My convictions should be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his or her own opinion of Chris McCandless. This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected sharply divergent points of view: Some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity-and was undeserving of the considerable media attention he received. In the weeks and months following the publication of the article in Outside, it generated more mail than any other article in the magazines history. Instead, his innocent mistakes turned out to be pivotal and irreversible, his name became the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family was left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love.Ī surprising number of people have been affected by the story of Chris McCandless’s life and death. Ingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April. And that is what he found, in abundance.įor most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than held his own. When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey peril, adversity, and Tol-stoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. In college McCandless began emulating Tolstoy’s asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that first astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to him. Long captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence.
I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. Through most of the book, I have tried-and largely succeeded, I think-to minimize my authorial presence. McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons.
Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’s starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by more current journalistic fare. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and had been an elite athlete. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt.
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