The Hawk

Issue date: 2/14/07 Section: Opinion

"In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter…"

So reads the enticing introduction on the cover of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. The reaction to that brief excerpt, similar to the reaction received by Krakauer's 1992 article in Outside magazine covering incident, is typically terse and condemning, full of tremendous misunderstanding. That excerpt does not even begin to cover other important pieces of the puzzle; namely, that McCandless was not suicidal, and that he was uncommonly intelligent, compassionate, and very much sane. That pretty much steals away all the possible explanations for his behavior, does it not? Why would someone from a wealthy family, who had just graduated from a prestigious institution (Emory University) with a very high GPA, and who is not mentally ill, decide to forsake everything he had worked for, in the name of a dangerous cross-country journey spent entirely either alone or in the company of vagabonds? It is the question that I could not easily answer to those who asked, "Hey, what's that book you're reading about?" in the past few weeks.

Many will say that I am wrong; McCandless was crazy, or foolish, or stupid, but I can almost guarantee they have not read this book. Into the Wild endeavors successfully not only to answer that question above, but also to bring the ideas of a whole host of literary geniuses into a modern context. McCandless was inspired mainly by transcendental authors Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also greatly admired Leo Tolstoy and Jack London. Dissatisfied with what he saw as a life of petty glamour and wealth, he embarked for a life on the road after his college graduation. In the journals he kept, it is obvious how ecstatic he was to be free of things such as classes, appointments, and schedules in general. He believed, similar to Emerson and Thoreau, that much of life is wasted away in the pursuit of disingenuous ends, tasks which society required him to perform but which did not satisfy, and in fact often led away from, his inner yearnings. He felt a tremendous empathy for the poor and the disadvantaged, and expressed an outrage at social injustice from an early age. And at this point, it is important to ask, was McCandless really that different, really that strange? Well, it certainly was not his beliefs which set him so far apart. This personality description above is one which fits a whole host of people that anyone could identify. Who hasn't felt disenfranchised by school, or work, or by social responsibilities, and wished they could just up and leave? True, few act upon these feelings, or take them so strongly to heart in the manner which McCandless did, but still, this does not make him that outstanding.

Continued...

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