Afterwards, I completely forgot about my late-night moment of wonder. That was until recently, when my friend Ed brought the film up in conversation saying how amazing it was, and then I learned that it was based on a book so naturally, the book was ordered within a day or two.
Well, the book came yesterday and I've read 144 pages out of 205, and nothing has ever resonated with me so deeply. So much so that I feel compelled to spread the word of this book, I want to shout out passages in the street, I want to buy 10 million copies and throw them at people. The author, Jon Krakauer, analyses the incredible story of Chris McCandless, constantly posing the ultimate question of whether what he did was amazing or stupid. He sums up the entire story in the first four lines of his 'author's note' at the beginning of the book:
"In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters."
If you've seen the film, this might shock you - because the film doesn't tell it as a documentary - it follows Chris along his journey and you find yourself rooting for him, heartbroken when he dies from picking the wrong berries and poisoning himself. If this was a spoiler, I'm totally not sorry because you should always read the book before watching the film anyway - duh.
This Jon Krakauer guy, he really seems to get it. He paints Chris out in such a light that I feel like I know him. There are excerpts from Chris' journal to help flesh out the bones of the facts, but you really get the sense that the author is on the same wavelength as his subject. And I am very much on that wavelength too.
Chris hated almost everything about the comfortable American existence. He studied racism, apartheid, starvation and suffering, as well as politics. He spent his Friday nights in the pits of the town, surveying homeless people and prostitutes to truly appreciate the segregation in wealth; he hated any unnecessary show of wealth and turned down his parents' offer to buy him a new car because the beaten-up old one he had ran perfectly fine. He was searching for something deeper, more real, he hitchhiked up and down America for two years, making deep and real connections with those he met on the way, and left an imprint upon those people. I can say that I've never met Chris, and I don't know everything about his amazing story, but he has truly already left an imprint on me too. He gave himself another name, the name of Alexander Supertramp, he burned all his money and forms of identification, he left it all behind.
The first passage I highlighted from the book was from a letter written by Chris, sent to an elderly man he met whilst hitchhiking, who formed a deep love for Chris, proposing to adopt him as his Grandson, following Chris' advice to give up his comfortable conventional life and travel round a bit, even when he was into his late 70s/early 80s:
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future."
Read that over a couple of times. Do you get it? Do you agree? Does it fill you with a fierce empathy for this long-gone man and his ideas? Because it does for me. I couldn't have worded my inward thoughts more perfectly. I feel like I should have been sat with Chris in that bus, I feel like I should have met him on the road somewhere, and I feel like we could have talked wildly for hours, non-stop, both on a higher level of consciousness, with a wider view of seeing. I feel that there is a palpable loss for this human being in the world, or at least a lack of those who share the same outlook.
Krakauer goes on to talk about other explorers who did a similar thing, He talks about Carl McCunn, a photographer who at the age of 35, chartered a helicopter to a remote lake near Fort Yukon, Alaska, and for some unknown reason, failed to organise his return trip. He'd flown out at the beginning of August, and sometime in late November, killed himself with a bullet to the head. He also talks about a climber, John Waterman, who once spent 145 days alone to climb a mountain. Parallels have been drawn between these people and Chris because, quite simply, does to much time in the wild - make us wild? When the mind is left to wonder and the comfort of conversation isn't available, what do we do? We are left to be our own best friend as well as our own worst enemy; we are left only with our thoughts, and some of us have darker thoughts than others. Chris even said so himself in his final desolate days, with the words "Happiness is only real when shared."
Two other adventurers are compared to Chris also, Gene Rosellini, a.k.a Mayor of Hippie Cove, who despaired at the modern world and devoted more than 10 years of his life to an experiment with the aim of seeing if the modern man could live like a caveman. In a letter to a friend, however, he revealed, "I learned it is not possible for human beings, as we know them, to live off the land." I must say, although I do agree with this observation, the key phrase here is 'as we know them'. The sad truth is, us human beings have advanced so fast and so far that we would find any kind of extreme survival alien. This is why Wall-E depicts us all as fat blobs and this is why the whole Bear Gryll's Island show is exactly what it says on the tin - a TV show - fantasy. As much as I would love us all to return to instinct, like I said in my 'Meat Matter' post, it's entirely impractical and idealistic.
This raises the question - so, what was Chris McCandless trying to prove by going out into the wild completely unprepared? And my honest opinion is that he wasn't trying to prove anything - he wasn't trying to wow us all with some experiment and he clearly wasn't trying to get a big reality TV show contract. He was just living, escaping the cities and the clutches of modern, lazy life.
The other adventurer that Krakauer did his homework on was Everett Ruess. It is Ruess that Krakauer most closely relates Chris too, and it is easy to see why. Ruess got on the road and hitchhiked as soon as he could - after getting his diploma. He wrote letters in abundance and this is where I found myself going crazy with the highlighter.
"I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and the star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities."
These people, are magicians with words, the wilderness turned them into poets, and I feel it doing the same to me every time I gaze out onto the ocean, every time I tread upon the springy forest floor carpeted with pine needles, every time I breathe in the clear alpine air, blinded by snow and sky. I crave a life on the road - a life that is uncertain, obscure, sometimes lonely and desolate, other times filled with faces and noise and chaos. As Reuss even penned himself; "I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly."
So, I'm not about to fill my little Herschel backpack with cereal bars and announce that I'm off to fend for myself on Mount Snowdon, but I do feel more full and reassured by the mere existence of these people, by the comfort that their words give to me - I feel a kindred spirit in Chris, and in anybody who appreciates adventure. And so my little part in this is to get out there, like Chris, to LIVE out there, to be wild, to get out there on a ski season this year, to pack my van up next year with Kai and hit the road. I want to shower under sprinklers on private land and be chased off, I want my only source of food to be from natural resources, I want to howl at the moon and survey the stars, I want to come close to death to give me more value to my life, I want to help other people who weren't lucky enough to be born under the same circumstances as me.
I want to embrace my wilder mind.
12.2.68 - August 92
