April 27th, 1992

Greetings from Fairbanks!  This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.  Arrived here 2 days ago.  It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory.  But I finally got here.  Please return all mail I receive to the sender.  It might be a very long time before I return South.  If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man.  I now walk into the wild.

Alex.

It’s not often that I manage to read an entire book in a single sitting.  When it does happen, I’m either ill with nothing else to do, or the book is so special I can’t bear to be parted from it.  My experience with Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer falls, with certainty, into the second camp.

Into the Wild recounts the true and haunting tale of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young man from an affluent Washington DC family who, upon graduating from college in 1990, donated the $24,000 he had saved for law school to a hunger charity, burned all of the cash he held in his wallet and set off to travel, anonymously, around the American west.  McCandless didn’t stop to bid his family farewell, he simply upped and left with a few meagre possessions, changing his name along the way in order that he couldn’t be traced.

McCandless, operating under his adopted name of Alexander Supertramp, spent almost two years in the north American west before embarking on a journey into the Alaskan wilderness, his ultimate dream.  In late April 1992, he sent the above message to his friend Wayne Westerberg, after which he ventured alone into the Alaskan wild, north of Mount McKinley.  McCandless lived for over 100 days in the wilderness, setting up camp in an old abandoned bus and using a small rifle to hunt for food.  The gritty reality of Alaskan survival, however, proved to be too much for McCandless in his state of ill preparation and inexperience.  His emaciated, decomposing body was found by a moose hunter in August 1992, four months after he had set off.  Chris McCandless had starved to death.

It was upon writing of McCandless’s fate in Outside magazine in 1992 that Jon Krakauer first became involved with the story.  A story which Krakauer found so compelling that he was moved to investigate it further and present his findings in the form of the book.  Chris McCandless kept journals and took photographs of his travels, both before and during his period in Alaska.  Jon Krakauer has combined those materials with information gleaned from the people McCandless encountered on his journey – some of whom became the man’s closest friends – to create a supremely powerful portrait of a life that was lived with little more than a passing nod to the bounds of conventionality.

When it was first reported in late 1992, the story of Chris McCandless and his death in the wilderness attracted a multitude of differing reactions.  Some people denounced McCandless as a selfish, impudent adolescent, someone who had demonstrated only fleeting regard for the power of the wild and as such, had no business being there.  Others championed McCandless as the founding father of a new way of living in the 20th century.  A man who, upon finding himself ill-suited to the constraints of conventional life as we know it, actually went ahead and dug out the gumption to do something about it – actions which lots of people only ever dream of in the wildest of their dreams.

Reading Krakauer’s book, I personally failed to find much evidence of immaturity, or selfishness come to that.  McCandless was not a stupid person, and while he may have underestimated the difficulties he would encounter in the Alaskan wilderness, his reasons for going there seem to me to be the result of deep, probing thought rather than a whimsical by-product of twenty-something angst.  McCandless lived his life guided by an internal compass which he had programmed for himself – as far as I’m concerned there’s far more to admire about that than there is to criticise.  My favourite passage from Krakauer’s book, which I’ve reproduced below, is hugely reminiscent of many of the books, blogs and articles I’ve read over the past two years.  Unconventional living has never been more in vogue than it currently seems to be, but what marks Chris McCandless out from the rest of the crowd is that he was thinking about, writing about, and actually living his unchartered life almost two full decades before the idea even occurred to the rest of us.

“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.  The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.  The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

Letter from Chris McCandless to Ronald Franz, April 1992.