Many Alaskans have long been exasperated or downright hostile over the mythologizing of Chris McCandless, the hapless college graduate who starved to death in a derelict bus a day’s walk up a mining access road on the north side of Denali National Park. Here is an essay by Alaska writer Craig Medred, with new reporting and insight into what really drove McCandless “into the wild.”
Already the Interior Alaska winter has locked the spruce forests along the Stampede Trail in its long, cold embrace. Gone back to the central-heating comfort of civilization are the pilgrims who made the summer trek out to the “Magic Bus.” And playing in movie theaters across America is the story of the hero who died out there.
It was on a fall day 15 years ago a trio of Alaskans hunting moose not far from the George Parks Highway north of Denali National Park found a disturbing note tacked to the old school bus long before abandoned along the rough, old mining road.
“SOS,” it said. “I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL LONE. THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME.”
Inside the rusting vehicle, the hunters found the starved and rotting remains of a young man. The body was later identified as that of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless, a continental wanderer originally from Annandale, Va. Death was attributed to starvation.
As McCandless’s story of suffering and failure on the fringe of the last great American wilderness emerged, Alaskans largely wrote him off of as yet another of those poor, unprepared fools fallen victim to Jack London’s Great White Silence.
Four years after his death, however, author Jon Krakauer elevated McCandless to iconic status in the best-selling book, “Into the Wild.” Krakauer saw in the cross-continent wanderings of McCandless and his final, tragic Alaska death the footprints of “the grip the wilderness has on 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.”
The fact the journey ended early in an old bus with little left behind but some sketchy journals (not nearly enough for a book), Krakauer blamed on the seeds of the wild potato. The seeds, he theorized, poisoned McCandless.
That theory was quickly debunked. The seeds weren’t poisonous.
So when director Sean Penn got around to rendering his version of Krakauer’s reality this year in the film version of Into the Wild, the seeds of the wild potato became the seeds of the wild sweet pea, which might or might not be poisonous to some degree depending on where and when they are eaten.
None of which deterred Penn, the creature of that Hollywood mentality that make truth secondary to story, from portraying an Alaskan plant guide as claiming that eating the sweet pea leads to “starvation and death.” This is now America’s take.
- Into the Wild links
- Medred: Story is a sham
- Wikipedia: Into the Wild with links
- Mens Journal: The Cult of Chris McCandless
- Dermot Cole: McCandless had a stash of dough
- Dermot Cole: Yet another Krakauer theory
- Craig Medred: The kid was insane
- Sherry Simpson: A Man Made Cold by the Universe
- Chip Brown: Haunting death
- AP: 1997 article reporting the seeds not poison
- Original Outside article by Krakauer
- GMU: List of sources for discussion
- FNS: Out of the wild
In a land where the Native peoples survived for thousands of years without farms or firearms, without automobiles or TVs, without almost anything, New York publishing and Hollywood glitz have combined to glorify a misguided young man who ate some poisonous peas, or maybe it was potato seeds after all.
Still clinging to some pretense of journalism, Krakauer, who dismissed the idea of sweet pea as the culprit in his book, is now theorizing that it was a fungus growing on the wild potato seeds, not the wild potato seeds themselves, that did McCandless in.
All of the attention paid seeds has served to focus so much debate on the highly speculative topic of “what” might have killed McCandless (other than simple starvation) that no one has thought to ask another obvious question:
“Who” might have killed McCandless?
There were, after all, not one but two entities in that bus — McCandless, and a creature of his imagination known to the world as “Alexander Supertramp,” or Alex for short.
Could it be that in a psychological war raging between McCandless and Supertramp, his alternative personality, the body found in the bus ended up being the physical remains of what the U.S. military might call “collateral damage”?
Neither the book nor movie version of Into the Wild bother to address this question. But then why should they?
The book really isn’t about McCandless to begin with; the book is about Krakauer. McCandless is a literary vehicle Krakauer uses to portray the extreme example of every young man who turns his back on today’s society and goes into the wilderness to find himself.
And the movie, well, the movie is about pretty scenery, rebellion and the most establishment of messages: The wilderness is Eden; the city is Hell, but don’t you dare venture into Eden because it is not for mere mortals.
Supertramp is born
“Driving west out of Atlanta,” Krakauer wrote in “Into the Wild,” “(McCandless) intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experiences. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless, he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny.”
The year was 1990. McCandless had just graduated from Emory University, and Supertramp had appeared fully born for the first time.
Supertramp gave away what was left of a trust fund that had paid McCandless’s way through college. Supertramp abandoned all of McCandless’s friends, cut off all contact with McCandless’s family, and hit the road.
Krakauer later recovered some of Supertramp’s journals from those days. In one of them, “Alex” recounts his failed efforts to paddle a canoe down the Colorado River to the Pacific Ocean:
“Canals break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumbfounded….he has not been traveling south but west and is headed for the center of the Baja Peninsula. Alex is crushed.
“At last, Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads south. Worries and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller.”
Supertramp’s journals, Krakauer duly notes, are “written in the third person in a stilted, self-conscious voice.”
The voices within
Schizophrenia is an illness reported to affect one in 25 families in this country. It is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain that leads people to delusions, hallucinations and the general loss of touch with reality. It often afflicts formerly personable and intelligent young men in their late teens or early 20s.
“A conspicuous feature of this (mental) disintegration concerns the individuals’ identity,” Drs. Anthony David, Roisin Kemp, Lade Smith and Thomas Fahy write in “Method in Madness: Case Studies in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry.” “Commenting on . . .actions with a third-person form of address may be the consequence of a person’s failure to recognize the self-origin of inner speech, and so he or she attributes it to someone else.”
Experts consider this a “first rank symptom” of schizophrenia.
“Personal identity is frequently disturbed in schizophrenia. Early symptoms include the feeling that one is different or altered in some as yet indefinable way,” they write. “In other cases, patients may believe that they are someone else, either known or unknown, famous or infamous.”
Many people have probably written about themselves in the third person at some time, as Supertramp did in his journals.
But how many of them flip back and forth between competing identities?
McCandless resurfaces
Even Krakauer seemed surprised by how sometimes, as he retraced the transcontinental trail of his young quarry, he was tracking Alexander Supertramp and other times Chris McCandless.
“Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald’s job (in Arizona), he presented himself as Chris McCandless, not as Alex, and gave his employers his real Social Security number,” Krakauer writes.
By the time the journey reached Alaska, though, Supertramp was clearly back in charge. It was “Alexander Supertramp” who in May 1992 signed a scrawl later found inside the now infamous bus:
“TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE. NO POOL. NO PETS. NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, CAUSE ‘THE WEST IS THE BEST.’ AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMATIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY THE CIVILIZATIONS HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD.”
Krakauer characterizes this message as “an exultant declaration of independence.”
But who was that “false being within” who needed to be killed?
Could this have been Alexander Supertramp writing about killing Chris McCandless?
Our dirty little secrets
Mental illness might be one of the last, great, personal behaviors still closeted in America.
It is now OK to be left handed; no longer do teachers try to force lefties to write with the “proper” hand.
It is now OK to be mentally challenged; no longer do we try to hide those once labeled as “retarded.” Quite the opposite, in fact. We now have events like Special Olympics to celebrate their achievements.
It is now OK to be gay; no longer is sexual identity a crime even if there are people in the country who don’t much like the idea of people of the same sex pairing up for life.
And despite all of this, it is really not OK to suffer from mental illness. Confess to alcohol, drug or sex abuse; undergo treatment; and all is fine. Confess to mental problems, and you’re toast. Being publicly labeled “mentally ill” is a professional death sentence. Crazy Uncle Fred remains the family secret, the relative kept in the closet and mentioned only in hushed tones.
It is so not-OK to be crazy, in fact, that Krakauer tried to rationalize the irrational behavior of Supertramp by blaming it on an overbearing and hypocritical father. As evidence, the author cited a letter McCandless wrote to his sister, Carine, on the eve of becoming Supertramp:
“Since they won’t ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation I’m going to let them think they are right, I’m going to let them think that I’m coming ‘around to see their side of things’ and that our relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots as long as I live. I’ll be through with with them once and for all, forever.”
Certainly, there are many who have irrationally railed against their parents in this manner as young adults, but how does one explain the severance of contact with a sibling who has been an ally all through life?
Once Chris morphed into Alex, Krakauer noted, “from then on, he scrupulously avoided contacting either his parents or Carine, the sister for whom he purportedly cared immensely.”
Penn, in his rendering of Krakauer’s book, tries to soften McCandless’s crazier behaviors, though some still show through, and blames everything else on a turbulent relationship between Supertramps parents. It might be the first time anyone has ever tried to attribute schizophrenia to being exposed to warring parents.
Does anyone really care?
As a reporter in Alaska for more than two decades, I was among the first to wallow in the McCandless story, and I confess to early on thinking he was but another of those poor, misguided fools who die in the north with some regularity. I no longer believe that.
Almost every psychiatrist, psychologist or mental-health professional I’ve talked to about “Into the Wild” over the years has noted — at least among those who’ve read the book — that schizophrenia or bipolar disorder was one of the first things that popped into their thoughts. Most have been reluctant to go on record saying so. Psychiatrist Dr. Michael Cull of Remote Medical in Seattle is an exception.
McCandless, he said, was “probably schizophrenic. I read (the book) some time ago, and it was an interesting book. If he was totally insane, as in psychotic, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a few days. (But) it’s a trip into insanity. It’s his journey into psychosis, and it gets more and more bizarre as times goes on.”
Schizophrenics, Cull added, often tend to be loners like McCandless because they function best as such.
“For a shizophrenic, if they are isolated from society, they can sometimes do better because what confuses them is external input,” the psychiatrist said. Unfortunately, if they are living in the wilderness and their psychosis worsens, there is no one to help them. And in a state of severe psychosis, Cull said, “they have a lot of difficulty just getting food in their mouths and clothes on their back.”
Cull said there have been psychiatrists who have discussed McCandless’s apparent mental problems, but they don’t do so very publicly. One cannot help but wonder how much this reluctance has to do with mental illness being one of those things we just don’t talk about in this country. Because to leave such a diagnosis unstated, or to at least fail to raise a discussion of it as a possibility, is to further the idea crafted by Krakauer and furthered by Penn, the idea that Supertramp/McCandless was a sad but iconic victim of the search for that knowledge many seek when they wander into the wilderness
McCandless was a sad victim, all right, but not of the search for knowledge.
And he most certainly wasn’t just the poor unprepared and under-equipped fool so easily dismissed by most Alaskans. He didn’t have the mental faculties to rise to that level.
In Krakauer’s book, there is a section that details Supertramp abandoning his car in Arizona shortly after fleeing Emory and arranging “all his paper currency in a pile on the sand — a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties — and (putting) a match to it. One hundred and twenty-three dollars in legal tender promptly reduced to ash and smoke.”
Krakauer sees this as part of McCandless’s search for himself. There is another view:
When you abandon your car and burn your money, you aren’t searching for yourself; you’ve lost yourself.
So what really happened in that bus?
Did Chris McCandless accidentally starve to death or kill himself by mistakenly eating something poisonous, as Krakauer believes and Penn now advocates?
Or did Alexander Supertramp cover Chris McCandless with a hallucinatory veil under which he succumbed to death by starvation?
Personally, having taken a few steps down the road to starvation not by choice and discovering the hallucinations there not all that different from those in the strange world of sleep deprivation, it is easy to imagine someone already having trouble maintaining a grasp on reality falling into a hopeless state of confusion, a state wherein disappears even the very basic idea one must eat and drink in order to survive.
Could Supertramp have taken McCandless to this point?
Consider that it was “Alexander Supertramp” who led the journey to the edge of the wilderness. And it was Alexander Supertramp who signed that May statement of purpose that talked about killing “THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUD(ING) THE SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE.”
Yet, it appears to have been Chris McCandless who made a lot of the early jottings in the meager journal found left behind in the bus. Gone from the early parts of the journal are the third person references. In their place are complete sentences in the first person:
“I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has begun.”
A few days after writing that, McCandless tried to walk from the bus back to highway. Confronted by a swollen Teklanika River, he turned back. His journal entries from that point on take a decided turn toward the choppy, stitled style of Supertramp:
“Diaster…Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared.”
It continues that way almost until the end.
“Death looms as serious threat,” the journal says for Aug. 5, 1992. “Too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in the wild — no game.”
Complete sentences written in the good grammar learned at Emory, where McCandless once wrote for the school paper, don’t return until they appear on the SOS note in the final days. Against the backdrop of the choppy journal entries, the note is startling for its sudden adherence to the rules of proper English:
“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.”
The note comes not from Alexander Supertramp, but from Chris McCandless.
Could it have been the last message of a man being murdered by a demon within?
[...] I think happened… and who killed Chris McCanless. OUT OF THE WILD — By Doug O’Harra Into The Wild: The False Being Within — By Doug [...]
[...] Into the Wild: The False Being Within: Craig Medred’s (2007) mental illness thesis; [...]
Exploring The False Being Within: If you study Psychology and mental illnesses, perhaps you can find these somewhat incomplete conclusions, but then what is not found unfortunately are these spiritual and emotional experiences that many people seem to understand about the drive of Chris McCandless. He didn’t have some mental illness and he wasn’t dealing with split personality. What he was noticing is that in society we all put this fake face on to please ourselves and everyone around us, especially our families, but it takes us so far away from actually accepting ourselves, and I speak now to those who desire to obtain that deep and real love inside and have it be the forefront of their personality. Many people are raised into families where this isn’t something that is even allowed to exist and it takes many years to recover and get away from those people and personalities you developed to protect yourself from the people who claimed to love you. And this is the false being within, the person you made to protect yourself from those closest to you and those around you, the false being within who fails in the end to give you the authenticity you require of yourself to love yourself and to finally truly love others, not just pretend you love them but really feel that love for them. This false being within, it is like sitting on the chair in the center of your mind deciding how you will think about people who you don’t even know, it judges and it tells you things negative all the time and it cares greatly about the most pointless details of life. For many people it becomes out of control and there is nowhere to grow within anymore and eventually they accept their false being over the real one because it just has so much power now, from the need to be right about things in an unsure world, and the need to complain over small discomforts because our current societal theme condemns us into a life where we must find a way to increase our standard of living and if we do not then we cannot be happy. This is the voice of the false being within. We must hide from this thing for a moment and realize it isn’t us but it is just something we allowed to take the place of us to protect us from feelings of guilt, pain, and anguish, or failures in life. What if happiness was found in your stuff which leads to what you think about how others looked at you? The government demands that we all keep shopping so that the economy can stay strong, but where is it getting us? A vain and emotionally empty lifestyle, so many people now only care what others think but they eventually stop caring about what they themselves think about themselves because it is just too painful to turn around, face yourself and leave your stuff behind, or is it? The false being would reply using our minds voice and say “Oh my god what will happen when everyone I know finds out that I don’t care what they think about me anymore, I mean I’ve been living this personality of success and greatness in front of them for so long or I haven’t reached the top yet and I want to see what it feels like! Now to turn into someone that my current personality would consider a failure in front of them is impossible.” We as people tend to forgive others far quicker than we forgive ourselves. Many people have totally settled for allowing the false being within to be themselves. This false being within is now who they have become and they are very quick to teach you lessons if you make a small mistake or don’t answer in a way that pleases their false being. This is why people treat each other so terrible. But the other side of this is that other people forgive us far quicker than they can forgive themselves, so we should keep that in mind if we have a problem in asking forgiveness from someone…
I replied to this because I believe we all have this false being, but I believe very few of us will ever find a way to defeat it and become the loving free hearted and minded person we wish to become. Someone free from the judgmental thoughts we’ve all feared from others eyes. If you go outside of America far enough away and settle awhile you will find it a little easier to control your own thoughts and judgements and its freeing being somewhere where they don’t speak your langauge, unfortunately Chris felt the only way was to be alone in Alaska and it sealed his fate, but he is now for us who believe in what he fought for a great sojourner of the earth who fought to live as he loved to live, by loving people and fighting those things within himself that pressured him to not love people as much as he could. This is the measure of every man and woman alive I believe. To look back in the end and know that you defeated everything inside of yourself that wasn’t able to love and forgive everyone and mostly forgive and love yourself so that you could really be authentic and show your love. This is what he fought and died for. Society.
Feel free to contact me: dr_whitelight@yahoo.com
Well said Dr. White-light. We must first forgive and love ourselves to be free.
[...] has been lots written about Christopher McCandless and the mistakes he made. I’m not going to repeat that here, but [...]
[...] are two interesting and provocative articles about Chris McCandless: “Into the Wild: The False Being Within” by Craig Medred in Far North Science; and “The Cult of Chris McCandless” by Matthew Power in Men’s Journal. The latter [...]
It is expected that a movie adaptation will contain distortions and half truths. For example, the film seemed to suggest that McCandless’ death was accidental, because he mistook one plant for another.
[...] the idea that he was a moron not to bring along a map or a guidebook to the suggestion that he was mentally ill. All of this is missing the point. As Krakauer makes clear in the book, the point was that the [...]
[...] here is the article. Conclusion? Chris became schizophrenic in his 20s, and died because his mental conditioned worsened and he had nobody around to help him out. and remind him to eat. [...]
[...] don’t understand those who worship this guy. he was a sick kid (i read one excellent article that made a very compelling case that he was schizophrenic) who showed little respect for the [...]
I watched the movie about Chris McCandless called “In the Wild” and it was a very unbelievable story. It was a very good book and I need to check out the book. I don’t really understand the choices that McCandless made on his journey to Alaska. I think it’s kind of ironic that he died but I guess he didn’t always make wise decisions.
As much as some people here and elsewhere do not understand why some people “worship this guy”, i conversely do not understand why there is a need to vilify Chris McCandless. What he did was admittedly foolhardy and impetuous, but I do not think it’s right and even necessary to dismiss it as stupid and selfish (not my words, mind you).
It really depresses me, this “in-the-know” elitism and etnocentrism Alaskans have about their “hardiness” as a people. This need to brag about how they wouldn’t do anything so stupid as venturing into the wilderness unprepared. I dont think McCandless wanted to go to uncharted (to him) territory with safety blankets such as maps and compasses. He wasnt a hunter or explorer, no. He knew there were no blank spots anywhere anymore. In his mind, the only way the experience would be real, is if he approached it the way his heroes might have approached it decades back.
He wanted to be one with the harsh, unforgiving elements in order to search for himself. Much has been said about how stupid he was not to have the sense to bring a map, or he would have found a tram a fourth of a mile from where he was. But how would that have squared with what he was doing? It would have spoiled his wilderness experience knowing there was an escape valve of a tram within reach. He wanted to be untethered, unreachable. He wanted to do it on his own terms and rules. Was he right? From our own standpoint, no. Because he died. But that’s a very shallow worldview. I think Chris found what he was looking for. And he was very fortunate to have done so. How many of us can say that?
Though I agree that mental illness is a huge problem in the US and it is possible that Chris was mentally ill, this seems to circumvent the very real point of the book (for certain) and the movie. I don’t think that Chris is alone in his desire to externalize an internal conflict by trying to face it in a self-imposed isolation in “the wilderness.” People have been doing this for eons and most indigenous cultures around the planet have had rites of passage that included facing their internal ‘demons’ in isolation in order to become a more self-realized person–i.e. adult. This desire alone does not make a person mentally ill.
Furthermore, those of us who have NEVER even met this person have any right to try to judge or characterize him, all of this seems to be in the same ilk as those who fawn over celebrities, trying to determine what ailment or condition they are suffering from–please give it a rest.
It also seems that people are very quick to judge Chris, for all his blunders–WITHOUT ever looking at their own hubris and subsequent mistakes in the backcountry, which should be the real starting point of any discussion of this movie/book. Every experienced backcountry person starts a greenhorn and every greenhorn makes stupid mistakes, AND hopefully lives to learn from it.
Though I now live in New Zealand, I am originally from Oregon, and having lived along the Pacific Crest Trail for 8 years, worked in the backcountry (firefighting, hazardous fuel reduction, trail restoration, etc.), backpacked/tramped in the backcountry for several years now, have a fair amount of whitewater rafting experience over the years (including Grade 4+ and 5), spent a lot of time outdoors (including in the San Juan Islands, B.C., Cascade Mountains, Inside Passage, tropics in Australia and Fiji, Southern Alps of NZ, etc.), fully trained in CPR, First Aid and 2-way radio communication, etc.–Despite all of this, I have been washed down a river due to misjudging its shallow swiftness, been lost by myself (over the years) multiple times in the ‘bush,’ and been unable to truly help a workmate having (first attack) anaphylactic shock from yellow jacket stings (she took a turn for the better before her airways shut, after spewing the Benadryl pills and after the helicopter was unable to find a place to land due the terrain).
–The point being, what happened to Chris can happen to anyone and has; whether he was mentally ill or not is beside the point–we all make mistakes (in the backcountry) and this should really be an opportunity to reflect on our own AND learn.
[On another note, I would like to ask people to stop thinking of Alaska as some benchmark for ruggedness or the "Last Frontier." The 'Frontier' is a myth created by Anglo-Saxon men in their ignorance of the fact that every 'pioneer' did not aimlessly launch themselves into the wilderness, they survived with the help of the indigenous peoples who lived there or explorers/trappers/whalers/sealers (if they were non-local-indigenous persons) who had learned from the indigenous peoples and then passed this on to the 'pioneers.' I think this myth is in part responsible why people (such as Chris) forego common sense and learning local knowledge of the particular backcountry they are visiting.]
Thanks for reading!
My review here:
http://maxdoesct.blogspot.com/
[...] Into the wild, the false being within (Farnorthscience.com) [...]
I’m behind the times apparently as I wasn’t aware of McCandless’s adventures until the movie came out in 2007, and just now finished reading the book “Into the Wild.” Funny considering I lived in Alaska a total of 30 years. The Alaskan wilderness inspired me to get a degree in Biology in the first place, and although I was offered a job at Scripps in LaJolla I returned to work as a Field Biologist in Alaska in April 1993. I could relate to his desire to be in Alaska’s wild and experience life unimpeded by the race to make the most money. The funny thing is the only thing I heard from Alaskan’s of which I was one, is about some nut who perished near Mt. McKinley on a suicide mission. 17 years later I had to cry..often while reading the book. And, I rarely cry. From what I read I understood him to be someone who valued life to the fullest extent. I’ve been to all corners of Alaska’s wild. What a great loss his life was. Rarely do you come across people with such passion for adventure and love of life itself.
[...] Into The Wild The False Being Within Far North Science Posted by root 40 minutes ago (http://www.farnorthscience.com) Oct 13 2007 leave a reply you must be logged in to post a comment far north science is powered by wordpress the site design is based on tiga Discuss | Bury | News | Into The Wild The False Being Within Far North Science [...]
The way Chris died is not nearly as presient as how he lived. On his own terms and fully a life that enriched others and himself both mentally and spiritually. He taught us all that life should be fully lived as a gift from God. He did some amazing things in his life. I don’t hink too many who were afraid of water could have canoed the Colorado River for example. Chris may or may not have been mentally ill. I have worked with many mentally ill people and I can’t say based on the evidence at hand. Psychotic symptoms can be exactly the same as those produced with severe insomnia and starvation. However anyone who has spent time in the “wild” will acknowledge that a lapse in judgement at the wrong time can easily cost you your life. If you judge Chris too harshly on this basis you are only fooling yourself. I wish Chris were still here as he had a great deal still to offer the world. His presence, I am sure is missed by many. I think he probably smiles down on all of us and the “tempest in a teapot” controversy over his death with the his good kind nature and hopes we come away with more.
NoobsRus – Finally a sane, cogent statement. What is with those Alaska-centric xenophobes?
I don’t view Chris M. as a hero. I see his story as an adventure, one that he may not have been fully prepared to undertake. It would seem to me that he was breaking away from a conventional life that left him unsatisfied.
It seems to me that Chris isn’t really your issue, but the “hollywoodization” of his story. Maybe your real issue is with Sean Penn. But who really cares what your issues happen to be?
The fact remains that, to many, Alaska is a final frontier, a place that isn’t all concrete, fancy cars, plastic surgery and club scenes.
He was obviously trying to get back to a place that was less complicated. What gets me is why a group of people would try to negate a young man’s existence. You are just an Alaskan version of the Enquirer – gossip mongering and basically only fit for bird cage lining.
Medred is guilty of what he accuses Krakauer of – inventing a fiction to explain what can’t be understood. Clearly, McCandless as schizophrenic might give us a helpful explanation, but it wouldn’t give us the truth. Young adults don’t have journies into mental illness as Medred purports, they crash into disabling psychoses which render them incapaable of holding jobs, forming connected relationships, exhibiting successful problem solving and maintaining a focused goal, all characteristics chronicled by McCandless of his journey. No one can know completely what drove this young man, but fleeing the cynical life of his parents while drawn to the honest purity of the wild works for me. I’m certain of one thing only, he wouldn’t have trusted Mr. Medred.