McCandless’s story first gained attention as a magazine article by Krakauer in January 1993. To expand the piece into a book, the author hit the road, just as his antihero had a few years before. Technically, the most impressive thing about Into the Wild is how Krakauer, armed with only the most fugitive clues, was able to retrace nearly every step of McCandless’s erratic path as he zigzagged all over the West, driving an old car, hitchhiking, and hopping freight trains, before arrowing north toward Alaska.
Throughout those months of Krakauer’s sleuthing in 1993 and 1994, I was afforded a ringside seat. Twenty years earlier, in 1973, “fresh off the turnip truck from small-town Oregon” (as he would later write), Krakauer arrived at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, where I was teaching literature and mountaineering. He quickly morphed from wide-eyed acolyte into colleague and drinking buddy. Jon was also the only Hampshire student to become my lifelong climbing partner. In 1983, after years of pounding nails to support his climbing-bum habit, Jon decided to try to write for a living.
Ten years later, as he careened around the West sniffing for McCandless’s scent, Jon would call me from the road every few days. “Dave, I found the Datsun!” he chortled from an Arizona pay phone. (Three years earlier, McCandless had abandoned the battered used car he’d bought in high school in a forlorn desert ravine called Detrital Wash.) A few weeks later, “I located the 81-year-old guy who wanted to adopt Chris. Chris told him to change his whole life and hit the road, and by God, the old man did!”
Emile Hirsch and Catherine Keener
For Krakauer, the agony of writing has always crystallized around getting the first paragraph down on paper. By 1993, he’d perfected his avoidance strategy, which was to convince himself he needed to flee the word processor to do more research. Now, as he followed McCandless’s ghost, that strategy was paying off in spades. Even while he was burning through his book advance, he was getting to know Chris McCandless from the inside out. Each little find in the Mojave Desert or the South Dakota wheat fields went toward building the character that would burst forth so vividly in the pages of Into the Wild.
The core question for both the book and the film is, What ultimately made McCandless tick? What drove him not only to his manic escape from society and his solitary death in the wilderness, but to the passionate idealism that fueled it?
For Krakauer a breakthrough in understanding his protagonist came when he won the trust of Carine. Alienated from the family ménage herself, Carine chose to rebel in a more private, less spectacular fashion. Although she remains in regular contact with her parents, she keeps a certain psychic distance. As she told me over the phone, “I went away too. I left. There’s just no movie about it.”
Into the wild and Chris Mccandless photographs
Months into Krakauer’s research, Carine pointed him toward a skeleton in the McCandless closet that seemed to explain her brother’s estrangement from his parents. In 1986, after graduation from high school, Chris took off from the family home in Annandale, Virginia, on a cross-country ramble four years before he would leave for good. He eventually made his way to El Segundo, California, where he had lived with his family for the first six years of his life. He knew that his father, an aerospace engineer, had had a first marriage, producing six children. But Chris learned a murkier truth from family friends in El Segundo. Walt had not in fact divorced his first wife until well after Chris was born. In secret, he had kept up the relationship and had fathered another son two years after Billie had given birth to Chris.
In Krakauer’s view, Chris came home from that trip with a “smoldering anger” that, after years of brooding upon the deception, would ultimately motivate
his headlong flight. And herein lay a deep linkage connecting Krakauer to McCandless.
Jon, as I had long known, had a difficult relationship with his own father. As he writes in Into the Wild: “Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please.”
