Christopher McCandless

I recently, for the second time, finished reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild. I can’t quite pin down why this story is so captivating to me, but it is. Before I even read the book, I saw the movie, and I only became aware of the movie because I found out that Eddie Vedder did the soundtrack. Into the Wild, the movie adaptation directed by Sean Penn, came out around Aug/Sept. of ’07, but I didn’t see it until late October of that same year. I had no idea that it was based on a true story, especially one that was well documented while I was too busy learning to be a sophomore in high school in 1992. Other than Vedder’s insightful lyrics and familiar baritone, the movie didn’t do much for me. Even the trailers I had seen suggested that this was going to be some upbeat, romanticized adventure of a man losing himself in nature who would come back to share his tale of catharsis in the wild and reinvent himself. This is what I expected, until the end.

            As it turned out, the spirited adventurer, Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp), dies an agonizing death from starvation in a rundown bus in the Alaska wilderness. I didn’t see Chris’s death coming at all. It really threw me for a loop, and the fact that this really happened haunted me for many days after. At this point, I was hooked. The morbidity of the ordeal sucked me right in and I wanted to know as much as I could about Chris’s experince. Shortly after seeing the movie, I bought Krakauer’s book, which was published four years after Chris’s death. Krakauer actually first wrote about the story shortly after it broke in an article for Outside magazine. What fascinated me even more was the mention of photos that Chris had taken during his travels, some of which were published. The inside cover of Into the Wild contains a photo of Chris, sitting leisurely on a chair in front of Magic Bus 142, with a big smile on his face. This is the same photo shown at the end of the movie, but in full color and greater detail, obviously. My curiosity prompted me to do a Google search for more pictures of Chris and to my luck several came up, including specific pictures that were mentioned in the book. One of these self-portraits was Chris’s last, taken probably within days of his death. He is dressed in what looks like a wool, or hide parka; his hair is wild and unkempt; he looks very gaunt and frail and is holding a paper or tablet with his final words, all of this while he stands smiling under the Alaskan sun.

            Having reflected on Chris’s story, I have found an admiration for him. He always stood by his word and convictions, and actually lived the life of social critic as opposed to just writing about society from a comfortable distance. I also admire him for his courage. The lifestyle he chose was a very difficult one, both mentally and physically, and it had its risks, not only of what became his undoing, but he could have just as easily become a victim of crime, an accidently fall or injury, a drowning, exposure, and so many possible occurances that come with life on the road. I know that I could never do what Chris did, nor would I want to. I don’t think it is healthy to be too isolationistic, but it should be respected. There are certain things I like possessing, consuming, valuing, and I like to engage in the various ways the world communicates. I to have my misgivings about society but I am more comfortable keeping these ideas and expressing them within society. Chris also reminds me a lot of myself. I have a tendency to shut certain people out of my life, and I can probably say why if I really thought about, but I don’t want to. I am shy by nature, but this only manifests in certain situations, particularly in relationships, and interactions with women I’m interested in. I avoid conflict if at all possible, and would rather dwell in my own anger and inadequacy when dealing with conflict. And when I do express my discontent, it often comes out too aggressively. I have a tendency to be selfish, and I am definitely a narcissist. I am okay with all of this; it’s who I am sometimes.

            One of the things I didn’t like about Chris was his penchant to push his idealology on other people, there’s nothing I hate more than that. Of course, my own disagreement here is not as indignant, since I mostly favor Chris’s disposition. I also think Chris should have at least contacted his sister once while he was traveling; she was the only one would understood him, and he vanished from her life no differently than he did his parents’.

            Chris McCandless’s story will no doubt stick with me for the rest of my life. It’s one of those incidences you can easily get wrapped up in, probably the same way people get compulsive about Kennedy’s assassination. In addition to becoming familiar with this story I have also discovered what a great writer Jon Krakauer is. As a final task in completing my writing degree, I have to do a directed study (scrutinizing an author’s words line by line to gain insight into the writer’s mind) of an author’s work, and I chose an excerpt from Into the Wild. Here, I put the story aside and chose an excerpt in which Krakauer discusses his own spirit of adventure, and his near death experience during an enduring mountain climb, experiencing the same catharsis that Chris had.