Christopher McCandless
Christopher McCandless in his camp on the Stampede Trail
Christopher
Johnson McCandless (12
February 1968 – 18 August 1992) was an American wanderer who with little food
and little equipment, hiked into the Alaskan wilderness to live a life of
solitude. He ultimately died near Denali National Park. In 1996, Jon Krakauer
wrote a book about his life, Into the Wild, which inspired a 2007 film
of the same name directed by Sean Penn and stars Emile Hirsch as McCandless.
Childhood and education
McCandless
grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father,
Walt McCandless, worked as an antenna specialist for NASA. His mother,
Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson, was his father's secretary and later
helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company.
From
early childhood, teachers noticed McCandless was unusually strong-willed. As he
grew older, he coupled this with an intense idealism and physical endurance. In
high school, he served as captain of the cross-country team, urging teammates
to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were "running
against the forces of darkness....all the evil in the world, all the
hatred."
He
graduated from W.T. Woodson High School in 1986 and from Emory University in
1990, majoring in history and anthropology. His upper middle-class background
and academic success masked growing contempt for what he saw as the empty
materialism of American society. In his junior year, he declined membership in
Phi Beta Kappa, on the basis honors and titles were irrelevant. McCandless was
strongly influenced by Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, and he
dreamed about leaving society for a Thoreau-like period of solitary
contemplation.
On the road
After
graduating in 1990, he gave $24,000 of the $42,000 bequest of a family friend
for his last two years of college, to the charity Oxfam International and began
traveling, using the name "Alexander Supertramp" (Krakauer notes the
connection with WH Davies, Welsh author of 'Autobiography of a Super-Tramp'
published in 1908). McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and
South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator. McCandless alternated
between having jobs and living with no money and little or no human contact,
sometimes successfully foraging for food. He survived a flash flood but lost
his car (the car was not actually lost; because of McCandless' lack of
knowledge of mechanics, he thought it was unrepairable) along with kayaking
down remote stretches of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California.
McCandless took pride in surviving with a minimum of gear and funds, and generally
made little preparation.
For
years, McCandless dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey" where he would live
off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his
physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992
McCandless hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by Jim
Gallien, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. Gallien was
concerned about "Alex", who had little gear and no experience in the
Alaskan bush. Gallien tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and offered to
drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment. McCandless refused all
assistance except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melts, and a bag of corn
chips.
After
hiking the Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus used as a hunting
shelter parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park (
) and began his attempt to live off the land.
He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle, with plenty of
.22LR hollow-tip ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books,
and some camping equipment. He assumed he could forage for plant food and hunt
game. Despite his inexperience as a hunter, McCandless poached some small game
such as porcupines and birds. Once he killed a moose; however, he failed to
preserve the meat properly. Rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat,
as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he smoked it, following the advice of
hunters he met in South Dakota.
His
journal contains entries covering a total of 189 days. These entries range from
ecstatic to grim with McCandless' changing fortunes. In July, after living in
the bus for several months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back
blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then considerably higher and swifter
than when he crossed in April.
On August 12,
McCandless wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal
"Beautiful Blueberries". He tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's
memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which contains an excerpt from a
Robinson Jeffers poem entitled "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":
Death's
a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something
more equal to centuries
Than
muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The
mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire
or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The
mountains are not softened or troubled
And
a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.
On the other side
of the page, McCandless added, "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE
LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"
On September 6,
1992, two hikers and a group of moose hunters found this note on the door of
the bus:
"S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless. August?"
His
body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus, weighing an estimated 67
pounds. He had been dead for more than two weeks. His official cause of death
was starvation.
Biographer
Jon Krakauer suggests two factors may have contributed to McCandless's death in
August, 1992. First, he was running the risk of starvation due to increased
activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting. However,
Krakauer insists starvation was not, as McCandless' death certificate states,
the primary cause of death. Initially, Krakauer claimed McCandless might have
ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum alpinum). However, extensive laboratory
testing proves conclusively there was no alkaloid toxin present in McCandless'
food supplies. In later editions of the book, therefore, Krakauer has
speculated a fungus Rhizoctonia leguminicola could have grown on the
seeds McCandless ate. However, there remains no evidence to support Krakauer's
theory, and all forensic data suggests starvation.
His
journal entry for that date reads, "Extremely weak. Fault of pot[ato]
seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy." McCandless
had been digging and eating the root of the wild potato—Hedysarum alpinum, a
common area wildflower also known as Eskimo potato, which Kari's book told him
was widely eaten by native Alaskans—for more than a month without ill effect.
On July 14 he apparently started eating the pealike seedpods of the plant as
well, again without ill effect. There is, however, a closely related plant—wild
sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii—that is very difficult to distinguish from wild
potato, grows beside it, and is poisonous. In all likelihood McCandless
mistakenly ate some seeds from the wild sweet pea and became gravely ill.
Cultural legacy
Krakauer's
book made Christopher McCandless a heroic figure to many. By 2002, the
abandoned bus (No. 142) on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped became a
tourist destination. Sean Penn's film Into the Wild, based on Jon
Krakauer's book, was released in September 2007. In October 2007, a documentary
film on McCandless's journey by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, The Call
of the Wild, was released. McCandless's story also inspired an episode of
the TV series Millennium, the album Cirque by Biosphere, and folk songs
by singers Ellis Paul, Eddie From Ohio, Harrod and Funck, and Eric Peters.
Unlike
Krakauer and many readers, who have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless,
some Alaskans have negative views and about those who romanticize his fate.
Because he had no maps, McCandless was unaware a hand-operated tram crossed the
impassable river 1/4 mile from where he attempted to cross. There were cabins
stocked with emergency supplies within a few miles of the bus, although they
had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled, possibly by McCandless,
as detailed in Lamothe's documentary.
Alaskan
Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will
call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to
Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape
where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically
nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly
see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and
inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually
live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the
area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament
[…] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”