Into the Wild

As a teenager, I had quite an obsession with the issue of society vs. nature, and had this unrealistically romantic concept of living in the wild. I think a good number of teenagers go through that phase? Nevertheless, I eventually moved on and developed a better outlook on life. But during that time of my life, my mother brought a book, Into the Wild, written by John Krakauer, which retraces the life and eventful death of Christopher McCandless. This young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked into the wilderness north of Mount McKinley. Four months later he was found dead. This book had everything I loved, an adventure, mystery (did he want to die?), passion, wilderness, and possibly madness. Within mere pages, I was hooked!

John Krakauer, who wrote Into Thin Air, was asked to write an article for Outside about Chris Mccandless. Yet long after writing the article, Krakauer could not forget about this man, as he could identify certain aspects of himself to this young man all too well. Eventually he decided to spend a year retracing McCandless' journey from his birth to death in Alaska in 1992.

Christopher Johnson McCandless was born on February 12, 1968, and was raised in Washington, D.C. by his parents. He excelled academically and was an elite athlete. As soon as he graduated with honors from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless changed his name, gave away his savings of 24,000 to charity, abandoned his car, and burned all the cash in his wallet. He created a new life for himself, as a wanderer of North America. His family had no idea where he was or what became of him until his death was discovered by moose hunters. McCandless became consumed with Jack London's book known as the Call of the Wild, along with other authors such as Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy, who possibly influenced the way Christopher chose to live his life as.

John Krakauer traces McCandless' journey through Arizona, California and South Dakota and interviews the people who befriended McCandless who at the time called himself Alexander Supertramp. He lived from job to job and went weeks at times where he lived without money and little human contact. His friends knew he dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey' for years where he would live off the land. In April 1992, McCandless hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska, and was last seen by James Gallien who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. McCandless had very little and refused all assistance that a concerned James Gallien tried to give, except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melts, and a bag of potato chips. Other than the items that Gallien gave him, he only had a ten pound bag of rice, a hunting rifle with plenty of ammunition, a book of local plant life along with several other books, and some camping equipment. After hiking into the wild, McCandless found an abandoned bus parked on a section of the Stampede near Denali National Park and chose to settle there. His journal entries covers a total of 113 separate days. After living off the land for several months, Chris decided to leave but found the trail back was blocked by the Teklanika River.

On September 6, 1992, a group of moose hunters found an SOS note on the door of the bus. Inside the bus was his body inside his sleeping bag, dead for more than two weeks. The official cause of death was starvation, but John Krakauer believes that Chris died of eating the seeds of the "Eskimo potato, which McCandless wrote about.

In addition of going in depth of McCandless adventures, Krakauer also writes about his own experiences of climbing Mount Everest which turned into a nightmarish disaster. Other than personal accounts of his experiences, he also writes about several men that answered the call of the wild and never returned, such as Everett Ruess, a twenty years old man who disappeared in the Utah desert in 1934.

After Into the Wild was published, Christopher McCandless started to have a following of young idealistic adults who want to answer the call of the wild up in Alaska, much to the annoyance of the Alaskans. Many Alaskans consider McCandless a fool for wandering into the wilderness of Alaska without being fully prepared and completely unaware of his surroundings. Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote:

"I am exposed continually to what I will call the "McCandless Phenomenon." People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent... When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament... Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide."

Into the Wild, is a must for anybody who previously enjoyed John Krakauer's Into Thin Air. If you have not read either but enjoy a good true story full of adventures, you will most likely enjoy this book. I know I enjoyed it enough to reread it every other year.