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The damage wasn’t discovered until late July, when a wildlife biologist named Paul Atkinson made the grueling ten-mile bush?whack over the Outer Range, from the road into Denali National Park to the Park Service shelter. He was shocked and baffled by the mindless destruction that greeted him. “It was obviously not the work of bear,” Atkinson reports. “I’m a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like. This looked like somebody had gone at the cabins with a claw hammer and bashed every?thing in sight. From the size of the fireweed growing up through mattresses that had been tossed outside, it was clear that the vandalism had occurred many weeks earlier.”
“It was completely trashed,” Will Forsberg says of his cabin. “Everything that wasn’t nailed down had been wrecked. All the lamps were broken and most of the windows. The bedding and mattresses had been pulled outside and thrown in a heap, ceiling boards yanked down, fuel cans were punctured, the wood stove was removed—even a big carpet had been hauled out to rot. And all the food was gone. So the cabins wouldn’t have helped Alex much even if he had found them. Or then again, maybe he did.”
Forsberg considers McCandless the prime suspect. He believes McCandless blundered upon the cabins after arriving at the bus during the first week of May, flew into a rage over the intrusion of civilization on his precious wilderness experience, and sys?tematically wrecked the buildings. This theory fails to explain, however, why McCandless didn’t, then, also trash the bus.
Carwile also suspects McCandless. “It’s just intuition,” he ex?plains, “but I get the feeling he was the kind of guy who might want to ‘set the wilderness free.’ Destroying the cabins would be a way of doing that. Or maybe it was his intense dislike of the government: He saw the sign on the Park Service cabin identify?ing it as such, assumed all three cabins were government prop?erty, and decided to strike a blow against Big Brother. That certainly seems within the realm of possibility.”
The authorities, for their part, don’t think McCandless was the vandal. “We really hit a blank on who might have done it,” says Ken Kehrer, chief ranger for Denali National Park. “But Chris McCandless isn’t considered a suspect by the National Park Ser?vice.” In fact, there is nothing in McCandless’s journal or pho-tographs to suggest he went anywhere near the cabins. When McCandless ventured beyond the bus in early May, his pictures show that he headed north, downstream along the Sushana, the opposite direction of the cabins. And even if he had somehow chanced upon them, it’s difficult to imagine him destroying the buildings without boasting of the deed in his diary.
There are no entries in McCandless’s journal for August 6, 7, and 8. On August 9, he notes that he shot at a bear but missed. On Au?gust 10, he saw a caribou but didn’t get a shot off, and he killed five squirrels. If a sufficient amount of swainsonine had accumu?lated in his body, however, this windfall of small game would have provided little nourishment. On August 11, he killed and ate one ptarmigan. On August 12, he dragged himself out of the bus to forage for berries, after posting a plea for assistance in the un?likely event that someone would stop by while he was away. Writ?ten in meticulous block letters on a page torn from Gogol’s Taras Bulba, it reads:
S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU.
He signed the note “CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?” Recognizing the gravity of his predicament, he had abandoned the cocky moniker he’d been using for years, Alexander Supertramp, in favor of the name given to him at birth by his parents.
Many Alaskans have wondered why, in his desperation, McCandless didn’t start a forest fire at this point, as a distress sig?nal. There were two nearly full gallons of stove gas in the bus; presumably, it would have been a simple matter to start a confla?gration large enough to attract the attention of passing airplanes or at least burn a giant SOS into the muskeg.
Contrary to common belief, however, the bus doesn’t lie be?neath any established flight path, and very few planes fly over it. Over the four days I spent on the Stampede Trail, I didn’t see a single aircraft overhead, other than commercial jets flying at al?titudes greater than twenty-five thousand feet. Small planes did no doubt pass within sight of the bus from time to time, but McCandless would probably have had to start a fairly large for?est fire to be sure of attracting their attention. And as Carine McCandless points out, “Chris would never, ever, intentionally burn down a forest, not even to save his life. Anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn’t understand the first thing about my brother.”
Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire. In advanced stages of famine, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to cold, physical and mental ex?haustion. The skin becomes discolored. In the absence of key nu?trients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain, inducing convulsions and hallucinations. Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.
On August 12, he wrote what would prove to be the final words in his journal: “Beautiful Blueberries.” From August 13 through 18, his journal records nothing beyond a tally of the days. At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the page were some lines L’Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:
Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.
On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”
Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on Au?gust 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.
One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photo?graph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.
Epilogue
Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which 1 have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.
EDWARD WHYMPER, SCRAMBLES AMONGST THE ALPS
We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason,and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
ANNIE DILLARD, HOLY THE FIRM
The helicopter labors upward, thwock-thwock-thwocking over the shoulder of Mt. Healy. As the altimeter needle brushes five thousand feet, we crest a mud-colored ridge, the earth drops away, and a breathtaking sweep of taiga fills the Plexiglas wind?screen. In the distance I can pick out the Stampede Trail, cutting a faint, crooked stripe from east to west across the land?scape.
Billie McCandless is in the front passenger seat; Walt and I oc?cupy the back. Ten hard months have passed since Sam McCand?less appeared at their Chesapeake Beach doorstep to tell them Chris was dead. It is time, they have decided, to visit the place where their son met his end, to see it with their own eyes.
Walt has spent the past ten days in Fairbanks, doing contract work for NASA, developing an airborne radar system for search-and-rescue missions that will enable searchers to find the wreck?age of a downed plane amid thousands of acres of densely forested country. For several days now he’s been distracted, irri?table, edgy. Billie, who arrived in Alaska two days ago, confided to me that the prospect of visiting the bus has been difficult for him to come to terms with. Surprisingly, she says she feels calm and centered and has been looking forward to this trip for some time.
Taking a helicopter was a last-minute change of plans. Billie wanted badly to travel overland, to follow the Stampede Trail as Chris had done. Toward that end she’d contacted Butch Killian, the Healy coal miner who’d been present when Chris’s body was discovered, and he agreed to drive Walt and Billie into the bus on his all-terrain vehicle. But yesterday Killian called their hotel to say that the Teklanika River was still running high—too high, he worried, to cross safely, even with his amphibious, eight-wheeled Argo. Thus the helicopter.
Two thousand feet beneath the aircraft’s skids a mottled green tweed of muskeg and spruce forest now blankets the rolling country. The Teklanika appears as a long brown ribbon thrown carelessly across the land. An unnaturally bright object comes into view near the confluence of two smaller streams: Fairbanks bus 142. It has taken us fifteen minutes to cover the distance it took Chris four days to walk.
The helicopter settles noisily onto the ground, the pilot kills the engine, and we hop down onto sandy earth. A moment later the machine lifts off in a hurricane of prop wash, leaving us sur?rounded by a monumental silence. As Walt and Billie stand ten yards from the bus, staring at the anomalous vehicle without speaking, a trio of jays prattles from a nearby aspen tree.
“It’s smaller,” Billie finally says, “than I thought it would be. I mean the bus.” And then, turning to take in the surroundings: “What a pretty place. I can’t believe how much this reminds me of where I grew up. Oh, Walt, it looks just like the Upper Penin?sula! Chris must have loved being here.”
“I have a lot of reasons for disliking Alaska, OK?” Walt an?swers, scowling. “But I admit it—the place has a certain beauty. I can see what appealed to Chris.”
For the next thirty minutes Walt and Billie walk quietly around the decrepit vehicle, amble down to the Sushana River, visit the nearby woods.
Billie is the first to enter the bus. Walt returns from the stream to find her sitting on the mattress where Chris died, taking in the vehicle’s shabby interior. For a long time she gazes silently at her son’s boots under the stove, his handwriting on the walls, his toothbrush. But today there are no tears. Picking through the clutter on the table, she bends to examine a spoon with a dis?tinctive floral pattern on the handle. “Walt, look at this,” she says. “This is the silverware we had in the Annandale house.”
At the front of the bus, Billie picks up a pair of Chris’s patched, ragged jeans and, closing her eyes, presses them to her face. “Smell,” she urges her husband with a painful smile. “They still smell like Chris.” After a long beat she declares, to herself more than to anyone else, “He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”
Billie and Walt wander in and out of the bus for the next two hours. Walt installs a memorial just inside the door, a simple brass plaque inscribed with a few words. Beneath it Billie arranges a bouquet of fireweed, monkshood, yarrow, and spruce boughs. Under the bed at the rear of the bus, she leaves a suitcase stocked with a first-aid kit, canned food, other survival supplies, a note urging whoever happens to read it to “call your parents as soon as possible.” The suitcase also holds a Bible that belonged to Chris when he was a child, even though, she allows, “I haven’t prayed since we lost him.”
Walt, in a reflective mood, has had little to say, but he appears more at ease than he has in many days. “I didn’t know how I was going to react to this,” he admits, gesturing toward the bus. “But now I’m glad we came.” This brief visit, he says, has given him a slightly better understanding of why his boy came into this coun?try. There is much about Chris that still baffles him and always will, but now he is a little less baffled. And for that small solace he is grateful.
“It’s comforting to know Chris was here,” Billie explains, “to know for certain that he spent time beside this river, that he stood on this patch of ground. So many places we’ve visited in the past three years—we’d wonder if possibly Chris had been there. It was terrible not knowing—not knowing anything at all.
“Many people have told me that they admire Chris for what he was trying to do. If he’d lived, I would agree with them. But he didn’t, and there’s no way to bring him back. You can’t fix it. Most things you can fix, but not that. I don’t know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”
Abruptly, the quiet is shattered by the percussive racket of the helicopter, which spirals down from the clouds and lands in a patch of fireweed. We climb inside; the chopper shoulders into the sky and then hovers for a moment before banking steeply to the southeast. For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains vis?ible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book would have been impossible without consider?able assistance from the McCandless family. I am deeply indebted to Walt McCandless, Billie McCandless, Carine McCandless, Sam McCandless, and Shelly McCandless Garcia. They gave me full access to Chris’s papers, letters, and photographs and talked with me at great length. No family member made any attempt to exert control over the book’s content or direction, despite knowing that some material would be extremely painful to see in print. At the family’s request, twenty percent of the royalties generated by sales of Into the Wild will be donated to a scholarship fund in Chris McCandless’s name.
I am grateful to Doug Stumpf, who acquired the manuscript for Villard Books/Random House, and to David Rosenthal and Ruth Fecych, who edited the book with skill and care following Doug’s premature departure. Thanks, also, to Annik LaFarge, Adam Rothberg, Dan Rembert, Dennis Ambrose, Laura Taylor, Diana Frost, Deborah Foley, and Abigail Winograd at Villard/ Random House for their assistance.
This book began as an article in Outside magazine. I would like to thank Mark Bryant and Laura Hohnhold for assigning me the piece and shaping it so adroitly. Adam Horowitz, Greg Cliburn, Kiki Yablon, Larry Burke, Lisa Chase, Dan Ferrara, Sue Smith, Will Dana, Alex Heard, Donovan Webster, Kathy Martin, Brad Wetzler, and Jaqueline Lee worked on the article as well.
Special gratitude is owed to Linda Mariam Moore, Roman Dial, David Roberts, Sharon Roberts, Matt Hale, and Ed Ward for providing invaluable advice and criticism; to Margaret David-son for creating the splendid maps; and to John Ware, my agent nonpareil.
Important contributions were also made by Dennis Burnett, Chris Fish, Eric Hathaway, Gordy Cucullu, Andy Horowitz, Kris Maxie Gillmer, Wayne Westerberg, Mary Westerberg, Gail Borah, Rod Wolf, Jan Burres, Ronald Franz, Gaylord Stuckey, Jim Gal-lien, Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, Ferdie Swanson, Butch Kil-lian, Paul Atkinson, Steve Carwile, Ken Kehrer, Bob Burroughs, Berle Mercer, Will Forsberg, Nick Jans, Mark Stoppel, Dan Solie, Andrew Liske, Peggy Dial, James Brady, Cliff Hudson, the late Mugs Stump, Kate Bull, Roger Ellis, Ken Sleight, Bud Walsh, Lori Zarza, George Dreeszen, Sharon Dreeszen, Eddie Dickson, Priscilla Russell, Arthur Kruckeberg, Paul Reichart, Doug Ewing, Sarah Gage, Mike Ralphs, Richard Keeler, Nancy J. Turner, Glen Wagner, Tom Clausen, John Bryant, Edward Treadwell, Lew Krakauer, Carol Krakauer, Karin Krakauer, Wendy Krakauer, Sarah Krakauer, Andrew Krakauer, Ruth Selig, and Peggy Langrall.
