Grouch's Full Review: Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild
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.
That’s the first paragraph of Jon Krakauer’s gripping book Into the Wild (published one year before his best-selling Into Thin Air). If those two sentences don’t grab you by the eyeballs and keep them glued to the page, then I suggest a visit to your optometrist is in order.
I was hooked by Krakauer’s narrative from the start, but for a different reason. When Christopher McCandless, the ill-fated young man, disappeared into the wild landscape of Interior Alaska, I was living just 150 miles to the north in Fairbanks. When the unidentified, decaying body was found by hunters that summer, it made state headlines. “How sad,” we all thought. Then, as the mystery deepened, we thought, “How intriguing.” But when we learned that McCandless had wanted to leave civilization behind and plunge headlong into the isolated wilderness, many of us thought, “How stupid.”
Taking McCandless’ story at the face value of newspaper accounts, I’ll admit I was one of the finger-pointers who denounced the brash young man. After reading Krakauer’s account, however, I have a better understanding of what made McCandless tick. Krakauer puts a human face on the tabloid headline and it becomes a tale that’s alternately harrowing, sad and mystifying. We may never understand the method behind McCandless’ madness, but Into the Wild paints a vivid portrait, stroke by stroke, of a confused young man on a fatal sojourn.
McCandless came from a rich family and had graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990. But he also had a restless spirit. Wanderlust overwhelmed him. To his relatives, his behavior grew increasingly odd and troublesome. He gave away his trust fund to charity, he cut all ties to his family, he burned the cash in his wallet, and finally he set off across America on a quest for moral rigor and asceticism (sparked by reading the writings of Leo Tolstoy).
As Krakauer writes, McCandless invented “an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.” He also renamed himself as Alexander Supertramp, “master of his own destiny.”
That destiny would lead ultimately to an abandoned bus out in the middle of Alaska’s unforgiving bush wilderness. This is the spot McCandless hiked to, twenty-five miles from the nearest highway. There, along a seldom-used dog-mushing trail, he set up camp in the old bus, gathered berries, and scribbled in his journal. Eventually, it became his final resting place.
McCandless lasted 113 days in the wilderness. Krakauer calls his death “a terrible accident” that was not, by all appearances, an eco-suicide but a series of wrong choices. Eat this berry, take a misstep on the tundra, drink from the wrong stream—any of these could be one link in a fatal chain. In the northern climates, the smallest mistake can quickly become your last one. People out for an afternoon hike have been known to die simply because they forgot to pack the right kind of jacket. In Alaska, preparation and forethought is everything.
Of course, many people (like McCandless) get a little dewy-eyed when they think of the 49th state. And rightly so. I lived in Alaska, off and on, for nearly nine years and believe me when I tell you there is no other place on earth like "the Great Land." It is beautiful beyond words. But it’s the kind of beauty that can cloud minds.
As Krakauer writes: Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.
In other words, Alaska was probably the last place Christopher McCandless should have ventured. Throughout Into the Wild, Krakauer admits he’s a little biased toward McCandless’ situation since he himself once walked in the 24-year-old’s hiking boots.
About midway through Into the Wild, Krakauer pauses to relate his own harrowing tale of a wilderness adventure that almost made him an obituary headline. His expedition to Alaska’s Devils Thumb in 1977 eerily mirrors McCandless’ twenty-five years later. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality, Krakauer writes. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink.
So, when he first heard about the body discovered in the bus in the middle of Alaska’s wilderness, he felt a twinge from his own past. Doing a quick investigation into the circumstances behind McCandless’ death, he wrote a memorable article for Outside magazine. That one article generated the biggest flood of mail in the magazine’s history.
Alaskans, in particular, wrote to Outside, denouncing McCandless as “mentally disturbed,” a “nut,” a “kook.” However, to Krakauer he was “a seeker” who had “an impractical fascination with the harsh side of nature.”
As an aside, I wonder if Krakauer would be so kind to McCandless today in light of his own experiences with human nature vs. Mother Nature on Everest (as described in Into Thin Air). Would he still be so forgiving of McCandless’ walk into the wild?
It’s difficult to say for sure. What is certain, however, is the fact that whatever stance Krakauer took, it would be a highly readable one. Into the Wild is modern journalism in its finest hour. Using the diaries found at the bus and interviews with family, friends and strangers who gave the young hitchhiker rides, the author reconstructs McCandless’ last months with with the kind of nerve-jarring suspense normally found in novels. There are times when the story simply becomes too painful to read. The haunting photos McCandless took of himself standing out in the middle of that remote landscape only compound the sorrow of a life that walked down the wrong trail.
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Chris...More at HotBookSale
This movie tie-in edition follows the haunting story of 22-year-old Chris McCandless, who walked into the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992 and...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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