The Wild Truth (34 page)

So, I didn’t. “Heather?” I called down the hallway.

“Yeeees?” she answered, knowingly.

“Can you come here for a minute please?” I continued. She came down the hall with an expectation of what was to come. I recognized there was no fear in her eyes, and I was proud of myself for that. “Hello there, sweetheart,” I said with a hint of sarcasm. “Do you recall me asking you to clean the bathroom this morning?”

“Yes,” she answered, looking down just slightly, then around the bathroom.

“And was I speaking English at that time?” I asked.

“Yes,” she concurred, smiling a little.

“And is English still your primary language?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she answered.

“Oh good! So, you
did
understand me. I was concerned the French you’re studying in school had taken over completely, and I don’t remember much of it myself. Whew!” I walked to the kitchen, leaving Heather to her cleaning, fully prepared that we’d have the same conversation again when it came to her room.

Christiana is thriving, and she and Heather continue to have a close and protective relationship. Together they have already taught me more than I can ever hope to teach them. When I look at them, I think about Chris and me, but I also think about Sam, Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, Shannon, and Quinn. My extended family today is closer than ever. That family doesn’t involve the people who biologically produced me; it includes those who molded me. We’ve had cause throughout our lives as children, as adults, and now as parents to band together time and time again. Perhaps the greatest bequest that Walt and Billie have offered us, in the end, is how their actions have brought us all together.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO
I visited the area where Chris spent his last days, the purest and most peaceful days of his life. It had taken me fifteen years to emotionally prepare myself for the trip, and my brothers and sisters helped give me that strength.

I made the trip with Jon in the summer of 2007, right before the movie was due to hit theaters across the world. Just as Jon’s presence was of great comfort to me throughout my experience with the book and film about Chris’s life, it felt incredibly appropriate to have him beside me on the day that I would visit the site of Chris’s death.

I wondered what was going through Jon’s mind as we watched the ruggedness of the Alaskan backcountry spread out beneath us. I knew it was not in Jon’s character to take the easy way in. My own adventurous side felt a bit cheated as we floated high above the thick spruce and alder in a safe and warm helicopter. I would rather have immersed myself in the challenge but only if it had made sense. Despite my deep love of nature and outdoor adventures, I had never visited the outback of Alaska before, nor had I hiked in similar territory. I accepted my level of naïveté, and since I did not take the time to properly train and prepare, I knew that I should not hike in. The most important goal of that trip was for me to get back home to Heather and Christiana, and Chris’s voice in my head was my strongest reminder.

Glaciers were visible in the distance, but there was no snow on the ground as there had been when Chris hiked through this terrain. From up above, hearing nothing but the high-pitched hum of the aircraft’s rotors and our pilot’s conversant narrative through my headset, it was hard to imagine what Chris experienced. The pictures he had taken shifted through my mind. My chest tightened as Jon pointed out the Teklanika River. The churning waters were still brown with silt from the late spring thaw.

The skids touched down on the rocky banks of the much tamer Sushana River, the waterway that ambles beside the abandoned bus that Chris had made his base camp for more than one hundred days. We were still a short walk from where the derelict vehicle rests. The toes of my thick boots scuffed along the shoreline. I picked up a few small colorful rocks and examined them for their aerodynamic properties, then tossed them across the top of the water as Chris had once taught me to do, hopeful for the skip. But my skills were rusty and the rocks simply plunked into the cold, slow current to meet the river bottom once again.

As I made my way up the short trail, Jon allowed me the time and space I needed to digest what was waiting just beyond the overgrown vegetation. As I entered a clearing, I saw it, just to my right. Fairbanks City Transit System bus 142 was parked beside a thicket of aspen and scraggly clumps of fireweed with blushing blooms. The green and white paint was peeling from over forty years of battling the elements. Rust devoured the metal as it crept across each point where yellow primer was exposed. I slowly turned, full circle, taking deep breaths to soak in the pain and the peace. I could see what had attracted Chris to this serene and beautiful place, and I remembered how he could be alone without being lonely. But sadness returned as I recalled his journal entries that revealed he was lonely and scared toward the end. In front of the bus sat the chair in which Chris took his now infamous self-portrait—the sole image Jon used in
Into the Wild
—during a happier time here, one leg comfortably propped up on the other, his wide smile lighting up an expression of absolute content. I cemented the image in my mind as the memory I would take from this place.

The whining of mosquitoes at my ears motivated me to move on, and I asked Jon to show me the location of the cave where Chris tried in vain to protect the moose meat from hordes of flies and their maggot offspring. The bus sat about ten yards from a small cliff overlooking the Sushana. We scrambled over the precipice toward the water on a narrow and scarcely used trail. Despite the throng of insects that followed, it was a beautiful setting, with the soft sounds of water running over and between rocks, meandering through forest as far as the eye could see. I imagined Chris pausing to take in the secluded view as he hauled his bath and drinking water up and over the edge. A small opening appeared in the bedrock not far from the top, where Chris had removed enough of the compacted dirt for his improvised smoking pit. The weight of his despair bore down on me as I stood in the same footing where he would have agonized over the failure of his attempt.

Back atop the overhang, I stared across the clearing and steeled myself to examine the interior of the bus. As I entered, I looked directly to the mattress where Chris took his last breaths. Tears blurred my peripheral vision as I walked slowly to the back. As I sat on the makeshift bed and cleared my eyes, I tried to imagine Chris here: stoking the fire in the oil-drum stove, having his meals, reading his books, and writing in his journal. Some of the windows were broken, some were missing, allowing the cool damp air and mosquitoes inside. The floor was strewn with leaves and dirt. I felt the urge to clean it up. But not the energy.

As my gaze traveled upward, I saw graffiti covering the worn sheet-metal walls, much of it scrawled by pilgrims inspired by Jon’s book to visit my brother’s final resting place. Many had come from distant points around the globe. While the messages had their differences—some were quite heartrending, while others appeared to have been written with elation—they all led me to believe that what draws individuals to this place is not so much about connecting with something they’ve found in Chris but rather to reconnect with something they’ve lost in themselves.

I heard Jon moving around outside the bus and it struck me that I owed him a debt that I could never repay. The fact remains that if Jon had not written such an intriguing book, my family and I would have been able to just grieve in silence. However, the world would have lost the inspirational story of my brother. And I would be stuck only with every day’s sadness, without the constant influx of gracious strangers and their stories to offset that grief.

I also would never have had the emotional strength to track my brother’s journey and follow his path, as Jon did. There is so much I never would have known about the last years of his life and, perhaps most importantly, the last hours of his life. I would still be without the peace that I have in my own heart, from knowing the peace that Chris found in his, before his death. Jon wrote:

The note Chris held was the one the coroner had given us so long ago. Chris had torn a page from one of his favorite books—Louis L’Amour’s memoir,
Education of a Wandering Man
—and written in very neat, very large block letters:

I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD.
GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!

On the backside of this page were some printed lines that L’Amour had offered from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

Although Chris addressed others in his final message, I believe that the act of writing it was more for himself than for the world. His final act of self-awareness. His final act of truth.

TO ME, LIFE IS LIKE A BOOK
. We all have the same first and last chapters. What makes up the story of our lives, and the legacy we leave behind, are the pages in between.

It is tragic that my brother died so young. But although he dreaded his impending death, he still died at peace, because the paths he had chosen throughout his life had kept him true to himself. And in the end, whenever that end comes, isn’t that the best any of us can hope for?

I believe Chris went into the wilderness in search of what was lacking in his childhood: peace, purity, honesty. And he understood there was nowhere better for him to find that than in nature.

At forty-two, I often feel like I am living for both Chris and me, as the span of his entire life has roughly been the first half of my own. He never had the opportunity to experience a long adulthood or to be a parent. I realize now that my adulthood is where I have sought out what was lacking in my childhood: necessary lessons of worth, strength, and unconditional love.

The legacy I leave behind will have little to do with famous stories, books, or movies. It will have everything to do with the love I feel for two little girls. Except for Shannon, all my siblings have kids, and I know they feel about their own kids the same way I feel about mine. Most of us were apprehensive about becoming parents, and we all delight in seeing each other be so
good
at it. In the decades since Chris’s death, my siblings and I have come together to find our own truth and build our own beauty in his absence. In each other, we’ve found absolution, as I believe Chris found absolution in the wild before he died.

During my trip to the bus, I represented all of Chris’s brothers and sisters by leaving behind a journal. Chris’s siblings filled up the first few pages, but the rest remained for visitors to the remote location to leave their own stories about what brought them there.

“Follow your heart, follow your adventures,” wrote Sam.

“Chris,” wrote Stacy, “always the adventurer with a desire for knowledge. I know, I understand, and I love you!”

Shelly wrote, “Before my son was born I gave him a big McCandless-style party. Inside the invitation was this Hodding Carter quote: ‘There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.’ I think in some strange way you played a part in sending me the greatest gift. I will always use you as a guide so I don’t clip his wings. Always in my heart and soul.”

I placed a picture in the journal of all of us together as young children. We’re all standing side by side. When I look at the picture, I don’t see our intermixed ages. I don’t see half brothers and sisters. I don’t see anyone missing. I see wholeness. I see a family. I see we are all smiling, and even Chris has a beaming grin from ear to ear.

That was a good day, and one that can never be taken from us. Beneath the picture I wrote, “The love of brothers and sisters never dies,” and beneath that, I wrote a few simple words Shawna had contributed to the journal. Always the one to lay down roots in a storm, she added,

And she’s right.

{Photo © Dominic Peters}

On September 30, 2012, I opened my front door to load some things into my Honda Pilot and saw my mom standing on my front porch. She hadn’t been in my home for several years, and this visit had come without invitation. Shocked to see her there, my first thought was one of relief that Robert had the girls for the day. Heather was thirteen years old and Christiana was six—my youngest would not have even recognized her grandmother.