Originally written for hobby blog 8 June 2018
As is made evident on this blog, I have an interest in hiking. As such, I’ve been drawn to the experiences of other solo hikers, especially in what drives them to go on these journeys and how they tackle (or don’t tackle) the trials they inevitably face.
What is interesting about the three stories I plan to review is they are all real life experiences of someone. On top of that, Jon Krakauker’s Into the Wild, Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild have also all been made into movies. This gives me not only a chance to compare and contrast three books with a similar premise, but also in how they get adapted into film.
There is a major, striking difference between Into the Wild and the other memoirs I plan to review, and that is that it’s not written by the main “protagonist.” That is mainly because, also unlike the other two memoirs, the main subject, Christopher Johnson McCandless, does not survive his hike. This isn’t exactly a spoiler. It may be hard to see in the picture above, but the very cover of the book mentions his death, and if you don’t have the same version of the book I do, the second sentence in the whole book talks about his death.
I think one’s emotional reaction to hearing about even the bare bone details of McCandless’ death can say a lot about a person. McCandless died in April of 1992, a year before I was born and at 24. At the end of the day, memoirs are a character study, capturing the essence of a person set in time.
Christopher McCandless makes me very angry.
You could ask any of my friends I spoke to about this memoir while I was reading it and saying that I went on passionate rants about it are a understatement. In the author’s note, Krakauer speaks about how McCandless’ story struck a personal note with him and does not claim to be an impartial biographer. He goes on to say that the response to the original article he wrote for Outside was quite immense, with people falling on one of two sides in how they viewed the tragedy. People either looked at McCandless with admiration or disdain. I find my feelings a little more complicated.
Partly I asked myself why this death affected me so much, considering it happened before I was born. I think it’s because it makes me look at myself as a writer, as a backpacker, and how I’m working to achieve my own dreams. McCandless and I are similar in many ways, least of which we both have a penchant for literature and nature. One of the most frustrating things about this book is that much of it is speculation. Like I said, it is not written by McCandless himself, so Krakauer can only interview the people he met and gleam what he can from McCandless’ journal, pictures, and the possessions he left behind. Krakauer admits that even the exact manner of McCandless’ death is speculation. We can only track his movements by the scarce documents he left behind and the people he left impressions on.
It frankly surprises me that nearly all people McCandless had run-ins with, whether it be because he worked under them for several months or hitchhiked with them seem to view him as a charismatic, intelligent person. My experience with people who boast about loving to read canon writers like Tolstoy exposit endlessly about how their philosophy as the “right” philosophy, refuse to listen to other people’s advice and ideas, and tend to be very pretentious and obnoxious. Of course, I went to school for creative writing and English so I might have run into those kind of people more than the average bear. It is possible people were speaking more kindly about him because of his passing, another reason why we may never truly know the real McCandless.
There are some facts that aren’t up for debate. To make long story short, McCandless had a lot in life handed to him and threw it away. I probably sound like the bad person when I turn up my nose at him giving his $25 000 in savings for schooling to charity, but it stinks of someone who has never had to worry about money before. As far as I can tell, while McCandless and his father did not have the best relationship, his family was not abusive. You might be able to say his parents were neglectful at times, as they ran a business together and often fought about it. Being that it was obvious his family loved him and he at least seemed to care for his younger sister, the fact that McCandless did not reach out to them to at least say he was still alive and safe makes him seem like an awful person for, in the least, not recognizing the emotional turmoil he must be putting his family through. He sent more post-cards to the random people that helped him along the way than his own family.
Krakauer often talks about how McCandless was likely inspired to go on his adventure in reading the works of Jack London and Leo Tolstoy. Both writers extol the virtues of living as simply as possible and wax poetic about the beauty in nature. With everyone praising McCandless’ intelligence, I’m surprised McCandless just took such writers at their word. Not every writer practices what they preach, and as human beings we may be prone to over-romanticization. McCandless had many people along the way trying to tell him that he was not properly prepared to spend a spring in Alaska, but because he had fared fine in mainland United States, he thought he would be fine in Alaska. In the least this meant he was naïve and at worst arrogant and ignorant.
That’s another thing. From his journal entries, McCandless says he loves and respects nature, but scoffs at the idea of paying permits at a National Park, leaves a canoe in the wilderness, and lacked humility when it came to entering the Alaskan back-country. Permits aren’t just about “the man” for god sake. Rangers needs to be able to track how many people are in the park at any given time and I’m sure those permits go towards paying for park staff salaries and maintaining the park. If he refused to pay because he was broke (he wasn’t) I’d had more respect for him than when he went on philosophical diatribes. I could be reaching here, but I think McCandless wanted to go on a grand adventure, and that adventure ended up being too big for him. In the last few chapters of the book, we learn if only McCandless had taken a proper map, he’d seen he was only a 30 minute hike away from an area he could have crossed the raging river that kept him at the site he eventually died at.
Krakauer’s writing was light and easy to read. He didn’t just stick to interviews and McCandless’ journey. A whole chapter near the end of the book is dedicated to him and his friends visiting the site of McCandless’ death, and another looking at characters that met similar demises. One could argue that inserting the self into someone else’s biography shows a lack of focus, but it also shows the context the writer is writing from. As I mentioned near the beginning of this review, the books starts with his death, so it just isn’t written in chronological order, yet still flows well enough, even though the self-insert chapters and chapters not focused on McCandless tend to bring that flow to a screeching halt.
Yes, McCandless as a person as he is displayed in Into the Wild infuriates me, least of all because his death was so needless. If I had ever gotten the chance to meet him, I imagine he’d fit right in with my poetry friends, even if he and I would have regular, heated debates. That’s another upsetting part of this. McCandless is so much like someone I would know, could have even been me given a few tweaks to my life. I want to go on a grand adventure and travel Canada by foot coast-to-coast, but unlike McCandless, I know years of preparation stand before me. As much as I may have ranted and raved at his stupidity to my friends, I have to begrudgingly give him some respect that he just up and did what he wanted, regardless of what barriers he saw in his way.
Some Quick Stats:
Author: Jon Krakauer
Published: 1996, Villard
Pages: 207