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Who Was Chris McCandless?
Chris McCandless was a talented student at Emory University who came from a financially comfortable family in Virginia. He graduated from Emory in 1990. Soon afterwards, without telling his family, he donated roughly $24,000 of his savings to Oxfam and set off on the road. Later he adopted the name Alexander Supertramp. Emory itself confirms that McCandless was a 1990 graduate and that he gave approximately $24,000 to Oxfam.
His motivations seem to have come from a mixture of idealism and anger. He was strongly influenced by writers such as Tolstoy, Thoreau and Jack London. At the same time, he discovered that his father had maintained another family and had concealed this from him. Krakauer suggests that this discovery had significant effect on McCandless and his relationship with his parents.
From 1990 to 1992, McCandless travelled across the American West and Southwest, working odd jobs and hitchhiking. He travelled by canoe through Mexico, worked in grain harvesting and spent time living in an abandoned car.
Along the way, he formed genuine connections with people. There was Wayne Westerberg, who gave him work and friendship. There was Ron Franz, an elderly man who became deeply attached to McCandless and even wanted to adopt him. There was also Tracy, a young woman who developed feelings for him. But McCandless always moved on. Connection and permanence seemed to frighten him almost as much as the wilderness attracted him.
Alaska
In April 1992, McCandless hitchhiked into Alaska and walked into the wilderness near the Stampede Trail. He carried very little food—most notably about 10 pounds of rice—and a .22-calibre rifle. He eventually found an abandoned bus that became his shelter. The named the bus as - Magic Bus.
He hunted, foraged and kept a journal documenting his life in the wilderness. The Stampede Trail area is genuinely remote and difficult terrain. The National Park Service currently describes the area around the Stampede Trail as difficult to travel through, with brush, boggy ground and difficult river crossings. It specifically warns that the Teklanika crossing cannot be depended upon on foot in mid-summer. In July, McCandless tried to leave the wilderness. But the Teklanika River, which he had crossed earlier in the season, had become much more difficult to cross. He turned back.
By August, he was extremely weak. His body was eventually discovered by hunters in the bus in September. The remains weighed about 67 pounds, and starvation was recorded as the cause of death. This is where the central question of the book begins. There are some more theories around his death. However, I am not going in those details.
Was Chris McCandless a Hero or a Fool? Was McCandless a romantic idealist who died while pursuing something real and noble? Or was he a reckless, privileged young man who underestimated nature and hurt the people who loved him? Krakauer clearly has sympathy for McCandless. But he doesn't completely resolve the question for the reader.
How much go we really know about McCandless? There is another problem when trying to understand McCandless: he isn't around to explain himself. His journals were often terse and practical, recording what he ate, what he hunted and what happened to him. Krakauer therefore had to reconstruct McCandless's thoughts from journals, photographs, postcards, notes and interviews with people who knew him.
That leaves plenty of room for interpretation. For example, when McCandless described the Teklanika River as impossible to cross, Krakauer interpreted this as evidence that he wanted to leave but was prevented from doing so by the river. That may well be true. But we cannot know exactly what McCandless was thinking. This uncertainty is important because much of the emotional meaning we attach to the story comes through Krakauer's interpretation.
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| Alaska National Guard helicopter airlifting the bus from Stampede Trail (2020 June) |
What Actually Killed McCandless?
This is another area where the story is more complicated than the simple explanation that he "starved to death". Starvation was the recorded cause of death. But Krakauer became convinced that something else may have contributed to it. McCandless had eaten seeds from Hedysarum alpinum, commonly known as wild potato. On July 30, his journal recorded:
"EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POTATO SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY." Krakauer initially theorised that the seeds contained a toxic alkaloid. That theory was subsequently challenged by other researchers.
Nature as a Character
Krakauer doesn't paint Alaska as a postcard; he describes it as a merciless, indifferent force. He uses the phrase "the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier" to capture the scale and isolation of the place. To Krakauer, the environment isn't a friend. It is almost a mirror.
If you come prepared, it can be a sanctuary. If you make even one serious mistake, it can become a trap. Nature isn't mean. It simply doesn't care. That may be one of the most important lessons of 'Into the Wild'. We often project our own emotions onto nature. We imagine the mountains as beautiful, the wilderness as liberating and solitude as peaceful. But nature doesn't care whether you are brave, idealistic, angry or searching for yourself. It simply exists.
Understanding the Scale of Alaska.
Before judging McCandless too quickly, it is worth understanding the environment he entered. We often hear that Alaska is enormous, but numbers don't always convey what that actually means. Looking at it through the lens of Indian geography makes the scale easier to imagine.
1. The immense scale
Alaska covers about 1.72 million square kilometres, while India covers about 3.29 million square kilometres. So Alaska is slightly more than half the size of India. But the difference in population is much more dramatic. Alaska had about 733,000 people in the 2020 census, and its population density is only around 1.3 people per square mile—roughly 0.5 people per square kilometre. India, by comparison, is one of the most densely populated large countries in the world. That difference is difficult for someone living in India to intuitively understand.
2. The isolation
This is perhaps the most important part. Around 82% of Alaska's communities are not accessible by road. Think about that for a moment. In India, we are accustomed to the idea that if we are in trouble, there is probably a road, a village, a town, a phone signal or another person somewhere nearby. In much of Alaska, that assumption simply doesn't work.
3. The deceptive rivers
The Teklanika River was particularly important to McCandless's story. The National Park Service describes the crossing as unreliable on foot during mid-summer and recommends a pack raft for mid-summer travel. The surrounding terrain is also difficult, with brush, bogs and other obstacles.
That makes one thing clear: this wasn't simply a small stream that McCandless casually decided not to cross. The conditions had changed significantly between his arrival and his attempt to leave. The river didn't need to look like a wall to stop him. It simply needed to become too dangerous to cross.
4. The extreme cold
We often think of places like Dras or Siachen when we think about extreme cold. Alaska has also experienced extraordinarily low temperatures. The state's record low is −80°F (about −62°C), recorded at Prospect Creek in 1971.
But cold was not the only danger McCandless faced. Isolation, food availability, weather, difficult terrain and the inability to obtain help can turn a relatively small mistake into a life-threatening situation. That is the environment McCandless chose to enter. And it is worth remembering this when judging his decisions from the comfort of our homes.
What the Wilderness Ultimately Taught Him.
The tragedy of 'Into the Wild' may be found in the margins of its final pages. Near the end of his life, McCandless wrote: "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED". The words were written in the margins of Doctor Zhivago, beside a passage about how an unshared happiness is not happiness.
It is difficult not to see the irony. McCandless had spent years moving away from society, family and permanence. He wanted to experience life on his own terms. Yet, near the end, he seems to have recognized the importance of sharing life with others. However, we should be careful here. We don't actually know whether this represented a final philosophical transformation. Krakauer himself acknowledges that we can only speculate about what McCandless meant by it. Perhaps he had finally realized something important. Perhaps he hadn't. We will never know.
The Rash Idealism of Youth
Ultimately, this is story about rash idealism of youth. Most of us eventually learn that the quiet joys of family and community can be just as valuable as any grand landscape. McCandless might have reached the same conclusion if he had survived. Instead, his life remains a monument to the intense purity that many of us gradually leave behind as we grow older. That doesn't mean his journey was meaningless. Nor does it mean he was right.
We can admire his courage while recognizing his mistakes. We can understand his anger without approving of the way he treated the people who loved him. Perhaps we can recognize a little bit of ourselves in him. Most of us have, at some point, looked at our lives and felt that they were becoming a cage. We have imagined walking away from everything, starting again somewhere else and discovering who we really are.
The book makes you question what happens when that desire for freedom becomes more important than everything else. And perhaps the most uncomfortable question it leaves behind is this: What if the freedom we are looking for isn't found by escaping everything, but by learning what is actually worth holding on to?
I'd recommend this book if you've ever felt like your life was a cage. It makes you question what you really need to be happy. Perhaps more importantly, it makes you question what you are willing to leave behind in order to find it.
Sajeev
- Into the Wild (1996)
- Into Thin Air (1997)
- Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains (1990)
- Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003)
- Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)
- Three Cups of Deceit (2011)
- Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (2015)
- Classic Krakauer: Essays on Wilderness and Risk (2019)
References:
'Into the Wild' Inspires Adventurers, but at What Cost? - ABC News
2: https://magazine.emory.edu/2007/autumn/wild.html Emory Magazine: Autumn 2007: Wild Life
3: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/95440/into-the-wild-by-jon-krakauer/
4: https://home.nps.gov/dena/planyourvisit/unit61-62-63.htm
5: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.wem.2014.08.014
6: https://www.enotes.com/topics/into-wild/questions/on-what-page-in-the-book-into-the-wild-can-this-179527
