The Wild Truth (30 page)

“Where’s my baby?” I asked.

The nurse looked around the room and asked someone to take Heather out. Heather looked straight over to me.

“No. She can stay. What’s wrong?” The words fell out of my mouth in a slow cadence, not really wanting to be answered.

That’s when they told us our little girl had Down syndrome. I was in shock. I had been so cautious during my pregnancy—coping well with stress, exercising properly, eating healthily, never drinking any alcohol or even a single soda. There had been no signs of trouble at my doctor visits, and screening tests for common concerns had been negative. I didn’t know anything about what caused Down syndrome. The doctor explained that it happens at conception—it was part of her DNA.

I looked around the room to my husband, to my friends, to anyone, for strength. Everyone was staring at each other or straight ahead, not knowing what to say. The nurse proceeded to explain that our baby had been taken to the intensive care unit because she likely had heart defects and gastrointestinal disorders.

“I want to see her right now!” I insisted.

“I’m sorry,” said the nurse, “but she has to stay down there, and you can’t be allowed to get out of this bed until you can move your legs on your own.”

“Damn it! I knew I shouldn’t have asked for the epidural!” I said and started to sob.

Aside from my crying, the room was silent. And then my little Heather, one month shy of turning seven, walked over to me, took my hand in hers, and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. She’s gonna be just fine, because you’re gonna take great care of her just like you take care of me.”

HEATHER
’
S PREDICTION CAME TRUE.
During three days in the hospital, while the doctors ran tests and waited for results, her little sister surprised everyone with her determination and ability to thrive. Aside from some minor and ordinary newborn complications, she proved to be perfectly healthy. As the doctors explained the extensive therapies that would be required to deal with her disability I felt the importance of ensuring she was surrounded only by love, support, and positive energy.

It was clear she had her uncle’s strong spirit, and we decided to name her Christiana.

Truth

Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich
food and wine in abundance, and 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,
passage highlighted by Chris

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS

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 ?

(Note written on the back side of a page torn from Louis
L’Amour’s
Education of a Wandering Man,
found with Chris’s
remains. His last journal entry was “Beautiful Blueberries.”)

C
ARINE
!”
JON KRAKAUER
’
S VOICE
buzzed through the phone. “I finally found out what happened to Chris’s backpack!” The news startled me to the point that I almost dropped the phone into the bath water I was drawing for Christiana.

Two and a half weeks after Chris had died inside Fairbanks 142, after not seeing or speaking to another human for one hundred and twelve days, six Alaskans found themselves in an unexpected meeting outside the derelict bus. An overwhelming stench of decomposition, along with an ominous note taped to a window glass, kept them from examining the interior. According to Jon’s findings, one man who’d mustered the nerve to peer through the window to investigate further recalled seeing an expensive backpack among the rifle, paperback books, and other items that were found with Chris’s body. But the Alaska State Troopers who had extricated Chris’s remains from the isolated vehicle had not returned with a backpack for the coroner to turn over to his family. When Jon visited the bus for the first time, he recognized many items that remained there as having belonged to Chris, but his backpack was nowhere to be found.

Fifteen years after Chris’s death, Jon received a call from one Will Forsberg. A dog musher from Healy, Forsberg spends serene winters with his wife and dogs in a cabin six miles south of where the bus rests. Jon had spoken with Forsberg while researching
Into the Wild,
and while he had not mentioned this previously, the Alaskan now claimed to have Chris’s pack.

During the recent call, Forsberg had told Jon that he had visited the bus shortly after Chris’s death. After noticing the pack had been left behind, he took it back to his cabin, where, after deciding it could be useful, he simply hung the backpack outside on a nail under the eave of his roof.

The mystery-solving phone call came to Jon after he had first learned, through the Internet, that Forsberg reportedly had the items. Having not heard back from Forsberg after several droning requests left on his answering machine, Jon phoned my parents and suggested they give it a try. When he offered them Forsberg’s phone number, they declined. Jon’s next call was to me. I called Forsberg as soon as I hung up with Jon, and after several phone calls between Forsberg, Jon, and myself, the backpack was on its way to my front door.

I understood why Jon had called my parents first with the opportunity to retrieve the backpack, and I appreciated why that was appropriate. Jon always struck me as a man of veracity, who accepted a natural order when it came to such things. I had witnessed him put forth great efforts to share a mutually respectful relationship with my parents, despite the irrational behavior they sometimes aimed at him.

I also greatly admired his belief in the importance of truth, even as I had asked him not to divulge my family’s traumatic history. Jon had spent three years of his life following and researching Chris’s journeys before publishing his book about them, and his fixation on uncovering and dissecting every detail could often be described as obsessive. Perhaps the greatest example of his zeal was his bullheaded determination to unravel the mystery of exactly how Chris had died.

Jon’s initial approach to this question was to assume the accuracy of the coroner’s report, which stated that Chris had starved to death. But as Jon examined Chris’s journal entries and photographs of the food he’d hunted and foraged, Jon came to believe that the coroner’s report failed to consider crucial evidence about the cause of his death. Further, determining the precise cause of Chris’s death
mattered,
because it could potentially say a lot about how prepared—or foolhardy—he had been. Jon remembered his own youth filled with risk-taking adventures, and he queried other adventure seekers about their opinions of Chris. Was he just an ill-prepared, arrogant tenderfoot? Or was there something more to what drove him?

When visiting the bus, Jon cited Chris’s blunders to his friend and travel companion Roman Dial, who by all accounts is an incredibly accomplished and well-respected outdoorsman in Alaska. Jon felt Roman’s response was important enough to include in
Into the Wild:

According to Chris’s terse journal entries, on July 30, 1992, he suddenly fell ill—an illness that weakened him to the point that he could not hike out or hunt or forage for food. These entries persuaded Jon that starvation alone was not responsible for his rapid demise. Chris stated unequivocally in his ninety-fourth journal entry, approximately eighteen days before his death, that his extreme illness was the “fault of potato seeds.” He added that he was “extremely weak” and was experiencing “much trouble just to stand up.” This foreboding statement led Jon to explore a number of theories in an effort to either prove or disprove Chris’s claim.

After ascertaining that Chris had properly identified the wild potato and had not mistaken it for another, putatively toxic species, the wild sweet pea, Jon sent seeds he’d gathered from the wild potato plants growing around the bus to be tested for toxic alkaloids. When an Alaskan chemist derisively announced, “I tore that plant apart. There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I’d eat it myself,” Jon explored the possibility that a toxic mold had contaminated the seeds Chris had stored in a dirty plastic bag before eating them. When that theory was also shot down, Jon sent the seeds to a lab in Michigan to be tested for other, less obvious toxins. Finally, after several false leads and months of expensive chemical analyses, Jon conclusively determined by means of liquid chromatography—tandem mass spectrometry that the seeds contained a toxic, non-protein amino acid known to cause serious illness in both animals and humans.

And why did Jon spend tens of thousands of dollars, devote months of his life, and subject himself to public ridicule trying to figure out the precise cause of Chris’s death? I believe that he did it for Chris. I believe that Jon genuinely cares about the morality and necessity of truth, as Chris did. And never does such a search for truth seem more compelling, and more crucial, than when it involves probing the personal enigmas that exist within each of us. Some people need to seek that truth and share it, regardless of the consequences.

WITH THE MYSTERY
of Chris’s backpack finally solved, I was provided with definitive answers to a few lingering questions—questions I was often asked by those who remained skeptical about Chris’s ultimate ambitions. When I spoke with Forsberg, he explained that several years after taking the backpack from the bus, he discovered Chris’s wallet inside, zipped underneath the interior lining, which apparently was utilized by Chris as a makeshift hidden compartment. Inside the wallet, Forsberg found several forms of identification and three crisp one hundred dollar bills—further evidence that while Chris was determined to challenge himself to survive in the harsh wilds of Alaska, he fully intended to walk back out.

It remains unclear to me exactly why Forsberg did not report the discovery of the backpack and wallet to authorities. In the months after Chris’s death, Forsberg, along with another cabin owner in the area, asserted his belief that Chris had most likely been the vandal who had trashed some cabins that summer—even though Chris’s journal showed no evidence that he had traveled anywhere near the cabins and he was not considered a suspect by the National Park Service. What I did glean from my own conversation with Forsberg was that with the passage of time, he had come to understand that it was unlikely that Chris had been the culprit. As talk of the movie ambled through the media, and with the presence of the film crew in the areas of Alaska where Chris had been, the backpack that had been hanging idly on the side of Forsberg’s cabin for so many years seemed to gain new life. He felt it was time to return it to Chris’s family. For that kindness, I will always be grateful.

RECEIVING CHRIS
’
S BACKPACK
through the mail, a decade and a half after his death, was a surreal experience. As I peered into the large box, my tears quickly began to dot the cardboard. The fatigued material felt rough and rigid between my fingers. I could tell it was a North Face pack, although no identifying information remained on the outside. I propped it up next to my own thirty-liter capacity pack, stood back, and estimated that it could carry slightly more. In the natural light coming through my kitchen windows, the pack’s muddled charcoal color contrasted starkly with the deep rich black I had seen in the pictures that Chris took during his travels so many years ago. It spoke to me about exploration. It looked like it still wanted to go. I thought about everywhere it had been, the distance it had covered with Chris, the stories it could tell. I had never been jealous of an inanimate object before.