Nightglow Window

Friday, October 12, 2007

Into The Wild

I watched Into The Wild tonight, and it left an impression on me. The movie, directed by Sean Penn and taken from Jon Krakauer's excellent nonfiction book, follows Christopher Johnson McCandless as he sets off on a journey of self discovery through the landscape of the American West.

As the book's jacket reads: "Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild."

McCandless paddles a canoe down the Colorado river, backpacks the Sierra, hops freight cars, hitchhikes around the west working odd jobs and meets an array of characters living on society's less-fettered fringes.

His story veers from the somewhat typical tale of boho anti-materialistic dirtbagging when he travels to Alaska to the stunning-yet-unforgiving landscape near Denali National Park.

McCandless heads down the Stampede Trail, crosses the Savage and Teklanika rivers during the spring when water levels are low, and discovers a derelict bus abandoned 22 miles from the nearest road. As Brian Miller ably writes, "For the next four months he called the bus home, hunting and living off the land until approximately August, at which point he ran into some bad luck.

"He apparently ate the wrong food, the seed pods of the wild Siberian pea, at the instruction of a book he had brought. Also, he was unable to cure the meat he had harvested. Becoming increasingly ill and starving, he attempted to exit the bush, but when he got to the Teklanika, he was unable to cross because it had risen quite a bit by then. He had no map, else he could have possibly located one of the two ranger stations located nearby. He was trapped there, on the west side of the Teklanika. He journeyed back to the bus, a mere 16 miles from the nearest homestead, and died there some time in late August. His body was discovered by hunters only a few weeks later."

Today the bus is a shrine of sorts. There is a copy of Into the Wild there, as well as a bible, a notebook, the original Krakauer article that appeared in Outside magazine on Chris, plenty of first aid and survival gear such as rations and sleeping bags, and a plaque with Chris's last words: "I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and God Bless all."

What gives McCandless' story resonance with me is how I recognize a part of myself in him. I understand what he was after better than perhaps I should, perhaps more than I'm comfortable with.

In 1989 I spent quite a bit of time in Alaska with my sister, culminating in a short bike tour with her down the Denali Park Road. We heard the howl of wolves while camping alongside the Teklanika river. We hiked down the Savage River gorge to within 12 miles of where McCandless would die a few years later.

That trip was incredibly influential, shaping the next few years of my life. It spurred my 2,100-mile bike tour from Lompoc to Jackson, Wyoming the next summer. It set me off down the path of mountaineering, backpacking, and rock climbing. For a time, solo winter backpacking in the San Gorgonio wilderness was my favorite thing, sleeping in the snow at 10,500 feet giddy with the feeling that there wasn't anyone within fifteen miles, that I was really on my own. This passion eventually led me to become editor of Outdoor Retailer magazine. I even authored a guidebook to San Diego hiking that's still in print.

So what to make of McCandless? A part of me is unforgiving. His unflagging dedication to the natural aesthetic seems equally idealistic, naive, and quixotic to the 40-year-old version of me. His apparent disinterest in his surroundings -- after all he could have found help or escaped had he simply carried a topo of the area -- is frustrating but not really baffling. When returning from summitting Mt Rainier in May 1992, I chose to lie down in the back seat of the car through Los Angeles, unwilling to stomach the look of the city, disgusted by the whole mess. A part of me understands.

Eventually I mellowed, my own views subsumed by experience and a broader range of interest, kids, and responsibilites. My climbing gear moulders in the garage. My ice axe and crampons are rusty, my ropes past their expiration date. I struggle to recall how to tie a double fisherman's knot, something that I could once do with my eyes closed in a rain storm. But part of me, perhaps a dwindling part, still understands a bit of what McCandless was searching for over that far horizon, and that both thrills and troubles me.