Many of McCandless’s Alaska critics point out that if the kid had had a map, he probably wouldn’t have died. The USGS quadrangle of the wilderness into which he ventured clearly indicates a gauging station with a cable across the Teklanika River, only a mile (two kilometers) downstream from the spot where McCandless, as he tried to hike out, was turned back by the swollen river. The map also locates three cabins in which he might have found emergency rations and supplies. As I read the manuscript of Into the Wild, I voiced the same stricture.
Jon, however, had a compelling rejoinder. McCandless’s deliberate choice not to take a map, like his choice to carry only a ten-pound (five-kilogram) bag of rice into the wilderness, was, Jon argued, the very kind of upping the ante that we admired in other adventurers. Many landmarks in the history of exploration have come about when bold innovators chose not to use all the means their predecessors had counted on. McCandless’s deliberate self-limitation, in this view, was like Reinhold Messner climbing Everest without bottled oxygen, or Børge Ousland skiing across Antarctica without airdropped supplies or prelaid depots.
Into the wild and Chris Mccandless
A long autobiographical digression in the middle of Into the Wild recounts the author’s own solo expedition, at age 23, to a formidable Alaska mountain called the Devils Thumb. “People told me it was suicidal to try to hike up the Baird Glacier without a partner and a rope,” Jon pointed out. On his trek from the seacoast to the base of the mountain, Jon had to negotiate a fiendish icefall riddled with hidden crevasses. His only insurance was the absurd arrangement of a pair of ten-foot (three-meter) curtain rods strapped to his backpack in an X-formation, a contraption he hoped would catch the lips of any crevasse into which he might fall. “I got away with it. Chris didn’t. That’s the only difference.”
Sean Penn had his own answer to the “Alaska take” on McCandless—the clueless hippie who got what he asked for. “One hundred and thirteen days,” Penn says, a terse declaration of McCandless’s achievement. “That’s more time than 99.9 percent of his critics have ever spent alone, even the Alaskans,” Penn elaborated. “It’s a long time. It’s done a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month at a time. It’s got nothing to do with our judgment of his outdoor skills. It’s the strength of the commitment that counts.
Into the wild - Christopher McCandless
“As for those who want to nitpick, I start with the ones who tried to tell the world it wasn’t a moose.” On June 9, 1992, six weeks into his survival mission, McCandless recorded his greatest triumph in the journal he kept on the last two pages of a guidebook to Alaska plant lore. “MOOSE!” he wrote in capitals, double-underlined. He had shot the beast with his .22-caliber rifle.
The two Alaskan hunters who stumbled upon McCandless’s body three months later read his diary, examined the bones of the great animal that still lay strewn about the camp, and declared it a caribou, not a moose. “The kid didn’t know what the hell he was doing up here,” one of the hunters later told Krakauer, and his buddy chimed in, “That told me right there he wasn’t no Alaskan.” So Krakauer reported in his magazine article. But the next summer, when he retraced McCandless’s route to his fatal camp on foot with Alaska wilderness veteran Roman Dial, they found the same bones. Dial instantly recognized them as those of a moose. Photos later developed from McCandless’s camera confirmed the animal’s identity. In his book, Krakauer corrected the “caribou” error.
Says Penn, “There’s know-it-alls in every section of life.”
