Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival (17 page)

Chapter 7 - Sought Solitude, Found Death

FEW FIGURES HAVE CAPTURED THE WORLD’S COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION AS POWERFULLY AS
CHRIS M
C
CANDLESS
HAS.
B
RILLIANT, ATHLETIC, AND STRICKEN WITH ONE OF THE MOST ACUTE CASES OF
WANDERLUST
EVER DOCUMENTED IN THE POPULAR MEDIA,
M
C
C
ANDLESS’S
NOMADIC
DAYS WERE MADE FAMOUS BY THE PUBLICATION OF
J
ON
K
RAKAUER’S ARTICLE IN
O
UTSIDE
MAGAZINE, BY
K
RAKAUER’S SUBSEQUENT BOOK,
INTO THE WILD
, AND BY
S
EAN
P
ENN’S FILM OF THE SAME NAME.
Y
ET AS POWERFUL AS THE
M
C
C
ANDLESS STORY MAY BE, THE FACT IS THAT
C
HRIS DIDN’T HAVE TO
DIE.

He was young, strong, supremely confident, and fed up with modern society. So Chris McCandless set out on a journey, one where he would not only shed the layers of conformity that had been heaped on his shoulders by the outside world but also discover who he truly was. For nearly two years, Chris McCandless lived that dream, traipsing along the fringes of society. Then he decided to head into the Alaskan wilderness. It was the last place he’d ever call home.

And while it’s difficult to find fault with a young idealist seeking an existential experience through wilderness living, the fact is that McCandless was woefully unprepared for what faced him when he set off into the Alaskan bush in April 1992. As soon as he took his first step on that untamed soil, he was writing the prologue to his own death sentence. But Chris McCandless didn’t have to die.

McCandless’s idealistic and romantic view of the world’s wild places was, at least in part, born of the authors he adored, people like Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. They seemed to forge in him a certain philosophical arrogance that made him dislike society and yearn for a place where he wouldn’t have to compromise his ideals.

But idealism and arrogance are dangerous partners to bring into the cold Alaskan wilderness. Nobody romanticizes how painful it is to get frostbite or how awful it is to go without food for days on end, but these are the realities of most survival situations, and they seemed lost on Chris.

Although he certainly started marching to the beat of his own drummer much earlier in his life, the road to his eventual death began shortly after he graduated from Emory University in June 1990. Without a word of notice to friends or family, he loaded what few belongings he had into his old Datsun and started driving west. His goal, apparently, was to leave behind the trappings and structure of modern-day society. Here was a young man who wanted nothing to do with schedules or responsibilities, meetings or deadlines, or the encumbrances of material possessions. He got exactly what he wanted—and, unfortunately, much more.

Shortly after his journey began, McCandless shed his legal name and started calling himself Alexander Supertramp. He traveled across the country throughout that summer and fall, living, essentially, like a super tramp. He hitched rides with strangers, hopped trains, and occasionally fell in with other vagabonds he met on the road. He took the odd job, though he alternated these forays back into the structure of modern-day society with periods where he lived with little money or human contact.

And as romantic as Chris’s days on the road may seem, it’s important to remember that absolutely none of this would have prepared him for what awaited him in the Alaskan wilderness, regardless of what Krakauer might have intimated. In fact, McCandless didn’t experience anything close to hardcore or true wilderness living until, on an impulse, he bought an aluminum canoe near the California–Arizona border and decided to paddle four hundred miles down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, where the river finishes its journey in Mexico.

As with everything he did as a super tramp, McCandless didn’t prepare at all for this significant undertaking. In some ways, he had every right to be arrogant. He was very smart, a natural salesman, great with people, and a terrific athlete. And he was certainly successful at surviving on the fringes of society. But this skill set, upon which his arrogance rested, means little in the wild, whether it’s Alaska or the Colorado River.

And although McCandless survived more than two months in the canoe, he certainly had his share of mishaps. He got lost almost every time he had to do some route-finding, and was continually bailed out of trouble by accommodating Mexicans. He may have proved he could survive on minimal amounts of food, as he subsisted on little more than five pounds of rice, but surviving on minimal amounts of food is not the greatest challenge of wilderness survival. And he would not run across too many helpful people out in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

In early 1991, McCandless eventually found his way back across the border from Mexico and into the United States. He had been on the road for more than six months and showed little sign of losing his love of the new life he had created. He spent most of that year wandering around the southwestern U.S., following much the same pattern he had established in 1990: work a little, slum a little.

As 1992 began, McCandless decided to fulfill one of his life’s dreams and head to Alaska. His first stop was South Dakota, where he stayed with a friend and earned some money. Then, in mid-April, he started hitchhiking northwest. McCandless reached Fairbanks, Alaska, about ten days later.

The most dangerous thing about McCandless at this point in his travels is that he had convinced himself that he could actually survive in Alaska with minimal supplies. After all, he had made it through the previous year and a half, including his river journey. Why should Alaska be any different? Well, Alaska
is
different—much different.

McCandless had defined himself through his charisma, and usually had other people around to help him out, to feed him, put him up, or drive him somewhere. So yes, he was terrific at surviving, as long as he was working on the fringes of society and interacting with other people. He used his charm, not his survival skills, to get him through those situations.

Well, guess what: charm counts for absolutely nothing in the wilderness. You can’t charm a fish onto your hook or wood to burst into flames. Your personality is not going to shelter you from the cold and wind. And there’s a big difference between finding a place to sleep at a truck stop and surviving in the bush. McCandless’s survival skills were all based on having the trappings of society—those same trappings that he loathed so much—at his fingertips.

In recounting the McCandless story, I can’t help but feel that the ultimate cause of his downfall was his arrogance. He didn’t have to go completely unprepared into one of the earth’s harshest climates, but he did. Why? Because he was sure he was clever enough and fit enough to survive. And yes, he likely planned on staying there for only a few months, and yes, summer was approaching. But those are very poor reasons to ignore the fact that surviving in the wilderness—let alone the Alaskan wilderness—is brutally hard work.

I understand that there was a part of Chris that didn’t want to know what he was getting into, so it would all be new—novel and pure. But it would not have been a slight to his idealism to have taken the proper food and supplies with him. In fact, it probably would have helped him, because it would have given him a little more free time to expound upon the beauty and vastness of the natural world around him.

Most people don’t have the luxury of planning for their survival situations. They happen, you’re thrown in, and that’s that. But McCandless had, in fact, been dreaming about an “Alaskan odyssey” for years. And yet, he scoffed at the opportunity to plan. That’s not admirable, idealistic, or even cool, it’s foolhardy.

When I go out into unfamiliar wilderness, no matter where and no matter how experienced I may be, I always make it a point to spend time with someone local who knows the area and can teach me relevant skills. Doing this does not remove the romantic appeal of the wilderness. McCandless seemed to think it sufficient to take into the bush whatever he had learned in hippie camps, trailer parks, and truck stops.

So, what did McCandless take with him? Jim Gallien, the last person to see McCandless alive, said his half-full pack seemed to weigh only twenty-five or thirty pounds, ridiculously light for someone planning a several-month excursion into a land still blanketed under at least a foot of snow. In it was a woefully inadequate collection of items: a ten-pound bag of rice (his only food!), a .22-caliber rifle and ammunition (a poor choice), and some camping equipment. The heaviest part of McCandless’s bag? The nine or ten books he toted along.

Included in his personal library were pop novels written by people like Michael Crichton and Louis L’Amour. Okay, I understand taking something to read. But take one or two books at the most, and make sure one of them is a survival guide. I can’t pass judgment on whether or not to take novels on such a journey, except to say that I would not do it. I would prefer to live the dream rather than have a fictional escape to it.

The only book McCandless carried that was even remotely related to surviving was a plant identification book. He must have thought this guide, as comprehensive as it might have been, would help him locate food when hunting was marginal. But it makes little sense for someone to head into the wilderness with only a plant book and no firsthand instruction. Identifying plants with only a book is very difficult and has gotten loads of people into trouble. McCandless did forage successfully for berries and other wild edibles, but for all we know, he might have walked right over any number of other wonderfully edible plants. Ultimately, the book failed him, because it’s no substitute for hands-on information. In short, you should never be certain that you can identify a new plant unless someone has taught you personally. Plants may look different depending on the location or season, and even the most comprehensive guides don’t have the room to go into such detail. McCandless’s own journal pointed to his shortcomings in this area: a few late entries point to his suspicion that he’s poisoned himself by eating the seeds of the wild potato plant.

Now on the trail, McCandless likely hiked for a couple of days before stumbling upon the rusting, abandoned bus that would became his home—and eventually, his tomb. The bus, which had been skidded into the bush for use as a hunting shelter, was equipped with rough bedding and a wood-burning stove. Not more than twenty-five miles from the nearest town, Healy, and just outside the boundaries of Denali National Park, he set up camp.

McCandless’s chance encounter with the bus illustrates that, no matter how far off the beaten track you may go, there’s always a pretty good chance you’ll find something useful. When I was in the Amazon jungle with the Waorani people, I was amazed to find that their village was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Where did they get that when they’re in the middle of the jungle, half-naked, and hunting with blow guns? They had simply found an abandoned mine some distance away and taken it all from there, carrying it through miles of thick jungle.

Apparently happy in his new home, McCandless scrawled what Krakauer called his “declaration of independence” on a sheet of plywood filling one of the bus’s broken windows:

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. 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 pilgrimage. 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
May 1992

Chris was clearly seeking some type of higher experience, but any survival expert—and most Alaskans, for that matter—will tell you that the Alaskan bush is not the place to find it. You want that higher experience? Go spend six months in a monastery or live with a Tibetan monk for a while. Don’t use the wilderness as your temple, because there aren’t any monks who will bring you water and food. And if you don’t have what you need, you may very well perish.