s son had been due to graduate from medical school the
following June. Franz started hitting the whiskey, hard.
Six months later he managed to pull himself together and quit drinking, cold
turkey, but he never really got over the loss. To salve his loneliness in the years
after the accident, he started unofficially “adopting” indigent Okinawan boys
and girls, eventually taking fourteen of them under his wing, paying for the
oldest to attend medical school in Philadelphia and another to study medicine in
Japan.
When Franz met McCandless, his long-dormant paternal impulses were kindled
anew. He couldn’t get the young man out of his mind. The boy had said his name
was Alex—he’d declined to give a surname—and that he came from West Virginia.
He was polite, friendly, well-groomed.
“He seemed extremely intelligent,” Franz states in an exotic brogue that
sounds like a blend of Scottish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Carolina drawl. “I
thought he was too nice a kid to be living by that hot springs with those nudists
and drunks and dope smokers.” After attending church that Sunday, Franz
decided to talk to Alex “about how he was living. Somebody needed to convince
him to get an education and a job and make something of his life.”
When he returned to McCandless’s camp and launched into the selfimprovement
pitch, though, McCandless cut him off abruptly. “Look, Mr. Franz,”
he declared, “you don’t need to worry about me. I have a college education. I’m
not destitute. I’m living like this by choice.” And then, despite his initial prickliness,
the young man warmed to the old-timer, and the two engaged in a long
conversation. Before the day was out, they had driven into Palm Springs in
Franz’s truck, had a meal at a nice restaurant, and taken a ride on the tramway
to the top of San Ja-cinto Peak, at the bottom of which McCandless stopped to
unearth a Mexican scrape and some other possessions he’d buried for safekeeping
a year earlier.
Over the next few weeks McCandless and Franz spent a lot of time together.
The younger man would regularly hitch into Salton City to do his laundry and
barbecue steaks at Franz’s apartment. He confided that he was biding his time
until spring, when he intended to go to Alaska and embark on an “ultimate adventure.”
He also turned the tables and started lecturing the grandfatherly
figure about the shortcomings of his sedentary existence, urging the eighty-yearold
to sell most of his belongings, move out of the apartment, and live on the
road. Franz took these harangues in stride and in fact delighted in the boy’s
company.
An accomplished leatherworker, Franz taught Alex the secrets of his craft; for
his first project McCandless produced a tooled leather belt, on which he created
an artful pictorial record of his wanderings. ALEX is inscribed at the belt’s left
end; then the initials C.J.M. (for Christopher Johnson McCandless) frame a skull
and crossbones. Across the strip of cowhide one sees a rendering of a two-lane
blacktop, a NO U-TURN sign, a thunderstorm producing a flash flood that engulfs a
car, a hitchhiker’s thumb, an eagle, the Sierra Nevada, salmon cavorting in the
Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Coast Highway from Oregon to Washington, the Rocky
Mountains, Montana wheat fields, a South Dakota rattlesnake, Westerberg’s
house in Carthage, the Colorado River, a gale in the Gulf of California, a canoe
beached beside a tent, Las Vegas, the initials T.C.D., Morro Bay, Astoria, and at
the buckle end, finally, the letter N (presumably representing north). Executed
with remarkable skill and creativity, this belt is as astonishing as any artifact
Chris McCandless left behind.
Franz grew increasingly fond of McCandless. “God, he was a smart kid,” the
old man rasps in a barely audible voice. He directs his gaze at a patch of sand
between his feet as he makes this declaration; then he stops talking. Bending
stiffly from the waist, he wipes some imaginary dirt from his pant leg. His
ancient joints crack loudly in the awkward silence.
More than a minute passes before Franz speaks again; squinting at the sky, he
begins to reminisce further about the time he spent in the youngsters company.
Not infrequently during their visits, Franz recalls, McCandless’s face would
darken with anger and he’d fulminate about his parents or politicians or the endemic
idiocy of mainstream American life. Worried about alienating the boy,
Franz said little during such outbursts and let him rant.
One day in early February, McCandless announced that he was splitting for
San Diego to earn more money for his Alaska trip.
“You don’t need to go to San Diego,” Franz protested. “I’ll give you money if
you need some.”
“No. You don’t get it. I’m going to San Diego. And I’m leaving on Monday”
“OK. I’ll drive you there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” McCandless scoffed.
“I need to go anyway,” Franz lied, “to pick up some leather supplies.”
McCandless relented. He struck his camp, stored most of his belongings in
Franz’s apartment—the boy didn’t want to schlepp his sleeping bag or backpack
around the city—and then rode with the old man across the mountains to the
coast. It was raining when Franz dropped McCandless at the San Diego waterfront.
“It was a very hard thing for me to do,” Franz says. “I was sad to be
leaving him.”
On February 19, McCandless called Franz, collect, to wish him a happy eightyfirst
birthday; McCandless remembered the date because his own birthday had
been seven days earlier: He had turned twenty-four on February 12. During this
phone call he also confessed to Franz that he was having trouble finding work.
On February 28, he mailed a postcard to Jan Burres. “Hello!” it reads,
Have been living on streets of San Diego for the past week. First day I got
here it rained like hell. The missions here suck and I’m getting preached to
death. Not much happening in terms of jobs so I’m heading north tomorrow.
I’ve decided to head for Alaska no later than May 1st, but I’ve got to raise a
little cash to outfit myself. May go back and work for a friend I have in South
Dakota if he can use me. Don’t know where I’m headed now but I’ll write when I
get there. Hope all’s well with you. TAKE CARE, ALEX
On March 5, McCandless sent another card to Burres and a card to Franz as
well. The missive to Burres says,
Greetings from Seattle! I’m a hobo now! That’s right, I’m riding the rails
now. What fun, I wish I had jumped trains earlier. The rails have some
drawbacks, however. First is that one becomes absolutely filthy. Second is that
one must tangle with these crazy bulls. I was sitting in a hotshot in L.A. when a
bull found me with his flashlight about 10 P.M. “Get outta there before I KILL
ya!” screamed the bull. I got out and saw he had drawn his revolver. He
interrogated me at gunpoint, then growled, “If I ever see you around this train
again I’ll kill ya! Hit the road!” What a lunatic! I got the last laugh when I
caught the same train 5 minutes later and rode it all the way to Oakland. I’ll be
in touch,
ALEX
A week later Franz’s phone rang. “It was the operator,” he says, “asking if I
would accept a collect call from someone named Alex. When I heard his voice, it
was like sunshine after a month of rain.”
“Will you come pick me up?” McCandless asked.
“Yes. Where in Seattle are you?”
“Ron,” McCandless laughed, “I’m not in Seattle. I’m in California, just up the
road from you, in Coachella.” Unable to find work in the rainy Northwest,
McCandless had hopped a series of freight trains back to the desert. In Colton,
California, he was discovered by another bull and thrown in jail. Upon his release
he had hitchhiked to Coachella, just southeast of Palm Springs, and called Franz.
As soon as he hung up the phone, Franz rushed off to pick McCandless up.
“We went to a Sizzler, where I filled him up with steak and lobster,” Franz
recalls, “and then we drove back to Salton City.”
McCandless said that he would be staying only a day, just long enough to wash
his clothes and load his backpack. He’d heard from Wayne Westerberg that a job
was waiting for him at the grain elevator in Carthage, and he was eager to get
there. The date was March 11, a Wednesday. Franz offered to take McCandless to
Grand Junction, Colorado, which was the farthest he could drive without missing
an appointment in Salton City the following Monday. To Franz’s surprise and
great relief, McCandless accepted the offer without argument.
Before departing, Franz gave McCandless a machete, an arctic parka, a
collapsible fishing pole, and some other gear for his Alaska undertaking. Thursday
at daybreak they drove out of Salton City in Franz’s truck. In Bullhead City they
stopped to close out McCandless’s bank account and to visit Charlie s trailer,
where McCandless had stashed some books and other belongings, including the
journal-photo album from his canoe trip down the Colorado. McCandless then
insisted on buying Franz lunch at the Golden Nugget Casino, across the river in
Laughlin. Recognizing McCandless, a waitress at the Nugget gushed, “Alex! Alex!
You’re back!”
Franz had purchased a video camera before the trip, and he paused now and
then along the way to record the sights. Although McCandless usually ducked
away whenever Franz pointed the lens in his direction, some brief footage exists
of him standing impatiently in the snow above Bryce Canyon. “Ok, let’s go,” he
protests to the camcorder after a few moments. “There’s a lot more ahead,
Ron.” Wearing jeans and a wool sweater, McCandless looks tan, strong, healthy.
Franz reports that it was a pleasant, if hurried trip. “Sometimes we’d drive
for hours without saying a word,” he recalls. “Even when he was sleeping, I was
happy just knowing he was there.” At one point Franz dared to make a special
request of McCandless. “My mother was an only child,” he explains. “So was my
father. And I was their only child. Now that my own boy’s dead, I’m the end of
the line. When I’m gone, my family will be finished, gone forever. So I asked Alex
if I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson.”
McCandless, uncomfortable with the request, dodged the question: “We’ll
talk about it when I get back from Alaska, Ron.”
On March 14, Franz left McCandless on the shoulder of Interstate 70 outside
Grand Junction and returned to southern California. McCandless was thrilled to
be on his way north, and he was relieved as well—relieved that he had again
evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy
emotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of
his family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s
length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now
he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.
Painlessly, that is, from McCandless’s perspective—although not from the old
man’s. One can only speculate about why Franz became so attached to
McCandless so quickly, but the affection he felt was genuine, intense, and
unalloyed. Franz had been living a solitary existence for many years. He had no
family and few friends. A disciplined, self-reliant man, he got along remarkably
well despite his age and solitude. When McCandless came into his world,
however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses.
Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also
reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void in
Franz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly as
he’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.
In early April a long letter arrived in Franz’s post-office box bearing a South
Dakota postmark. “Hello Ron,” it says,
Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearly
two weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction,
Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City without too many
problems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is not
very bad and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are even
already going out into their fields. It must be getting rather hot down there in
Southern California by now. I wonder if you ever got a chance to get out and see
how many people showed up for the March 20 Rainbow gathering there at the
hotsprings. It sounds like it might have been a lot of fun, but I don’t think you
really understand these kind of people very well.
I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wants
me to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combining
with him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my Alaskan
Odyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will be
leaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may have
received to the return address listed below.
Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times that we
spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may
be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get
through this Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing from me again in the
future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really
should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things
which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to
attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not
take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a
life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give
one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous
spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living
spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters
with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an
endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you
want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for
monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first
appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you
will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out
of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I
fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are
even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to
see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every
American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason
incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as
possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day.
I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover
all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle
down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new
horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if
you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an
entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human
relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything
we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our
habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new
kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out
there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only
person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new
circumstances.
Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put
a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great
work that God has done here in the American West. You will see things and
meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy
style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as
possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I
see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and
experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just
get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you
did.
TAKE CARE RON, ALEX
Please write back to:
Alex McCandless
Madison, SD 57042
Astoundingly, the eighty-one-year-old man took the brash twenty-four-yearold
vagabonds advice to heart. Franz placed his furniture and most of his other
possessions in a storage locker, bought a CMC Duravan, and outfitted it with
bunks and camping gear. Then he moved out of his apartment and set up camp
on the bajada.
Franz occupied McCandless’s old campsite, just past the hot springs. He
arranged some rocks to create a parking area for the van, transplanted prickly
pears and indigobushes for “landscaping.” And then he sat out in the desert, day
after day after day, awaiting his young friend’s return.
Ronald Franz (this is not his real name; at his request I have given him a
pseudonym) looks remarkably sturdy for a man in his ninth decade who has
survived two heart attacks. Nearly six feet tall, with thick arms and a barrel
chest, he stands erect, his shoulders unbowed. His ears are large beyond the
proportions of his other features, as are his gnarled, meaty hands. When I walk
into his camp in the desert and introduce myself, he is wearing old jeans and an
immaculate white T-shirt, a decorative tooled-leather belt of his own creation,
white socks, scuffed black loafers. His age is betrayed only by the creases across
his brow and a proud, deeply pitted nose, over which a purple filigree of veins
unfolds like a finely wrought tattoo. A little more than a year after McCandless’s
death he regards the world through wary blue eyes.
To dispel Franz’s suspicion, I hand him an assortment of photographs I’d taken
on a trip to Alaska the previous summer, during which I’d retraced McCandless’s
terminal journey on the Stampede Trail. The first several images in the stack are
landscapes—shots of the surrounding bush, the overgrown trail, distant
mountains, the Sushana River. Franz studies them in silence, occasionally
nodding when I explain what they depict; he seems grateful to see them.
When he comes to the pictures of the bus in which the boy died, however, he
stiffens abruptly. Several of these images show McCandless’s belongings inside
the derelict vehicle; as soon as Franz realizes what he’s seeing, his eyes mist
over, he thrusts the photos back at me without examining the rest, and the old
man walks away to compose himself as I mumble a lame apology.
Franz no longer lives at McCandless’s campsite. A flash flood washed the
makeshift road away, so he moved twenty miles out, toward the Borrego
badlands, where he camps beside an isolated stand of cottonwoods. Oh-My-God
Hot Springs is gone now, too, bulldozed and plugged with concrete by order of
the Imperial Valley Health Commission. County officials say they eliminated the
springs out of concern that bathers might become gravely ill from virulent
microbes thought to flourish in the thermal pools.
“That sure could of been true,” says the clerk at the Salton City store, “but
most people think they bulldozed ‘em ‘cause the springs was starting to attract
too many hippies and drifters and scum like that. Good riddance, you ask me.”
For more than eight months after he said good-bye to McCandless, Franz
remained at his campsite, scanning the road for the approach of a young man
with a large pack, waiting patiently for Alex to return. During the last week of
1992, the day after Christmas, he picked up two hitchhikers on his way back from
a trip into Salton City to check his mail. “One fella was from Mississippi, I think;
the other was a Native American,” Franz remembers. “On the way out to the hot
springs, I started telling them about my friend Alex, and the adventure he’d set
out to have in Alaska.”
Suddenly, the Indian youth interrupted: “Was his name Alex McCandless?”
“Yes, that’s right. So you’ve met him, then—”
“I hate to tell you this, mister, but your friend is dead. Froze to death up on
the tundra. Just read about it in Outdoor magazine.”
In shock, Franz interrogated the hitchhiker at length. The details rang true;
his story added up. Something had gone horribly wrong. McCandless would never
be coming back.
“When Alex left for Alaska,” Franz remembers, “I prayed. I asked God to keep
his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let
Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the
Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I
couldn’t believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy
like Alex.
“After I dropped off the hitchhikers,” Franz continues, “I turned my van
around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went
out into the desert and drank it. I wasn’t used to drinking, so it made me sick.
Hoped it’d kill me, but it didn’t. Just made me real, real sick.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
CARTHAGE
There was some books... One was Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that
left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The
statements was interesting, but tough.
MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal
relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some
instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has
steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his
personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does
not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from
behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can
see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose
principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was
not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
ANTHONY STORR, SOLITUDE: A RETURN TO THE SELF
The big John Deere 8020 squats silently in the canted evening light, a long
way from anywhere, surrounded by a half-mowed field of South Dakota milo.
Wayne Westerberg’s muddy sneakers protrude from the maw of the combine, as
if the machine were in the process of swallowing him whole, an overgrown metal
reptile digesting its prey. “Hand me that goddamn wrench, will you?” an angry,
muffled voice demands from deep within the machine’s innards. “Or are you guys
too busy standing around with your hands in your goddamn pockets to be of any
use?” The combine has broken down for the third time in as many days, and
Westerberg is frantically trying to replace a hard-to-reach bushing before
nightfall.
An hour later he emerges, smeared with grease and chaff but successful.
“Sorry about snapping like that,” Westerberg apologizes. “We’ve been working
too many eighteen-hour days. I guess I’m getting a little snarly, it being so late in
the season and all, and us being shorthanded besides. We was counting on Alex
being back at work by now.” Fifty days have gone by since McCandless’s body
was discovered in Alaska on the Stampede Trail.
Seven months earlier, on a frosty March afternoon, McCand-less had ambled
into the office at the Carthage grain elevator and announced that he was ready
to go to work. “There we were, ringing up the morning’s tickets,” remembers
Westerberg, “and in walks Alex with a big old backpack slung over his shoulder.”
He told Westerberg he planned on staying until April 15, just long enough to put
together a grubstake. He needed to buy a pile of new gear, he explained,
because he was going to Alaska. McCand-less promised to come back to South
Dakota in time to help with the autumn harvest, but he wanted to be in
Fairbanks by the end of April in order to squeeze in as much time as possible up
North before his return.
During those four weeks in Carthage, McCandless worked hard, doing dirty,
tedious jobs that nobody else wanted to tackle: mucking out warehouses,
exterminating vermin, painting, scything weeds. At one point, to reward
McCandless with a task that involved slightly more skill, Westerberg attempted to
teach him to operate a front-end loader. “Alex hadn’t been around machinery
much,” Westerberg says with a shake of his head, “and it was pretty comical to
watch him try to get the hang of the clutch and all those levers. He definitely
wasn’t what you’d call mechanically minded.”
Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense.
Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have
great difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest. “Alex wasn’t a total
space cadet or anything,” says Westerberg; “don’t get me wrong. But there was
gaps in his thinking. I remember once I went over to the house, walked into the
kitchen, and noticed a god-awful stink. I mean it smelled nasty in there. I opened
the microwave, and the bottom of it was filled with rancid grease. Alex had been
using it to cook chicken, and it never occurred to him that the grease had to
drain somewhere. It wasn’t that he was too lazy to clean it up—Alex always kept
things real neat and orderly—it was just that he hadn’t noticed the grease.”
Soon after McCandless returned to Carthage that spring, Westerberg
introduced him to his longtime, on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gail Borah, a
petite, sad-eyed woman, as slight as a heron, with delicate features and long
blond hair. Thirty-five years old, divorced, a mother of two teenage children, she
quickly became close to McCandless. “He was kind of shy at first,” says Borah.
“He acted like it was hard for him to be around people. I just figured that was
because he’d spent so much time by himself.
“I had Alex over to the house for supper just about every night,” Borah
continues. “He was a big eater. Never left any food on his plate. Never. He was a
good cook, too. Sometimes he’d have me over to Wayne’s place and fix supper
for everybody. Cooked a lot of rice. You’d think he would of got tired of it, but
he never did. Said he could live for a month on nothing but twenty-five pounds of
rice.
“Alex talked a lot when we got together,” Borah recalls. “Serious stuff, like
he was baring his soul, kind of. He said he could tell me things that he couldn’t
tell the others. You could see something was gnawing at him. It was pretty
obvious he didn’t get along with his family, but he never said much about any of
them except Carine, his little sister. He said they were pretty close. Said she was
beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would turn their heads
and stare.”
Westerberg, for his part, didn’t concern himself with McCandless’s family
problems. “Whatever reason he had for being pissed off, I figured it must have
been a good one. Now that he’s dead, though, I don’t know anymore. If Alex was
here right now, I’d be tempted to chew him out good: ‘What the hell were you
thinking? Not speaking to your family for all that time, treating them like dirt!’
One of the kids that works for me, fuck, he don’t even have any goddamn
parents, but you don’t hear him bitching. Whatever the deal was with Alex’s
family, I guarantee you I’ve seen a lot worse. Knowing Alex, I think he must have
just got stuck on something that happened between him and his dad and couldn’t
leave it be.”
Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis
of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were
stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’s extravagantly
independent nature, polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt’s
authority through high school and college to a surprising degree, but the boy
raged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he perceived to be
his father’s moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parents’ lifestyle, the
tyranny of their conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled—and when he finally
did, it was with characteristic immoderation.
Shortly before he disappeared, Chris complained to Carine that their parents’
behavior was “so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful and insulting that I
finally passed my breaking point.” He went on:
Since they won’t ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation
I’m going to let them think they are right, I’m going to let them think that I’m
“coming around to see their side of things “ and that our relationship is
stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m
going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my
parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long
as I live. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever.
The chill Westerberg sensed between Alex and his parents stood in marked
contrast to the warmth McCandless exhibited in Carthage. Outgoing and
extremely personable when the spirit moved him, he charmed a lot of folks.
There was mail waiting for him when he arrived back in South Dakota,
correspondence from people he’d met on the road, including what Westerberg
remembers as “letters from a girl who had a big crush on him, someone he’d
gotten to know in some Timbuktu—some campground, I think.” But McCandless
never mentioned any romantic entanglements to either Westerberg or Borah.
“I don’t recollect Alex ever talking about any girlfriends,” says Westerberg.
“Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have a
family some day. You could tell he didn’t take relationships lightly. He wasn’t
the kind of guy who would go out and pick up girls just to get laid.”
It was clear to Borah, too, that McCandless hadn’t spent much time cruising
singles bars. “One night a bunch of us went out to a bar over in Madison,” says
Borah, “and it was hard to get him out on the dance floor. But once he was out
there, he wouldn’t sit down. We had a blast. After Alex died and all, Carine told
me that as far as she knew, I was one of the only girls he ever went dancing
with.”
In high school McCandless had enjoyed a close rapport with two or three
members of the opposite sex, and Carine recalls one instance when he got drunk
and tried to bring a girl up to his bedroom in the middle of the night (they made
so much noise stumbling up the stairs that Billie was awakened and sent the girl
home). But there is little evidence that he was sexually active as a teenager and
even less to suggest that he slept with any woman after graduating from high
school. (Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that he was ever sexually
intimate with a man.) It seems that McCandless was drawn to women but
remained largely or entirely celibate, as chaste as a monk.
Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and
often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a
collection of stories that included Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the
nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such
passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled
with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinctive hand. And in the chapter
on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in
the bus, McCandless circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are
called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which
succeed it.”
We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an
apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the
enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corollary of a
personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its
more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated
others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a
lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of
countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, misfits, and adventurers. Like not a few
of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety
of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerful
to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the
succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress
with nature, with the cosmos itself. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.
McCandless assured both Westerberg and Borah that when his northern
sojourn was over, he would return to South Dakota, at least for the fall. After
that, it would depend.
“I got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last big
adventure,” Westerberg offers, “and that he wanted to settle down some. He
said he was going to write a book about his travels. He liked Carthage. With his
education, nobody thought he was going to work at a goddamn grain elevator the
rest of his life. But he definitely intended to come back here for a while, help us
out at the elevator, figure out what he was going to do next.”
That spring, however, McCandless’s sights were fixed unflinchingly on Alaska.
He talked about the trip at every opportunity. He sought out experienced hunters
around town and asked them for tips about stalking game, dressing animals,
curing meat. Borah drove him to the Kmart in Mitchell to shop for some last
pieces of gear.
By mid-April, Westerberg was both shorthanded and very busy, so he asked
McCandless to postpone his departure and work a week or two longer.
McCandless wouldn’t even consider it. “Once Alex made up his mind about
something, there was no changing it,” Westerberg laments. “I even offered to
buy him a plane ticket to Fairbanks, which would have let him work an extra ten
days and still get to Alaska by the end of April, but he said, ‘No, I want to hitch
north. Flying would be cheating. It would wreck the whole trip.’”
Two nights before McCandless was scheduled to head north, Mary Westerberg,
Wayne’s mother, invited him to her house for dinner. “My mom doesn’t like a lot
of my hired help,” Westerberg says, “and she wasn’t real enthusiastic about
meeting Alex, either. But I kept bugging her, telling her ‘You gotta meet this
kid,’ and so she finally had him over for supper. They hit it off immediately. The
two of ‘em talked nonstop for five hours.”
“There was something fascinating about him,” explains Mrs. Westerberg,
seated at the polished walnut table where McCandless dined that night. “Alex
struck me as much older than twenty-four. Everything I said, he’d demand to
know more about what I meant, about why I thought this way or that. He was
hungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who
insisted on living out his beliefs.
“We talked for hours about books; there aren’t that many people in Carthage
who like to talk about books. He went on and on about Mark Twain. Gosh, he was
fun to visit with; I didn’t want the night to end. I was greatly looking forward to
seeing him again this fall. I can’t get him out of my mind. I keep picturing his
face—he sat in the same chair you’re sitting in now. Considering that I only spent
a few hours in Alex’s company, it amazes me how much I’m bothered by his
death.”
On McCandless’s final night in Carthage, he partied hard at the Cabaret with
Westerberg’s crew. The Jack Daniel’s flowed freely.
To everyone’s surprise, McCandless sat down at the piano, which he’d never
mentioned he knew how to play, and started pounding out honky-tonk country
tunes, then ragtime, then Tony Bennett numbers. And he wasn’t merely a drunk
inflicting his delusions of talent on a captive audience. “Alex,” says Gail Borah,
“could really play. I mean he was good. We were all blown away by it.”
On the morning of April 15, everybody gathered at the elevator to see
McCandless off. His pack was heavy. He had approximately one thousand dollars
tucked in his boot. He left his journal and photo album with Westerberg for
safekeeping and gave him the leather belt he’d made in the desert.
“Alex used to sit at the bar in the Cabaret and read that belt for hours on
end,” says Westerberg, “like he was translating hieroglyphics for us. Each picture
he’d carved into the leather had a long story behind it.”
When McCandless hugged Borah good-bye, she says, “I noticed he was crying.
That frightened me. He wasn’t planning on being gone all that long; I figured he
wouldn’t have been crying unless he intended to take some big risks and knew he
might not be coming back. That’s when I started having a bad feeling that we
wouldn’t never see Alex again.”
A big tractor-semitrailer rig was idling out front; Rod Wolf, one of
Westerberg’s employees, needed to haul a load of sunflower seeds to Enderlin,
North Dakota, and had agreed to drive McCandless to Interstate 94.
“When I let him off, he had that big damn machete hanging off his shoulder,”
Wolf says. “I thought, ‘Jeeze, nobody’s going to pick him up when they see that
thing.’ But I didn’t say nothin’ about it. I just shook his hand, wished him good
luck, and told him he’d better write.”
McCandless did. A week later Westerberg received a terse card with a
Montana postmark:
APRIL 18. Arrived in Whitefish this morning on a freight train. I am making
good time. Today I will jump the border and turn north for Alaska. Give my
regards to everyone.
TAKE CARE, ALEX
Then, in early May, Westerberg received another postcard, this one from
Alaska, with a photo of a polar bear on the front. It was postmarked April 27,
1992. “Greetings from Fairbanks!” it reads,
This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It
was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here.
Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time
before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear
from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.
ALEX.
On the same date McCandless sent a card bearing a similar message to Jan
Burres and Bob:
Hey Guys!
This is the last communication you shall receive from me. I now walk out to
live amongst the wild. Take care, it was great knowing you.
ALEXANDER.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALASKA
It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves
in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way
of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant
an or thought.
THEODORE ROSZAK, “IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS”
We have in America “The Big Two-Hearted River” tradition: taking your
wounds to the wilderness for a cure, a conversion, a rest, or whatever. And
as in the Hemingway story, if your wounds aren’t too bad, it works. But this
isn’t Michigan (or Faulkner’s Big Woods in Mississippi, for that matter). This
is Alaska.
EDWARD HOAGLAND, “Up THE BLACK TO CHALKYITSIK”
When McCandless turned up dead in Alaska and the perplexing circumstances
of his demise were reported in the news media, many people concluded that the
boy must have been mentally disturbed. The article about McCandless in Outside
generated a large volume of mail, and not a few of the letters heaped
opprobrium on McCandless—and on me, as well, the author of the story, for
glorifying what some thought was a foolish, pointless death.
Much of the negative mail was sent by Alaskans. “Alex is a nut in my book,”
wrote a resident of Healy, the hamlet at the head of the Stampede Trail. “The
author describes a man who has given away a small fortune, forsaken a loving
family, abandoned his car, watch and map and burned the last of his money
before traipsing off into the ‘wilderness’ west of Healy.”
“Personally I see nothing positive at all about Chris McCand-less’s lifestyle or
wilderness doctrine,” scolded another correspondent. “Entering the wilderness
purposefully ill-prepared, and surviving a near-death experience does not make
you a better human, it makes you damn lucky.”
One reader of the Outside piece wondered, “Why would anyone intending to
‘live off the land for a few months’ forget Boy Scout rule number one: Be
Prepared? Why would any son cause his parents and family such permanent and
perplexing pain?”
“Krakauer is a kook if he doesn’t think Chris ‘Alexander Su-pertramp’
McCandless was a kook,” opined a man from North Pole, Alaska. “McCandless had
already gone over the edge and just happened to hit bottom in Alaska.”
The most strident criticism came in the form of a dense, mul-tipage epistle
from Ambler, a tiny Inupiat village on the Kobuk River north of the Arctic Circle.
The author was a white writer and schoolteacher, formerly from Washington,
B.C., named Nick Jans. Warning that it was 1:00 A.M. and he was well into a
bottle of Seagram’s, Jans let fly:
Over the past 15 years, I’ve run into several McCandless types out in the
country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated
themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble. McCandless
was hardly unique; there’s quite a few of these guys hanging around the state,
so much alike that they’re almost a collective cliche. The only difference is that
McCandless ended up dead, with the story of his dumbassedness splashed across
the media.... (Jack London got it right in “To
Build a Fire.” McCandless is, finally, just a pale 20th-century burlesque of
London’s protagonist, who freezes because he ignores advice and commits bigtime
hubris)....
His ignorance, which could have been cured by a USGS quadrant and a Boy
Scout manual, is what killed him. And while I feel for his parents, I have no
sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance ... amounts to disrespect for the land,
and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the
Exxon Valdez spill—just another case of underprepared, overconfident men
bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite
humility. It’s all a matter of degree.
McCandless’s contrived asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound
rather than reduce the fault.... McCandless’s postcards, notes, and journals...
read like the work of an above average, somewhat histrionic high school kid—or
am I missing something?
The prevailing Alaska wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more
dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find
answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely
death. Dozens of marginal characters have marched off into the Alaska wilds over
the years, never to reappear. A few have lodged firmly in the state’s collective
memory.
There was the countercultural idealist who passed through the village of
Tanana in the early 1970s, announcing that he intended to spend the rest of his
life “communing with Nature.” In midwinter a field biologist discovered all his
belongings—two rifles, camping gear, a diary filled with incoherent ranting about
truth and beauty and recondite ecological theory—in an empty cabin near Tofty,
its interior filled with drifted snow. No trace of the young man was ever found.
A few years later there was the Vietnam vet who built a cabin on the Black
River east of Chalkyitsik to “get away from people.” By February he’d run out of
food and starved, apparently without making any attempt to save himself,
despite the fact that there was another cabin stocked with meat just three miles
downstream. Writing about this death, Edward Hoagland observed that Alaska is
“not the best site in the world for eremitic experiments or peace-love theatrics.”
And then there was the wayward genius I bumped into on the shore of Prince
William Sound in 1981. I was camped in the woods outside Cordova, Alaska,
trying in vain to find work as a deckhand on a seine boat, biding my time until
the Department of Fish and Game announced the first “opener”—the start of the
commercial salmon season. One rainy afternoon while walking into town, I
crossed paths with an unkempt, agitated man who appeared to be about forty.
He wore a bushlike black beard and shoulder-length hair, which he kept out of
his face with a headband made from a filthy nylon strap. He was walking toward
me at a brisk clip, hunched beneath the considerable weight of a six-foot log
balanced across one shoulder.
I said hello as he approached, he mumbled a reply, and we paused to chat in
the drizzle. I didn’t ask why he was carrying a sodden log into the forest, where
there seemed to be plenty of logs already. After a few minutes spent exchanging
earnest banalities, we went our separate ways.
From our brief conversation I deduced that I had just met the celebrated
eccentric whom the locals called the Mayor of Hippie Cove—a reference to a
bight of tidewater north of town that was a magnet for long-haired transients,
near which the Mayor had been living for some years. Most of the residents of
Hippie Cove were, like me, summer squatters who’d come to Cordova hoping to
score high-paying fishing jobs or, failing that, find work in the salmon canneries.
But the Mayor was different.
His real name was Gene Rosellini. He was the eldest stepson of Victor
Rosellini, a wealthy Seattle restaurateur, and cousin of Albert Rosellini, the
immensely popular governor of Washington State from 1957 to 1965. As a young
man Gene had been a good athlete and a brilliant student. He read obsessively,
practiced yoga, became expert at the martial arts. He sustained a perfect 4.0
grade-point average through high school and college. At the University of
Washington and later at Seattle University, he immersed himself in anthropology,
history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours
without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he
maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external
validation.
By and by Rosellini left academia, departed Seattle, and drifted north up the
coast through British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle. In 1977, he landed in
Cordova. There, in the forest at the edge of town, he decided to devote his life
to an ambitious anthropological experiment.
“I was interested in knowing if it was possible to be independent of modern
technology,” he told an Anchorage Daily News reporter, Debra McKinney, a
decade after arriving in Cordova. He wondered whether humans could live as our
forebears had when mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roamed the land or
whether our species had moved too far from its roots to survive without
gunpowder, steel, and other artifacts of civilization. With the obsessive attention
to detail that characterized his brand of dogged genius, Rosellini purged his life
of all but the most primitive tools, which he fashioned from native materials with
his own hands.
“He became convinced that humans had devolved into progressively inferior
beings,” McKinney explains, “and it was his goal to return to a natural state. He
was forever experimenting with different eras—Roman times, the Iron Age, the
Bronze Age. By the end his lifestyle had elements of the Neolithic.”
He dined on roots, berries, and seaweed, hunted game with spears and
snares, dressed in rags, endured the bitter winters. He seemed to relish the
hardship. His home above Hippie Cove was a windowless hovel, which he built
without benefit of saw or ax: “He’d spend days,” says McKinney, “grinding his
way through a log with a sharp stone.”
As if merely subsisting according to his self-imposed rules weren’t strenuous
enough, Rosellini also exercised compulsively whenever he wasn’t occupied with
foraging. He filled his days with calisthenics, weight lifting, and running, often
with a load
of rocks on his back. During one apparently typical summer he reported
covering an average of eighteen miles daily.
Rosellini’s “experiment” stretched on for more than a decade, but eventually
he felt the question that inspired it had been answered. In a letter to a friend he
wrote,
/ began my adult life with the hypothesis that it would be possible to
become a Stone Age native. For over 30 years, I programmed and conditioned
myself to this end. In the last 10 of it, I would say I realistically experienced the
physical, mental, and emotional reality of the Stone Age. But to borrow a
Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I
learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the
land.
Rosellini appeared to accept the failure of his hypothesis with equanimity. At
the age of forty-nine, he cheerfully announced that he had “recast” his goals and
next intended to “walk around the world, living out of my backpack. I want to
cover 18 to 27 miles a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
The trip never got off the ground. In November 1991, Rosellini was discovered
lying facedown on the floor of his shack with a knife through his heart. The
coroner determined that the fatal wound was self-inflicted. There was no suicide
note. Rosellini left no hint as to why he had decided to end his life then and in
that manner. In all likelihood nobody will ever know.
Rosellini’s death and the story of his outlandish existence made the front page of
the Anchorage Daily News. The travails of John Mallon Waterman, however,
attracted less attention. Born in 1952, Waterman was raised in the same
Washington suburbs that gave shape to Chris McCandless. His father, Guy
Waterman, is a musician and freelance writer who, among other claims to
modest fame, authored speeches for presidents, ex-presidents, and other
prominent Washington politicians. Waterman pere also happens to be an expert
mountaineer who taught his three sons to climb at an early age. John, the middle
son, went rock climbing for the first time at thirteen.
He was a natural. John headed to the crags at every opportunity and trained
obsessively when he couldn’t climb. He cranked out four hundred push-ups every
day and walked two and a half miles to school, fast. After walking home in the
afternoon, he’d touch the front door and head back to the school to make a second
round-trip.
In 1969, as a sixteen-year-old, John climbed Mt. McKinley (which he called
Denali, as most Alaskans do, preferring the peak’s Athapaskan name), becoming
the third-youngest person to stand atop the highest landform on the continent.
Over the next few years he pulled off even more impressive ascents in Alaska,
Canada, and Europe. By the time he enrolled in the University of Alaska at
Fairbanks, in 1973, Waterman had established a reputation as one of the most
promising young alpinists in North America.
Waterman was a small person, barely five feet three inches tall, with an elfin
face and the sinewy, inexhaustible physique of a gymnast. Acquaintances
remember him as a socially awkward man-child with an outrageous sense of
humor and a squirrelly, almost manic-depressive personality.
“When I first met John,” says James Brady, a fellow climber and college
friend, “he was prancing across campus in a long black cape and blue Elton Johntype
glasses that had a star between the lenses. He carried around a cheap
guitar held together with masking tape and would serenade anybody who’d listen
with long, off-key songs about his adventures. Fairbanks has always attracted a
lot of weird characters, but he was wacky even by Fairbanks standards. Yeah,
John was out there. A lot of people didn’t know how to handle him.”
It is not difficult to imagine plausible causes for Waterman’s instability. His
parents, Guy and Emily Waterman, divorced when he was a teen, and Guy,
according to a source close to the family, “essentially abandoned his sons
following the divorce. He would have nothing more to do with the boys, and it
crippled John badly. Not long after their parents split up, John and his older
brother, Bill, went to visit their father—but Guy refused to see them. Shortly
after that, John and Bill went to Fairbanks to live with an uncle. At one point
while they were up there, John got very excited because he heard that his father
was coming to Alaska to climb. But when Guy arrived in the state he never took
the trouble to see his sons; he came and went without even bothering to visit. It
broke John’s heart.”
Bill, with whom John had an extremely close relationship, lost a leg as a
teenager trying to hop a freight train. In 1973, Bill posted an enigmatic letter
alluding vaguely to plans for an extended trip and then disappeared without a
trace; to this day nobody knows what became of him. And after John learned to
climb, eight of his intimates and climbing partners were killed in accidents or
committed suicide. It’s not much of a stretch to posit that such a rash of
misfortune dealt a serious blow to Waterman’s young psyche.
In March 1978, Waterman embarked on his most astonishing expedition, a solo
ascent of Mt. Hunter’s southeast spur, an un-climbed route that had previously
defeated three teams of elite mountaineers. Writing about the feat in Climbing
magazine, the journalist Glenn Randall reported that Waterman described his
companions on the climb as “the wind, the snow and death”:
Cornices as airy as meringue jutted over voids a mile deep. The vertical ice
walls were as crumbly as a bucket of ice-cubes half-thawed, then refrozen. They
led to ridges so narrow and so steep on both sides that straddling was the
easiest solution. At times the pain and loneliness overwhelmed him and he
broke down and cried.
After eighty-one days of exhausting, extremely hazardous climbing,
Waterman reached the 14,573-foot summit of Hunter, which rises in the Alaska
Range immediately south of Denali. Another nine weeks were required to make
the only slightly less harrowing descent; in total Waterman spent 145 days alone
on the mountain. When he got back to civilization, flat broke, he borrowed
twenty dollars from Cliff Hudson, the bush pilot who’d flown him out of the
mountains, and returned to Fairbanks, where the only work he could find was
washing dishes.
Waterman was nevertheless hailed as a hero by the small fraternity of
Fairbanks climbers. He gave a public slide show of the Hunter ascent that Brady
calls “unforgettable. It was an incredible performance, completely uninhibited.
He poured out all his thoughts and feelings, his fear of failure, his fear of death.
It was like you were there with him.” In the months following the epic deed,
though, Waterman discovered that instead of putting his demons to rest, success
had merely agitated them.
Waterman’s mind began to unravel. “John was very self-critical, always
analyzing himself,” Brady recalls. “And he’d always been kind of compulsive. He
used to carry around a stack of clipboards and notepads. He’d take copious
notes, creating a complete record of everything he did during the course of each
day. I remember running into him once in downtown Fairbanks. As I walked up,
he got out a clipboard, logged in the time he saw me and recorded what our
conversation was about—which wasn’t much at all. His notes on our meeting
were three or four pages down, behind all the other stuff he’d already scribbled
that day. Somewhere he must have had piles and piles and piles of notes like
that, which I’m sure would have made sense to no one except John.”
Soon thereafter Waterman ran for the local school board on a platform
promoting unrestricted sex for students and the legalization of hallucinogenic
drugs. He lost the election, to nobody’s surprise save his own, but immediately
launched another political campaign, this time for the presidency of the United
States. He ran under the banner of the Feed-the-Starving Party, the main priority
of which was to ensure that nobody on the planet died of hunger.
To publicize his campaign, he laid plans to make a solo ascent of the south
face of Denali, the mountain’s steepest aspect, in winter, with a minimum of
food. He wanted to underscore the waste and immorality of the standard
American diet. As part of his training regimen for the climb, he immersed himself
in bathtubs filled with ice.
Waterman flew to the Kahiltna Glacier in December 1979 to begin the ascent
but called it off after only fourteen days. “Take me home,” he reportedly told
his bush pilot. “I don’t want to die.” Two months later, however, he prepared
for a second attempt. But in Talkeetna, a village south of Denali that is the point
of embarkation for most mountaineering expeditions into the Alaska Range, the
cabin he was staying in caught fire and burned to rubble, incinerating both his
equipment and the voluminous accumulation of notes, poetry, and personal
journals that he regarded as his life’s work.
Waterman was completely unhelmed by the loss. A day after the fire he
committed himself to the Anchorage Psychiatric Institute but left after two
weeks, convinced there was a conspiracy afoot to put him away permanently.
Then, in the winter of 1981, he launched yet another solo attempt on Denali.
As if climbing the peak alone in winter weren’t challenging enough, this time
he decided to up the ante even further by beginning his ascent at sea level,
which entailed walking 160 hard, circuitous miles from the shore of Cook Inlet
just to reach the foot of the mountain. He started plodding north from tidewater
in February, but his enthusiasm fizzled on the lower reaches of the Ruth Glacier,
still thirty miles from the peak, so he aborted the attempt and retreated to
Talkeetna. In March, however, he mustered his resolve once more and resumed
his lonely trek. Before leaving town, he told the pilot Cliff Hudson, whom he regarded
as a friend, “I won’t be seeing you again.”
It was an exceptionally cold March in the Alaska Range. Late in the month
Mugs Stump crossed paths with Waterman on the upper Ruth Glacier. Stump, an
alpinist of world renown who died on Denali in 1992, had just completed a
difficult new route on a nearby peak, the Mooses Tooth. Shortly after his chance
encounter with Waterman, Stump visited me in Seattle and remarked that “John
didn’t seem like he was all there. He was acting spacey and talking some crazy
shit. Supposedly he was doing this big winter ascent of Denali, but he had hardly
any gear with him. He was wearing a cheap one-piece snowmobile suit and
wasn’t even carrying a sleeping bag. All he had in the way of food was a bunch of
flour, some sugar, and a big can of Crisco.” In his book Breaking Point, Glenn
Randall writes:
For several weeks, Waterman lingered in the area of the Shel-don Mountain
House, a small cabin perched on the side of the Ruth Glacier in the heart of the
range. Kate Bull, a friend of Waterman’s who was climbing in the area at the
time, reported that he was run down and less cautious than usual. He used the
radio he had borrowed from Cliff [Hudson] to call him and have him fly in more
supplies. Then he returned the radio he had borrowed.
“I won’t be needing this any more,” he said. The radio would have been his
only means of calling for help.
Waterman was last placed on the Northwest Fork of the Ruth Glacier on April
1. His tracks led toward the east buttress of Denali, straight through a labyrinth
of giant crevasses, evidence that he had made no apparent effort to circumvent
obvious hazards. He was not seen again; it is assumed he broke through a thin
snow bridge and plummeted to his death at the bottom of one of the deep
fissures. The National Park Service searched Waterman’s intended route from the
air for a week following his disappearance but found no sign of him. Some
climbers later discovered a note atop a box of Waterman’s gear inside the
Sheldon Mountain House. “3-13-81,” it read. “My last kiss 1:42 PM.”
Perhaps inevitably, parallels have been drawn between John Waterman and
Chris McCandless. Comparisons have also been drawn between McCandless and
Carl McCunn, an affable ab-sentminded Texan who moved to Fairbanks during
the 1970s oil boom and found lucrative employment on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline
construction project. In early March 1981, as Waterman was making his final
journey into the Alaska Range, McCunn hired a bush pilot to drop him at a
remote lake near the Coleen River, about seventy-five miles northeast of Fort
Yukon on the southern margin of the Brooks Range.
A thirty-five-year-old amateur photographer, McCunn told friends that the
main reason for the trip was to shoot pictures of wildlife. He flew into the
country with five hundred rolls of film, .22- and .30-.30-caliber rifles, a shotgun,
and fourteen hundred pounds of provisions. His intention was to remain in the
wilderness through August. Somehow, though, he neglected to arrange for the
pilot to fly him back to civilization at summer’s end, and it cost McCunn his life.
This astounding oversight wasn’t a great surprise to Mark Stoppel, a young
Fairbanks resident who had come to know McCunn well during the nine months
they worked on the pipeline together, shortly before the lanky Texan departed
for the Brooks Range.
“Carl was a friendly, extremely popular, down-home sort of guy,” Stoppel
recalls. “And he seemed like a smart guy. But there was a side to him that was a
little bit dreamy, a little bit out of touch with reality. He was flamboyant. He
liked to party hard. He could be extremely responsible, but he had a tendency to
wing it sometimes, to act impulsively, to get by on bravado and style. No, I guess
it really doesn’t surprise me that Carl went out there and forgot to arrange to be
picked up. But then I’m not easily shocked. I’ve had several friends who drowned
or got murdered or died in weird accidents. In Alaska you get used to strange
stuff happening.”
In late August, as the days grew shorter and the air turned sharp and
autumnal in the Brooks Range, McCunn began to worry when nobody arrived to
fly him out. “I think I should have used more foresight about arranging my
departure,” he confessed to his diary, significant portions of which were
published posthumously in a five-part story by Kris Capps in the Fairbanks Daily
News-Miner. “I’ll soon find out.”
Week by week he could feel the accelerating advance of winter. As his food
supply grew meager, McCunn deeply regretted tossing
all but a dozen of his shotgun shells into the lake. “I keep thinking of all
the shotgun shells I threw away about two months ago,” he wrote. “Had five
boxes and when I kept seeing them sitting there I felt rather silly for having
brought so many. (Felt like a war monger.) ... real bright. Who would have
known I might need them just to keep from starving.”
Then, on a brisk September morning, deliverance seemed to be at hand.
McCunn was stalking ducks with what remained of his ammunition when the
stillness was rocked by the buzz of an airplane, which soon appeared overhead.
The pilot, spotting the camp, circled twice at a low altitude for a closer look.
McCunn waved wildly with a fluorescent-orange sleeping-bag cover. The aircraft
was equipped with wheels rather than floats and thus couldn’t land, but McCunn
was certain he’d been seen and had no doubt the pilot would summon a
floatplane to return for him. He was so sure of this he recorded in the journal
that “I stopped waving after the first pass. I then got busy packing things up and
getting ready to break camp.”
But no airplane arrived that day, or the next day, or the next. Eventually,
McCunn looked on the back of his hunting license and understood why. Printed on
the little square of paper were drawings of emergency hand signals for
communicating with aircraft from the ground. “I recall raising my right hand,
shoulder high and shaking my fist on the plane’s second pass,” McCunn wrote. “It
was a little cheer—like when your team scored a touchdown or something.”
Unfortunately, as he learned too late, raising a single arm is the universally
recognized signal for “all OK; assistance not necessary.” The signal for “SOS;
send immediate help,” is two upraised arms.
“That’s probably why after they flew somewhat away they returned for one
more pass and on that one I gave no signal at all (in fact I may have even turned
my back to the plane as it passed),” McCunn mused philosophically. “They
probably blew me off as a weirdo.”
By the end of September, snow was piling up on the tundra, and the lake had
frozen over. As the provisions he’d brought ran out, McCunn made an effort to
gather rose hips and snare rab-bits. At one point he managed to scavenge meat
from a diseased caribou that had wandered into the lake and died. By October,
however, he had metabolized most of his body fat and was having difficulty
staying warm during the long, cold nights. “Certainly someone in town should
have figured something must be wrong—me not being back by now,” he noted.
But still no plane appeared.
“It would be just like Carl to assume that somebody would magically appear
to save him,” says Stoppel. “He was a Teamster—he drove a truck—so he had
plenty of downtime on the job, just sitting on his butt inside his rig,
daydreaming, which is how he came up with the idea for the Brooks Range trip.
It was a serious quest for him: He spent the better part of a year thinking about
it, planning it, figuring it out, talking to me during our breaks about what gear to
take. But for all the careful planning he did, he also indulged in some wild
fantasies.
“For instance,” Stoppel continues, “Carl didn’t want to fly into the bush
alone. His big dream, originally, was to go off and live in the woods with some
beautiful woman. He was hot for at least a couple of different girls who worked
with us, and he spent a lot of time and energy trying to talk Sue or Barbara or
whoever into accompanying him—which in itself was pretty much pure
fantasyland. There was no way it was going to happen. I mean, at the pipeline
camp where we worked, Pump Station 7, there were probably forty guys for
every woman. But Carl was a dreamin’ kind of dude, and right up until he flew
into the Brooks Range, he kept hoping and hoping and hoping that one of these
girls would change her mind and decide to go with him.”
Similarly, Stoppel explains, “Carl was the sort of guy who would have
unrealistic expectations that someone would eventually figure out he was in
trouble and cover for him. Even as he was on the verge of starving, he probably
still imagined that Big Sue was going to fly in at the last minute with a planeload
of food and have this wild romance with him. But his fantasy world was so far off
the scale that nobody was able to connect with it. Carl just got hungrier and
hungrier. By the time he finally understood that nobody was going to come
rescue him, he’d shriveled up to the point where it was too late for him to do
anything about it.”
As McCunn’s food supply dwindled to almost nothing, he wrote in his journal,
“I’m getting more than worried. To be honest, I’m starting to be a bit scared.”
The thermometer dipped to minus five degrees Fahrenheit. Painful, pus-filled
frostbite blisters formed on his fingers and toes.
In November he finished the last of his rations. He felt weak and dizzy; chills
racked his gaunt frame. The diary recorded, “Hands and nose continue to get
worse as do feet. Nose tip very swollen, blistered, and scabbed... This is sure a
slow and agonizing way to die.” McCunn considered leaving the security of his
camp and setting out on foot for Fort Yukon but concluded he wasn’t strong
enough, that he would succumb to exhaustion and the cold long before he got
there.
“The part of the interior where Carl went is a remote, very blank part of
Alaska,” says Stoppel. “It gets colder than hell there in the winter. Some people
in his situation could have figured out a way to walk out or maybe winter over,
but to do that, you’d have to be extremely resourceful. You’d really need to
have your shit together. You’d have to be a tiger, a killer, a fuckin’ animal. And
Carl was too laid back. He was a party boy.”
“I can’t go on like this, I’m afraid,” McCunn wrote sometime in late
November near the end of his journal, which by now filled one hundred sheets of
blue-lined loose-leaf notebook paper. “Dear God in Heaven, please forgive me
my weakness and my sins. Please look over my family.” And then he reclined in
his wall tent, placed the muzzle of the .30-.30 against his head, and jerked his
thumb down on the trigger. Two months later, on February 2, 1982, Alaska State
Troopers came across his camp, looked inside the tent, and discovered the
emaciated corpse frozen hard as stone.
There are similarities among Rosellini, Waterman, McCunn, and McCandless.
Like Rosellini and Waterman, McCandless was a seeker and had an impractical
fascination with the harsh side of nature. Like Waterman and McCunn, he
displayed a staggering paucity of common sense. But unlike Waterman,
McCandless wasn’t mentally ill. And unlike McCunn, he didn’t go into the bush
assuming someone would automatically appear to save his bacon before he came
to grief.
McCandless didn’t conform particularly well to the bush-casualty stereotype.
Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious
to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn’t incompetent—he wouldn’t have lasted
113 days if he were. And he wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t
an outcast. McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to
say. A pilgrim, perhaps.
Some insight into the tragedy of Chris McCandless can be gained by studying
predecessors cut from the same exotic cloth. And in order to do that, one must
look beyond Alaska, to the bald-rock canyons of southern Utah. There, in 1934, a
peculiar twenty-year-old boy walked into the desert and never came out. His
name was Everett Ruess.
[See Map Page 86]
CHAPTER NINE
DAVIS GULCH
As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not
tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead,
more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and starsprinkled
sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the
unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the
discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I
feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I
miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share
the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It
is enough that I am surrounded with beauty....
Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine
and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don’t think I could ever
settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I
would prefer anything to an anticlimax.
THE LAST LETTER EVER RECEIVED FROM EVERETT RUESS, TO HIS
BROTHER, WALDO, DATED NOVEMBER 11, 1934
What Everett Ruess was after was beauty, and he conceived beauty in
pretty romantic terms. We might be inclined to laugh at the extravagance of
his beauty-worship if there were not something almost magnificent in his
single-minded dedication to it. Esthetics as a parlor affectation is ludicrous
and sometimes a little obscene; as a way of life it sometimes attains dignity.
If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because
there was little difference between them except age.
WALLACE STEGNER, MORMON COUNTRY
Davis Creek is only a trickle during most of the year and sometimes not even
that. Originating at the foot of a high rock battlement known as Fiftymile Point,
the stream flows just four miles across the pink sandstone slabs of southern Utah
before surrendering its modest waters to Lake Powell, the giant reservoir that
stretches one hundred ninety miles above Glen Canyon Dam. Davis Gulch is a
small watershed by any measure, but a lovely one, and travelers through this
dry, hard country have for centuries relied on the oasis that exists at the bottom
of the slotlike defile. Eerie nine-hundred-year-old petroglyphs and pictographs
decorate its sheer walls. Crumbling stone dwellings of the long-vanished Kayenta
Anasazi, the creators of this rock art, nestle in protective nooks. Ancient Anasazi
potsherds mingle in the sand with rusty tin cans discarded by turn-of-the-century
stockmen, who grazed and watered their animals in the canyon.
For most of its short length, Davis Gulch exists as a deep, twisting gash in the
slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone
walls that bar access to the canyon floor. There is a hidden route into the gulch
at its lower end, however. Just upstream from where Davis Creek flows into Lake
Powell, a natural ramp zigzags down from the canyons west rim. Not far above
the creek bottom the ramp ends, and a crude staircase appears, chiseled into the
soft sandstone by Mormon cattlemen nearly a century ago.
The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and
brick-red sand. Vegetation is lean. Shade from the withering sun is virtually
nonexistent. To descend into the confines of the canyon, however, is to arrive in
another world. Cottonwoods lean gracefully over drifts of flowering prickly pear.
Tall grasses sway in the breeze. The ephemeral bloom of a sego lily peeks from
the toe of a ninety-foot stone arch, and canyon wrens call back and forth in
plaintive tones from a thatch of scrub oak. High above the creek a spring seeps
from the cliff face, irrigating a growth of moss and maidenhair fern that hangs
from the rock in lush green mats.
Six decades ago in this enchanting hideaway, less than a mile downstream
from where the Mormon steps meet the floor of the gulch, twenty-year-old
Everett Ruess carved his nom de plume into the canyon wall below a panel of
Anasazi pictographs, and he did so again in the doorway of a small masonry
structure built by the Anasazi for storing grain. “NEMO 1934,” he scrawled, no
doubt moved by the same impulse that compelled Chris McCandless to inscribe
“Alexander Supertramp/May 1992” on the wall of the Sushana bus—an impulse
not so different, perhaps, from that which inspired the Anasazi to embellish the
rock with their own now-indecipherable symbols. In any case, shortly after Ruess
carved his mark into the sandstone, he departed Davis Gulch and mysteriously
disappeared, apparently by design. An extensive search shed no light on his
whereabouts. He was simply gone, swallowed whole by the desert. Sixty years
later we still know next to nothing about what became of him.
Everett was born in Oakland, California, in 1914, the younger of two sons
raised by Christopher and Stella Ruess. Christopher, a graduate of Harvard
Divinity School, was a poet, a philosopher, and a Unitarian minister, although he
earned his keep as a bureaucrat in the California penal system. Stella was a
headstrong woman with bohemian tastes and driving artistic ambitions, for both
herself and her kin; she self-published a literary journal, the Ruess Quartette,
the cover of which was emblazoned with the family maxim: “Glorify the hour.” A
tight-knit bunch, the Ruesses were also a nomadic family, moving from Oakland
to Fresno to Los Angeles to Boston to Brooklyn to New Jersey to Indiana before
finally settling in southern California when Everett was fourteen.
In Los Angeles, Everett attended the Otis Art School and Hollywood High. As a
sixteen-year-old he embarked on his first long solo trip, spending the summer of
1930 hitchhiking and trekking through Yosemite and Big Sur, ultimately winding
up in Carmel. Two days after arriving in the latter community, he brazenly
knocked on the door of Edward Weston, who was sufficiently charmed by the
overwrought young man to humor him. Over the next two months the eminent
photographer encouraged the boy’s uneven but promising efforts at painting and
block printing, and permitted Ruess to hang around his studio with his own sons,
Neil and Cole.
At the end of the summer, Everett returned home only long enough to earn a
high school diploma, which he received in January 1931. Less than a month later
he was on the road again, tramping alone through the canyon lands of Utah,
Arizona, and New Mexico, then a region nearly as sparsely populated and
wrapped in mystique as Alaska is today. Except for a short, unhappy stint at
UCLA (he dropped out after a single semester, to his father’s lasting dismay),
two extended visits with his parents, and a winter in San Francisco (where he
insinuated himself into the company of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and the
painter Maynard Dixon), Ruess would spend the remainder of his meteoric life on
the move, living out of a backpack on very little money, sleeping in the dirt,
cheerfully going hungry for days at a time.
Ruess was, in the words of Wallace Stegner, “a callow romantic, an
adolescent esthete, an atavistic wanderer of the wastelands”:
At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning
up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the
world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those
dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did
the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized
and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of
wonder...
Deliberately he punished his body, strained his endurance, tested his
capacity for strenuousness. He took out deliberately over trails that Indians and
old timers warned him against. He tackled cliffs that more than once left him
dangling halfway between talus and rim... From his camps by the water pockets
or the canyons or high on the timbered ridges of Navajo Mountain he wrote long,
lush, enthusiastic letters to his family and friends, damning the stereotypes of
civilization, chanting his barbaric adolescent yawp into the teeth of the world.
Ruess churned out many such letters, which bore the postmarks of the remote
settlements through which he passed: Kayenta, Chinle, Lukachukai; Zion Canyon,
Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde; Escalante, Rainbow Bridge, Canyon de Chelly.
Reading this correspondence (collected in W. L. Rusho’s meticulously researched
biography, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty), one is struck by Ruess’s
craving for connection with the natural world and by his almost incendiary
passion for the country through which he walked. “I had some terrific
experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last—overpowering, overwhelming,”
he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. “But then I am always being
overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.”
Everett Ruess’s correspondence reveals uncanny parallels between Ruess and
Chris McCandless. Here are excerpts from three of Ruess’s letters:
I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of
the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its
resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best.... I’ll never stop
wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest,
most desolate spot there is.
The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached
from life and somehow gentler.... I have some good friends here, but no one
who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don’t know of anyone,
though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far
alone.
I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want
to live more intensely and richly.
In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more wild
adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen—wild,
tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward
from the vermilion sands of the desert, canyons five feet wide at the bottom
and hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons, and
hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers, abandoned a thousand years ago.
A half century later McCandless sounds eerily like Ruess when he declares in a
postcard to Wayne Westerberg that “I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life
for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to
pass up.” And echoes of Ruess can be heard, as well, in McCandless’s last letter
to Ronald Franz (see pages 56-58).
Ruess was just as romantic as McCandless, if not more so, and equally
heedless of personal safety. Clayborn Lockett, an archaeologist who briefly
employed Ruess as a cook while excavating an Anasazi cliff dwelling in 1934, told
Rusho that “he was appalled by the seemingly reckless manner in which Everett
moved around dangerous cliffs.”
Indeed, Ruess himself boasts in one of his letters, “Hundreds of times I have
trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical edges in the search for
water or cliff dwellings. Twice I was nearly gored to death by a wild bull. But
always, so far, I’ve escaped unscathed and gone forth to other adventures.” And
in his final letter Ruess nonchalantly confesses to his brother:
/ have had a few narrow escapes from rattlers and crumbling cliffs. The last
misadventure occurred when Chocolatero [his burro] stirred up some wild bees.
A few more stings might have been too much for me. I was three or four days
getting my eyes open and recovering the use of my hands.
Also like McCandless, Ruess was undeterred by physical discomfort; at times
he seemed to welcome it. “For six days I’ve been suffering from the semi-annual
poison ivy case—my sufferings are far from over,” he tells his friend Bill Jacobs.
He goes on:
For two days I couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and
twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over me, while the
poison oozed and crusted on my face and arms and back. I ate nothing—there
was nothing to do but suffer philosophically...
I get it every time, but I refuse to be driven out of the woods.
And like McCandless, upon embarking on his terminal odyssey, Ruess adopted
a new name or, rather, a series of new names. In a letter dated March 1,1931, he
informs his family that he has taken to calling himself Lan Rameau and requests
that they “please respect my brush name... How do you say it in French? Nomme
de broushe, or what?” Two months later, however, another letter explains that
“I have changed my name again, to Evert Rulan. Those who knew me formerly
thought my name was freakish and an affectation of Frenchiness.” and then in
August of that same year, with no explanation, he goes back to calling himself
Everett Ruess and continues to do so for the next three years—until wandering
into Davis Gulch. There, for some unknowable reason, Everett twice etched the
name Nemo—Latin for “nobody”—into the soft Navajo sandstone—and then vanished.
He was twenty years old.
The last letters anyone received from Ruess were posted from the Mormon
settlement of Escalante, fifty-seven miles north of Davis Gulch, on November 11,
1934. Addressed to his parents and his brother, they indicate that he would be
incommunicado for “a month or two.” Eight days after mailing them, Ruess encountered
two sheepherders about a mile from the gulch and spent two nights at
their camp; these men were the last people known to have seen the youth alive.
Some three months after Ruess departed Escalante, his parents received a
bundle of unopened mail forwarded from the postmaster at Marble Canyon,
Arizona, where Everett was long overdue. Worried, Christopher and Stella Ruess
contacted the authorities in Escalante, who organized a search party in early
March 1935. Starting from the sheep camp where Ruess was last seen, they began
combing the surrounding country and very quickly found Everett’s two burros at
the bottom of Davis Gulch, grazing contentedly behind a makeshift corral
fashioned from brush and tree limbs.
The burros were confined in the upper canyon, just upstream from where the
Mormon steps intersect the floor of the gulch; a short distance downstream the
searchers found unmistakable evidence of Ruess’s camp, and then, in the
doorway of an Anasazi granary below a magnificent natural arch, they came
across “NEMO 1934” carved into a stone slab. Four Anasazi pots were carefully
arranged on a rock nearby. Three months later searchers came across another
Nemo graffito a little farther down the gulch (the rising waters of Lake Powell,
which began to fill upon the completion of Glen Canyon Dam, in 1963, have long
since erased both inscriptions), but except for the burros and their tack, none of
Ruess’s possessions—his camping paraphernalia, journals, and paintings—was ever
found.
It is widely believed that Ruess fell to his death while scrambling on one or
another canyon wall. Given the treacherous nature of the local topography (most
of the cliffs that riddle the region are composed of Navajo sandstone, a crumbly
stratum that erodes into smooth, bulging precipices) and Ruess’s penchant for
dangerous climbing, this is a credible scenario. Careful searches of cliffs near
and far, however, have failed to unearth any human remains.
And how to account for the fact that Ruess apparently left the gulch with a
heavy load of gear but without his pack animals? These bewildering
circumstances have led some investigators to conclude that Ruess was murdered
by a team of cattle rustlers known to have been in the area, who then stole his
belongings and buried his remains or threw them into the Colorado River. This
theory, too, is plausible, but no concrete evidence exists to prove it.
Shortly after Everett’s disappearance his father suggested that the boy had
probably been inspired to call himself Nemo by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea—a book Everett read many times—in which the
purehearted protagonist, Captain Nemo, flees civilization and severs his “every
tie upon the earth.” Everett’s biographer, W. L. Rusho, agrees with Christopher
Ruess’s assessment, arguing that Everett’s “withdrawal from organized society,
his disdain for worldly pleasures, and his signatures as NEMO in Davis Gulch, all
strongly suggest that he closely identified with the Jules Verne character.”
Ruess’s apparent fascination with Captain Nemo has fed speculation among
more than a few Ruess mythographers that Everett pulled a fast one on the world
after leaving Davis Gulch and is—or was—very much alive, quietly residing
somewhere under an assumed identity. A year ago, while filling my truck with
gas in Kingman, Arizona, I happened to strike up a conversation about Ruess with
the middle-aged pump attendant, a small, twitchy man with flecks of Skoal
staining the corners of his mouth. Speaking with persuasive conviction, he swore
that “he knew a fella who’d definitely bumped into Ruess” in the late 1960s at a
remote hogan on the Navajo Indian Reservation. According to the attendant’s
friend, Ruess was married to a Navajo woman, with whom he’d raised at least
one child. The veracity of this and other reports of relatively recent Ruess
sightings, needless to say, is extremely suspect.
Ken Sleight, who has spent as much time investigating the riddle of Everett
Ruess as any other person, is convinced that the boy died in 1934 or early 1935
and believes he knows how Ruess met his end. Sleight, sixty-five years old, is a
professional river guide and desert rat with a Mormon upbringing and a
reputation for insolence. When Edward Abbey was writing The Monkey Wrench
Gang, his picaresque novel about eco-terrorism in the canyon country, his pal
Ken Sleight was said to have inspired the character Seldom Seen Smith. Sleight
has lived in the region for forty years, visited virtually all the places Ruess
visited, talked to many people who crossed paths with Ruess, taken Ruess’s older
brother, Waldo, into Davis Gulch to visit the site of Everett’s disappearance.
“Waldo thinks Everett was murdered,” Sleight says. “But I don’t think so. I
lived in Escalante for two years. I’ve talked with the folks who are accused of
killing him, and I just don’t think they did it. But who knows? You can’t never
really tell what a person does in secret. Other folks believe Everett fell off a
cliff. Well, yeah, he coulda done that. It be an easy thing to do in that country.
But I don’t think that’s what happened.
“I tell you what I think: I think he drowned.”
Years ago, while hiking down Grand Gulch, a tributary of the San Juan River
some forty-five miles due east of Davis Gulch, Sleight discovered the name Nemo
carved into the soft mud mortar of an Anasazi granary. Sleight speculates that
Ruess inscribed this Nemo not long after departing Davis Gulch.
“After corralling his burros in Davis,” says Sleight, “Ruess hid all his stuff in a
cave somewhere and took off, playing Captain Nemo. He had Indian friends down
on the Navajo Reservation, and that’s where I think he was heading.” A logical
route to Navajo country would have taken Ruess across the Colorado River at
Hole-in-the-Rock, then along a rugged trail pioneered in 1880 by Mormon settlers
across Wilson Mesa and the Clay Hills, and finally down Grand Gulch to the San
Juan River, across which lay the reservation. “Everett carved his Nemo on the
ruin in Grand Gulch, about a mile below where Collins Creek comes in, then
continued on down to the San Juan. And when he tried to swim across the river,
he drowned. That’s what I think.”
Sleight believes that if Ruess had made it across the river alive and reached
the reservation, it would have been impossible for him to conceal his presence
“even if he was still playing his Nemo game. Everett was a loner, but he liked
people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A
lot of us are like that—I’m like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like
this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can’t
stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back
for a while, then get the hell out again. And that’s what Everett was doing.
“Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and
McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great
about them. They tried. Not many do.”
In attempting to understand Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless, it can be
illuminating to consider their deeds in a larger context. It is helpful to look at
counterparts from a distant place and a century far removed.
Off the southeastern coast of Iceland sits a low barrier island called Papos.
Treeless and rocky, perpetually clobbered by gales howling off the North
Atlantic, it takes its name from its first settlers, now long gone, the Irish monks
known as papar. Walking this gnarled shore one summer afternoon, I blundered
upon a matrix of faint stone rectangles embedded in the tundra: vestiges of the
monks’ ancient dwellings, hundreds of years older, even, than the Anasazi ruins
in Davis Gulch.
The monks arrived as early as the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., having sailed
and rowed from the west coast of Ireland. Setting out in small, open boats called
curraghs, built from cowhide stretched over light wicker frames, they crossed
one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world without knowing
what, if anything, they’d find on the other side.
The papar risked their lives—and lost them in untold droves— not in the
pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands in the name of any
despot. As the great arctic explorer and Nobel laureate Fridtjof Nansen points
out, “these remarkable voyages were... undertaken chiefly from the wish to find
lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the
turmoil and temptations of the world.” When the first handful of Norwegians
showed up on the shores of Iceland in the ninth century, the papar decided the
country had become too crowded—even though it was still all but uninhabited.
The monks’ response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward
Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past
the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a
yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.
Reading of these monks, one is moved by their courage, their reckless
innocence, and the urgency of their desire. Reading of these monks, one can’t
help thinking of Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless.
CHAPTER TEN
FAIRBANKS
DYING IN THE WILD, A HIKER RECORDED THE TERROR
ANCHORAGE, Sept. 12 (AP)—Last Sunday a young hiker, stranded by an
injury, was found dead at a remote camp in the Alaskan interior. No one is
yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell
a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.
The diary indicates that the man, believed to be an American in his late
20’s or early 30’s, might have been injured in a fall and that he was then
stranded at the camp for more than three months. It tells how he tried to
save himself by hunting game and eating wild plants while nonetheless
getting weaker.
One of his two notes is a plea for help, addressed to anyone who might
come upon the camp while the hiker searched the surrounding area for food.
The second note bids the world goodbye...
An autopsy at the state coroner’s office in Fairbanks this week found that
the man had died of starvation, probably in late July. The authorities
discovered among the man’s possessions a name that they believe is his.
But they have so far been unable to confirm his identity and, until they do,
have declined to disclose the name.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 13, 1992
By the time The New York Times picked up the story about the hiker, the
Alaska State Troopers had been trying for a week to figure out who he was. When
he died, McCandless was wearing a blue sweatshirt printed with the logo of a
Santa Barbara towing company; when contacted, the wrecking outfit professed
to know nothing about him or how he’d acquired the shirt. Many of the entries in
the brief, perplexing diary recovered with the body were terse observations of
flora and fauna, which fueled speculation that McCandless was a field biologist.
But that ultimately led nowhere, too.
On September 10, three days before news of the dead hiker appeared in the
Times, the story was published on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News.
When Jim Gallien saw the headline and the accompanying map indicating that
the body had been found twenty-five miles west of Healy on the Stampede Trail,
he felt the hairs bristle across the base of his scalp: Alex. Gallien still held a
picture in his mind of the odd, congenial youth striding down the trail in boots
two sizes too big for him—Gallien s own boots, the old brown Xtratufs he’d
persuaded the kid to take. “From the newspaper article, what little information
there was, it sounded like the same person,” says Gallien, “so I called the state
troopers and said, ‘Hey, I think I gave that guy a ride.’ “
“OK, sure,” replied trooper Roger Ellis, the cop on the other end of the line.
“What makes you think so? You’re the sixth person in the last hour who’s called
to say they know the hiker’s identity.” But Gallien persisted, and the more he
talked, the more Ellis’s skepticism receded. Gallien described several pieces of
equipment not mentioned in the newspaper account that matched gear found
with the body. And then Ellis noticed that the first cryptic entry in the hiker’s
journal read, “Exit Fairbanks. Sitting Galliean. Rabbit Day.”
The troopers had by this time developed the roll of film in the hiker’s
Minolta, which included several apparent self-portraits. “When they brought the
pictures out to the job site where I was working,” says Gallien, “there was no
two ways about it. The guy in the pictures was Alex.”
Because McCandless had told Gallien he was from South Dakota, the troopers
immediately shifted their search there for the hiker’s next of kin. An all-points
bulletin turned up a missing
person named McCandless from eastern South Dakota, coinci-dentally from a
small town only twenty miles from Wayne West-erberg’s home in Carthage, and
for a while the troopers thought they’d found their man. But this, too, turned
out to be a false lead.
Westerberg had heard nothing from the friend he knew as Alex McCandless
since receiving the postcard from Fairbanks the previous spring. On September
13, he was rolling down an empty ribbon of blacktop outside Jamestown, North
Dakota, leading his harvest crew home to Carthage after wrapping up the fourmonth
cutting season in Montana, when the VHP barked to life. “Wayne!” an
anxious voice crackled over the radio from one of the crew’s other trucks. “This
is Bob. You got your radio on?”
“Yeah, Bobby. Wayne here. What’s up?”
“Quick—turn on your AM, and listen to Paul Harvey. He’s talking about some
kid who starved to death up in Alaska. The police don’t know who he is. Sounds a
whole lot like Alex.”
Westerberg found the station in time to catch the tail end of the Paul Harvey
broadcast, and he was forced to agree: The few sketchy details made the
anonymous hiker sound distressingly like his friend.
As soon as he got to Carthage, a dispirited Westerberg phoned the Alaska
State Troopers to volunteer what he knew about McCandless. By that time,
however, stories about the dead hiker, including excerpts from his diary, had
been given prominent play in newspapers across the country. As a consequence
the troopers were swamped with calls from people claiming to know the hiker’s
identity, so they were even less receptive to Westerberg than they had been to
Gallien. “The cop told me they’d had more than one hundred fifty calls from
folks who thought Alex was their kid, their friend, their brother,” says
Westerberg. “Well, by then I was kind of pissed at getting the runaround, so I
told him, ‘Look, I’m not just another crank caller. I know who he is. He worked
for me. I think I’ve even got his Social Security number around here
somewhere.’”
Westerberg pawed through the files at the grain elevator until he found two
W-4 forms McCandless had filled out. Across the top of the first one, dating from
McCandless’s initial visit to Carthage, in 1990, he had scrawled “EXEMPT EXEMPT
EXEMPT EXEMPT” and given his name as Iris Fucyu. Address: “None of your damn
business.” Social Security number: “I forget.”
But on the second form, dated March 30, 1992, two weeks before he left for
Alaska, he’d signed his given name: “Chris J. McCandless.” And in the blank for
Social Security number he’d put down, “228-31-6704.” Westerberg phoned Alaska
again. This time the troopers took him seriously.
The Social Security number turned out to be genuine and placed McCandless’s
permanent residence in northern Virginia. Authorities in Alaska contacted lawenforcement
agencies in that state, who in turn started combing phone
directories for McCand-lesses. Walt and Billie McCandless had by then moved to
the Maryland shore and no longer had a Virginia phone number, but Walt’s eldest
child from his first marriage lived in Annandale and was in the book; late on the
afternoon of September 17, Sam McCandless received a call from a Fairfax
County homicide detective.
Sam, nine years older than Chris, had seen a short article about the hiker in
The Washington Post a few days earlier, but, he allows, “It didn’t occur to me
that the hiker might be Chris. Never even crossed my mind. It’s ironic because
when I read the article I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a terrible tragedy. I really
feel sorry for the family of this guy, whoever they are. What a sad story.’ “
Sam had been raised in California and Colorado, in his mother’s household,
and hadn’t moved to Virginia until 1987, after Chris had left the state to attend
college in Atlanta, so Sam didn’t know his half brother well. But when the
homicide detective started asking whether the hiker sounded like anyone he
knew, Sam reports, “I was pretty sure it was Chris. The fact that he’d gone to
Alaska, that he’d gone off by himself—it all added up.”
At the detective’s request, Sam went to the Fairfax County Police
Department, where an officer showed him a photograph of the hiker that had
been faxed from Fairbanks. “It was an eight-by-ten enlargement,” Sam recalls,
“a head shot. His hair was long, and he had a beard. Chris almost always had
short hair and was clean-shaven. And the face in the picture was extremely
gaunt. But I knew right away. There was no doubt. It was Chris. I went home,
picked up Michele, my wife, and drove out to Maryland to tell Dad and Billie. I
didn’t know what I was going to say. How do you tell someone that their child is
dead?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHESAPEAKE BEACH
Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you
didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been
led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you
had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family
nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need
of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of
being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded.
You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more
unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in
the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago passage highlighted in one of the books
found with Chris McCandless’s remains. “Need for a purpose” had been
written in mccandless’s hand in the margin above the passage.
Samuel Walter McCandless, Jr., fifty-six years old, is a bearded, taciturn man
with longish salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead.
Tall and solidly proportioned, he wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a
professorial demeanor. Seven weeks after the body of his son turned up in
Alaska wrapped in a blue sleeping bag that Billie had sewn for Chris from a
kit, Walt studies a sailboat scudding beneath the window of his waterfront
townhouse. “How is it,” he wonders aloud as he gazes blankly across Chesapeake
Bay, “that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?”
The McCandless home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, is tastefully
decorated, spotless, devoid of clutter. Floor-to-ceiling windows take in the hazy
panorama of the bay. A big Chevy Suburban and a white Cadillac are parked out
front, a painstakingly restored ‘69 Corvette sits in the garage, a thirty-foot
cruising catamaran is moored at the dock. Four large squares of poster board,
covered with scores of photos documenting the whole brief span of Chris’s life,
have occupied the dining-room table for many days now.
Moving deliberately around the display, Billie points out Chris as a toddler
astride a hobby horse, Chris as a rapt eight-year-old in a yellow rain slicker on his
first backpacking trip, Chris at his high school commencement. “The hardest
part,” says Walt, pausing over a shot of his son clowning around on a family
vacation, his voice cracking almost imperceptibly, “is simply not having him
around anymore. I spent a lot of time with Chris, perhaps more than with any of
my other kids. I really liked his company even though he frustrated us so often.”
Walt is wearing gray sweatpants, racquetball shoes, and a satin baseball
jacket embroidered with the logo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite the
casual attire, he projects an air of authority. Within the ranks of his arcane
field—an advanced technology called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR—he is an
eminence. SAR has been a component of high-profile space missions since 1978,
when the first SAR-equipped satellite, Seasat, was placed into orbit around the
earth. NASA’s project manager for that pioneering Seasat launch was Walt
McCandless.
The first line of Walt’s resume reads “Clearance: Current U.S. Department of
Defense Top Secret.” A little farther down the page an account of his
professional experience begins: “I perform private consulting services aligned
with remote sensor and satellite system design, and associated signal processing,
data reduction and information extraction tasks.” Colleagues refer to him as
brilliant.
Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does
unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of
the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an
undercurrent of nervous energy. Even from across the room it is apparent that
some very high voltage is crackling through his wires. There is no mistaking
whence Chris’s intensity came.
When Walt talks, people listen. If something or someone displeases him, his
eyes narrow and his speech becomes clipped. According to members of the
extended family, his moods can be dark and mercurial, although they say his
famous temper has lost much of its volatility in recent years. After Chris gave
everybody the slip in 1990, something changed in Walt. His son’s disappearance
scared and chastened him. A softer, more tolerant side of his personality came to
the fore.
Walt grew up poor in Greeley, Colorado, an agricultural town on the high,
windswept plains up near the Wyoming line. His family, he declares matter-offactly,
“was from the wrong side of the tracks.” A bright child, and driven, he
won an academic scholarship to Colorado State University in nearby Fort Collins.
To make ends meet, he held down an assortment of part-time jobs through
college, including one in a mortuary, but his steadiest paycheck came from
playing with Charlie Novak, the leader of a popular jazz quartet. Novak’s band,
with Walt sitting in on piano, worked the regional lounge circuit, covering dance
numbers and old standards in smoky honky-tonks up and down the Front Range.
An inspired musician with considerable natural talent, Walt still plays
professionally from time to time.
In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I, casting a shadow of fear across
America. In the ensuing national hysteria Congress funneled millions upon
millions of dollars into the California-based aerospace industry, and the boom
was on. For young Walt McCandless—just out of college, married, and with a
baby on the way—Sputnik opened the door to opportunity. After receiving his
undergraduate diploma, Walt took a job with Hughes Aircraft, which sent him to
Tucson for three years, where he earned a master’s degree in antenna theory at
the University of Arizona. As soon as he completed his thesis—”An Analysis of
Conical Helices”—he transferred to Hughes’s big California operation, where the
real action was, eager to make his mark in the race for space.
He bought a little bungalow in Torrance, worked hard, moved quickly up the
ladder. Sam was born in 1959, and four other children—Stacy, Shawna, Shelly,
and Shannon—followed in quick succession. Walt was appointed test director and
section head for the Surveyor 1 mission, the first spacecraft to make a soft
landing on the moon. His star was bright and rising.
By 1965, however, his marriage was in trouble. He and his wife, Marcia,
separated. Walt started dating a secretary at Hughes named Wilhelmina
Johnson—everyone called her Bil-lie—who was twenty-two years old and had
dark, striking eyes. They fell in love and moved in together. Billie got pregnant.
Very petite to begin with, in nine months she gained only eight pounds and never
even wore maternity clothes. On February 12, 1968, Billie gave birth to a son. He
was underweight, but healthy and animated. Walt bought Billie a Gianini guitar,
on which she strummed lullabies to soothe the fussy newborn. Twenty-two years
later, rangers from the National Park Service would find that same guitar on the
backseat of a yellow Datsun abandoned near the shore of Lake Mead.
It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter,
parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but
Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will
not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle
of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a
house down the street to plunder a neighbor’s candy drawer.
In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement
test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. “He wasn’t
happy about it,” Billie remembers, “because it meant he had to do extra
schoolwork. So he spent a week trying to get himself out of the program. This little
boy attempted to convince the teacher, the principal—anybody who would
listen—that the test results were in error, that he really didn’t belong there. We
learned about it at the first PTA meeting. His teacher pulled us aside and told us
that ‘Chris marches to a different drummer.’ She just shook her head.”
“Even when we were little,” says Carine, who was born three years after
Chris, “he was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial— he always had friends, and
everybody liked him—but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He
didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely.”
When Chris was six, Walt was offered a position at NASA, prompting a move
to the nation’s capital. They bought a split-level house on Willet Drive in
suburban Annandale. It had green shutters, a bay window, a nice yard. Four
years after arriving in Virginia, Walt quit working for NASA to start a consulting
firm— User Systems, Incorporated—which he and Billie ran out of their home.
Money was tight. In addition to the financial strain of exchanging a steady
paycheck for the vagaries of self-employment, Walt’s separation from his first
wife left him with two families to support. To make a go of it, says Carine, “Mom
and Dad put in incredibly long hours. When Chris and I woke up in the morning to
go to school, they’d be in the office working. When we came home in the
afternoon, they’d be in the office working. When we went to bed at night,
they’d be in the office working. They ran a real good business together and
eventually started making bunches of money, but they worked all the time.”
It was a stressful existence. Both Walt and Billie are tightly wound,
emotional, loath to give ground. Now and then the tension erupted in verbal
sparring. In moments of anger, one or the other often threatened divorce. The
rancor was more smoke than fire, says Carine, but “I think it was one of the
reasons Chris and I were so close. We learned to count on each other when Mom
and Dad weren’t getting along.”
But there were good times, too. On weekends and when school was out, the
family took to the road: They drove to Virginia Beach and the Carolina shore, to
Colorado to visit Walt’s kids from his first marriage, to the Great Lakes, to the
Blue Ridge Mountains. “We camped out of the back of the truck, the Chevy
Suburban,” Walt explains. “Later we bought an Airstream trailer and traveled
with that. Chris loved those trips, the longer the better. There was always a
little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited
it.”
In the course of their travels, the family visited Iron Mountain, Michigan, a small
mining town in the forests of the Upper Peninsula that was Billies childhood
home. She was one of six kids. Loren Johnson, Billies father, ostensibly worked as
a truck driver, “but he never held any job for long,” she says.
“Billies dad didn’t quite fit into society,” Walt explains. “In many ways he
and Chris were a lot alike.”
Loren Johnson was proud and stubborn and dreamy, a woodsman, a selftaught
musician, a writer of poetry. Around Iron Mountain his rapport with the
creatures of the forest was legendary. “He was always raising wildlife,” says
Billie. “He’d find some animal in a trap, take it home, amputate the injured
limb, heal it, and then let it go again. Once my dad hit a mother deer with his
truck, making an orphan of its fawn. He was crushed. But he brought the baby
deer home and raised it inside the house, behind the woodstove, just like it was
one of his kids.”
To support his family, Loren tried a series of entrepreneurial ventures, none
of them very successful. He raised chickens for a while, then mink and
chinchillas. He opened a stable and sold horse rides to tourists. Much of the food
he put on the table came from hunting—despite the fact that he was
uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie
says, “but we had to eat, so he did it.”
He also worked as a hunting guide, which pained him even more. “Men from
the city would drive up in their big Cadillacs, and my dad would take them out to
his hunting camp for a week to get a trophy. He would guarantee them a buck
before they left, but most of them were such lousy shots and drank so much that
they couldn’t hit anything, so he’d usually have to shoot the deer for them. God,
he hated that.”
Loren, not surprisingly, was charmed by Chris. And Chris adored his
grandfather. The old man’s backwoods savvy, his affinity for the wilderness, left
a deep impression on the boy.
When Chris was eight, Walt took him on his first overnight backpacking trip, a
three-day hike in the Shenandoah to climb Old Rag. They made the summit, and
Chris carried his own pack the whole way. Hiking up the mountain became a
father-son tradition; they climbed Old Rag almost every year thereafter.
When Chris was a little older, Walt took Billie and his children from both
marriages to climb Longs Peak in Colorado—at 14,256 feet, the highest summit in
Rocky Mountain National Park. Walt, Chris, and Walt’s youngest son from his first
marriage reached the 13,000-foot elevation. There, at a prominent notch called
the Keyhole, Walt decided to turn around. He was tired and feeling the altitude.
The route above looked slabby, exposed, dangerous. “I’d had it, OK,” Walt
explains, “but Chris wanted to keep going to the top. I told him no way. He was
only twelve then, so all he could do was complain. If he’d been fourteen or
fifteen, he would have simply gone on without me.”
Walt grows quiet, staring absently into the distance. “Chris was fearless even
when he was little,” he says after a long pause. “He didn’t think the odds
applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge.”
Chris was a high achiever in almost everything that caught his fancy.
Academically he brought home As with little effort. Only once did he receive a
grade lower than B: an F, in high school physics. When he saw the report card,
Walt made an appointment with the physics teacher to see what the problem
was. “He was a retired air force colonel,” Walt remembers, “an old guy, traditional,
pretty rigid. He’d explained at the beginning of the semester that
because he had something like two hundred students, lab reports had to be
written in a particular format to make grading them a manageable proposition.
Chris thought it was a stupid rule and decided to ignore it. He did his lab reports,
but not in the correct format, so the teacher gave him an F. After talking with
the guy, I came home and told Chris he got the grade he deserved.”
Both Chris and Carine shared Walt’s musical aptitude. Chris took up the
guitar, piano, French horn. “It was strange to see in a kid his age,” says Walt,
“but he loved Tony Bennett. He’d sing numbers like ‘Tender Is the Night’ while I
accompanied him on piano. He was good.” Indeed, in a goofy video Chris made in
college, he can be heard belting out “Summers by the sea/Sailboats in Capri”
with impressive panache, crooning like a professional lounge singer.
A gifted French-horn player, as a teen he was a member of the American
University Symphony but quit, according to Walt, after objecting to rules
imposed by a high school band leader. Carine recalls that there was more to it
than that: “He quit playing partly because he didn’t like being told what to do
but also because of me. I wanted to be like Chris, so I started to play French
horn, too. And it turned out to be the one thing I was better at than he was.
When I was a freshman and he was a senior, I made first chair in the senior band,
and there was no way he was going to sit behind his damn sister.”
Their musical rivalry seems not to have damaged the relationship between
Chris and Carine, however. They’d been best friends from an early age, spending
hours together building forts out of cushions and blankets in their Annandale
living room. “He was always really nice to me,” Carine says, “and extremely protective.
He’d hold my hand when we walked down the street. When he was in
junior high and I was still in grade school, he got out earlier than me, but he’d
hang out at his friend Brian Paskowitz’s house so we could walk home together.”
Chris inherited Billie’s angelic features, most notably her eyes, the black
depths of which betrayed his every emotion. Although he was small—in school
photographs he is always in the front row, the shortest kid in the class—Chris was
strong for his size and well coordinated. He tried his hand at many sports but had
little patience for learning the finer points of any of them. When he went skiing
during family vacations in Colorado, he seldom bothered to turn; he’d simply
crouch in a gorilla tuck, feet spread wide for stability, and point the boards
straight down the hill. Likewise, says Walt, “when I tried to teach him to play
golf, he refused to accept that form is everything. Chris would take the biggest
swing you ever saw, every time. Sometimes he’d hit the ball three hundred
yards, but more often he’d slice it into the next fairway.
“Chris had so much natural talent,” Walt continues, “but if you tried to coach
him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He
resisted instruction of any kind. I’m a serious racquetball player, and I taught
Chris to play when he was eleven. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he was
beating me regularly. He was very, very quick and had a lot of power; but when I
suggested he work on the gaps in his game, he refused to listen. Once in a
tournament he came up against a forty-five-year-old man with a lot of
experience. Chris won a bunch of points right out of the gate, but the guy was
methodically testing him, probing for his weakness. As soon as he figured out
which shot gave Chris the most trouble, that was the only shot Chris saw, and it
was all over.”
Nuance, strategy, and anything beyond the rudimentaries of technique were
wasted on Chris. The only way he cared to tackle a challenge was head-on, right
now, applying the full brunt of his extraordinary energy. And he was often
frustrated as a consequence. It wasn’t until he took up running, an activity that
rewards will and determination more than finesse or cunning, that he found his
athletic calling. At the age of ten, he entered his first running competition, a
ten-kilometer road race. He finished sixty-ninth, beating more than one thousand
adults, and was hooked. By the time he was in his teens, he was one of the top
distance runners in the region.
When Chris was twelve, Walt and Billie bought Carine a puppy, a Shetland
sheepdog named Buckley, and Chris fell into the habit of taking the pet with him
on his daily training runs. “Buckley was supposedly my dog,” says Carine, “but he
and Chris became inseparable. Buck was fast, and he’d always beat Chris home
when they went running. I remember Chris was so excited the first time he made
it home before Buckley. He went tearing all over the house yelling ‘I beat Buck! I
beat Buck!’”
At W. T. Woodson High School—a large public institution in Fairfax, Virginia,
with a reputation for high academic standards and winning athletic teams—Chris
was the captain of the crosscountry squad. He relished the role and concocted
novel, gruel-ing training regimens that his teammates still remember well.
“He was really into pushing himself,” explains Gordy Cucullu, a younger
member of the team. “Chris invented this workout he called Road Warriors: He
would lead us on long, killer runs through places like farmers’ fields and
construction sites, places we weren’t supposed to be, and intentionally try to get
us lost. We’d run as far and as fast as we could, down strange roads, through the
woods, whatever. The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into
unknown territory. Then we’d run at a slightly slower pace until we found a road
we recognized and race home again at full speed. In a certain sense that’s how
Chris lived his entire life.”
McCandless viewed running as an intensely spiritual exercise, verging on
religion. “Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us,” recalls Eric
Hathaway, another friend on the team. “He’d tell us to think about all the evil in
the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of
darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He
believed doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever
energy was available. As impressionable high school kids, we were blown away by
that kind of talk.”
But running wasn’t exclusively an affair of the spirit; it was a competitive
undertaking as well. When McCandless ran, he ran to win. “Chris was really
serious about running,” says Kris Maxie Gillmer, a female teammate who was
perhaps McCandless’s closest friend at Woodson. “I can remember standing at
the finish line, watching him run, knowing how badly he wanted to do well and
how disappointed he’d be if he did worse than he expected. After a bad race or
even a bad time trial during practice, he could be really hard on himself. And he
wouldn’t want to talk about it. If I tried to console him, he’d act annoyed and
brush me off. He internalized the disappointment. He’d go off alone somewhere
and beat himself up.
“It wasn’t just running Chris took so seriously,” Gillmer adds.
“He was like that about everything. You aren’t supposed to think about
heavy-duty stuff in high school. But I did, and he did, too, which is why we hit it
off. We’d hang out during snack break at his locker and talk about life, the state
of the world, serious things. I’m black, and I could never figure out why everyone
made such a big deal about race. Chris would talk to me about that kind of thing.
He understood. He was always questioning stuff in the same way. I liked him a
lot. He was a really good guy.”
McCandless took life’s inequities to heart. During his senior year at Woodson,
he became obsessed with racial oppression in South Africa. He spoke seriously to
his friends about smuggling weapons into that country and joining the struggle to
end apartheid. “We’d get into arguments about it once in a while,” recalls
Hathaway. “Chris didn’t like going through channels, working within the system,
waiting his turn. He’d say, ‘Come on, Eric, we can raise enough money to go to
South Africa on our own, right now. It’s just a matter of deciding to do it.’ I’d
counter by saying we were only a couple of kids, that we couldn’t possibly make
a difference. But you couldn’t argue with him. He’d come back with something
like ‘Oh, so I guess you just don’t care about right and wrong.’”
On weekends, when his high school pals were attending “keg-gers” and trying
to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of
Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals,
earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives.
“Chris didn’t understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry,
especially in this country,” says Billie. “He would rave about that kind of thing
for hours.”
On one occasion Chris picked up a homeless man from the streets of B.C.,
brought him home to leafy, affluent Annandale, and secretly set the guy up in
the Airstream trailer his parents parked beside the garage. Walt and Billie never
knew they were hosting a vagrant.
On another occasion Chris drove over to Hathaway’s house and announced
they were going downtown. “Cool!” Hathaway remembers thinking. “It was a
Friday night, and I assumed we were headed to Georgetown to party. Instead,
Chris parked down on Fourteenth Street, which at the time was a real bad part
of town. Then he said, ‘You know, Eric, you can read about this stuff, but you
can’t understand it until you live it. Tonight that’s what we’re going to do.’ We
spent the next few hours hanging out in creepy places, talking with pimps and
hookers and lowlife. I was, like, scared.
“Toward the end of the evening, Chris asked me how much money I had. I
said five dollars. He had ten. ‘OK, you buy the gas,’ he told me; ‘I’m going to get
some food.’ So he spent the ten bucks on a big bag of hamburgers, and we drove
around handing them out to smelly guys sleeping on grates. It was the weirdest
Friday night of my life. But Chris did that kind of thing a lot.”
Early in his senior year at Woodson, Chris informed his parents that he had no
intention of going to college. When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a
college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were
demeaning “twentieth-century inventions,” more of a liability than an asset, and
that he would do fine without one, thank you.
“That put us into kind of a tizzy,” Walt admits. “Both Billie and I come from
blue-collar families. A college degree is something we don’t take lightly, OK, and
we worked hard to be able to afford to send our kids to good schools. So Billie sat
him down and said, ‘Chris, if you really want to make a difference in the world,
if you really want to help people who are less fortunate, get yourself some
leverage first. Go to college, get a law degree, and then you’ll be able to have a
real impact.’”
“Chris brought home good grades,” says Hathaway. “He didn’t get into
trouble, he was a high achiever, he did what he was supposed to. His parents
didn’t really have grounds to complain. But they got on his case about going to
college; and whatever they said to him, it must have worked. Because he ended
up going to Emory, even though he thought it was pointless, a waste of time and
money.”
It’s somewhat surprising that Chris ceded to pressure from Walt and Billie
about attending college when he refused to listen to them about so many other
things. But there was never a shortage of apparent contradictions in the
relationship between Chris and his parents. When Chris visited with Kris Gillmer,
he frequently railed against Walt and Billie, portraying them as unreasonable
tyrants. Yet to his male buddies—Hathaway, Cucullu, and another track star,
Andy Horowitz—he scarcely complained at all. “My impression was that his
parents were very nice people,” says Hathaway, “no different, really, than my
parents or anyone’s parents. Chris just didn’t like being told what to do. I think
he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole
idea of parents.”
McCandless’s personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely
private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his
overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim dogooder
who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and
then and was an incorrigible ham.
Perhaps the greatest paradox concerned his feelings about money. Walt and
Billie had both known poverty when they were young and after struggling to rise
above it saw nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of their labor. “We worked
very, very hard,” Billie emphasizes. “We did without when the kids were little,
saved what we earned, and invested it for the future.” When the future finally
arrived, they didn’t flaunt their modest wealth, but they bought nice clothes,
some jewelry for Billie, a Cadillac. Eventually, they purchased the townhouse on
the bay and the sailboat. They took the kids to Europe, skiing in Breckenridge, on
a Caribbean cruise. And Chris, Billie acknowledges, “was embarrassed by all
that.”
Her son, the teenage Tolstoyan, believed that wealth was shameful,
corrupting, inherently evil—which is ironic because Chris was a natural-born
capitalist with an uncanny knack for making a buck. “Chris was always an
entrepreneur,” Billie says with a laugh. “Always.”
As an eight-year-old, he grew vegetables behind the house in Annandale and
then sold them door-to-door around the neighborhood. “Here was this cute little
boy pulling a wagon full of fresh-grown beans and tomatoes and peppers,” says
Carine.
“Who could resist? And Chris knew it. He’d have this look on his face like I’m
damn cute! Want to buy some beans?’ By the time he came home, the wagon
would be empty, and he’d have a bunch of money in his hand.”
When Chris was twelve, he printed up a stack of flyers and started a
neighborhood copy business, Chris’s Fast Copies, offering free pickup and
delivery. Using the copier in Walt and Billie s office, he paid his parents a few
cents a copy, charged customers two cents less than the corner store charged,
and made a tidy profit.
In 1985, following his junior year at Woodson, Chris was hired by a local
building contractor to canvass neighborhoods for sales, drumming up siding jobs
and kitchen remodelings. And he was astonishingly successful, a salesman
without peer. In a matter of a few months, half a dozen other students were
working under him, and he’d put seven thousand dollars into his bank account.
He used part of the money to buy the yellow Datsun, the secondhand B210.
Chris had such an outstanding knack for selling that in the spring of 1986, as
Chris’s high school graduation approached, the owner of the construction
company phoned Walt and offered to pay for Chris’s college education if Walt
would persuade his son to remain in Annandale and keep working while he went
to school instead of quitting the job and going off to Emory.
“When I mentioned the offer to Chris,” says Walt, “he wouldn’t even consider
it. He told his boss that he had other plans.” As soon as high school was over,
Chris declared, he was going to get behind the wheel of his new car and spend
the summer driving across the country. Nobody anticipated that the journey
would be the first in a series of extended transcontinental adventures. Nor could
anyone in his family have foreseen that a chance discovery during this initial
journey would ultimately turn him inward and away, drawing Chris and those
who loved him into a morass of anger, misunderstanding, and sorrow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANNANDALE
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table
where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance,
but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the
inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,WALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN
ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS.
AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE, THE WORD “TRUTH” HAD BEEN WRITTEN IN LARGE
BLOCK LETTERS IN MCCANDLESS’S HAND.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked
and naturally prefer mercy.
G. K. CHESTERTON
In 1986, on the sultry spring weekend that Chris graduated from Woodson
High School, Walt and Billie threw a party for him. Walt’s birthday was June 10,
just a few days away, and at the party Chris gave his father a present: a very
expensive Questar telescope.
“I remember sitting there when he gave Dad the telescope,” says Carine.
“Chris had tossed back a few drinks that night and was pretty blitzed. He got real
emotional. He was almost crying, fighting back the tears, telling Dad that even
though they’d had their differences over the years, he was grateful for all the
things Dad had done for him. Chris said how much he respected Dad for starting
from nothing, working his way through college, busting his ass to support eight
kids. It was a moving speech. Everybody there was all choked up. And then he
left on his trip.”
Walt and Billie didn’t try to prevent Chris from going, although they
persuaded him to take Walt’s Texaco credit card for emergencies and exacted a
promise from their son to call home every three days. “We had our hearts in our
mouths the whole time he was gone,” says Walt, “but there was no way to stop
him.”
After leaving Virginia, Chris drove south and then west across the flat Texas
plains, through the heat of New Mexico and Arizona, and arrived at the Pacific
coast. Initially, he honored the agreement to phone regularly, but as the summer
wore on, the calls became less and less frequent. He didn’t appear back home
until two days before the fall term was to start at Emory. When he walked into
the Annandale house, he had a scruffy beard, his hair was long and tangled, and
he’d shed thirty pounds from his already lean frame.
“As soon as I heard he was home,” says Carine, “I ran to his room to talk with
him. He was on the bed, asleep. He was so thin. He looked like those paintings of
Jesus on the cross. When Mom saw how much weight he’d lost, she was a total
wreck. She started cooking like mad to try and put some meat back on his
bones.”
Near the end of his trip, it turned out, Chris had gotten lost in the Mojave
Desert and had nearly succumbed to dehydration. His parents were extremely
alarmed when they heard about this brush with disaster but were unsure how to
persuade Chris to exercise more caution in the future. “Chris was good at almost
everything he ever tried,” Walt reflects, “which made him supremely
overconfident. If you attempted to talk him out of something, he wouldn’t argue.
He’d just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted.
“So at first I didn’t say anything about the safety aspect. I played tennis with
Chris, talked about other things, then eventually sat down with him to discuss
the risks he’d taken. I’d learned by then that a direct approach—’By God, you
better not try a stunt like that again!’—didn’t work with Chris. Instead, I tried to
explain that we didn’t object to his travels; we just wanted him to be a little
more careful and to keep us better informed of his whereabouts.”
To Walt’s dismay Chris bristled at this small dollop of fatherly advice. The
only effect it seemed to have was to make him even less inclined to share his
plans.
“Chris,” says Billie, “thought we were idiots for worrying about him.”
During the course of his travels, Chris had acquired a machete and a .30-06
rifle, and when Walt and Billie drove him down to Atlanta to enroll in college, he
insisted on taking the big knife and the gun with him. “When we went with Chris
up to his dorm room,” Walt laughs, “I thought his roommate’s parents were going
to have a stroke on the spot. The roommate was a preppy kid from Connecticut,
dressed like” Joe College, and Chris walks in with a scraggly beard and worn-out
clothes, looking like Jeremiah Johnson, packing a machete and a deer-hunting
rifle. But you know what? Within ninety days the preppy roommate had dropped
out, while Chris had made the dean’s list.”
To his parents’ pleasant surprise, as the school year stretched on, Chris
seemed thrilled to be at Emory. He shaved, trimmed his hair, and readopted the
clean-cut look he’d had in high school. His grades were nearly perfect. He
started writing for the school newspaper. He even talked enthusiastically about
going on to get a law degree when he graduated. “Hey,” Chris boasted to Walt at
one point, “I think my grades will be good enough to get into Harvard Law
School.”
The summer after his freshman year of college, Chris returned to Annandale
and worked for his parents’ company, developing computer software. “The
program he wrote for us that summer was flawless,” says Walt. “We still use it
today and have sold copies of the program to many clients. But when I asked
Chris to show me how he wrote it, to explain why it worked the way it did, he
refused. ‘All you need to know is that it works,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to know
how or why.’ Chris was just being Chris, but it infuriated me. He would have
made a great CIA agent—I’m serious; I know guys who work for the CIA. He told
us what he thought we needed to know and nothing more. He was that way about
everything.”
Many aspects of Chris’s personality baffled his parents. He could be generous
and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by
monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed
to intensify through his college years.
“I saw Chris at a party after his sophomore year at Emory,” remembers Eric
Hathaway, “and it was obvious he had changed. He seemed very introverted,
almost cold. When I said ‘Hey, good to see you, Chris,’ his reply was cynical:
‘Yeah, sure, that’s what everybody says/ It was hard to get him to open up. His
studies were the only thing he was interested in talking about. Social life at
Emory revolved around fraternities and sororities, something Chris wanted no
part of. I think when everybody started going Greek, he kind of pulled back from
his old friends and got more heavily into himself.”
The summer between his sophomore and junior years Chris again returned to
Annandale and took a job delivering pizzas for Domino’s. “He didn’t care that it
wasn’t a cool thing to do,” says Carine. “He made a pile of money. I remember
he’d come home every night and do his accounting at the kitchen table. It didn’t
matter how tired he was; he’d figure out how many miles he drove, how much
Domino’s paid him for gas, how much gas actually cost, his net profits for the
evening, how it compared to the same evening the week before. He kept track of
everything and showed me how to do it, how to make a business work. He didn’t
seem interested in the money so much as the fact that he was good at making it.
It was like a game, and the money was a way of keeping score.”
Chris’s relations with his parents, which had been unusually courteous since
his graduation from high school, deteriorated significantly that summer, and Walt
and Billie had no idea why. According to Billie, “He seemed mad at us more
often, and he became more withdrawn—no, that’s not the right word. Chris
wasn’t ever withdrawn. But he wouldn’t tell us what was on his mind and spent
more time by himself.”
Chris’s smoldering anger, it turns out, was fueled by a discovery he’d made
two summers earlier, during his cross-country wanderings. When he arrived in
California, he’d visited the El Se-gundo neighborhood where he’d spent the first
six years of his life. He called on a number of old family friends who still lived
there, and from their answers to his queries, Chris pieced together the facts of
his father’s previous marriage and subsequent divorce—facts to which he hadn’t
been privy.
Walt’s split from his first wife, Marcia, was not a clean or amicable parting.
Long after falling in love with Billie, long after she gave birth to Chris, Walt
continued his relationship with Marcia in secret, dividing his time between two
households, two families. Lies were told and then exposed, begetting more lies
to explain away the initial deceptions. Two years after Chris was born, Walt
fathered another son—Quinn McCandless—with Marcia. When Walt’s double life
came to light, the revelations inflicted deep wounds. All parties suffered
terribly.
Eventually, Walt, Billie, Chris, and Carine moved to the East Coast. The
divorce from Marcia was at long last finalized, allowing Walt and Billie to legalize
their marriage. They all put the turmoil behind them as best they could and
carried on with their lives. Two decades went by. Wisdom accrued. The guilt and
hurt and jealous fury receded into the distant past; it appeared that the storm
had been weathered. And then in 1986, Chris drove out to El Segundo, made the
rounds of the old neighborhood, and learned about the episode in all its painful
detail.
“Chris was the sort of person who brooded about things,” Carine observes. “If
something bothered him, he wouldn’t come right out and say it. He’d keep it to
himself, harboring his resentment, letting the bad feelings build and build.” That
seems to be what happened following the discoveries he made in El Segundo.
Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to
grant clemency, and this was especially true in Chris’s case. More even than most
teens, he tended to see things in black and white. He measured himself and
those around him by an impossibly rigorous moral code.
Curiously, Chris didn’t hold everyone to the same exacting standards. One of
the individuals he professed to admire greatly over the last two years of his life
was a heavy drinker and incorrigible philanderer who regularly beat up his
girlfriends. Chris was well aware of this man’s faults yet managed to forgive
them. He was also able to forgive, or overlook, the shortcomings of his literary
heroes: Jack London was a notorious drunk; Tolstoy, despite his famous advocacy
of celibacy, had been an enthusiastic sexual adventurer as young man and went
on to father at least thirteen children, some of whom were conceived at the
same time the censorious count was thundering in print against the evils of sex.
Like many people, Chris apparently judged artists and close friends by their
work, not their life, yet he was temperamentally incapable of extending such
lenity to his father. Whenever Walt McCandless, in his stern fashion, would
dispense a fatherly admonishment to Chris, Carine, or their half siblings, Chris
would fixate on his father’s own less than sterling behavior many years earlier
and silently denounce him as a. sanctimonious hypocrite. Chris kept careful
score. And over time he worked himself into a choler of self-righteous
indignation that was impossible to keep bottled up.
After Chris unearthed the particulars of Walt’s divorce, two years passed
before his anger began to leak to the surface, but leak it eventually did. The boy
could not pardon the mistakes his father had made as a young man, and he was
even less willing to pardon the attempt at concealment. He later declared to
Carine and others that the deception committed by Walt and Billie made his
“entire childhood seem like a fiction.” But he did not confront his parents with
what he knew, then or ever. He chose instead to make a secret of his dark
knowledge and express his rage obliquely, in silence and sullen withdrawal.
In 1988, as Chris’s resentment of his parents hardened, his sense of outrage
over injustice in the world at large grew. That summer, Billie remembers, “Chris
started complaining about all the rich kids at Emory.” More and more of the
classes he took addressed such pressing social issues as racism and world hunger
and inequities in the distribution of wealth. But despite his aversion to money
and conspicuous consumption, Chris’s political leanings could not be described as
liberal.
Indeed, he delighted in ridiculing the policies of the Democratic Party and
was a vocal admirer of Ronald Reagan. At Emory he went so far as to co-found a
College Republican Club. Chris’s seemingly anomalous political positions were
perhaps best summed up by Thoreau’s declaration in “Civil Disobedience”: “I
heartily accept the motto—’That government is best which governs least.’ “
Beyond that his views were not easily characterized.
As assistant editorial page editor of The Emory Wheel, he authored scores of
commentaries. In reading them half a decade later, one is reminded how young
McCandless was, and how passionate. The opinions he expressed in print, argued
with idiosyncratic logic, were all over the map. He lampooned Jimmy Carter and
Joe Biden, called for the resignation of Attorney General Edwin Meese,
lambasted Bible-thumpers of the Christian right, urged vigilance against the
Soviet threat, castigated the Japanese for hunting whales, and defended Jesse
Jackson as a viable presidential candidate. In a typically immoderate declaration
the lead sentence of McCandless’s editorial of March 1, 1988, reads, “We have
now begun the third month of the year 1988, and already it is shaping up to be
one of the most politically corrupt and scandalous years in modern history...”
Chris Morris, the editor of the paper, remembers McCandless as “intense.”
To his dwindling number of confreres, McCandless appeared to grow more
intense with each passing month. As soon as classes ended in the spring of 1989,
Chris took his Datsun on another prolonged, extemporaneous road trip. “We only
got two cards from him the whole summer,” says Walt. “The first one said,
‘Headed for Guatemala.’ When I read that I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going
down there to fight for the insurrectionists. They’re going to line him up in front
of a wall and shoot him.’ Then toward the end of the summer, the second card
arrived, and all it said was ‘Leaving Fairbanks tomorrow, see you in a couple of
weeks.’ It turned out he’d changed his mind and instead of heading south had
driven to Alaska.”
The grinding, dusty haul up the Alaska Highway was Chris’s first visit to the
Far North. It was an abbreviated trip—he spent a short time around Fairbanks,
then hurried south to get back to Atlanta in time for the start of fall classes—but
he had been smitten by the vastness of the land, by the ghostly hue of the
glaciers, by the pellucid subarctic sky. There was never any question that he
would return.
During his senior year at Emory, Chris lived off campus in his bare, spartan
room furnished with milk crates and a mattress on the floor. Few of his friends
ever saw him outside of classes. A professor gave him a key for after-hours
access to the library, where he spent much of his free time. Andy Horowitz, his
close high school friend and cross-country teammate, bumped into Chris among
the stacks early one morning just before graduation. Although Horowitz and
McCandless were classmates at Emory, it had been two years since they’d seen
each other. They talked awkwardly for a few minutes, then McCandless disappeared
into a carrel.
Chris seldom contacted his parents that year, and because he had no phone,
they couldn’t easily contact him. Walt and Billie grew increasingly worried about
their son’s emotional distance. In a letter to Chris, Billie implored, “You have
completely dropped away from all who love and care about you. Whatever it is—
whoever you’re with—do you think this is right?” Chris saw this as meddling and
referred to the letter as “stupid” when he talked to Carine.
“What does she mean ‘whoever I’m with’?” Chris railed at his sister. “She
must be fucking nuts. You know what I bet? I bet they think I’m a homosexual.
How did they ever get that idea? What a bunch of imbeciles.”
In the spring of 1990, when Walt, Billie, and Carine attended Chris’s
graduation ceremony, they thought he seemed happy. As they watched him
stride across the stage and take his diploma, he was grinning from ear to ear. He
indicated that he was planning another extended trip but implied that he’d visit
his family in An-nandale before hitting the road. Shortly thereafter, he donated
the balance of his bank account to OXFAM, loaded up his car, and vanished from
their lives. From then on he scrupulously avoided contacting either his parents or
Carine, the sister for whom he purportedly cared immensely.
“We were all worried when we didn’t hear from him,” says Carine, “and I
think my parents’ worry was mixed with hurt and anger. But I didn’t really feel
hurt by his failure to write. I knew he was happy and doing what he wanted to
do; I understood that it was important for him to see how independent he could
be. And he knew that if he’d written or called me, Mom and Dad would find out
where he was, fly out there, and try to bring him home.”
Walt does not deny this. “There’s no question in my mind,” he says. “If we’d
had any idea where to look—OK—I would have gone there in a flash, gotten a lock
on his whereabouts, and brought our boy home.”
As months passed without any word of Chris—and then years—the anguish
mounted. Billie never left the house without leaving a note for Chris posted on
the door. “Whenever we were out driving and saw a hitchhiker,” she says, “if he
looked anything like Chris, we’d turn around and circle back. It was a terrible
time. Night was the worst, especially when it was cold and stormy. You’d
wonder, ‘Where is he? Is he warm? Is he hurt? Is he lonely? Is he OK?’ “
In July 1992, two years after Chris left Atlanta, Billie was asleep in
Chesapeake Beach when she sat bolt upright in the middle of the night, waking
Walt. “I was sure I’d heard Chris calling me,” she insists, tears rolling down her
cheeks. “I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it. I wasn’t dreaming. I didn’t
imagine it. I heard his voice! He was begging, ‘Mom! Help me!’ But I couldn’t
help him because I didn’t know where he was. And that was all he said: ‘Mom!
Help me!’”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VIRGINIA BEACH
The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I
made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And
from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a
kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my
mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of
early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing— to put
away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire,
direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on
showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing
shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had
gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.
JOHN HAINES, THE STARS, THE Snow, THE FIRE: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE
NORTHERN WILDERNESS
Two framed photographs occupy the mantel in Carine McCand-less’s Virginia
Beach home: one of Chris as a junior in high school, the other of Chris as a sevenyear-
old in a pint-size suit and crooked tie, standing beside Carine, who is
wearing a frilly dress and a new Easter hat. “What’s amazing,” says Carine as she
studies these images of her brother, “is that even though the pictures were
taken ten years apart, his expression is identical.”
She’s right: In both photos Chris stares at the lens with the same pensive,
recalcitrant squint, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of an important
thought and was annoyed to be wasting his time in front of the camera. His
expression is most striking in the Easter photo because it contrasts so strongly
with the exuberant grin Carine wears in the same frame. “That’s Chris,” she says
with an affectionate smile, brushing her fingertips across the surface of the
image. “He’d get that look a lot.”
Lying on the floor at Carine’s feet is Buckley, the Shetland sheepdog Chris had
been so attached to. Now thirteen years old, he’s gone white in the muzzle and
hobbles around with an arthritic limp. When Max, Carine’s eighteen-month-old
Rottweiler, intrudes on Buckley’s turf, however, the ailing little dog thinks
nothing of confronting the much bigger animal with a loud bark and a flurry of
well-placed nips, sending the 130-pound beast scurrying for safety.
“Chris was crazy about Buck,” Carine says. “That summer he disappeared
he’d wanted to take Buck with him. After he graduated from Emory, he asked
Mom and Dad if he could come get Buck, but they said no, because Buckley had
just been hit by a car and was still recovering. Now, of course, they second-guess
the decision, even though Buck was really badly hurt; the vet said he’d never
walk again after that accident. My parents can’t help wondering—and I admit
that I can’t, either—how things might have turned out different if Chris had
taken Buck with him. Chris didn’t think twice about risking his own life, but he
never would have put Buckley in any kind of danger. There’s no way he would
have taken the same kind of chances if Buck had been with him.”
Standing five feet eight inches tall, Carine McCandless is the same height as
her brother was, maybe an inch taller, and looks enough like him that people
frequently asked if they were twins. An animated talker, she flips her waistlength
hair from her face with a toss of her head as she speaks and chops the air
for emphasis with small, expressive hands. She is barefoot. A gold crucifix
dangles from her neck. Her neatly pressed jeans have creases down the front.
Like Chris, Carine is energetic and self-assured, a high achiever, quick to
state an opinion. Also like Chris, she clashed fiercely with Walt and Billie as an
adolescent. But the differences between the siblings were greater than their
similarities.
Carine made peace with her parents shortly after Chris disappeared, and now,
at the age of twenty-two, she calls their relationship “extremely good.” She is
much more gregarious than Chris was and can’t imagine going off into the
wilderness—or virtually anywhere else—alone. And although she shares Chris’s
sense of outrage over racial injustice, Carine has no objection— moral or
otherwise—to wealth. She recently bought an expensive new home and regularly
logs fourteen-hour days at C.A.R. Services, Incorporated, the auto-repair
business she owns with her husband, Chris Fish, in the hope of making her first
million at an early age.
“I was always getting on Mom and Dad’s case because they worked all the
time and were never around,” she reflects with a self-mocking laugh, “and now
look at me: I’m doing the same thing.” Chris, she confesses, used to poke fun at
her capitalist zeal by calling her the duchess of York, Ivana Trump McCandless,
and “a rising successor to Leona Helmsley.” His criticism of his sister never went
beyond good-natured ribbing, however; Chris and Carine were uncommonly
close. In a letter delineating his quarrels with Walt and Billie, Chris once wrote
to her, “Anyway, I like to talk to you about this because you are the only person
in the world who could possibly understand what I’m saying.”
Ten months after Chris’s death, Carine still grieves deeply for her brother. “I
can’t seem to get through a day without crying,” she says with a look of
puzzlement. “For some reason the worst is when I’m in the car by myself. Not
once have I been able to make the twenty-minute drive from home to the shop
without thinking about Chris and breaking down. I get over it, but when it
happens, it’s hard.”
On the evening of September 17, 1992, Carine was outside giving her
Rottweiler a bath when Chris Fish pulled into the driveway. She was surprised he
was home so early; usually Fish worked late into the night at C.A.R. Services.
“He was acting funny,” Carine recalls. “There was a terrible look on his face.
He went inside, came back out, and started helping me wash Max. I knew
something was wrong then, because Fish never washes the dog.”
“I need to talk to you,” Fish said. Carine followed him into the house, rinsed
Max’s collars in the kitchen sink, and went into the living room. “Fish was sitting
on the couch in the dark with his head down. He looked totally hurt. Trying to
joke him out of his mood, I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I figured his buddies
must have been razzing him at work, maybe telling him they’d seen me out with
another guy or something. I laughed and asked, ‘Have the guys been giving you a
hard time?’ But he didn’t laugh back. When he looked up at me, I saw that his
eyes were red.”
“It’s your brother,” Fish had said. “They found him. He’s dead.” Sam, Walt’s
oldest child, had called Fish at work and given him the news.
Carine’s eyes blurred, and she felt the onset of tunnel vision. Involuntarily,
she started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth. “No,” she corrected
him, “Chris isn’t dead.” Then she began to scream. Her keening was so loud and
continuous that Fish worried the neighbors were going to think he was harming
her and call the police.
Carine curled up on the couch in a fetal position, wailing without pause.
When Fish tried to comfort her, she pushed him away and shrieked at him to
leave her alone. She remained hysterical for the next five hours, but by eleven
o’clock she had calmed sufficiently to throw some clothes into a bag, get into
the car with Fish, and let him drive her to Walt and Billies house in Chesapeake
Beach, a four-hour trip north.
On their way out of Virginia Beach, Carine asked Fish to stop at their church.
“I went in and sat at the altar for an hour or so while Fish stayed in the car,”
Carine remembers. “I wanted some answers from God. But I didn’t get any.”
Earlier in the evening Sam had confirmed that the photograph of the unknown
hiker faxed down from Alaska was indeed Chris, but the coroner in Fairbanks
required Chris’s dental records to make a conclusive identification. It took more
than a day to compare the X rays, and Billie refused to look at the faxed photo
until the dental ID had been completed and there was no longer any doubt
whatsoever that the starved boy found in the bus beside the Sushana River was
her son.
The next day Carine and Sam flew to Fairbanks to bring home Chris’s remains.
At the coroner’s office they were given the handful of possessions recovered with
the body: Chris’s rifle, a pair of binoculars, the fishing rod Ronald Franz had
given him, one of the Swiss Army knives Jan Burres had given him, the book of
plant lore in which his journal was written, a Minolta camera, and five rolls of
film—not much else. The coroner passed some papers across her desk; Sam
signed them and passed them back.
Less than twenty-four hours after landing in Fairbanks, Carine and Sam flew
on to Anchorage, where Chris’s body had been cremated following the autopsy at
the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. The mortuary delivered Chris’s ashes
to their hotel in a plastic box. “I was surprised how big the box was,” Carine
says. “His name was printed wrong. The label said CHRISTOPHER R. MCCANDLESS.
His middle initial is really J. It ticked me off that they didn’t get it right. I was
mad. Then I thought, ‘Chris wouldn’t care. He’d think it was funny.’ “
They caught a plane for Maryland the next morning. Carine carried her
brother’s ashes in her knapsack.
During the flight home, Carine ate every scrap of food the cabin attendants
set in front of her, “even though,” she says, “it was that horrible stuff they serve
on airplanes. I just couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away food since Chris
had starved to death.” Over the weeks that followed, however, she found that
her appetite had vanished, and she lost ten pounds, leading her friends to worry
that she was becoming anorectic.
Back in Chesapeake Beach, Billie had stopped eating, too. A tiny forty-eightyear-
old woman with girlish features, she lost eight pounds before her appetite
finally returned. Walt reacted the other way, eating compulsively, and gained
eight pounds.
A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial
record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the
fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time,
weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense
of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such
bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia
for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.
“I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances,” Billie
protests through her tears. “I just don’t understand it at all.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE STIKINE ICE CAP
/ grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was
wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely,
always as if it were not there... But you see at once what I do. I climb.
JOHN MENLOVE EDWARDS, “LETTER FROM A MAN”
/ cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I
first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct
remembrance of having been out overnight alone),—and then I steadily
ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts
haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass
an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a
mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What
distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled,
awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set
foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and
pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty
summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime
than the crater of a volcano spouting fire.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, JOURNAL
In the final postcard he sent to Wayne Westerberg, McCandless had written,
“If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you
to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.” When the adventure did
indeed prove fatal, this melodramatic declaration fueled considerable
speculation that the boy had been bent on suicide from the beginning, that when
he walked into the bush, he had no intention of ever walking out again. I’m not
so sure, however.
My suspicion that McCandless’s death was unplanned, that it was a terrible
accident, comes from reading those few documents he left behind and from
listening to the men and women who spent time with him over the final year of
his life. But my sense of Chris McCandless’s intentions comes, too, from a more
personal perspective.
As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless,
moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of
male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to
please. If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a
zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late
twenties that something was mountain climbing.
I devoted most of my waking hours to fantasizing about, and then
undertaking, ascents of remote mountains in Alaska and Canada—obscure spires,
steep and frightening, that nobody in the world beyond a handful of climbing
geeks had ever heard of. Some good actually came of this. By fixing my sights on
one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick
postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a
halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and
yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life
thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.
In 1977, while brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my
existential scabs, I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devils
Thumb. An intrusion of diorite sculpted by ancient glaciers into a peak of
immense and spectacular proportions, the Thumb is especially imposing from the
north: Its great north wall, which had never been climbed, rises sheer and clean
for six thousand feet from the glacier at its base, twice the height of Yosemite’s
El Capitan. I would go to Alaska, ski inland from the sea across thirty miles of
glacial ice, and ascend this mighty nordwand. I decided, moreover, to do it
alone.
I was twenty-three, a year younger than Chris McCandless when he walked
into the Alaska bush. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the
scattershot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of
Nietzsche, Ker-ouac, and John Menlove Edwards, the latter a deeply troubled
writer and psychiatrist who, before putting an end to his life with a cyanide
capsule in 1958, had been one of the preeminent British rock climbers of the
day. Edwards regarded climbing as a “psycho-neurotic tendency”; he climbed not
for sport but to find refuge from the inner torment that framed his existence.
As I formulated my plan to climb the Thumb, I was dimly aware that I might
be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it
wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.
I owned a book in which there was a photograph of the Devils Thumb, a blackand-
white image taken by an eminent glaciolo-gist named Maynard Miller. In
Miller’s aerial photo the mountain looked particularly sinister: a huge fin of
exfoliated stone, dark and smeared with ice. The picture held an almost
pornographic fascination for me. How would it feel, I wondered, to be balanced
on that bladelike summit ridge, worrying over the storm clouds building in the
distance, hunched against the wind and dunning cold, contemplating the drop on
either side? Could a person keep a lid on his terror long enough to reach the top
and get back down?
And if I did pull it off ... I was afraid to let myself imagine the triumphant
aftermath, lest I invite a jinx. But I never had any doubt that climbing the Devils
Thumb would transform my life. How could it not?
I was working then as an itinerant carpenter, framing condominiums in
Boulder for $3.50 an hour. One afternoon, after nine hours of humping two-bytens
and driving sixteen-penny nails, I told my boss I was quitting: “No, not in a
couple of weeks, Steve; right now was more like what I had in mind.” It took me
a few hours to clear my tools and other belongings out of the crummy job-site
trailer where I’d been squatting. And then I climbed into my car and departed for
Alaska. I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how
good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
The Devils Thumb demarcates the Alaska-British Columbia border east of
Petersburg, a fishing village accessible only by boat or plane. There was regular
jet service to Petersburg, but the sum of my liquid assets amounted to a 1960
Pontiac Star Chief and two hundred dollars in cash, not even enough for one-way
airfare. So I drove as far as Gig Harbor, Washington, abandoned the car, and
inveigled a ride on a northbound salmon seiner.
The Ocean Queen was a stout, no-nonsense workboat built from thick planks
of Alaska yellow cedar, rigged for long-lining and purse seining. In exchange for a
ride north, I had only to take regular turns at the helm—a four-hour wheel watch
every twelve hours—and help tie endless skates of halibut gear. The slow journey
up the Inside Passage unfolded in a gauzy reverie of anticipation. I was under
way, propelled by an imperative that was beyond my ability to control or
comprehend.
Sunlight glinted off the water as we chugged up the Strait of Georgia. Slopes
rose precipitously from the water’s edge, bearded in a gloom of hemlock and
cedar and devil’s club. Gulls wheeled overhead. Off Malcolm Island the boat split
a pod of seven orcas. Their dorsal fins, some as tall as a man, cut the glassy
surface within spitting distance of the rail.
Our second night out, two hours before dawn, I was steering from the flying
bridge when the head of a mule deer materialized in the spotlight’s glare. The
animal was in the middle of Fitz Hugh Sound, swimming through the cold black
water more than a mile from the Canadian shore. Its retinas burned red in the
blinding beam; it looked exhausted and crazed with fear. I swung the wheel to
starboard, the boat slid past, and the deer bobbed twice in our wake before
vanishing into the darkness.
Most of the Inside Passage follows narrow, fjordlike channels. As we passed
Dundas Island, though, the vista suddenly widened. To the west now was open
ocean, the full sweep of the Pacific, and the boat pitched and rolled on a
twelve-foot westerly swell. Waves broke over the rail. In the distance off the
starboard bow, a jumble of low, craggy peaks appeared, and my pulse quickened
at the sight. Those mountains heralded the approach of my desideratum. We had
arrived in Alaska.
Five days out of Gig Harbor, the Ocean Queen docked in Petersburg to take on
fuel and water. I hopped over the gunwale, shouldered my heavy backpack, and
walked down the pier in the rain. At a loss for what to do next, I took refuge
under the eaves of the town library and sat on my load.
Petersburg is a small town, and prim by Alaska standards. A tall, loose-limbed
woman walked by and struck up a conversation. Her name was Kai, she said, Kai
Sandburn. She was cheerful, outgoing, easy to talk to. I confessed my climbing
plans to her, and to my relief she neither laughed nor acted as though they were
particularly strange. “When the weather’s clear,” she simply offered, “you can
see the Thumb from town. It’s pretty. It’s over there, right across Frederick
Sound.” I followed her outstretched arm, which gestured to the east, at a low
wall of clouds.
Kai invited me home for dinner. Later I unrolled my sleeping bag on her floor.
Long after she fell asleep, I lay awake in the next room, listening to her peaceful
exhalations. I had convinced myself for many months that I didn’t really mind the
absence of intimacy in my life, the lack of real human connection, but the
pleasure I’d felt in this woman’s company—the ring of her laughter, the innocent
touch of a hand on my arm—exposed my self-deceit and left me hollow and
aching.
Petersburg lies on an island; the Devils Thumb is on the mainland, rising from
a frozen bald known as the Stikine Ice Cap. Vast and labyrinthine, the ice cap
rides the spine of the Boundary Ranges like a carapace, from which the long blue
tongues of numerous glaciers inch down toward the sea under the weight of the
ages. To reach the foot of the mountain, I had to find a ride across twenty-five
miles of saltwater and then ski thirty miles up one of these glaciers, the Baird, a
valley of ice that hadn’t seen a human footprint, I was fairly certain, in many,
many years.
I shared a ride with some tree planters to the head of Thomas Bay, where I
was put ashore on a gravel beach. The broad, rubble-strewn terminus of the
glacier was visible a mile away. Half an hour later I scrambled up its frozen snout
and began the long plod to the Thumb. The ice was bare of snow and embedded
with a coarse black grit that crunched beneath the steel points of my crampons.
After three or four miles I came to the snow line and there exchanged
crampons for skis. Putting the boards on my feet cut fifteen pounds from the
awful load on my back and made the going faster besides. But the snow
concealed many of the glaciers crevasses, increasing the danger.
In Seattle, anticipating this hazard, I’d stopped at a hardware store and
purchased a pair of stout aluminum curtain rods, each ten feet long. I lashed the
rods together to form a cross, then strapped the rig to the hip belt of my
backpack so the poles extended horizontally over the snow. Staggering slowly up
the glacier beneath my overloaded pack, bearing this ridiculous metal cross, I
felt like an odd sort ofpenitente. Were I to break through the veneer of snow
over a hidden crevasse, though, the curtain rods would—I hoped mightily—span
the slot and keep me from dropping into the frozen depths of the Baird.
For two days I slogged steadily up the valley of ice. The weather was good,
the route obvious and without major obstacles. Because I was alone, however,
even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and
more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering
over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than
they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions
were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were
deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding
drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
Three days after leaving Petersburg, I arrived beneath the Stikine Ice Cap
proper, where the long arm of the Baird joins the main body of ice. Here the
glacier spills abruptly over the edge of a high plateau, dropping seaward through
a gap between two mountains in a phantasmagoria of shattered ice. As I stared
at the tumult from a mile away, for the first time since leaving Colorado, I was
truly afraid.
The icefall was crisscrossed with crevasses and tottering se-racs. From afar it
brought to mind a bad train wreck, as if scores of ghostly white boxcars had
derailed at the lip of the ice cap and tumbled down the slope willy-nilly. The
closer I got, the more unpleasant it looked. My ten-foot curtain rods seemed a
poor defense against crevasses that were forty feet across and hundreds of feet
deep. Before I could plot a logical course through the icefall, the wind came up,
and snow began to slant hard out of the clouds, stinging my face and reducing
visibility to almost nothing.
For the better part of the day, I groped blindly through the labyrinth in the
whiteout, retracing my steps from one dead end to another. Time after time I’d
think I’d found a way out, only to wind up in a deep-blue cul-de-sac or stranded
atop a detached pillar of ice. My efforts were lent a sense of urgency by the
noises emanating from beneath my feet. A madrigal of creaks and sharp reports—
the sort of protest a large fir limb makes when it’s slowly bent to the breaking
point—served as a reminder that it is the nature of glaciers to move, the habit of
seracs to topple.
I put a foot through a snow bridge spanning a slot so deep I couldn’t see the
bottom of it. A little later I broke through another bridge to my waist; the poles
kept me out of the hundred-foot crevasse, but after I extricated myself, I bent
double with dry heaves, thinking about what it would be like to be lying in a pile
at the bottom of the crevasse, waiting for death to come, with nobody aware of
how or where I’d met my end.
Night had nearly fallen by the time I emerged from the top of the serac slope
onto the empty, wind-scoured expanse of the high glacial plateau. In shock and
chilled to the core, I skied far enough past the icefall to put its rumblings out of
earshot, pitched the tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and shivered myself into
a fitful sleep.
I had planned on spending between three weeks and a month on the Stikine
Ice Cap. Not relishing the prospect of carrying a four-week load of food, heavy
winter camping gear, and climbing hardware all the way up the Baird on my
back, I had paid a bush pilot in Petersburg $150—the last of my cash—to have six
cardboard cartons of supplies dropped from an airplane when I reached the foot
of the Thumb. On his map I’d showed the pilot exactly where I intended to be
and told him to give me three days to get there; he promised to fly over and
make the drop as soon thereafter as the weather permitted.
On May 6,1 set up a base camp on the ice cap just northeast of the Thumb
and waited for the airdrop. For the next four days it snowed, nixing any chance
for a flight. Too terrified of crevasses to wander far from camp, I spent most of
my time recumbent in the tent—the ceiling was too low to allow my sitting
upright— fighting a rising chorus of doubts.
As the days passed, I grew increasingly anxious. I had no radio nor any other
means of communicating with the outside world. It had been many years since
anyone had visited this part of the Stikine Ice Cap, and many more would likely
pass before anyone would again. I was nearly out of stove fuel and down to a
single chunk of cheese, my last package of Ramen noodles, and half a box of
Cocoa Puffs. This, I figured, could sustain me for three or four more days if need
be, but then what would I do? It would take only two days to ski back down the
Baird to Thomas Bay, but a week or more might easily pass before a fisherman
happened by who could give me a lift back to Petersburg (the tree planters with
whom I’d ridden over were camped fifteen miles down the impassable headlandstudded
coast and could be reached only by boat or plane).
When I went to bed on the evening of May 10, it was still snowing and blowing
hard. Hours later I heard a faint, momentary whine, scarcely louder than a
mosquito. I tore open the tent door. Most of the clouds had lifted, but there was
no airplane in sight.
The whine returned, more insistently this time. Then I saw it: a tiny red-andwhite
fleck high in the western sky, droning my way.
A few minutes later the plane passed directly overhead. The pilot, however,
was unaccustomed to glacier flying, and he’d badly misjudged the scale of the
terrain. Worried about flying too low and getting nailed by unexpected
turbulence, he stayed at least a thousand feet above me—believing all the while
he was just off the deck—and never saw my tent in the flat evening light. My
waving and screaming were to no avail; from his altitude, I was indistinguishable
from a pile of rocks. For the next hour he circled the ice cap, scanning its barren
contours without success. But the pilot, to his credit, appreciated the gravity of
my predicament and didn’t give up. Frantic, I tied my sleeping bag to the end of
one of the curtain rods and waved it for all I was worth. The plane banked
sharply and headed straight at me.
The pilot buzzed my tent three times in quick succession, dropping two boxes
on each pass; then the airplane disappeared over a ridge, and I was alone. As
silence again settled over the glacier, I felt abandoned, vulnerable, lost. I
realized that I was sobbing. Embarrassed, I halted the blubbering by screaming
obscenities until I grew hoarse.
I awoke early on May 11 to clear skies and the relatively warm temperature of
twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Startled by the good weather, mentally unprepared
to commence the actual climb, I hurriedly packed up a rucksack nonetheless and
began skiing toward the base of the Thumb. Two previous Alaska expeditions had
taught me that I couldn’t afford to waste a rare day of perfect weather.
A small hanging glacier extends out from the lip of the ice cap, leading up
and across the north face of the Thumb like a catwalk. My plan was to follow this
catwalk to a prominent rock prow in the center of the wall and thereby execute
an end run around the ugly, avalanche-swept lower half of the face.
The catwalk turned out to be a series of fifty-degree ice fields blanketed with
knee-deep powder snow and riddled with crevasses. The depth of the snow made
the going slow and exhausting; by the time I front-pointed up the overhanging
wall of the uppermost bergschrund, some three or four hours after leaving camp,
I was thrashed. And I hadn’t even gotten to the real climbing yet. That would
begin immediately above, where the hanging glacier gives way to vertical rock.
The rock, exhibiting a dearth of holds and coated with six inches of crumbly
rime, did not look promising, but just left of the main prow was a shallow corner
glazed with frozen meltwa-ter. This ribbon of ice led straight up for three
hundred feet, and if the ice proved substantial enough to support the picks of my
ice axes, the route might be feasible. I shuffled over to the bottom of the corner
and gingerly swung one of my tools into the two-inch-thick ice. Solid and plastic,
it was thinner than I would have liked but otherwise encouraging.
The climbing was steep and so exposed it made my head spin. Beneath my
Vibram soles the wall fell away for three thousand feet to the dirty, avalanchescarred
cirque of the Witches Cauldron Glacier. Above, the prow soared with
authority toward the summit ridge, a vertical half mile above. Each time I
planted one of my ice axes, that distance shrank by another twenty inches.
All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two
thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen
water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a
difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss
pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t
dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on
edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb
goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing
shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and
feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.
By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer
notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop
concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a
clear-eyed dream.
Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-today existence—
the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust
under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily
forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose
and by the seriousness of the task at hand.
At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest,
but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing
the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the
most reliable adhesive. Late in the day on the north face of the Thumb, I felt the
glue disintegrate with a swing of an ice ax.
I’d gained nearly seven hundred feet of altitude since stepping off the
hanging glacier, all of it on crampon front points and the picks of my axes. The
ribbon of frozen meltwater had ended three hundred feet up and was followed
by a crumbly armor of frost feathers. Though just barely substantial enough to
support body weight, the rime was plastered over the rock to a thickness of two
or three feet, so I kept plugging upward. The wall, however, had been growing
imperceptibly steeper, and as it did so, the frost feathers became thinner. I’d
fallen into a slow, hypnotic rhythm—swing, swing; kick, kick; swing, swing; kick,
kick— when my left ice ax slammed into a slab of diorite a few inches beneath
the rime.
I tried left, then right, but kept striking rock. The frost feathers holding me
up, it became apparent, were maybe five inches thick and had the structural
integrity of stale corn bread. Below was thirty-seven hundred feet of air, and I
was balanced on a house of cards. The sour taste of panic rose in my throat. My
eyesight blurred, I began to hyperventilate, my calves started to shake. I shuffled
a few feet farther to the right, hoping to find thicker ice, but managed only to
bend an ice ax on the rock.
Awkwardly, stiff with fear, I started working my way back down. The rime
gradually thickened. After descending about eighty feet, I got back on reasonably
solid ground. I stopped for a long time to let my nerves settle, then leaned back
from my tools and stared up at the face above, searching for a hint of solid ice,
for some variation in the underlying rock strata, for anything that would allow
passage over the frosted slabs. I looked until my neck ached, but nothing
appeared. The climb was over. The only place to go was down.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE STIKINE ICE CAP
But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in
us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the
judgement forbid as it may.
JOHN MUIR, THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
But have you noticed the slight curl at the end of Sam H’s mouth, when
he looks at you? It means that he didn’t want you to name him Sam II, for
one thing, and for two other things it means that he has a sawed-offin his
left pant leg, and a baling hook in his right pant leg, and is ready to kill you
with either one of them, given the opportunity. The father is taken aback.
What he usually says, in such a confrontation, is “I changed your diapers
for you, little snot.” This is not the right thing to say. First, it is not true
(mothers change nine diapers out of ten), and second, it instantly reminds
Sam II of what he is mad about. He is mad about being small when you
were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you
were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent
when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved
you, you didn’t notice.
DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER
After coming down from the side of the Devils Thumb, heavy snow and high
winds kept me inside the tent for most of the next three days. The hours passed
slowly. In the attempt to hurry them along, I chain-smoked for as long as my
supply of cigarettes held out, and I read. When I ran out of reading matter, I was
reduced to studying the ripstop pattern woven into the tent ceiling. This I did for
hours on end, flat on my back, while engaging in a heated self-debate: Should I
leave for the coast as soon as the weather broke, or should I stay put long
enough to make another attempt on the mountain?
In truth my escapade on the north face had rattled me, and I didn’t want to
go up on the Thumb again at all. But the thought of returning to Boulder in
defeat wasn’t very appealing, either. I could all too easily picture the smug
expressions of condolence I’d receive from those who’d been certain of my
failure from the get-go.
By the third afternoon of the storm, I couldn’t stand it any longer: the lumps
of frozen snow poking me in the back, the clammy nylon walls brushing against
my face, the incredible smell drifting up from the depths of my sleeping bag. I
pawed through the mess at my feet until I located a small green sack, in which
there was a metal film can containing the makings of what I’d hoped would be a
sort of victory cigar. I’d intended to save it for my return from the summit, but
what the hey—it wasn’t looking like I’d be visiting the top anytime soon. I poured
most of the can’s contents onto a leaf of cigarette paper, rolled it into a crooked
joint, and promptly smoked it down to the roach.
The marijuana of course only made the tent seem even more cramped, more
suffocating, more impossible to bear. It also made me terribly hungry. I decided
a little oatmeal would put things right. Making it, however, was a long,
ridiculously involved process: A potful of snow had to be gathered outside in the
tempest, the stove assembled and lit, the oatmeal and sugar located, the
remnants of yesterday’s dinner scraped from my bowl. I’d gotten the stove going
and was melting the snow when I smelled something burning. A thorough check
of the stove and its environs revealed nothing. Mystified, I was ready to chalk it
up to my chemically enhanced imagination when I heard something crackle at my
back.
I spun around in time to see a bag of garbage—into which I’d tossed the match
I’d used to light the stove—flare into a small conflagration. Beating on the fire
with my hands, I had it out in a few seconds, but not before a large section of
the tent’s inner wall vaporized before my eyes. The built-in fly escaped the
flames, so it was still more or less weatherproof; now, however, it was
approximately thirty degrees colder inside.
My left palm began to sting. Examining it, I noticed the pink welt of a burn.
What troubled me most, though, was that the tent wasn’t even mine: I’d
borrowed the expensive shelter from my father. It was new before my trip—the
hangtags had still been attached—and had been lent reluctantly. For several
minutes I sat dumbstruck, staring at the wreckage of the tent’s once-graceful
form amid the acrid scent of singed hair and melted nylon. You had to hand it to
me, I thought: I had a knack for living up to the old man’s worst expectations.
My father was a volatile, extremely complicated person, possessed of a brash
demeanor that masked deep insecurities. If he ever in his entire life admitted to
being wrong, I wasn’t there to witness it. But it was my father, a weekend
mountaineer, who taught me to climb. He bought me my first rope and ice ax
when I was eight years old and led me into the Cascade Range to make an assault
on the South Sister, a gentle ten-thousand-foot volcano not far from our Oregon
home. It never occurred to him that I would one day try to shape my life around
climbing.
A kind and generous man, Lewis Krakauer loved his five children deeply, in
the autocratic way of fathers, but his worldview was colored by a relentlessly
competitive nature. Life, as he saw it, was a contest. He read and reread the
works of Stephen Potter—the English writer who coined the terms one-upmanship
and gamesmanship—not as social satire but as a manual of practical stratagems.
He was ambitious in the extreme, and like Walt McCandless, his aspirations
extended to his progeny.
Before I’d even enrolled in kindergarten, he began preparing me for a shining
career in medicine—or, failing that, law as a poor consolation. For Christmas and
birthdays I received such gifts as a microscope, a chemistry set, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. From elementary school through high school, my siblings
and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs,
to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government.
Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the
right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life’s one
sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.
My father’s faith in this blueprint was unshakable. It was, after all, the path
he had followed to prosperity. But I was not a clone of my father. During my
teens, as I came to this realization, I veered gradually from the plotted course,
and then sharply. My insurrection prompted a great deal of yelling. The windows
of our home rattled with the thunder of ultimatums. By the time I left Corvallis,
Oregon, to enroll in a distant college where no ivy grew, I was speaking to my
father with a clenched jaw or not at all. When I graduated four years later and
did not enter Harvard or any other medical school but became a carpenter and
climbing bum instead, the unbridgeable gulf between us widened.
I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for
which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt
oppressed by the old man’s expectations. It was drilled into me that anything
less than winning was failure. In the impressionable way of sons, I did not
consider this rhetorically; I took him at his word. And that’s why later, when
long-held family secrets came to light, when I noticed that this deity who asked
only for perfection was himself less than perfect, that he was in fact not a deity
at all—well, I wasn’t able to shrug it off. I was consumed instead by a blinding
rage. The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond
my power to forgive.
Two decades after the fact I discovered that my rage was gone, and had been
for years. It had been supplanted by a rueful sympathy and something not unlike
affection. I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at
least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish
and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He’d built a bridge of privilege for
me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down
and crapping on the wreckage.
But this epiphany occurred only after the intervention of time and
misfortune, when my fathers self-satisfied existence had begun to crumble
beneath him. It began with the betrayal of his flesh: Thirty years after a bout
with polio, the symptoms mysteriously flared anew. Crippled muscles withered
further, synapses wouldn’t fire, wasted legs refused to ambulate. From medical
journals he deduced that he was suffering from a newly identified ailment known
as post-polio syndrome. Pain, excruciating at times, filled his days like a shrill
and constant noise.
In an ill-advised attempt to halt the decline, he started medicating himself.
He never went anywhere without a faux leather valise stuffed with dozens of
orange plastic pill bottles. Every hour or two he would fumble through the drug
bag, squinting at the labels, and shake out tablets of Dexedrine and Prozac and
deprenyl. He gulped pills by the fistful, grimacing, without water. Used syringes
and empty ampoules appeared on the bathroom sink. To a greater and greater
degree his life revolved around a self-administered pharmacopoeia of steroids,
amphetamines, mood elevators, and painkillers, and the drugs addled his onceformidable
mind.
As his behavior became more and more irrational, more and more delusional,
the last of his friends were driven away. My long-suffering mother finally had no
choice but to move out. My father crossed the line into madness and then very
nearly succeeded in taking his own life—an act at which he made sure I was
present.
After the suicide attempt he was placed in a psychiatric hospital near
Portland. When I visited him there, his arms and legs were strapped to the rails
of his bed. He was ranting incoherently and had soiled himself. His eyes were
wild. Flashing in defiance one moment, in uncomprehending terror the next,
they rolled far back in their sockets, giving a clear and chilling view into the
state of his tortured mind. When the nurses tried to change his linens, he
thrashed against his restraints and cursed them, cursed me, cursed the fates.
That his foolproof life plan had in the end transported him here, to this
nightmarish station, was an irony that brought me no pleasure and escaped his
notice altogether.
There was another irony he failed to appreciate: His struggle to mold me in
his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill
in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an
unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as
medical school, only different.
I suppose it was this inherited, off-kilter ambition that kept me from
admitting defeat on the Stikine Ice Cap after my initial attempt to climb the
Thumb had failed, even after nearly burning the tent down. Three days after
retreating from my first try, I went up on the north face again. This time I
climbed only 120 feet above the bergschrund before lack of composure and the
arrival of a snow squall forced me to turn around.
Instead of descending to my base camp on the ice cap, though, I decided to
spend the night on the steep flank of the mountain, just below my high point.
This proved to be a mistake. By late afternoon the squall had metastasized into
another major storm. Snow fell from the clouds at the rate of an inch an hour. As
I crouched inside my bivouac sack under the lip of the bergschrund, spindrift
avalanches hissed down from the wall above and washed over me like surf,
slowly burying my ledge.
It took about twenty minutes for the spindrift to inundate my bivvy sack—a
thin nylon envelope shaped exactly like a Baggies sandwich bag, only bigger—to
the level of the breathing slit. Four times this happened, and four times I dug
myself out. After the fifth burial, I’d had enough. I threw all my gear into my
pack and made a break for the base camp.
The descent was terrifying. Because of the clouds, the ground blizzard, and
the flat, fading light, I couldn’t tell slope from sky. I worried, with ample reason,
that I might step blindly off the top of a serac and end up at the bottom of the
Witches Cauldron, a vertical half mile below. When I finally arrived on the frozen
plain of the ice cap, I found that my tracks had long since drifted over.
I didn’t have a clue as to how to locate the tent on the featureless glacial
plateau. Hoping I’d get lucky and stumble across my camp, I skied in circles for
an hour—until I put a foot into a small crevasse and realized that I was acting like
an idiot—that I should hunker down right where I was and wait out the storm.
I dug a shallow hole, wrapped myself in the bivvy bag, and sat on my pack in
the swirling snow. Drifts piled up around me. My feet became numb. A damp chill
crept down my chest from the base of my neck, where spindrift had gotten inside
my parka and soaked my shirt. If only I had a cigarette, I thought, a single cigarette,
I could summon the strength of character to put a good face on this
fucked-up situation, on the whole fucked-up trip. I pulled the bivvy sack tighter
around my shoulders. The wind ripped at my back. Beyond shame, I cradled my
head in my arms and embarked on an orgy of self-pity.
I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of
twenty-three, personal mortality—the idea of my own death—was still largely
outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Boulder for Alaska, my
head swimming with visions of glory and redemption on the Devils Thumb, it
didn’t occur to me that I might be bound by the same cause-and-effect
relationships that governed the actions of others. Because I wanted to climb the
mountain so badly, because I had thought about the Thumb so intensely for so
long, it seemed beyond the realm of possibility that some minor obstacle like the
weather or crevasses or rime-covered rock might ultimately thwart my will.
At sunset the wind died, and the ceiling lifted 150 feet off the glacier,
enabling me to locate my base camp. I made it back to the tent intact, but it
was no longer possible to ignore the fact that the Thumb had made hash of my
plans. I was forced to acknowledge that volition alone, however powerful, was
not going to get me up the north wall. I saw, finally, that nothing was.
There still existed an opportunity for salvaging the expedition, however. A
week earlier I’d skied over to the southeast side of the mountain to take a look
at the route by which I’d intended to descend the peak after climbing the north
wall, a route that Fred Beckey, the legendary alpinist, had followed in 1946 in
making the first ascent of the Thumb. During my reconnaissance, I’d noticed an
obvious unclimbed line to the left of the Beckey route— a patchy network of ice
angling across the southeast face—that struck me as a relatively easy way to
achieve the summit. At the time, I’d considered this route unworthy of my
attentions. Now, on the rebound from my calamitous entanglement with the
nord-wand, I was prepared to lower my sights.
On the afternoon of May 15, when the blizzard finally abated, I returned to
the southeast face and climbed to the top of a slender ridge that abuts the upper
peak like a flying buttress on a Gothic cathedral. I decided to spend the night
there, on the narrow crest, sixteen hundred feet below the summit. The evening
sky was cold and cloudless. I could see all the way to tidewater and beyond. At
dusk I watched, transfixed, as the lights of Petersburg blinked on in the west.
The closest thing I’d had to human contact since the airdrop, the distant lights
triggered a flood of emotion that caught me off guard. I imagined people
watching baseball on television, eating fried chicken in brightly lit kitchens,
drinking beer, making love. When I lay down to sleep, I was overcome by a
wrenching loneliness. I’d never felt so alone, ever.
That night I had troubled dreams, of a police bust and vampires and a
gangland-style execution. I heard someone whisper, “I think he’s in there....” I
sat bolt upright and opened my eyes. The sun was about to rise. The entire sky
was scarlet. It was still clear, but a thin, wispy scum of cirrus had spread across
the upper atmosphere, and a dark line of squalls was visible just above the
southwestern horizon. I pulled on my boots and hurriedly strapped on my
crampons. Five minutes after waking up, I was climbing away from the bivouac.
I carried no rope, no tent or bivouac gear, no hardware save my ice axes. My
plan was to go light and fast, to reach the summit and make it back down before
the weather turned. Pushing myself, continually out of breath, I scurried up and
to the left, across small snowfields linked by ice-choked clefts and short rock
steps. The climbing was almost fun—the rock was covered with large, incut
holds, and the ice, though thin, never got steeper than seventy degrees—but I
was anxious about the storm front racing in from the Pacific, darkening the sky.
I didn’t have a watch, but in what seemed like a very short time, I was on the
distinctive final ice field. By now the entire sky was smeared with clouds. It
looked easier to keep angling to the left but quicker to go straight for the top.
Anxious about being caught by a storm high on the peak and without shelter, I
opted for the direct route. The ice steepened and thinned. I swung my left ice ax
and struck rock. I aimed for another spot, and once again it glanced off
unyielding diorite with a dull clank. And again, and again. It was a reprise of my
first attempt on the north face. Looking between my legs, I stole a glance at the
glacier more than two thousand feet below. My stomach churned.
Forty-five feet above me the wall eased back onto the sloping summit
shoulder. I clung stiffly to my axes, unmoving, racked by terror and indecision.
Again I looked down at the long drop to the glacier, then up, then scraped away
the patina of ice above my head. I hooked the pick of my left ax on a nickel-thin
lip of rock and weighted it. It held. I pulled my right ax from the ice, reached up,
and twisted the pick into a crooked half-inch fissure until it jammed. Barely
breathing now, I moved my feet up, scrabbling my crampon points across the
verglas. Reaching as high as I could with my left arm, I swung the ax gently at
the shiny, opaque surface, not knowing what I’d hit beneath it. The pick went in
with a solid whunk! A few minutes later I was standing on a broad ledge. The
summit proper, a slender rock fin sprouting a grotesque meringue of atmospheric
ice, stood twenty feet directly above.
The insubstantial frost feathers ensured that those last twenty feet remained
hard, scary, onerous. But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt
my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devils Thumb.
Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender
wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage
loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my
right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face
dropped twice that distance. I took some pictures to prove I’d been there and
spent a few minutes trying to straighten a bent pick. Then I stood up, carefully
turned around, and headed for home.
One week later I was camped in the rain beside the sea, marveling at the
sight of moss, willows, mosquitoes. The salt air carried the rich stink of tidal life.
By and by a small skiff motored into Thomas Bay and pulled up on the beach not
far from my tent. The man driving the boat introduced himself as Jim Freeman, a
timber faller from Petersburg. It was his day off, he said; he’d made the trip to
show his family the glacier and to look for bears. He asked me if I’d “been
huntin’, or what?”
“No,” I replied sheepishly. “Actually, I just climbed the Devils Thumb. I’ve
been over here twenty days.”
Freeman fiddled with a deck cleat and said nothing. It became obvious that
he didn’t believe me. Nor did he seem to approve of my snarled, shoulder-length
hair or the way I smelled after having gone three weeks without bathing or
changing my clothes. When I asked if he could give me a lift back to town,
however, he offered a grudging “I don’t see why not.”
The water was choppy, and the ride across Frederick Sound took two hours.
Freeman gradually warmed to me as we talked. He still wasn’t convinced I’d
climbed the Thumb, but by the time he steered the skiff into Wrangell Narrows,
he pretended to be. After docking the boat, he insisted on buying me a
cheeseburger. That evening he invited me to spend the night in a junked step
van parked in his backyard.
I lay down in the rear of the old truck for a while but couldn’t sleep, so I got
up and walked to a bar called Kite’s Kave. The euphoria, the overwhelming sense
of relief, that had initially accompanied my return to Petersburg faded, and an
unexpected melancholy took its place. The people I chatted with in Kito’s didn’t
seem to doubt that I’d been to the top of the Thumb; they just didn’t much care.
As the night wore on, the place emptied except for me and an old, toothless
Tlingit man at a back table. I drank alone, putting quarters into the jukebox,
playing the same five songs over and over until the barmaid yelled angrily, “Hey!
Give it a fucking rest, kid!” I mumbled an apology, headed for the door, and
lurched back to Freeman’s step van. There, surrounded by the sweet scent of old
motor oil, I lay down on the floorboards next to a gutted transmission and passed
out.
Less than a month after sitting on the summit of the Thumb, I was back in
Boulder, nailing up siding on the Spruce Street Townhouses, the same condos I’d
been framing when I left for Alaska. I got a raise, to four bucks an hour, and at
the end of the summer moved out of the job-site trailer to a cheap studio apartment
west of the downtown mall.
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than
what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your
God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris
McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according
to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb
would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed
almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles
for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.
As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most
notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we
were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And
I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of
the soul.
The fact that I survived my Alaska adventure and McCandless did not survive
his was largely a matter of chance; had I not returned from the Stikine Ice Cap in
1977, people would have been quick to say of me—as they now say of him—that I
had a death wish. Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered
from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly; but I wasn’t
suicidal.
At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-
Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn’t yet appreciate its terrible finality or the
havoc it could wreak on those who’d entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I
was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the
edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in
those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some
forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet,
hidden petals of a woman’s sex.
In my case—and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless— that was a very
different thing from wanting to die.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE ALASKA INTERIOR
/ wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage
life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of
civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western
wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man.
The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of
suffering, and the novelty of danger.
ESTWICK EVANS, A PEDESTRIOUS TOUR, OF FOUR THOUSAND MILES, THROUGH THE
WESTERN STATES AND TERRITORIES, DURING THE WINTER AND SPRING OF 1818
Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his
works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage
for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his
own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect
setting for either melancholy or exultation.
RODERICK NASH, WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND
On April 15, 1992, Chris McCandless departed Carthage, South Dakota, in the
cab of a Mack truck hauling a load of sunflower seeds: His “great Alaskan
odyssey” was under way. Three days later he crossed the Canadian border at
Roosville, British Columbia, and thumbed north through Skookumchuck and Radium
Junction, Lake Louise and Jasper, Prince George and Daw-son Creek—
where, in the town center, he took a snapshot of the signpost marking the
official start of the Alaska Highway. MILE “0,” the sign reads, FAIRBANKS 1,523 MILES.
Hitchhiking tends to be difficult on the Alaska Highway. It’s not unusual, on
the outskirts of Dawson Creek, to see a dozen or more doleful-looking men and
women standing along the shoulder with extended thumbs. Some of them may
wait a week or more between rides. But McCandless experienced no such delay.
On April 21, just six days out of Carthage, he arrived at Liard River Hotsprings, at
the threshold of the Yukon Territory.
There is a public campground at Liard River, from which a boardwalk leads
half a mile across a marsh to a series of natural thermal pools. It is the most
popular way-stop on the Alaska Highway, and McCandless decided to pause there
for a soak in the soothing waters. When he finished bathing and attempted to
catch another ride north, however, he discovered that his luck had changed.
Nobody would pick him up. Two days after arriving, he was still at Liard River,
impatiently going nowhere.
At six-thirty on a brisk Thursday morning, the ground still frozen hard,
Gaylord Stuckey walked out on the boardwalk to the largest of the pools,
expecting to have the place to himself. He was surprised, therefore, to find
someone already in the steaming water, a young man who introduced himself as
Alex.
Stuckey—bald and cheerful, a ham-faced sixty-three-year-old Hoosier—was en
route from Indiana to Alaska to deliver a new motor home to a Fairbanks RV
dealer, a part-time line of work in which he’d dabbled since retiring after forty
years in the restaurant business. When he told McCandless his destination, the
boy exclaimed, “Hey, that’s where I’m going, too! But I’ve been stuck here for a
couple of days now, trying to get a lift. You mind if I ride with you?”
“Oh, jiminy,” Stuckey replied. “I’d love to, son, but I can’t. The company I
work for has a strict rule against picking up hitchhikers. It could get me canned.”
As he chatted with McCandless through the sulfurous mist, though, Stuckey began
to reconsider: “Alex was clean-shaven and had short hair, and I could tell by the
language he used that he was a real sharp fella. He wasn’t what you’d call a
typical hitchhiker. I’m usually leery of ‘em. I figure there’s probably something
wrong with a guy if he can’t even afford a bus ticket. So anyway, after about half
an hour I said, ‘I tell you what, Alex: Liard is a thousand miles from Fairbanks.
I’ll take you five hundred miles, as far as Whitehorse; you’ll be able to get a ride
the rest of the way from there.’”
A day and a half later, however, when they arrived in White-horse—the
capital of the Yukon Territory and the largest, most cosmopolitan town on the
Alaska Highway—Stuckey had come to enjoy McCandless’s company so much that
he changed his mind and agreed to drive the boy the entire distance. “Alex
didn’t come out and say too much at first,” Stuckey reports. “But it’s a long,
slow drive. We spent a total of three days together on those washboard roads,
and by the end he kind of let his guard down. I tell you what: He was a dandy
kid. Real courteous, and he didn’t cuss or use a lot of that there slang. You could
tell he came from a nice family. Mostly he talked about his sister. He didn’t get
along with his folks too good, I guess. Told me his dad was a genius, a NASA
rocket scientist, but he’d been a bigamist at one time—and that kind of went
against Alex’s grain. Said he hadn’t seen his parents in a couple of years, since
his college graduation.”
McCandless was candid with Stuckey about his intent to spend the summer
alone in the bush, living off the land. “He said it was something he’d wanted to
do since he was little,” says Stuckey. “Said he didn’t want to see a single person,
no airplanes, no sign of civilization. He wanted to prove to himself that he could
make it on his own, without anybody else’s help.”
Stuckey and McCandless arrived in Fairbanks on the afternoon of April 25. The
older man took the boy to a grocery store, where he bought a big bag of rice,
“and then Alex said he wanted to go out to the university to study up on what
kind of plants he could eat. Berries and things like that. I told him, ‘Alex, you’re
too early. There’s still two foot, three foot of snow on the ground. There’s
nothing growing yet.’ But his mind was pretty well made up. He was champing at
the bit to get out there and start hiking.”
Stuckey drove to the University of Alaska campus, on the west end of
Fairbanks, and dropped McCandless off at 5:30 P.M.
“Before I let him out,” Stuckey says, “I told him, ‘Alex, I’ve driven you a
thousand miles. I’ve fed you and fed you for three straight days. The least you
can do is send me a letter when you get back from Alaska.’ And he promised he
would.
“I also begged and pleaded with him to call his parents. I can’t imagine
anything worse than having a son out there and not knowing where he’s at for
years and years, not knowing whether he’s living or dead. ‘Here’s my credit card
number,’ I told him. ‘Please call them!’ But all he said was ‘Maybe I will and
maybe I won’t.’ After he left, I thought, ‘Oh, why didn’t I get his parents’ phone
number and call them myself?’ But everything just kind of happened so quick.”
After dropping McCandless at the university, Stuckey drove into town to
deliver the RV to the appointed dealer, only to be told that the person
responsible for checking in new vehicles had already gone home for the day and
wouldn’t be back until Monday morning, leaving Stuckey with two days to kill in
Fairbanks before he could fly home to Indiana. On Sunday morning, with time on
his hands, he returned to the campus. “I hoped to find Alex and spend another
day with him, take him sightseeing or something. I looked for a couple of hours,
drove all over the place, but didn’t see hide or hair of him. He was already
gone.”
After taking his leave of Stuckey on Saturday evening, McCandless spent two
days and three nights in the vicinity of Fairbanks, mostly at the university. In the
campus book store, tucked away on the bottom shelf of the Alaska section, he
came across a scholarly, exhaustively researched field guide to the region’s
edible plants, Tanaina Plantlore/Dena’ina K’et’una: An Ethnobotany of the
Dena’ina Indians of Southcentral Alaska by Priscilla Russell Kari. From a postcard
rack near the cash register, he picked out two cards of a polar bear, on which he
sent his final messages to Wayne Westerberg and Jan Burres from the university
post office.
Perusing the classified ads, McCandless found a used gun to buy, a
semiautomatic .22-caliber Remington with a 4-x-20 scope and a plastic stock. A
model called the Nylon 66, no longer in production, it was a favorite of Alaska
trappers because of its light weight and reliability. He closed the deal in a
parking lot, probably paying about $125 for the weapon, and then purchased four
one-hundred-round boxes of hollow-point long-rifle shells from a nearby gun
shop.
At the conclusion of his preparations in Fairbanks, McCandless loaded up his
pack and started hiking west from the university. Leaving the campus, he walked
past the Geophysical Institute, a tall glass-and-concrete building capped with a
large satellite dish. The dish, one of the most distinctive landmarks on the
Fairbanks skyline, had been erected to collect data from satellites equipped with
synthetic aperture radar of Walt McCandless’s design. Walt had in fact visited
Fairbanks during the start-up of the receiving station and had written some of
the software crucial to its operation. If the Geophysical Institute prompted Chris
to think of his father as he tramped by, the boy left no record of it.
Four miles west of town, in the evening’s deepening chill, McCandless pitched
his tent on a patch of hard-frozen ground surrounded by birch trees, not far from
the crest of a bluff overlooking Gold Hill Gas & Liquor. Fifty yards from his camp
was the terraced road cut of the George Parks Highway, the road that would take
him to the Stampede Trail. He woke early on the morning of April 28, walked
down to the highway in the predawn gloaming, and was pleasantly surprised
when the first vehicle to come along pulled over to give him a lift. It was a gray
Ford pickup with a bumper sticker on the back that declared, i FISH THEREFORE i AM.
PETERSBURG, ALASKA. The driver of the truck, an electrician on his way to
Anchorage, wasn’t much older than McCandless. He said his name was Jim
Gallien.
Three hours later Gallien turned his truck west off the highway and drove as
far as he could down an unplowed side road. When he dropped McCandless off on
the Stampede Trail, the temperature was in the low thirties—it would drop into
the low teens at night—and a foot and a half of crusty spring snow covered the
ground. The boy could hardly contain his excitement. He was, at long last, about
to be alone in the vast Alaska wilds.
As he trudged expectantly down the trail in a fake-fur parka, his rifle slung
over one shoulder, the only food McCandless carried was a ten-pound bag of
long-grained rice—and the two sandwiches and bag of corn chips that Gallien had
contributed. A year earlier he’d subsisted for more than a month beside the Gulf
of California on five pounds of rice and a bounty of fish caught with a cheap rod
and reel, an experience that made him confident he could harvest enough food
to survive an extended stay in the Alaska wilderness, too.
The heaviest item in McCandless’s half-full backpack was his library: nine or
ten paperbound books, most of which had been given to him by Jan Burres in
Niland. Among these volumes were titles by Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gogol, but
McCandless was no literary snob: He simply carried what he thought he might
enjoy reading, including mass-market books by Michael Crichton, Robert Pirsig,
and Louis L’Amour. Having neglected to pack writing paper, he began a laconic
journal on some blank pages in the back of Tanaina Plantlore.
The Healy terminus of the Stampede Trail is traveled by a handful of dog
mushers, ski tourers, and snow-machine enthusiasts during the winter months,
but only until the frozen rivers begin to break up, in late March or early April. By
the time McCandless headed into the bush, there was open water flowing on
most of the larger streams, and nobody had been very far down the trail for two
or three weeks; only the faint remnants of a packed snow-machine track
remained for him to follow.
McCandless reached the Teklanika River his second day out. Although the
banks were lined with a jagged shelf of frozen overflow, no ice bridges spanned
the channel of open water, so he was forced to wade. There had been a big thaw
in early April, and breakup had come early in 1992, but the weather had turned
cold again, so the river’s volume was quite low when McCandless crossed—
probably thigh-deep at most—allowing him to splash to the other side without
difficulty. He never suspected that in so doing, he was crossing his Rubicon. To
McCandless’s inexperienced eye, there was nothing to suggest that two months
hence, as the glaciers and snowfields at the Teklanika’s headwater thawed in the
summer heat, its discharge would multiply nine or ten times in volume,
transforming the river into a deep, violent torrent that bore no resemblance to
the gentle brook he’d blithely waded across in April.
From his journal we know that on April 29, McCandless fell through the ice
somewhere. It probably happened as he traversed a series of melting beaver
ponds just beyond the Teklanika’s western bank, but there is nothing to indicate
that he suffered any harm in the mishap. A day later, as the trail crested a ridge,
he got his first glimpse of Mt. McKinley s high, blinding-white bulwarks, and a day
after that, May 1, some twenty miles down the trail from where he was dropped
by Gallien, he stumbled upon the old bus beside the Sushana River. It was
outfitted with a bunk and a barrel stove, and previous visitors had left the
improvised shelter stocked with matches, bug dope, and other essentials. “Magic
Bus Day,” he wrote in his journal. He decided to lay over for a while in the
vehicle and take advantage of its crude comforts.
He was elated to be there. Inside the bus, on a sheet of weathered plywood
spanning a broken window, McCandless scrawled an exultant declaration of
independence:
TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE
FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. ANAESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM
ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ‘CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST. “ AND NOW AFTER TWO
RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE
FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION. TEN DAYS AND
NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER
TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN
THE WILD.
ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY1992
Reality, however, was quick to intrude on McCandless’s reverie. He had
difficulty killing game, and the daily journal entries during his first week in the
bush include “Weakness,” “Snowed in,” and “Disaster.” He saw but did not shoot
a grizzly on May 2, shot at but missed some ducks on May 4, and finally killed and
ate a spruce grouse on May 5; but he didn’t shoot anything else until May 9, when
he bagged a single small squirrel, by which point he’d written “4th day famine”
in the journal.
But soon thereafter his fortunes took a sharp turn for the better. By mid-May
the sun was circling high in the heavens, flooding the taiga with light. The sun
dipped below the northern horizon for fewer than four hours out of every
twenty-four, and at midnight the sky was still bright enough to read by. Everywhere
but on the north-facing slopes and in the shadowy ravines, the snowpack
had melted down to bare ground, exposing the previous season’s rose hips and
lingonberries, which McCandless gathered and ate in great quantity.
He also became much more successful at hunting game and for the next six
weeks feasted regularly on squirrel, spruce grouse, duck, goose, and porcupine.
On May 22, a crown fell off one of his molars, but the event didn’t seem to
dampen his spirits much, because the following day he scrambled up the nameless,
humplike, three-thousand-foot butte that rises directly north of the bus,
giving him a view of the whole icy sweep of the Alaska Range and mile after mile
of uninhabited country. His journal entry for the day is characteristically terse
but unmistakably joyous: “CLIMB MOUNTAIN!”
McCandless had told Gallien that he intended to remain on the move during
his stay in the bush. “I’m just going to take off and keep walking west,” he’d
said. “I might walk all the way to the Bering Sea.” On May 5, after pausing for
four days at the bus, he resumed his perambulation. From the snapshots
recovered with his Minolta, it appears that McCandless lost (or intentionally left)
the by now indistinct Stampede Trail and headed west and north through the hills
above the Sushana River, hunting game as he went.
It was slow going. In order to feed himself, he had to devote a large part of
each day to stalking animals. Moreover, as the ground thawed, his route turned
into a gauntlet of boggy muskeg and impenetrable alder, and McCandless
belatedly came to appreciate one of the fundamental (if counterintuitive) axioms
of the North: winter, not summer, is the preferred season for traveling overland
through the bush.
Faced with the obvious folly of his original ambition, to walk five hundred
miles to tidewater, he reconsidered his plans. On May 19, having traveled no
farther west than the Toklat River— less than fifteen miles beyond the bus—he
turned around. A week later he was back at the derelict vehicle, apparently
without regret. He’d decided that the Sushana drainage was plenty wild to suit
his purposes and that Fairbanks bus 142 would make a fine base camp for the
remainder of the summer.
Ironically, the wilderness surrounding the bus—the patch of overgrown
country where McCandless was determined “to become lost in the wild”—
scarcely qualifies as wilderness by Alaska standards. Less than thirty miles to the
east is a major thoroughfare, the George Parks Highway. Just sixteen miles to
the south, beyond an escarpment of the Outer Range, hundreds of tourists
rumble daily into Denali Park over a road patrolled by the National Park Service.
And unbeknownst to the Aesthetic Voyager, scattered within a six-mile radius of
the bus are four cabins (although none happened to be occupied during the
summer of 1992).
But despite the relative proximity of the bus to civilization, for all practical
purposes McCandless was cut off from the rest of the world. He spent nearly four
months in the bush all told, and during that period he didn’t encounter another
living soul. In the end the Sushana River site was sufficiently remote to cost him
his life.
In the last week of May, after moving his few possessions into the bus,
McCandless wrote a list of housekeeping chores on a parchmentlike strip of birch
bark: collect and store ice from the river for refrigerating meat, cover the
vehicle s missing windows with plastic, lay in a supply of firewood, clean the
accumulation of old ash from the stove. And under the heading “LONG TERM” he
drew up a list of more ambitious tasks: map the area, improvise a bathtub,
collect skins and feathers to sew into clothing, construct a bridge across a nearby
creek, repair mess kit, blaze a network of hunting trails.
The diary entries following his return to the bus catalog a bounty of wild
meat. May 28: “Gourmet Duck!” June 1: “5 Squirrel.” June 2: “Porcupine,
Ptarmigan, 4 Squirrel, Grey Bird.” June 3: “Another Porcupine! 4 Squirrel, 2 Grey
Bird, Ash Bird.” June 4: “A THIRD PORCUPINE! Squirrel, Grey Bird.” On June 5,
he shot a Canada goose as big as a Christmas turkey. Then, on June 9. he bagged
the biggest prize of all: “MOOSE!” he recorded in the journal. Overjoyed, the
proud hunter took a photograph of himself kneeling over his trophy, rifle thrust
triumphantly overhead, his features distorted in a rictus of ecstasy and
amazement, like some unemployed janitor who’d gone to Reno and won a million-
dollar jackpot.
Although McCandless was enough of a realist to know that hunting game was
an unavoidable component of living off the land, he had always been ambivalent
about killing animals. That ambivalence turned to remorse soon after he shot the
moose. It was relatively small, weighing perhaps six hundred or seven hundred
pounds, but it nevertheless amounted to a huge quantity of meat. Believing that
it was morally indefensible to waste any part of an animal that has been shot for
food, McCandless spent six days toiling to preserve what he had killed before it
spoiled. He butchered the carcass under a thick cloud of flies and mosquitoes,
boiled the organs into a stew, and then laboriously excavated a burrow in the
face of the rocky stream bank directly below the bus, in which he tried to cure,
by smoking, the immense slabs of purple flesh.
Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to
slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack. But McCandless, in
his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he’d consulted in South Dakota, who
advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.
“Butchering extremely difficult,” he wrote in the journal on June
10. “Fly and mosquito hordes. Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung,
steaks. Get hindquarters and leg to stream.”
June 11: “Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head. Get rest to
stream. Haul near cave. Try to protect with smoker.”
June 12: “Remove half rib-cage and steaks. Can only work nights. Keep
smokers going.”
June 13: “Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave. Start
smoking.”
June 14: “Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks
like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest
tragedies of my life.”
At that point he gave up on preserving the bulk of the meat and abandoned
the carcass to the wolves. Although he castigated himself severely for this waste
of a life he’d taken, a day later McCandless appeared to regain some
perspective, for his journal notes, “henceforth will learn to accept my errors,
however great they be.”
Shortly after the moose episode McCandless began to read Thoreau’s Walden.
In the chapter titled “Higher Laws,” in which Thoreau ruminates on the morality
of eating, McCandless highlighted, “when I had caught and cleaned and cooked
and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant
and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to.”
“THE MOOSE,” McCandless wrote in the margin. And in the same passage he
marked,
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an
instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects;
and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe
that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic
faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from
animal food, and from much food of any kind....
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend
the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they
should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The
fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor
interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and
it will poison you.
“YES,” wrote McCandless and, two pages later, “Consciousness of food. Eat
and cook with concentration... Holy Food.” On the back pages of the book that
served as his journal, he declared:
I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has just begun.
Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant
attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, examples A job, a
task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no
value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning
resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
Absolute Truth and Honesty.
Reality.
Independence.
Finality—Stability—Consistency.
As McCandless gradually stopped rebuking himself for the waste of the moose,
the contentment that began in mid-May resumed and seemed to continue
through early July. Then, in the midst of this idyll, came the first of two pivotal
setbacks.
Satisfied, apparently, with what he had learned during his two months of
solitary life in the wild, McCandless decided to return to civilization: It was time
to bring his “final and greatest adventure” to a close and get himself back to the
world of men and women, where he could chug a beer, talk philosophy, enthrall
strangers with tales of what he’d done. He seemed to have moved beyond his
need to assert so adamantly his autonomy, his need to separate himself from his
parents. Maybe he was prepared to forgive their imperfections; maybe he was
even prepared to forgive some of his own. McCandless seemed ready, perhaps, to
go home.
Or maybe not; we can do no more than speculate about what he intended to
do after he walked out of the bush. There is no question, however, that he
intended to walk out.
Writing on a piece of birch bark, he made a list of things to do before he
departed: “Patch Jeans, Shave!, Organize pack...” Shortly thereafter he propped
his Minolta on an empty oil drum and took a snapshot of himself brandishing a
yellow disposable razor and grinning at the camera, clean-shaven, with new
patches cut from an army blanket stitched onto the knees of his filthy jeans. He
looks healthy but alarmingly gaunt. Already his cheeks are sunken. The tendons
in his neck stand out like taut cables.
On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoys “Family Happiness,” having
marked several passages that moved him:
He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for
others....
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for
happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being
useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to
have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then
rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness.
And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps—what
more can the heart of a man desire?
Then, on July 3, he shouldered his backpack and began the twenty-mile hike
to the improved road. Two days later, halfway there, he arrived in heavy rain at
the beaver ponds that blocked access to the west bank of the Teklanika River. In
April they’d been frozen over and hadn’t presented an obstacle. Now he must
have been alarmed to find a three-acre lake covering the trail. To avoid having
to wade through the murky chest-deep water, he scrambled up a steep hillside,
bypassed the ponds on the north, and then dropped back down to the river at the
mouth of the gorge.
When he’d first crossed the river, sixty-seven days earlier in the freezing
temperatures of April, it had been an icy but gentle knee-deep creek, and he’d
simply strolled across it. On July 5, however, the Teklanika was at full flood,
swollen with rain and snowmelt from glaciers high in the Alaska Range, running
cold and fast.
If he could reach the far shore, the remainder of the hike to the highway
would be easy, but to get there he would have to negotiate a channel some one
hundred feet wide. The water, opaque with glacial sediment and only a few
degrees warmer than the ice it had so recently been, was the color of wet
concrete. Too deep to wade, it rumbled like a freight train. The powerful
current would quickly knock him off his feet and carry him away.
McCandless was a weak swimmer and had confessed to several people that he
was in fact afraid of the water. Attempting to swim the numbingly cold torrent
or even to paddle some sort of improvised raft across seemed too risky to
consider. Just downstream from where the trail met the river, the Teklanika
erupted into a chaos of boiling whitewater as it accelerated through the narrow
gorge. Long before he could swim or paddle to the far shore, he’d be pulled into
these rapids and drowned.
In his journal he now wrote, “Disaster.... Rained in. River look impossible.
Lonely, scared.” He concluded, correctly, that he would probably be swept to his
death if he attempted to cross the Teklanika at that place, in those conditions. It
would be suicidal; it was simply not an option.
If McCandless had walked a mile or so upstream, he would have discovered
that the river broadened into a maze of braided channels. If he’d scouted
carefully, by trial and error he might have found a place where these braids were
only chest-deep. As strong as the current was running, it would have certainly
knocked him off his feet, but by dog-paddling and hopping along the bottom as
he drifted downstream, he could conceivably have made it across before being
carried into the gorge or succumbing to hypothermia.
But it would still have been a very risky proposition, and at that point
McCandless had no reason to take such a risk. He’d
been fending for himself quite nicely in the country. He probably understood
that if he was patient and waited, the river would eventually drop to a level
where it could be safely forded. After weighing his options, therefore, he settled
on the most prudent course. He turned around and began walking to the west,
back toward the bus, back into the fickle heart of the bush.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked
with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there,
the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of
which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no
man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor
mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh
and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—
to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it
if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast,
terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on,
or to be buried in,— no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie
there,— the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the
presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place of
heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to
the rocks and to wild animals than we... What is it to be admitted to a
museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown
some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my
body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear
not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear
bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me?
Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to
come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!
the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where
are we?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “KTAADN”
A year and a week after Chris McCandless decided not to attempt to cross the
Teklanika River, I stand on the opposite bank—the eastern side, the highway
side—and gaze into the churning water. I, too, hope to cross the river. I want to
visit the bus. I want to see where McCandless died, to better understand why.
It is a hot, humid afternoon, and the river is livid with runoff from the fastmelting
snowpack that still blankets the glaciers in the higher elevations of the
Alaska Range. Today the water looks considerably lower than it looks in the
photographs McCandless took twelve months ago, but to try to ford the river
here, in thundering midsummer flood, is nevertheless unthinkable. The water is
too deep, too cold, too fast. As I stare into the Teklanika, I can hear rocks the
size of bowling balls grinding along the bottom, rolled downstream by the
powerful current. I’d be swept from my feet within a few yards of leaving the
bank and pushed into the canyon immediately below, which pinches the river
into a boil of rapids that continues without interruption for the next five miles.
Unlike McCandless, however, I have in my backpack a 1:63,360-scale
topographic map (that is, a map on which one inch represents one mile).
Exquisitely detailed, it indicates that half a mile downstream, in the throat of
the canyon, is a gauging station that was built by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Unlike McCandless, too, I am here with three companions: Alaskans Roman Dial
and Dan Solie and a friend of Roman’s from California, Andrew Liske. The
gauging station can’t be seen from where the Stampede Trail comes down to the
river, but after twenty minutes of fighting our way through a snarl of spruce and
dwarf birch, Roman shouts, “I see it! There! A hundred yards farther.”
We arrive to find an inch-thick steel cable spanning the gorge, stretched
between a fifteen-foot tower on our side of the river and an outcrop on the far
shore, four hundred feet away. The cable was erected in 1970 to chart the
Teklanika s seasonal fluctuations; hydrologists traveled back and forth above the
river by means of an aluminum basket that is suspended from the cable with
pulleys. From the basket they would drop a weighted plumb line to measure the
river’s depth. The station was decommissioned nine years ago for lack of funds,
at which time the basket was supposed to be chained and locked to the tower on
our side—the highway side—of the river. When we climbed to the top of the
tower, however, the basket wasn’t there. Looking across the rushing water, I
could see it over on the distant shore—the bus side—of the canyon.
Some local hunters, it turns out, had cut the chain, ridden the basket across,
and secured it to the far side in order to make it harder for outsiders to cross the
Teklanika and trespass on their turf. When McCandless tried to walk out of the
bush one year ago the previous week, the basket was in the same place it is now,
on his side of the canyon. If he’d known about it, crossing the Teklanika to safety
would have been a trivial matter. Because he had no topographic map, however,
he had no way of conceiving that salvation was so close at hand.
Andy Horowitz, one of McCandless’s friends on the Woodson High crosscountry
team, had mused that Chris “was born into the wrong century. He was
looking for more adventure and freedom than today’s society gives people.” In
coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country, to find a
blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the
map—not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came
up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his
own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita.
Because he lacked a good map, the cable spanning the river also remained
incognito. Studying the Teklanika’s violent flow, McCandless thus mistakenly
concluded that it was impossible to reach the eastern shore. Thinking that his
escape route had been cut off, he returned to the bus—a reasonable course of
action, given his topographical ignorance. But why did he then stay at the bus
and starve? Why, come August, didn’t he try once more to cross the Teklanika,
when it would have been running significantly lower, when it would have been
safe to ford?
Puzzled by these questions, and troubled, I am hoping that the rusting hulk of
Fairbanks bus 142 will yield some clues. But to reach the bus, I, too, need to
cross the river, and the aluminum tram is still chained to the far shore.
Standing atop the tower anchoring the eastern end of the span, I attach
myself to the cable with rock-climbing hardware and begin to pull myself across,
hand over hand, executing what mountaineers call a Tyrolean traverse. This
turns out to be a more strenuous proposition than I had anticipated. Twenty minutes
after starting out, I finally haul myself Onto the outcrop on the other side,
completely spent, so wasted I can barely raise my arms. After at last catching my
breath, I climb into the basket— a rectangular aluminum car two feet wide by
four feet long—disconnect the chain, and head back to the eastern side of the
canyon to ferry my companions across.
The cable sags noticeably over the middle of the river; so when I cut loose
from the outcrop, the car accelerates quickly under its own weight, rolling faster
and faster along the steel strand, seeking the lowest point. It’s a thrilling ride.
Zipping over the rapids at twenty or thirty miles per hour, I hear an involuntary
bark of fright leap from my throat before I realize that I’m in no danger and
regain my composure.
After all four of us are on the western side of the gorge, thirty minutes of
rough bushwhacking returns us to the Stampede Trail. The ten miles of trail we
have already covered—the section between our parked vehicles and the river—
were gentle, well marked, and relatively heavily traveled. But the ten miles to
come have an utterly different character.
Because so few people cross the Teklanika during the spring and summer
months, much of the route is indistinct and overgrown with brush. Immediately
past the river the trail curves to the southwest, up the bed of a fast-flowing
creek. And because beavers have built a network of elaborate dams across this
creek, the route leads directly through a three-acre expanse of standing water.
The beaver ponds are never more than chest deep, but the water is cold, and as
we slosh forward, our feet churn the muck on the bottom into a foul-smelling
miasma of decomposing slime.
The trail climbs a hill beyond the uppermost pond, then rejoins the twisting,
rocky creek bed before ascending again into a jungle of scrubby vegetation. The
going never gets exceedingly difficult, but the fifteen-foot-high tangle of alder
pressing in from both sides is gloomy, claustrophobic, oppressive. Clouds of mosquitoes
materialize out of the sticky heat. Every few minutes the insects’
piercing whine is supplanted by the boom of distant thunder, rumbling over the
taiga from a wall of thunderheads rearing darkly on the horizon.
Thickets of buckbrush leave a crosshatch of bloody lacerations on my shins.
Piles of bear scat on the trail and, at one point, a set of fresh grizzly tracks—
each print half again as long as a size-nine boot print—put me on edge. None of
us has a gun. “Hey, Griz!” I yell at the undergrowth, hoping to avoid a surprise
encounter. “Hey, bear! Just passing through! No reason to get riled!”
I have been to Alaska some twenty times during the past twenty years—to
climb mountains, to work as a carpenter and a commercial salmon fisherman and
a journalist, to goof off, to poke around. I’ve spent a lot of time alone in the
country over the course of my many visits and usually relish it. Indeed, I had intended
to make this trip to the bus by myself, and when my friend Roman invited
himself and two others along, I was annoyed. Now, however, I am grateful for
their company. There is something disquieting about this Gothic, overgrown
landscape. It feels more malevolent than other, more remote corners of the
state I know—the tundra-wrapped slopes of the Brooks Range, the cloud forests
of the Alexander Archipelago, even the frozen, gale-swept heights of the Denali
massif. I’m happy as hell that I’m not here alone.
At 9:00 P.M. we round a bend in the trail, and there, at the edge of a small
clearing, is the bus. Pink bunches of fireweed choke the vehicle’s wheel wells,
growing higher than the axles. Fairbanks bus 142 is parked beside a coppice of
aspen, ten yards back from the brow of a modest cliff, on a shank of high ground
overlooking the confluence of the Sushana River and a smaller tributary.
It’s an appealing setting, open and filled with light. It’s easy to see why
McCandless decided to make this his base camp.
We pause some distance away from the bus and stare at it for a while in
silence. Its paint is chalky and peeling. Several windows are missing. Hundreds of
delicate bones litter the clearing around the vehicle, scattered among thousands
of porcupine quills: the remains of the small game that made up the bulk of
McCandless’s diet. And at the perimeter of this boneyard lies one much larger
skeleton: that of the moose he shot, and subsequently agonized over.
When I’d questioned Gordon Samel and Ken Thompson shortly after they’d
discovered McCandless’s body, both men insisted—adamantly and unequivocally—
that the big skeleton was the remains of a caribou, and they derided the
greenhorns ignorance in mistaking the animal he killed for a moose. “Wolves had
scattered the bones some,” Thompson had told me, “but it was obvious that the
animal was a caribou. The kid didn’t know what the hell he was doing up here.”
“It was definitely a caribou,” Samel had scornfully piped in. “When I read in
the paper that he thought he’d shot a moose, that told me right there he wasn’t
no Alaskan. There’s a big difference between a moose and a caribou. A real big
difference. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to be able to tell them apart.”
Trusting Samel and Thompson, veteran Alaskan hunters who’ve killed many
moose and caribou between them, I duly reported McCandless’s mistake in the
article I wrote for Outside, thereby confirming the opinion of countless readers
that McCandless was ridiculously ill prepared, that he had no business heading
into any wilderness, let alone into the big-league wilds of the Last Frontier. Not
only did McCandless die because he was stupid, one Alaska correspondent
observed, but “the scope of his self-styled adventure was so small as to ring pathetic—
squatting in a wrecked bus a few miles out of Healy, potting jays and
squirrels, mistaking a caribou for a moose (pretty hard to do).... Only one word
for the guy: incompetent.”
Among the letters lambasting McCandless, virtually all those I received
mentioned his misidentification of the caribou as proof that he didn’t know the
first thing about surviving in the back-country. What the angry letter writers
didn’t know, however, was that the ungulate McCandless shot was exactly what
he’d said it was. Contrary to what I reported in Outside, the animal was a moose,
as a close examination of the beasts remains now indicated and several of
McCandless’s photographs of the kill later confirmed beyond all doubt. The boy
made some mistakes on the Stampede Trail, but confusing a caribou with a
moose wasn’t among them.
Walking past the moose bones, I approach the vehicle and step through an
emergency exit at the back. Immediately inside the door is the torn mattress,
stained and moldering, on which McCandless expired. For some reason I am taken
aback to find a collection of his possessions spread across its ticking: a green
plastic canteen; a tiny bottle of water-purification tablets; a used-up cylinder of
Chap Stick; a pair of insulated flight pants of the type sold in military-surplus
stores; a paperback copy of the bestseller O Jerusalem!, its spine broken; wool
mittens; a bottle of Muskol insect repellent; a full box of matches; and a pair of
brown rubber work boots with the name Gallien written across the cuffs in faint
black ink.
Despite the missing windows, the air inside the cavernous vehicle is stale and
musty. “Wow,” Roman remarks. “It smells like dead birds in here.” A moment
later I come across the source of the odor: a plastic garbage bag filled with
feathers, down, and the severed wings of several birds. It appears that
McCandless was saving them to insulate his clothing or perhaps to make a feather
pillow.
Toward the front of the bus, McCandless’s pots and dishes are stacked on a
makeshift plywood table beside a kerosene lamp. A long leather scabbard is
expertly tooled with the initials R. E: the sheath for the machete Ronald Franz
gave McCandless when he left Salton City.
The boy’s blue toothbrush rests next to a half-empty tube of Colgate, a
packet of dental floss, and the gold molar crown that, according to his journal,
fell off his tooth three weeks into his sojourn. A few inches away sits a skull the
size of a watermelon, thick ivory fangs jutting from its bleached maxillae. It is a
bear skull, the remains of a grizzly shot by someone who visited the bus years
before McCandless’s tenure. A message scratched in Chris’s tidy hand brackets a
cranial bullet hole: ALL HAIL THE PHANTOM BEAR, THE BEAST WITHIN US ALL.
ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP. MAY 1992.
Looking up, I notice that the sheet-metal walls of the vehicle are covered
with graffiti left by numerous visitors over the years. Roman points out a
message he wrote when he stayed in the bus four years ago, during a traverse of
the Alaska Range: NOODLE EATERS EN ROUTE TO LAKE CLARK 8/89. Like Roman, most
people scrawled little more than their names and a date. The longest, most
eloquent graffito is one of several inscribed by McCandless, the proclamation of
joy that begins with a nod to his favorite Roger Miller song: TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE
EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN
EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD...
Immediately below this manifesto squats the stove, fabricated from a rusty
oil drum. A twelve-foot section of a spruce trunk is jammed into its open
doorway, and across the log are draped two pairs of torn Levi’s, laid out as if to
dry. One pair of jeans—waist thirty, inseam thirty-two—is patched crudely with
silver duct tape; the other pair has been repaired more carefully, with scraps
from a faded bedspread stitched over gaping holes in the knees and seat. This
latter pair also sports a belt fashioned from a strip of blanket. McCandless, it
occurs to me, must have been forced to make the belt after growing so thin that
his pants wouldn’t stay up without it.
Sitting down on a steel cot across from the stove to mull over this eerie
tableau, I encounter evidence of McCandless’s presence wherever my vision
rests. Here are his toenail clippers, over there his green nylon tent spread over a
missing window in the front door. His Kmart hiking boots are arranged neatly
beneath the stove, as though he’d soon be returning to lace them up and hit the
trail. I feel uncomfortable, as if I were intruding, a voyeur who has slipped into
McCandless’s bedroom while he is momentarily away. Suddenly queasy, I stumble
out of the bus to walk along the river and breathe some fresh air.
An hour later we build a fire outside in the fading light. The rain squalls, now
past, have rinsed the haze from the atmosphere, and distant, backlit hills stand
out in crisp detail. A stripe of incandescent sky burns beneath the cloud base on
the northwestern horizon. Roman unwraps some steaks from a moose he shot in
the Alaska Range last September and lays them across the fire on a blackened
grill, the grill McCandless used for broiling his game. Moose fat pops and sizzles
into the coals. Eating the gristly meat with our fingers, we slap at mosquitoes
and talk about this peculiar person whom none of us ever met, trying to get a
handle on how he came to grief, trying to understand why some people seem to
despise him so intensely for having died here.
By design McCandless came into the country with insufficient provisions, and
he lacked certain pieces of equipment deemed essential by many Alaskans: a
large-caliber rifle, map and compass, an ax. This has been regarded as evidence
not just of stupidity but of the even greater sin of arrogance. Some critics have
even drawn parallels between McCandless and the Arctic’s most infamous tragic
figure, Sir John Franklin, a nineteenth-century British naval officer whose
smugness and hauteur contributed to some 140 deaths, including his own.
In 1819, the Admiralty assigned Franklin to lead an expedition into the
wilderness of northwestern Canada. Two years out of England, winter overtook
his small party as they plodded across an expanse of tundra so vast and empty
that they christened it the Barrens, the name by which it is still known. Their
food ran out. Game was scarce, forcing Franklin and his men to subsist on lichens
scraped from boulders, singed deer hide, scavenged animal bones, their own
boot leather, and finally one another’s flesh. Before the ordeal was over, at least
two men had been murdered and eaten, the suspected murderer had been
summarily executed, and eight others were dead from sickness and starvation.
Franklin was himself within a day or two of expiring when he and the other
survivors were rescued by a band of metis.
An affable Victorian gentleman, Franklin was said to be a good-natured
bumbler, dogged and clueless, with the naive ideals of a child and a disdain for
acquiring backcountry skills. He had been woefully unprepared to lead an Arctic
expedition, and upon returning to England, he was known as the Man Who Ate His
Shoes—yet the sobriquet was uttered more often with awe than with ridicule. He
was hailed as a national hero, promoted to the rank of captain by the Admiralty,
paid handsomely to write an account of his ordeal, and, in 1825, given command
of a second Arctic expedition.
That trip was relatively uneventful, but in 1845, hoping finally to discover the
fabled Northwest Passage, Franklin made the mistake of returning to the Arctic
for a third time. He and the 128 men under his command were never heard from
again. Evidence unearthed by the forty-odd expeditions sent to search for them
eventually established that all had perished, the victims of scurvy, starvation,
and unspeakable suffering.
When McCandless turned up dead, he was likened to Franklin not simply
because both men starved but also because both were perceived to have lacked
a requisite humility; both were thought to have possessed insufficient respect for
the land. A century after Franklin’s death, the eminent explorer Vilhjalmur
Stefansson pointed out that the English explorer had never taken the trouble to
learn the survival skills practiced by the Indians and the Eskimos—peoples who
had managed to flourish “for generations, bringing up their children and taking
care of their aged” in the same harsh country that killed Franklin. (Stefansson
conveniently neglected to mention that many, many Indians and Eskimos have
starved in the northern latitudes, as well.)
McCandless’s arrogance was not of the same strain as Franklin’s, however.
Franklin regarded nature as an antagonist that would inevitably submit to force,
good breeding, and Victorian discipline. Instead of living in concert with the
land, instead of relying on the country for sustenance as the natives did, he attempted
to insulate himself from the northern environment with ill-suited
military tools and traditions. McCandless, on the other hand, went too far in the
opposite direction. He tried to live entirely off the country—and he tried to do it
without bothering to master beforehand the full repertoire of crucial skills.
It probably misses the point, though, to castigate McCandless for being ill
prepared. He was green, and he overestimated his resilience, but he was
sufficiently skilled to last for sixteen weeks on little more than his wits and ten
pounds of rice. And he was fully aware when he entered the bush that he had
given himself a perilously slim margin for error. He knew precisely what was at
stake.
It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered
reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our
culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure.
That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much
and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit
young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact
evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his
fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.
He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, “that
mattered.” He possessed grand—some would say grandiose—spiritual ambitions.
According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless’s beliefs, a
challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn’t a challenge at all.
It is not merely the young, of course, who are drawn to hazardous
undertakings. John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense
conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a
bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose
best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in
1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter. In another essay Muir rapturously
describes riding out a ferocious Sierra gale, by choice, in the uppermost branches
of a one-hundred-foot Douglas fir:
[N]ever before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender
tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent,
bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing
indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with
muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
He was thirty-six years old at the time. One suspects that Muir wouldn’t have
thought McCandless terribly odd or incomprehensible.
Even staid, prissy Thoreau, who famously declared that it was enough to have
“traveled a good deal in Concord,” felt compelled to visit the more fearsome
wilds of nineteenth-century Maine and climb Mt. Katahdin. His ascent of the
peak’s “savage and awful, though beautiful” ramparts shocked and frightened
him, but it also induced a giddy sort of awe. The disquietude he felt on
Katahdin’s granite heights inspired some of his most powerful writing and
profoundly colored the way he thought thereafter about the earth in its coarse,
undomesticated state.
Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily
to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country
of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already
knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention
outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without
developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with,
that land and all it holds.
The entries in McCandlesss journal contain few abstractions about wilderness
or, for that matter, few ruminations of any kind. There is scant mention of the
surrounding scenery. Indeed, as Roman’s friend Andrew Liske points out upon
reading a photocopy of the journal, “These entries are almost entirely about
what he ate. He wrote about hardly anything except food.”
Andrew is not exaggerating: The journal is little more than a tally of plants
foraged and game killed. It would probably be a mistake, however, to conclude
thereby that McCandless failed to appreciate the beauty of the country around
him, that he was unmoved by the power of the landscape. As cultural ecologist
Paul Shepard has observed,
The nomadic Bedouin does not dote on scenery, paint landscapes, or compile
a nonutilitarian natural history... [H]is life is so profoundly in transaction with
nature that there is no place for abstraction or esthetics or a “nature
philosophy” which can be separated from the rest of his life... Nature and his
relationship to it are a deadly-serious matter, prescribed by convention,
mystery, and danger. His personal leisure is aimed away from idle amusement or
detached tampering with nature’s processes. But built into his life is awareness
of that presence, of the terrain, of the unpredictable weather, of the narrow
margin by which he is sustained.
Much the same could be said of McCandless during the months he spent beside
the Sushana River.
It would be easy to stereotype Christopher McCandless as another boy who
felt too much, a loopy young man who read too many books and lacked even a
modicum of common sense. But the stereotype isn’t a good fit. McCandless
wasn’t some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair.
To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he
wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted
the value of things that came easily. He demanded much of himself—more, in the
end, than he could deliver.
Trying to explain McCandless’s unorthodox behavior, some people have made
much of the fact that like John Waterman, he was small in stature and may have
suffered from a “short man’s complex,” a fundamental insecurity that drove him
to prove his manhood by means of extreme physical challenges. Others have
posited that an unresolved Oedipal conflict was at the root of his fatal odyssey.
Although there may be some truth in both hypotheses, this sort of posthumous
off-the-rack psychoanalysis is a dubious, highly speculative enterprise that
inevitably demeans and trivializes the absent analysand. It’s not clear that much
of value is learned by reducing Chris McCandless’s strange spiritual quest to a list
of pat psychological disorders.
Roman and Andrew and I stare into the embers and talk about McCandless
late into the night. Roman, thirty-two, inquisitive and outspoken, has a
doctorate in biology from Stanford and an abiding distrust of conventional
wisdom. He spent his adolescence in the same Washington, D.C., suburbs as
McCandless and found them every bit as stifling. He first came to Alaska as a
nine-year-old, to visit a trio of uncles who mined coal at Usibelli, a big strip-mine
operation a few miles east of Healy, and immediately fell in love with everything
about the North. Over the years that followed, he returned repeatedly to the
forty-ninth state. In 1977, after graduating from high school as a sixteen-year-old
at the top of his class, he moved to Fairbanks and made Alaska his permanent
home.
These days Roman teaches at Alaska Pacific University, in Anchorage, and
enjoys statewide renown for a long, brash string of backcountry escapades: He
has—among other feats—traveled the entire 1,000-mile length of the Brooks
Range by foot and paddle, skied 250 miles across the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge in subzero winter cold, traversed the 700-mile crest of the Alaska Range,
and pioneered more than thirty first ascents of northern peaks and crags. And
Roman doesn’t see a great deal of difference between his own widely respected
deeds and McCandless’s adventure, except that McCandless had the misfortune
to perish.
I bring up McCandless’s hubris and the dumb mistakes he made—the two or
three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him his life. “Sure, he
screwed up,” Roman answers, “but I admire what he was trying to do. Living
completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I’ve
never done it. And I’d bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call
McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or
two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing
except what you hunt and gather—most people have no idea how hard that
actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.
“I guess I just can’t help identifying with the guy,” Roman allows as he pokes
the coals with a stick. “I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could
easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started
coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just
as eager. And I’m sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in
common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his
critics. Which is maybe why they’re so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds
them a little too much of their former selves.”
Roman’s observation underscores how difficult it is for those of us
preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we
were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth. As Everett Ruess’s
father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, “The
older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all
poorly understood Everett.”
Roman, Andrew, and I stay up well past midnight, trying to make sense of
McCandless’s life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive.
Gradually, the conversation lags and falters. When I drift away from the fire to
find a place to throw down my sleeping bag, the first faint smear of dawn is already
bleaching the rim of the northeastern sky. Although the mosquitoes are
thick tonight and the bus would no doubt offer some refuge, I decide not to bed
down inside Fairbanks 142. Nor, I note before sinking into a dreamless sleep, do
the others.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
It is nearly impossible for modem man to imagine what it is like to live by
hunting. The life of a hunter is one of hard, seemingly continuous overland
travel... A life of frequent concerns that the next interception may not work,
that the trap or the drive will fail, or that the herds will not appear this
season. Above all, the life of a hunter carries with it the threat of deprivation
and death by starvation.
JOHN M. CAMPBELL, THE HUNGRY SUMMER
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the
riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover
mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write
symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith.
You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic
elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with,
love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills
the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic
ideals of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea offree
personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO - PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS
FOUND WITH CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS;UNDERSCORING BY
MCCANDLESS
After his attempt to depart the wilderness was stymied by the Teklanika’s
high flow, McCandless arrived back at the bus on July 8. It’s impossible to know
what was going through his mind at that point, for his journal betrays nothing.
Quite possibly he was unconcerned about his escape routes having been cut off;
indeed, at the time there was little reason for him to worry: It was the height of
summer, the country was a fecund riot of plant and animal life, and his food
supply was adequate. He probably surmised that if he bided his time until
August, the Teklanika would subside enough to be crossed.
Reestablished in the corroded shell of Fairbanks 142, McCandless fell back
into his routine of hunting and gathering. He read Tolstoys “The Death of Ivan
Ilych” and Michael Crichtons Terminal Man. He noted in his journal that it rained
for a week straight. Game seems to have been plentiful: In the last three weeks
of July, he killed thirty-five squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and
woodpeckers, and two frogs, all of which he supplemented with wild potatoes,
wild rhubarb, various species of berries, and large numbers of mushrooms. But
despite this apparent munificence, the meat he’d been killing was very lean, and
he was consuming fewer calories than he was burning. After subsisting for three
months on an exceedingly marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric
deficit. He was balanced on a precarious edge. And then, in late July, he made
the mistake that pulled him down.
He had just finished reading Doctor Zhivago, a book that incited him to
scribble excited notes in the margins and underline several passages:
Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then
turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep
breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer
to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she
rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the
meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if
this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors
who would do it in her place.
“NATURE/PURITY,” he printed in bold characters at the top of the page.
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of
human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature,
apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of
sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by
emotion!
McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled “refuge in
nature” in black ink.
Next to “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those
around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared
happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all,” he noted,
“HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that
McCandless’s long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. It
can be interpreted to mean that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the
armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended
to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy,
and become a member of the human community. But we will never know,
because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read.
Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, there is an ominous entry in
the journal: “EXTREMLY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO
STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Before this note there is nothing in the
journal to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances. He was hungry,
and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and
bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health. Then, after July 30, his
physical condition suddenly went to hell. By August 19, he was dead.
There has been a great deal of conjecture about what caused such a
precipitous decline. In the days following the identification of McCandless’s
remains, Wayne Westerberg vaguely recalled that Chris might have purchased
some seeds in South Dakota before heading north, including perhaps some potato
seeds, with which he intended to plant a vegetable garden after getting
established in the bush. According to one theory, McCand-less never got around
to planting the garden (I saw no evidence of a garden in the vicinity of the bus)
and by late July had grown hungry enough to eat the seeds, which poisoned him.
Potato seeds are in fact mildly toxic after they’ve begun to sprout. They
contain solanine, a poison that occurs in plants of the nightshade family, which
causes vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and lethargy in the short term, and
adversely affects heart rate and blood pressure when ingested over an extended
period. This theory has a serious flaw, however: In order for McCandless to have
been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many
pounds of them; and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him
off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato
seeds, if he carried any at all.
But other scenarios involve potato seeds of an entirely different variety, and
these scenarios are more plausible. Pages 126 and 127 of Tanaina Plantlore
describe a plant that is called wild potato by the Dena’ina Indians, who
harvested its carrotlike root. The plant, known to botanists as Hedysarum
alpinum, grows in gravelly soil throughout the region.
According to Tanaina Plantlore, “The root of the wild potato is probably the
most important food of the Dena’ina, other than wild fruit. They eat it in a
variety of ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it especially dipped in
oil or lard, in which they also preserve it.” The citation goes on to say that the
best time to dig wild potatoes “is in the spring as soon as the ground thaws....
During the summer they evidently become dry and tough.”
Priscilla Russell Kari, the author of Tanaina Plantlore, explained to me that
“spring was a really hard time for the Dena’ina people, particularly in the past.
Often the game they depended on for food didn’t show up, or the fish didn’t
start running on time. So they depended on wild potatoes as a major staple until
the fish came in late spring. It has a very sweet taste. It was—and still is—
something they really like to eat.”
Above ground the wild potato grows as a bushy herb, two feet tall, with stalks
of delicate pink flowers reminiscent of miniature sweet-pea blossoms. Taking a
cue from Kari’s book, McCandless started to dig and eat wild potato roots on
June 24, apparently without ill effect. On July 14, he began consuming the
pealike seed pods of the plant as well, probably because the roots were
becoming too tough to eat. A photograph he took during this period shows a onegallon
Ziploc plastic bag stuffed to overflowing with such seeds. And then, on
July 30, the entry in his journal reads, “EXTREMLY WEAK. FAULT OF POT.
SEED...”
One page after Tanaina Plantlore enumerates the wild potato, it describes a
closely related species, wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii. Although a
slightly smaller plant, wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even
expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart. There is only a
single distinguishing characteristic that is absolutely reliable: On the underside of
the wild potato’s tiny green leaflets are conspicuous lateral veins; such veins are
invisible on the leaflets of the wild sweet pea.
Kari’s book warns that because wild sweet pea is so difficult to distinguish
from wild potato and “is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to
identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food.”
Accounts of individuals being poisoned from eating H. mackenzii are nonexistent
in modern medical literature, but the aboriginal inhabitants of the North have
apparently known for millennia that wild sweet pea is toxic and remain
extremely careful not to confuse H. alpinum with H. mackenzii.
To find a documented poisoning attributable to wild sweet pea, I had to go all
the way back to the nineteenth-century annals of Arctic exploration. I came
across what I was looking for in the journals of Sir John Richardson, a famous
Scottish surgeon, naturalist, and explorer. He’d been a member of the hapless Sir
John Franklin s first two expeditions and had survived both of them; it was
Richardson who executed, by gunshot, the suspected murderer-cannibal on the
first expedition. Richardson also happened to be the botanist who first wrote a
scientific description of H. mackenzii and gave the plant its botanical name. In
1848, while leading an expedition through the Canadian Arctic in search of the by
then missing Franklin, Richardson made a botanical comparison of H. alpinum
and H. mackenzii. H. alpinum, he observed in his journal,
furnishes long flexible roots, which taste sweet like the liquorice, and are
much eaten in the spring by the natives, but become woody and lose their
juiciness and crispness as the season advances. The root of the hoary,
decumbent, and less elegant, but larger-flowered Hedysarum mackenzii is
poisonous, and nearly killed an old Indian woman at Fort Simpson, who had
mistaken it for that of the preceding species. Fortunately, it proved emetic; and
her stomach having rejected all that she had swallowed, she was restored to
health, though her recovery was for some time doubtful.
It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mistake as the
Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated. From all the available
evidence, there seemed to be little doubt that McCandless—rash and incautious
by nature—had committed a careless blunder, confusing one plant for another,
and died as a consequence. In the Outside article, I reported with great certainty
that H. mackenzii, the wild sweet pea, killed the boy. Virtually every other
journalist who wrote about the McCandless tragedy drew the same conclusion.
But as the months passed and I had the opportunity to ponder McCandless s
death at greater length, the less plausible this consensus seemed. For three
weeks beginning on June 24, McCandless had dug and safely eaten dozens of wild
potato roots without mistaking H. mackenzii for H. alpinum; why, on July 14,
when he started gathering seeds instead of roots, would he suddenly have
confused the two species?
McCandless, I came to believe with increasing conviction, scrupulously
steered clear of the toxic H. mackenzii and never ate its seeds or any other part
of the plant. He was indeed poisoned, but the plant that killed him wasn’t wild
sweet pea. The agent of his demise was wild potato, H. alpinum, the species
plainly identified as nontoxic in Tanaina Plantlore.
The book advises only that the roots of the wild potato are edible. Although it
says nothing about the seeds of the species being edible, it also says nothing
about the seeds being toxic. To be fair to McCandless, it should be pointed out
that the seeds of H. alpinum have never been described as toxic in any published
text: An extensive search of the medical and botanical literature yielded not a
single indication that any part of H. alpinum is poisonous.
But the pea family (Leguminosae, to which H. alpinum belongs) happens to be
rife with species that produce alkaloids— chemical compounds that have
powerful pharmacological effects on humans and animals. (Morphine, caffeine,
nicotine, curare, strychnine, and mescaline are all alkaloids.) And in many
alkaloid-producing species, moreover, the toxin is strictly localized within the
plant.
“What happens with a lot of legumes,” explains John Bryant, a chemical
ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, “is that the plants concentrate
alkaloids in the seed coats in late summer, to discourage animals from eating
their seeds. Depending on the time of year, it would not be uncommon for a
plant with edible roots to have poisonous seeds. If a species does produce
alkaloids, as fall approaches, the seeds are where the toxin is most likely to be
found.”
During my visit to the Sushana River, I collected samples of H. alpinum
growing within a few feet of the bus and sent seed pods from this sample to Tom
Clausen, a colleague of Professor Bryant’s in the Chemistry Department at the
University of Alaska. Conclusive spectrographic analysis has yet to be completed,
but preliminary testing by Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward
Treadwell, indicates that the seeds definitely contains traces of an alkaloid.
There is a strong likelihood, moreover, that the alkaloid is swainsonine, a
compound known to ranchers and livestock veterinarians as the toxic agent in
locoweed.
There are some fifty varieties of toxic locoweeds, the bulk of which are in the
genus Astragalus—a genus very closely related to Hedysarum. The most obvious
symptoms of locoweed poisoning are neurological. According to a paper
published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association,
among the signs of locoweed poisoning are “depression, a slow staggering gait,
rough coat, dull eyes with a staring look, emaciation, muscular incoordination,
and nervousness (especially when stressed). In addition, affected animals may
become solitary and hard to handle, and may have difficulty eating and
drinking.”
With the discovery by Clausen and Treadwell that wild potato seeds may be
repositories of swainsonine or some similarly toxic compound, a compelling case
can be made for these seeds having caused McCandless s death. If true, it means
that McCandless wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he has been made
out to be. He didn’t carelessly confuse one species with another. The plant that
poisoned him was not known to be toxic—indeed, he’d been safely eating its
roots for weeks. In his state of hunger, McCandless simply made the mistake of
ingesting its seed pods. A person with a better grasp of botanical principles
would probably not have eaten them, but it was an innocent error. It was,
however, sufficient to do him in.
The effects of swainsonine poisoning are chronic—the alkaloid rarely kills
outright. The toxin does the deed insidiously, indirectly, by inhibiting an enzyme
essential to glycoprotein metabolism. It creates a massive vapor lock, as it were,
in mammalian fuel lines: The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a
source of usable energy. If you ingest too much swainsonine, you are bound to
starve, no matter how much food you put into your stomach.
Animals will sometimes recover from swainsonine poisoning after they stop
eating locoweed, but only if they are in fairly robust condition to begin with. In
order for the toxic compound to be excreted in the urine, it first has to bind with
available molecules of glucose or amino acid. A large store of proteins and sugars
must be present to mop up the poison and wring it from the body.
“The problem,” says Professor Bryant, “is that if you’re lean and hungry to
begin with, you’re obviously not going to have any glucose and protein to spare;
so there’s no way to flush the toxin from your system. When a starving mammal
ingests an alkaloid—even one as benign as caffeine—it’s going to get hit much
harder by it than it normally would because they lack the glucose reserves
necessary to excrete the stuff. The alkaloid is simply going to accumulate in the
system. If McCandless ate a big slug of these seeds while he was already in a
semi-starving condition, it would have been a setup for catastrophe.”
Laid low by the toxic seeds, McCandless discovered that he was suddenly far
too weak to hike out and save himself. He was now too weak even to hunt
effectively and thus grew weaker still, sliding closer and closer toward
starvation. His life was spiraling out of control with awful speed.
There are no journal entries for July 31 or August 1. On August 2, the diary
says only, “TERRIBLE WIND.” Autumn was just around the corner. The
temperature was dropping, and the days were becoming noticeably shorter: Each
rotation of the earth held seven fewer minutes of daylight and seven more of
cold and darkness; in the span of a single week, the night grew nearly an hour
longer.
“DAY 100! MADE IT!” he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving
such a significant milestone, “BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH
LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME
TRAPPED IN THE WILD.—NO GAME.”
If McCandless had possessed a U.S. Geological Survey topographic map, it
would have alerted him to the existence of a Park Service cabin on the upper
Sushana River, six miles due south of the bus, a distance he might have been able
to cover even in his severely weakened state. The cabin, just inside the boundary
of De-nali National Park, had been stocked with a small amount of emergency
food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for the use of backcountry rangers on their
winter patrols. And although they aren’t marked on the map, two miles even
closer to the bus are a pair of private cabins—one owned by the well-known
Healy dog mushers Will and Linda Forsberg; the other, by an employee of Denali
National Park, Steve Carwile—where there should have been some food as well.
McCandless’s apparent salvation, in other words, seemed to be only a threehour
walk upriver. This sad irony was widely noted in the aftermath of his death.
But even if he had known about these cabins, they wouldn’t have delivered
McCandless from harm: At some point after mid-April, when the last of the
cabins was vacated as the spring thaw made dog mushing and snow-machine
travel problematic, somebody broke into all three cabins and vandalized them
extensively. The food inside was exposed to animals and the weather, ruining it.
The damage wasn’t discovered until late July, when a wildlife biologist
named Paul Atkinson made the grueling ten-mile bushwhack over the Outer
Range, from the road into Denali National Park to the Park Service shelter. He
was shocked and baffled by the mindless destruction that greeted him. “It was
obviously not the work of bear,” Atkinson reports. “I’m a bear technician, so I
know what bear damage looks like. This looked like somebody had gone at the
cabins with a claw hammer and bashed everything in sight. From the size of the
fireweed growing up through mattresses that had been tossed outside, it was
clear that the vandalism had occurred many weeks earlier.”
“It was completely trashed,” Will Forsberg says of his cabin. “Everything that
wasn’t nailed down had been wrecked. All the lamps were broken and most of
the windows. The bedding and mattresses had been pulled outside and thrown in
a heap, ceiling boards yanked down, fuel cans were punctured, the wood stove
was removed—even a big carpet had been hauled out to rot. And all the food was
gone. So the cabins wouldn’t have helped Alex much even if he had found them.
Or then again, maybe he did.”
Forsberg considers McCandless the prime suspect. He believes McCandless
blundered upon the cabins after arriving at the bus during the first week of May,
flew into a rage over the intrusion of civilization on his precious wilderness
experience, and systematically wrecked the buildings. This theory fails to
explain, however, why McCandless didn’t, then, also trash the bus.
Carwile also suspects McCandless. “It’s just intuition,” he explains, “but I get
the feeling he was the kind of guy who might want to ‘set the wilderness free.’
Destroying the cabins would be a way of doing that. Or maybe it was his intense
dislike of the government: He saw the sign on the Park Service cabin identifying
it as such, assumed all three cabins were government property, and decided to
strike a blow against Big Brother. That certainly seems within the realm of
possibility.”
The authorities, for their part, don’t think McCandless was the vandal. “We
really hit a blank on who might have done it,” says Ken Kehrer, chief ranger for
Denali National Park. “But Chris McCandless isn’t considered a suspect by the
National Park Service.” In fact, there is nothing in McCandless’s journal or photographs
to suggest he went anywhere near the cabins. When McCandless
ventured beyond the bus in early May, his pictures show that he headed north,
downstream along the Sushana, the opposite direction of the cabins. And even if
he had somehow chanced upon them, it’s difficult to imagine him destroying the
buildings without boasting of the deed in his diary.
There are no entries in McCandless’s journal for August 6, 7, and 8. On August
9, he notes that he shot at a bear but missed. On August 10, he saw a caribou but
didn’t get a shot off, and he killed five squirrels. If a sufficient amount of
swainsonine had accumulated in his body, however, this windfall of small game
would have provided little nourishment. On August 11, he killed and ate one
ptarmigan. On August 12, he dragged himself out of the bus to forage for berries,
after posting a plea for assistance in the unlikely event that someone would stop
by while he was away. Written in meticulous block letters on a page torn from
Gogol’s Taras Bulba, it reads:
S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO
HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD,
PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND
SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU.
He signed the note “CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?” Recognizing the gravity of his
predicament, he had abandoned the cocky moniker he’d been using for years,
Alexander Supertramp, in favor of the name given to him at birth by his parents.
Many Alaskans have wondered why, in his desperation, McCandless didn’t
start a forest fire at this point, as a distress signal. There were two nearly full
gallons of stove gas in the bus; presumably, it would have been a simple matter
to start a conflagration large enough to attract the attention of passing airplanes
or at least burn a giant SOS into the muskeg.
Contrary to common belief, however, the bus doesn’t lie beneath any
established flight path, and very few planes fly over it. Over the four days I spent
on the Stampede Trail, I didn’t see a single aircraft overhead, other than
commercial jets flying at altitudes greater than twenty-five thousand feet. Small
planes did no doubt pass within sight of the bus from time to time, but
McCandless would probably have had to start a fairly large forest fire to be sure
of attracting their attention. And as Carine McCandless points out, “Chris would
never, ever, intentionally burn down a forest, not even to save his life. Anybody
who would suggest otherwise doesn’t understand the first thing about my
brother.”
Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire. In advanced stages of famine, as
the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart
disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to
cold, physical and mental exhaustion. The skin becomes discolored. In the
absence of key nutrients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain,
inducing convulsions and hallucinations. Some people who have been brought
back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the
hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a
sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity.
It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.
On August 12, he wrote what would prove to be the final words in his journal:
“Beautiful Blueberries.” From August 13 through 18, his journal records nothing
beyond a tally of the days. At some point during this week, he tore the final page
from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the
page were some lines L’Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Wise
Men in Their Bad Hours”:
Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.
On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief
adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD
BLESS ALL!”
Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and
slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d
walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus
and discover his body inside.
One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus
under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera
lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly
emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—
because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed
him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. He is
smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris
McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.
Epilogue
Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like
floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier
times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there
have been griefs upon which 1 have not dared to dwell; and with these in
mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are
nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the
happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from
the beginning think what may be the end.
EDWARD WHYMPER, SCRAMBLES AMONGST THE ALPS
We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence
of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then
when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to
toss things, like our reason,and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for
home.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the
heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip,
and tales for other times.
ANNIE DILLARD, HOLY THE FIRM
The helicopter labors upward, thwock-thwock-thwocking over the shoulder of
Mt. Healy. As the altimeter needle brushes five thousand feet, we crest a mudcolored
ridge, the earth drops away, and a breathtaking sweep of taiga fills the
Plexiglas windscreen. In the distance I can pick out the Stampede Trail, cutting a
faint, crooked stripe from east to west across the landscape.
Billie McCandless is in the front passenger seat; Walt and I occupy the back.
Ten hard months have passed since Sam McCandless appeared at their
Chesapeake Beach doorstep to tell them Chris was dead. It is time, they have
decided, to visit the place where their son met his end, to see it with their own
eyes.
Walt has spent the past ten days in Fairbanks, doing contract work for NASA,
developing an airborne radar system for search-and-rescue missions that will
enable searchers to find the wreckage of a downed plane amid thousands of
acres of densely forested country. For several days now he’s been distracted,
irritable, edgy. Billie, who arrived in Alaska two days ago, confided to me that
the prospect of visiting the bus has been difficult for him to come to terms with.
Surprisingly, she says she feels calm and centered and has been looking forward
to this trip for some time.
Taking a helicopter was a last-minute change of plans. Billie wanted badly to
travel overland, to follow the Stampede Trail as Chris had done. Toward that end
she’d contacted Butch Killian, the Healy coal miner who’d been present when
Chris’s body was discovered, and he agreed to drive Walt and Billie into the bus
on his all-terrain vehicle. But yesterday Killian called their hotel to say that the
Teklanika River was still running high—too high, he worried, to cross safely, even
with his amphibious, eight-wheeled Argo. Thus the helicopter.
Two thousand feet beneath the aircraft’s skids a mottled green tweed of
muskeg and spruce forest now blankets the rolling country. The Teklanika
appears as a long brown ribbon thrown carelessly across the land. An unnaturally
bright object comes into view near the confluence of two smaller streams:
Fairbanks bus 142. It has taken us fifteen minutes to cover the distance it took
Chris four days to walk.
The helicopter settles noisily onto the ground, the pilot kills the engine, and
we hop down onto sandy earth. A moment later the machine lifts off in a
hurricane of prop wash, leaving us surrounded by a monumental silence. As Walt
and Billie stand ten yards from the bus, staring at the anomalous vehicle without
speaking, a trio of jays prattles from a nearby aspen tree.
“It’s smaller,” Billie finally says, “than I thought it would be. I mean the
bus.” And then, turning to take in the surroundings: “What a pretty place. I can’t
believe how much this reminds me of where I grew up. Oh, Walt, it looks just
like the Upper Peninsula! Chris must have loved being here.”
“I have a lot of reasons for disliking Alaska, OK?” Walt answers, scowling.
“But I admit it—the place has a certain beauty. I can see what appealed to
Chris.”
For the next thirty minutes Walt and Billie walk quietly around the decrepit
vehicle, amble down to the Sushana River, visit the nearby woods.
Billie is the first to enter the bus. Walt returns from the stream to find her
sitting on the mattress where Chris died, taking in the vehicle’s shabby interior.
For a long time she gazes silently at her son’s boots under the stove, his
handwriting on the walls, his toothbrush. But today there are no tears. Picking
through the clutter on the table, she bends to examine a spoon with a distinctive
floral pattern on the handle. “Walt, look at this,” she says. “This is the
silverware we had in the Annandale house.”
At the front of the bus, Billie picks up a pair of Chris’s patched, ragged jeans
and, closing her eyes, presses them to her face. “Smell,” she urges her husband
with a painful smile. “They still smell like Chris.” After a long beat she declares,
to herself more than to anyone else, “He must have been very brave and very
strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”
Billie and Walt wander in and out of the bus for the next two hours. Walt
installs a memorial just inside the door, a simple brass plaque inscribed with a
few words. Beneath it Billie arranges a bouquet of fireweed, monkshood, yarrow,
and spruce boughs. Under the bed at the rear of the bus, she leaves a suitcase
stocked with a first-aid kit, canned food, other survival supplies, a note urging
whoever happens to read it to “call your parents as soon as possible.” The
suitcase also holds a Bible that belonged to Chris when he was a child, even
though, she allows, “I haven’t prayed since we lost him.”
Walt, in a reflective mood, has had little to say, but he appears more at ease
than he has in many days. “I didn’t know how I was going to react to this,” he
admits, gesturing toward the bus. “But now I’m glad we came.” This brief visit,
he says, has given him a slightly better understanding of why his boy came into
this country. There is much about Chris that still baffles him and always will, but
now he is a little less baffled. And for that small solace he is grateful.
“It’s comforting to know Chris was here,” Billie explains, “to know for certain
that he spent time beside this river, that he stood on this patch of ground. So
many places we’ve visited in the past three years—we’d wonder if possibly Chris
had been there. It was terrible not knowing—not knowing anything at all.
“Many people have told me that they admire Chris for what he was trying to
do. If he’d lived, I would agree with them. But he didn’t, and there’s no way to
bring him back. You can’t fix it. Most things you can fix, but not that. I don’t
know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a
sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than
others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”
Abruptly, the quiet is shattered by the percussive racket of the helicopter,
which spirals down from the clouds and lands in a patch of fireweed. We climb
inside; the chopper shoulders into the sky and then hovers for a moment before
banking steeply to the southeast. For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains
visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing
smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book would have been impossible without considerable assistance
from the McCandless family. I am deeply indebted to Walt McCandless, Billie
McCandless, Carine McCandless, Sam McCandless, and Shelly McCandless Garcia.
They gave me full access to Chris’s papers, letters, and photographs and talked
with me at great length. No family member made any attempt to exert control
over the book’s content or direction, despite knowing that some material would
be extremely painful to see in print. At the family’s request, twenty percent of
the royalties generated by sales of Into the Wild will be donated to a scholarship
fund in Chris McCandless’s name.
I am grateful to Doug Stumpf, who acquired the manuscript for Villard
Books/Random House, and to David Rosenthal and Ruth Fecych, who edited the
book with skill and care following Doug’s premature departure. Thanks, also, to
Annik LaFarge, Adam Rothberg, Dan Rembert, Dennis Ambrose, Laura Taylor,
Diana Frost, Deborah Foley, and Abigail Winograd at Villard/ Random House for
their assistance.
This book began as an article in Outside magazine. I would like to thank Mark
Bryant and Laura Hohnhold for assigning me the piece and shaping it so adroitly.
Adam Horowitz, Greg Cliburn, Kiki Yablon, Larry Burke, Lisa Chase, Dan Ferrara,
Sue Smith, Will Dana, Alex Heard, Donovan Webster, Kathy Martin, Brad Wetzler,
and Jaqueline Lee worked on the article as well.
Special gratitude is owed to Linda Mariam Moore, Roman Dial, David Roberts,
Sharon Roberts, Matt Hale, and Ed Ward for providing invaluable advice and
criticism; to Margaret David-son for creating the splendid maps; and to John
Ware, my agent nonpareil.
Important contributions were also made by Dennis Burnett, Chris Fish, Eric
Hathaway, Gordy Cucullu, Andy Horowitz, Kris Maxie Gillmer, Wayne Westerberg,
Mary Westerberg, Gail Borah, Rod Wolf, Jan Burres, Ronald Franz, Gaylord
Stuckey, Jim Gal-lien, Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, Ferdie Swanson, Butch Killian,
Paul Atkinson, Steve Carwile, Ken Kehrer, Bob Burroughs, Berle Mercer, Will
Forsberg, Nick Jans, Mark Stoppel, Dan Solie, Andrew Liske, Peggy Dial, James
Brady, Cliff Hudson, the late Mugs Stump, Kate Bull, Roger Ellis, Ken Sleight, Bud
Walsh, Lori Zarza, George Dreeszen, Sharon Dreeszen, Eddie Dickson, Priscilla
Russell, Arthur Kruckeberg, Paul Reichart, Doug Ewing, Sarah Gage, Mike Ralphs,
Richard Keeler, Nancy J. Turner, Glen Wagner, Tom Clausen, John Bryant,
Edward Treadwell, Lew Krakauer, Carol Krakauer, Karin Krakauer, Wendy
Krakauer, Sarah Krakauer, Andrew Krakauer, Ruth Selig, and Peggy Langrall.
I benefited from the published work of journalists Johnny Dodd, Kris Capps,
Steve Young, W. L. Rusho, Chip Brown, Glenn Randall, Jonathan Waterman,
Debra McKinney, T. A. Badger, and Adam Biegel.
For providing inspiration, hospitality, friendship, and sage counsel, I am
grateful to Kai Sandburn, Randy Babich, Jim Freeman, Steve Rottler, Fred
Beckey, Maynard Miller, Jim Doherty, David Quammen, Tim Cahill, Rosalie
Stewart, Shannon Costello, Alison Jo Stewart, Maureen Costello, Ariel Kohn, Kelsi
Krakauer,
Miriam Kohn, Deborah Shaw, Nick Miller, Greg Child, Dan Cau-thorn, Kitty
Calhoun Grissom, Colin Grissom, Dave Jones, Fran Kaul, David Trione, Dielle
Havlis, Pat Joseph, Lee Joseph, Pierret Vogt, Paul Vogt, Ralph Moore, Mary
Moore, and Woodrow O. Moore.

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