Into
the Wild
Chris
McCandless had just graduated from college when he disposed of pretty much
everything he owned and walked away from his family, never contacting them
again. He spent two years tramping round
America, sleeping rough, performing manual labour and occasionally travelling
just for the sake of it. His dream
throughout that time was to visit Alaska – an Alaska created in his mind by
reading Jack London books – and live in the wilds, living off the land. After almost three months of this, in a
malnutritioned and weakened state, he was poisoned by some of the berries he
had collected and he died in the abandoned bus where he had been living. When his remains were found, and his identity
sort after and discovered, his story found some notoriety, which was bolstered
further when Jon Krakauer expanded a magazine article he had written about
McCandless into a book, Into the Wild.
Sean Penn subsequently turned the book into a film.
The
story caused some controversy. Was
McCandless a naïve fool to head out into the wilderness with few skills and a
romantic notion about casting off the chains of modern society? Or was his romantic dream a noble ambition,
serving as an inspiration for all those disaffected with the turns Western
culture has taken? Krakauer’s superbly
readable, moving and intelligent book paints a more complicated picture of the
young man at its heart. In the end I was
left feeling that this was the unhappy result of that youthful excess of
passion, the belief in an absolutism that detests compromise. Western society, he felt, with its hypocrisy
and greed should be rejected in favour of a life more in tune with and
respectful of nature. To him it was
either black or it was white. Hence the
rejection of his family, a callous and hurtful thing to do, as we can see. But I find it hard to condemn him, as many
people did at the time, because he was young and young people do feel that
passion. To condemn is to judge a young
person’s actions with an old person’s attitude to life, experience condemning
innocence.
McCandless
wasn’t a loner, he was a talker and made friends easily. On his long journey to his lonely death he
touched many lives and affected them for ever.
One in particular was a solitary old man called Ron Franz (in the book). Krakauer writes this about the end of their
friendship:
On
March 14, Franz left McCandless on the shoulder of Interstate 70 outside Grand
Junction and returned to Southern California.
McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as
well – relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy,
of friendship and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of
his family. He had successfully kept Jan
Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’s length, flitting out of their lives before
anything was expected of him. And now
he’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well.
Painlessly,
that is, from McCandless’s perspective – although not from the old man’s. One can only speculate about why Franz became
so attached to McCandless so quickly, but affection he felt was genuine,
intense, unalloyed. Franz had been
living a solitary existence for many years.
He had no family and few friends.
A disciplined, self-reliant man, he had got on remarkably well despite
his age and solitude. When McCandless came
into his world, however, the boy undermined the man’s meticulously constructed
defenses. Franz relished being with
McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also reminded him how lonely he’d
been. The boy unmasked the gaping void
in Franz’s life even as he helped fill it.
When McCandless departed as suddenly as he’d arrived, Franz found
himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt.*
These
couple of paragraphs hit me hard, ‘in the heart, where it hurt’, to use Simon
Armitage’s phrase, and I think gets to the core of the book as a story of
loneliness. After McCandless left, Franz
bought an RV and went travelling to, trying to find that companionship he had
found with the boy.
In
the bus, by the body, were many annotated books, including a number by
Tolstoy. In one McCandless had
highlighted a passage: ‘life similar to the life of those around us, merging
with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and an unshared happiness is not
happiness’. He had added, his crucial
insight of his time in the wilderness, ‘HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.’ It’s a heart-breaking story, a heart-breaking
film and a heart-breaking book.
*
Excerpt from ‘Into the Wild’, © Jon Krakauer, Pan-Macmillan 1998.
