Travelers' Tales Alaska (36 page)

And then there are the pilgrims, the scores and scores of believers who, stooped beneath the weight of their packs and lives, walk that long Stampede Trail to see the place where Chris McCandless died—and never take a step beyond.

For two hours we rode along the rim of the shallow valley. Heat from the engines warmed our hands. We followed a trail used by dog mushers and snowmachiners; here and there other trails curved to the north or south. Russet
scraps of tundra patched the snow, and the packed trail wound across the ground like a boardwalk. We had barely beaten spring.

A Healy woman named Connie led most of the time because she knew the way. The others in the group were my friends Kris, Joe, and Charles. Kris and Joe live just outside the park; Kris, a freelance writer, covered the McCandless story when it first broke in Alaska, and she's the one who told me that people had been visiting the bus like it was Jim Morrison's grave in Paris. Joe had visited the site shortly after the body was discovered. Charles, a photographer, came along to document the bus and to make tasteless jokes. He wasn't alone. I suggested our journey should be titled “Into the Weird.”

Now and then we rode by other trails looping across the snow, and an hour into our trip, two snowmachiners passed us before we reached the Teklanika River. They were friends of Joe's on their way northward to fix an off-road tracked vehicle that had broken a fuel line during a fall moose hunt. Their trail curved across a distant ridge, and I admired their ease and confidence roaming around out here, where machines can break down or dogs can run away and the walk home will be long and troublesome. You couldn't call it the middle of nowhere; the Stampede Trail has been mapped for decades. Still, you'd want to know what you're doing, so as not to make your next public appearance in a newspaper headline or as another statistic.

The Teklanika River ice had not yet softened, and we crossed its smooth expanse without trouble, just below where it emerges from a gulch. We cruised through Moose Alley, dipped into the forest, wound across the beaver ponds, and rose along an alder-thick ridgeline. Occasionally moose tracks post-holed the snow. I tried to imagine hiking here in the summer, calling out to bears and waving away mosquitoes.

We rounded a bend and suddenly there was the bus, hollow-eyed and beat up, the most absurd thing you could imagine in this open, white space. Faded letters just below the side windows said “Fairbanks City Transit System.” The derelict bus seemed so familiar because we had seen its picture many times in newspapers and on the jacket of Krakauer's book. For decades it had served as a hunting camp and backcountry shelter, a corroding green-and-white hull of civilization transplanted to a knoll above the Sushana River. Now it was haunted real estate.

We turned off the snowmachines and stood stretching in the sunshine and the kind of quiet that vibrates. A trash barrel, a fire grill, plenty of footprints, and frozen dog shit provided evidence of passing dogsleds and snowmachines. A wire chair leaned against the bus. I wondered how many people had posed there for photographs. The bus made me uneasy, and I was glad to be there with friends. It must have sheltered many people over the years who came to shoot and drink and close themselves up against the night.

Kris and I squeezed through a gap in the jammed door and climbed in. It was warm enough to remove our hats and gloves while we looked around, though an occasional draft swept through the broken windows. A bullet hole had pierced the windshield on the driver's side.

The bus was littered with messages scratched into the rusted ceilings and walls referring to McCandless's death, which seemed to bring out the earnestness of a Hallmark card in visitors: “Fulfill your Dreams, Nothing Feels Better,” “Stop Trying to Fool Others as the Truth Lies Within,” and “The Best Things in Life are Free.” Also, “Keep This Place Clean You Human Pigs.”

Scattered among the needles and twigs on the floor were bizarre artifacts: frayed hanks of rope, a mayonnaise jar lid, a
camp shower bag, blue playing cards. The driver's seat was missing, but downy grouse feathers lined crannies in the dashboard. A few liquor bottles—big gulps remaining of the Jack Daniels and the Yukon Jack—crowded a small stand, which also held an electronic guitar tuner, a tin coffeepot, shotgun shells, a yellow container of Heet, and a can of Copenhagen Snuff.

Stowed beneath were worn Sorel boots and pairs of filthy jeans, one set patched crudely with scraps of a green wool Army blanket. Were these the jeans mentioned in the book? Hard to believe they were still here considering that locals joke about dismantling the bus and selling it on eBay. It was creepy.

A stovepipe lurched from a small barrel woodstove and poked through the roof. A green tent fly covered the rusted springs of a twin-size mattress. And here was the disturbing part: the bed lodged sideways against the bus's rear, mattress stained, straw-like stuffing exposed, the remnants of the cover torn and shredded. That's where his body was found.

On the wall beside the bed was a brass plaque left by his parents that read:

Christopher Johnson McCandless. “Alex.” 2/68-8/92. Chris, our beloved son and brother, died here during his adventurous travels in search of how he could best realize God's great gift of life, with his final message, “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God Bless All,” we commend his soul to the world. The McCandless Family. 7/93

Three notebooks sat on the plywood table. They included a three-ring binder protecting a photocopy of Krakauer's original
Outside
article with its blaring headline “Lost In the Wild.” It was a Monty Pythonesque moment when someone pointed out an unrelated title on the magazine cover: “Are
you too thin? The case for fat.” This kind of humor is one reason why Alaskans fear dying ridiculously: the living are so cruel to the foolish dead. It's a way of congratulating ourselves on remaining alive.

Kris and I began flipping through the steno notebooks, which had been filled with comments by visitors, the way people write in logbooks in public cabins or guestbooks at art galleries. The chronology began with the July 1993 visit by McCandless's parents. His mother wrote:

“Sonny boy, it's time to leave. The helicopter will soon arrive. I wondered briefly if it would be hard to enter your last home. The wonderful pictures you left in your final testament welcomed me in and I'm finding it difficult to leave, instead. I can appreciate joy in your eyes reported by your self-portraits. I too, will come back to this place. Mom.”

These heartfelt words were followed by a single sentence from Krakauer himself: “Chris—Your memory will live on in your admirers.”

“Oh, gag,” Kris said.

Kris is not what you would call romantic about the wilderness. She and Joe are among the most competent Alaskans I know. They hunt, guide river trips, paddle whitewater all through Alaska and Canada, and travel frequently in the back-country. In March, they had wanted to catch some of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, so they'd snowmachined from their house near McKinley Village through the uninhabited midsection of Alaska to Rainy Pass, winter camping along the 300-mile route. I was embarrassed about my modest survival gear when I saw how well-rigged their machines were with snowshoes, a come-along, and other useful equipment compactly stowed. To people like them, the adulation of Christopher McCandless is just one more reason to stay in sensible old Alaska.

Beneath the bed was a small blue suitcase, a Starline, the kind your grandmother might have taken on weekend trips. The lid was busted off the hinges. Christopher McCandless's mother had filled it with survival gear and left it, and over the years other people had removed things or added to it. Joe dragged the suitcase out, plopped it on the bed and called out an inventory as he sorted through the jumble, beginning with a crumpled silver survival blanket: “The Jiffy Pop tinfoil thing. Look right here: saltwater taffy. Holy Bible. Cheesecloth. A map saying ‘You are here. Walk this way out to get food.'”

He was joking, I think.

“Emergency first aid kit. The mittens. The headnet. Waterproof matches. The squirrels have gotten to the Ramen. Vaseline. Sewing kit. Jungle head net. Toothpaste. Cigarette papers. Princess Cruises Suntan Lotion SPF 30.”

There was more: firestarter, tissue paper, soap, a can of tuna. Then Joe grew bored and went outside so Charles could take his picture posing by the famous bus with a can of Spam in his left hand.

“That's almost bad luck,” Connie said quietly, and I had to agree.

Kris and I took turns reading aloud comments left by those who came after the visit by Krakauer and McCandless's parents. Some were epistles, others aphorisms. The earliest dated to January 1994 and was left by a pair of Alaskans who came by snowmachine: “Cloudy, & 42 degrees. Emergency supplies in good order.”

In May, people started recording more intimate thoughts:

“Like Chris, I came to Alaska looking for some answers as I near my last year in college. A very emotional day and a
highlight of my summer up here in the wild land of Alaska. Constant thoughts of my family and friends.”

“I'll return next year and try to set myself free again.”

“The vibes I felt from the bus made me sit and think for hours. I wasn't able to sleep until I felt every emotion possible: amazed, sadness, wonderment, happiness, and many more…”

Charles looked over my shoulder and read. “I wish I could come in here and have an inspirational moment,” he said. “I wish my life was Zenned out.”

“‘Only time will tell how Chris McCandless's life has affected mine,'” Kris read. She snorted and looked up. “It's garbage! I mean, am I too cynical?”

We were. We were too cynical to read entry after entry from people looking for meaning in the life and death of a man who had rejected his family, mooched his way across the country and called himself “Alexander Supertramp” in the third person. I struggled to imagine the emotional currents that had carried people here to this bus, so far from their homes, to honor his memory. Later, a friend who had been born in Alaska and exiled to Maryland for five years tried to explain the overwhelming smallness and sameness of life on the suburban East Coast, where lawn care excites great interest; no wonder someone like Christopher McCandless seems adventurous and spiritual and inspiring, despite being dead.

Several visitors mentioned that
Into the Wild
had prompted their trips, but the book must have motivated nearly all of the pilgrimages, because why else would people attach any significance to the bus? They had come from Europe, California, Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Utah, Ontario, North Carolina.