2023-08-18 03:33:45
Christopher McCandless left his name aside to use a new one when he decided to start his adventure: he was renamed Alexander Supertramp, something like Alexander Vagabond
They found him on August 18, 1992, thirty-one years ago, tucked into his sleeping bag, inside a bus from the 40s, deteriorated and abandoned in an inhospitable area of Alaska. He weighed eighty pounds and had been dead for at least two weeks. A bag of bones. On the door of the dilapidated bus there was a note: “SOS, I need you to help me. I am wounded, dying, and too weak to walk out of here. I’m all alone. It is not a joke. For God’s sake, I ask you to stay to save me. I’ve been out berry picking and I’ll be back tonight. Thank you. Chris McCandless. August?” It was August, the 12th. The boy, he was twenty-four years old, had already lost track of time. That day, he also wrote what were his last words in his travel journal. He tore out the last page of the book Education of a Wandering Man, the memoir of Louis L’AMour who was an author of Western novels, and on the back wrote with strange lucidity in the face of his imminent death: “I have had a happy life and give thank Mr. Goodbye, blessings to all.”
The official cause of death for Chris McCandless revealed by the autopsy was starvation. He died of starvation, which is one of the most horrible deaths imaginable: his body devours itself, the skin becomes stiff, withers like a leaf in autumn; before lethargy, before it is impossible to distinguish day from night, they suffer from severe intestinal pain and devastating weakness; all the forces leave the human being unable to unbutton his clothes, to stand up, to clean the viscous liquid that flows from the nose, mouth, eyes. Then the will is lost; then consciousness; finally, life.
That happened to McCandless, a boy who had been an athlete, a high school sports hero, a brilliant student, the owner of a bright future who, nevertheless, one day put everything aside and became an idealistic hermit who renounced the society that had formed it. Long before McCandless was born, in March 1845, American religious leader Ellery Channing, a man who fought against slavery and authored a doctrine that grounded all authentic spirituality in freedom, gave the writer, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, a student of nature and its relationship to the human condition. He told her: “Go away. He builds a cabin and begins the great process of devouring yourself: I see no other alternative for you, no other hope. That Thoreau did: on July 4, 1845, he moved into a small cabin he had built on the land of another great poet, Ralph Emerson, and lived for two years. He later wrote: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live alone, deliberately, to face the essential facts of life and see if I could learn what I had to teach and not discover, at the time of death, that I had not lived.” The story, which seems anachronistic, is not: Thoreau was the great inspirer of the life of Chris McCandless. At least, from the second part of his brief life.
The first part had begun on February 12, 1968 in El Segundo, California. Chris was the son of Walt McCandless, a NASA specialist in equipping the radar system for space shuttles, still in embryo. His mother, Wilhelmina “Billie” Johnson, was the secretary of the NASA specialist and, later, his partner in the successful consulting company for high-tech projects. The couple had another daughter, Carine, to whom Chris was always very close. Chris McCandless’s childhood was not easy because that happy family hid a secret, it happens in the best families: the parents argued often, almost always in front of the children, they even considered divorce and put the children in the alternative of choosing Who did they want to live with?
After graduating from Emory University with majors in History and Anthropology, he donated the remaining $24,000 of his university fund to a confederation of international non-governmental organizations that carry out humanitarian work in ninety countries.
Chris learned something else from a family friend, something that devastated him: his father had had children with another woman before he met Wilhelmina, and he was still married to that woman. The story cut Chris deeply. His teachers at WT Woodson High School always noticed in him a strong will that he always combined with great physical resistance. He excelled in athletics. He was captain of the team of sprinters whom he urged to run “against all the forces of darkness, against all evil in the world, against all hate.” For the McCandless boy, athletics was not a sport, it was a spiritual exercise.
He graduated from high school in 1986 and entered Emory University to major in History and Anthropology. He was a brilliant student, with an above-average IQ, who showed from his early years a certain rejection of the American society that sheltered him, of his “empty materialism”, of his dubious honors. In his first year at Emory he was offered membership in a prestigious local fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, a distinction he rejected with a harsh sentence: “Honors and titles are irrelevant.” He was already influenced by Thoreau, by the stories of Jack London, by reading the great novels of Leo Tolstoy, by Fedor Dostoyevsky, by Nikolai Gogol and by Boris Pasternak. Thoreau had promoted in his time a new, extreme, peaceful and unresigned movement that held that the ideal spiritual state was achieved through personal intuition rather than thanks to a political or religious doctrine. His texts hit hard on the personality of Tolstoy who had sent them to Mahatma Gandhi, in India. Both were fascinated, and moved, by the “civil disobedience” that Thoreau preached.
That civil disobedience had a history that, in addition to Tolstoy and Gandhi, was devoured by Chris McCandless because it contained the spirit of a romantic, pure and unshakable rebellion. Between July 24 and 25, 1846, Thoreau had run into the local tax collector who had demanded, as was his duty, six years’ worth of back taxes. Thoreau refused because, among other things, he was against slavery still in force, and against his country’s war against Mexico, which would end with the incorporation into the United States of more than half of the Mexican territory. He ended up in jail and was released the next day, under his protest, because a relative, probably his aunt, cut his losses and paid the owed taxes. The experience marked the writer very deeply, who synthesized it in a phrase of overwhelming rebellion: “In the face of a government that unjustly imprisons anyone, the home of an honest man is jail.”
In 1848 Thoreau gave a series of lectures on civil disobedience that encased him in the personality of an ascetic and virtuous individualism, also somewhat extreme: “Any man who is more right than his fellow men already constitutes a majority of one.” His idea, which expressed that a government should not have more power than the citizens are willing to cede to it, led him to propose the abolition of all forms of government. Chris McCandless was dazzled by these readings, took Thoreau’s teachings as those of a spiritual guide and prepared to break with society, to go off into the unknown and spend much of his time in solitary contemplation to find himself. Like the philosopher, Chris also did not want to discover, at the time of his death, that he had not lived.
After walking several kilometers on the Stampede Trail, he found what he saw as salvation and instead would be his coffin: an old abandoned, ailing, dilapidated bus, made in the forties
When he graduated from Emory in 1990, he donated the remaining $24,000 of his college fund to Oxfam, a confederation of international nongovernmental organizations that carry out humanitarian efforts in ninety countries; he abandoned his car, cut ties with his family and headed deep into the United States to live as a transhumant. He left the name behind him to use a new one, Alexander Supertramp, something like Alejandro Vagabundo, and for two years he toured the states of South Dakota, Arizona and California; He even entered Mexico clandestinely: he rowed a precarious canoe along the Morelos dam, in the state of Baja California, which had been inaugurated in 1950. He was obsessed with finding himself in the most absolute freedom, facing the wildest nature and far from social conventions and material rules. He was a civil disobedient.
Throughout his journey, the interior and the other, he worked in everything he could: he was a farm laborer, a restaurant waiter, an employee in fast food chains; he earned the necessary dollars for an austere and even remote life; he had periods of sociability with his peers and months in which, without money, he lived isolated from any human contact and even struggled to get some food. He learned to live from nature; he ate roots, mushrooms, mushrooms, plants; he survived several dangers that jeopardized him, one of them, says the legend, when a flood in the Mojave desert destroyed a fragile and wobbly car that he had obtained, and he was left on foot and in the open. He took another life risk when he took another uncertain canoe down the stormy waters of the Colorado River, en route to the Gulf of California.
His little feats as an elemental wanderer shaped his personality; he took pride in surviving and carrying on with almost no experience and elemental tools, utensils, and weapons. His exploits also gave him some arrogance, a certain unconsciousness in the face of risks, and a pleasure for the vertigo and danger that had prevailed over caution, in anticipation of eventual and unpleasant surprises, and had cauterized any objection to irresponsibility and the carelessness.
For years, young Chris had dreamed of carrying out a kind of “Alaskan Odyssey”, as he himself had christened it. It was about living off the land, far from civilization and in a truly hostile territory, while he reflected in a travel diary his physical and spiritual progress in his struggle with nature, which was also a provocation. In April 1992, with only four months to live, he hitchhiked across the Yukon Territory to Fairbanks, Alaska. That was where they last saw him vital. He was picked up on the road by Jim Gallien, who took him to the “Stampede Trail”, or “Path of the stampede”, a little-traveled route, forgotten on maps, about five miles from a town called Healy, surrounded by nature hostile, closed and dangerous.
The replica of “The Magic Bus”, Christopher McCandless’s house and coffin, which was used in the movie “Into the Wild” is a restaurant tourist attraction in Healy, near Denali National Park, Alaska
“Stampede Trail” was actually an old mining trail that had seen its glory years in the 1930s, when wealth seekers set out to find the antimony lying in Stampede Cove, on the Clearwater River. But in 1992 that path of fortune was a desolate and dangerous wasteland. Gallien was struck by the austere precariousness of the equipment Chris McCandless was carrying. He also knew right away that he was an inexperienced boy to face the dangers and rigors of Alaska. He tried to convince him to postpone his trip and even offered to take him to Anchorage, about three hundred miles from Fairbanks, so that he could buy more suitable and better equipped equipment for survival. But the McCandless boy didn’t want any help. He only accepted from his generous and concerned new friend a pair of old rubber boots, two cans of tuna and a bag of corn. He also did not carry with him two fundamental elements of every traveler: a map and a compass. It doesn’t matter which paths you want to travel; It does not matter if it is about dangerous paths and wild nature, or the winding and equally little-known routes of the soul, a map and a compass are always essential.
After walking several miles on the Stampede Trail, McCandless found what he saw as salvation and instead would be his coffin: an old, ailing, dilapidated abandoned bus, made in the 1940s, which had been left on that trail as proof of the glory of other times. Chris made it his house. He insisted then, a new test for his rebellious life, in living exclusively from the land. In addition to the bag of rice, the two cans of tuna, and the old rubber boots, he also carried a Remington semiautomatic rifle, .22 caliber, because he was determined to hunt for a living. He also had no experience as a hunter, but still he caught small animals, birds, porcupines, rabbits; he even killed an elk, but he couldn’t keep his meat despite having smoked it over branches, as some hunters in South Dakota had taught him on his voyage of initiation.
Then the drama of hunger began, exacerbated by the intense physical activity that Chris carried out every day, which contrasted with the scant food he consumed. In July 1992, after living for several months in the abandoned 142 bus that had been the Fairbanks City Transit System, Chris decided to leave it and find another way, a route out of this trap. He couldn’t do it. He found the Teklanika River, which he had crossed in April, but now, with the summer thaws, much more swollen.
If he had had a map at hand, he would have known that just four hundred meters from his bad destination there was a device hanging from a steel cable that allowed him to cross the river thanks to a system of pulleys. He also never knew that some twelve kilometers from the bus he had abandoned there were cabins stocked with emergency supplies, like the ones he himself had found and used in the vicinity of the bus he returned to and which was his last home. The diary of his life in the open has entries of different caliber and intensity throughout one hundred and thirteen days. One of them, that of July 30, is dramatic. He says: “Extremely weak, lack of water, seed…”.
“The removal was arranged by the Alaska National Guard to prevent McCandless fans from trespassing into a hostile area.”
Chris’s odyssey was collected in a biographical book by Jon Krakauer Into the Wild, which was translated into Spanish as “Towards Wild Routes”. This is the name of the film that glorifies Chris, starring Emile Hirsch and directed by Sean Penn. Krakauer maintains as one of the probable causes of McCandless’s death the equivocal relationship between his physical activity and his poor diet. In the original edition of his work, Krakauer claimed that instead of starvation, as the death certificates claimed, McCandless was surprised by death because he had eaten toxic seeds, Hedysarum alpinum, known as Alpine Peas, which would have confused with edible seeds. He takes Chris’s emotional July 30th diary entry as evidence. Laboratory tests showed that there was no toxin in McCandless’s body, which put that hypothesis to rest. In later editions of his book, Krakauer claimed that it had been a fungus “Rhizoctonia leguminicola,” a pathogen of red clover that also clings to other plants, present on the seeds that McCandless did eat. Nor is there any evidence to support Krakauer’s theory. Forensic medicine holds that Chris died of starvation.
Krakauer’s book and Penn’s film sparked enthusiastic fervor for Chris McCandless and his ideals. The 142 bus became an object of worship and pilgrimage among mountaineers, backpackers and hikers who wanted to partly reproduce its odyssey. In Alaska, the view they had and still has of McCandless is different. They judge him as arrogant and reckless. Park ranger Peter Christian of Alaskan Park, who endured the barrage of Chris imitators, wrote at the time: “Here we are always exposed to what I call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ It is almost always young people who come to Alaska to challenge themselves against a deserted landscape, with difficult access and almost non-existent chances of rescue. (…) I think that what McCandless did was foolish and inconsiderate. He spent very little time learning what the wildlife was really like here. And then he came to Stampede Trail without a map. If he had, he could have gotten out of here without difficulty. Judith Kleinfeld, a journalist for the Anchorage Daily News, also wrote: “Many Alaskans reacted angrily to his stupidity. They said that he had to be quite an idiot to starve to death, in the middle of summer, forty kilometers from the highway ”.
On June 18, 2020, the famous 142 where McCandless died was removed from Stampede Trail. He had arrived there in 1961 through the Yutan Construction Company, which was to pave the forest road. The buses, which belonged to Fairbanks public transport, were used to house the workers who built that route: they had bunk beds and wood stoves. The works were stopped in 1963 and all the buses were removed, except for 142, which was left to serve as a refuge for hunters in the area and which, finally, gave shelter to Chris McCandless.
According to the Alaska National Guard, which was in charge of lassoing the bus and lifting it like a baby, hanging from a powerful Chinook helicopter, between 2010 and 2019 two hikers drowned in the Teklanika River, when they tried to reach Chris’s sanctuary. And at least fifteen other people put their lives in danger and had to be rescued. Enough to end the risky pilgrimages to the area.
Chris McCandless’s brief life left a slight cultural legacy, too tenuous to have cost the life he took. That happens with young deaths: you always know who it was that left, but you’ll never know who it could have been. Nor is that beautiful poetic sentence that affirms that he who does not know where he is going cannot be lost.
Uncertainty often leads to tragedy.
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