Travelers' Tales Alaska (37 page)

One man made the journey after reading a book review while sitting in a doctor's office in Ithaca, N.Y. “It was then I knew the bus was a place I must visit,” he wrote. “Christopher's
story changed the way I look at a lot of things, moreover it changed my perception of ‘need.' I will be forever in your debt Alex! May you wander your travels in peace.”

A fellow from Belgium wrote: “I've come from Europe to follow the footsteps of a ‘pilgrim,' as says Krakauer, and I'd almost say a prophet!” He then criticized the materialistic attitude of Alaskans and urged them to read Tolstoy “instead of prostituting their country to tourism.”

I laughed at that. The Belgian and the others had themselves turned the bus into a perverse tourist destination now so well known that it's mentioned in
The Milepost
. They urged each other to protect the vehicle as a memorial, to leave things untouched. “His monument and tomb are a living truth whose flame will light the ‘way of dreams' in other's lives,” someone wrote. It was not hard to imagine that before long visitors would be able to buy t-shirts saying “I Visited The Bus” or “I Survived Going Into the Wild.” So many people seemed to have found their way out here that an espresso stand didn't seem out of the question.

Astounded by page after page of such writings, we counted the number of people identified in the notebooks. More than 200 had trekked to the bus since McCandless's death, and that didn't account for those who passed by without comment. Think of that: More than 200 people, many as inexperienced as McCandless, had hiked or bicycled along the Stampede Trail to the bus—and every one of them had somehow managed to return safely.

Only one person even vaguely questioned this paradox: “Perhaps we shouldn't romanticize or cananize (sic) him…. After all, Crane and I walked here in no time at all, so Chris wasn't far from life…not really.” But then, perhaps unwilling to seem harsh, the writer added, “These questions are in vain.
We shouldn't try to climb into another's mind, attempting to know what he thought or felt.”

Others criticized Alaskans for doing just that: “I am quite offended when I hear that people mock his story as one of stupidity and carelessness. Every man and woman has desires and hopes for happiness in life, but sadly, only few succeed.”

A newcomer to Alaska wrote, “No wonder Alaskans did not understand the call to which most men feel at some point in their lives. No wonder they did not understand Chris McCandless. If you cannot fell it, mine it, or rape it, and in the very end profit from it, then it must be ludicrous and ill-conceived. Idealism, when harnessed for good unselfish acts, results in great men; the greatest and most influential of our times. Chris was on the verge of that path…”

Many people promised in their comments to call their families as soon as they could, so who's to say their journeys were wasted? Yet I felt exactly as a friend did as he read my notes later: repulsed and fascinated.

The practical entries, and there were just a few, were penned by Alaskans who noted the weather conditions, the river's depth, and so on—the sort of information useful to other backcountry travelers. Jon Nierenberg, a Stampede Trail resident, left a detailed description of how to cross the Teklanika River when it runs high—a problem that had defeated McCandless. Added in pencil was the advice, “Also, there's the park boundary cabin six miles away—upstream on the Sushana River. Food there. Don't trash the place.”

A few people didn't feel obligated to join the soul-searching. “Too spooked to stay,” one guy wrote. Another said, “This place is a mess.” And another noted, “It sure is a long way out here. I'm glad I flew in.”

But most comments were written by those experiencing
some sort of emotional release:

“It's a good place to die.”

“I cried so much I couldn't believe it.”

“This bus has a sacred feeling to it and I feel grateful to be able to visit the place where Chris lived and died.”

“I started my journey here hoping two things. 1) somewhere out there I would find myself 2) that I would find some hope for the future. Now I am here at the bus and I am happy because the future looks up. And I know who I am. Now it's time to go home to the ones I love and help bring truth to the light.”

“The beginning of my journey is my departure from this abandoned bus. I feel alive and free—a freedom too beautiful to express in mere words.”

“I didn't begin to understand Alex's quest until today. Along the way I have discovered peace and tranquility
and realized for the first time that the journey is the best part. Unexpectedly filled with emotion upon finding the bus, choking back tears, I can return to life and civilization with fresh eyes. Alex, you have inspired me and changed my life forever. If only there were more like you. Left bottle of Jack Daniels.”

“Chris may have fucked up, but he fucked up brilliantly. Nonetheless, family
and
freedom would have been better.”

And on and on.

Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the “he had a death wish” camp because I don't know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the “what a dumbshit” territory, tempered by brief alliances with the “he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest” partisans. Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.

But it's more complicated than that. I can almost understand why he rejected maps, common sense, conventional wisdom, and local knowledge before embarking on his venture. Occasionally when I hear others make fun of Christopher McCandless, I fall quiet. My favorite book growing up was Scott O'Dell's
Island of the Blue Dolphins
, based on a true story about a nineteenth-century Chumash Indian girl who survived for years alone on an island off the California coast. How often had I imagined myself living in that hut of whale bones, catching fish by hand and taming wild dogs for companionship? It's common, this primal longing to connect with a natural world that provides and cradles, that toughens and inspires.

Yet this is the easiest thing to criticize—the notion that
wilderness exists to dispense epiphanies and spiritual cures as part of the scenery. Live here long enough, and you'll learn that every moment spent admiring endless vistas or wandering the land is a privilege, accompanied by plenty of other moments evading mosquitoes by the millions, outlasting weather, avoiding giardia, negotiating unruly terrain, and thinking uneasily about the occasional predator. Walking cross-country through alder thickets or muskeg may be the hardest thing you do all year, as you fight against the earth's tendency to grab hold of you for itself.

And of course it's hard to eat out there. A friend who trapped in his youth likens the bush to a desert, nearly empty of wildlife. One winter he ate marten tendons for days because his food ran out. Read the journal of Fred Fickett, who accompanied Lt. Henry Allen on a 1,500-mile exploration of the Copper, Tanana, and Koyukuk river valleys; it is the story of hungry men.

May 20, 1885: “One of our dogs found a dead goose. We took it from him and ate it.” May 22: “Had rotten salmon straight for breakfast. It was so bad that even the Indian dogs wouldn't eat it.” May 28: “Had a little paste for breakfast, rotten and wormy meat for dinner, rotten goose eggs and a little rice for supper… about 1/4 what we needed.” May 30: “Indian gave us a dinner of boiled meat from which he had scraped the maggots in handfuls before cutting it up. It tasted good, maggots and all.”

There's a reason the Natives sometimes starved in the old days—and they knew what they were doing. There's a reason that many homesteaders and bush rats collect welfare to supplement hunting and fishing. There's a reason we gather in cities and villages. So many people want to believe that it's possible to live a noble life alone in the wilderness, living entirely off the land—and yet the indigenous peoples of
Alaska know that only by depending upon each other, only by forming a community, does survival become possible.

People have been dying in the wilderness for as long as people have been going into it. There are always lessons to be learned from such sad stories, even lessons as simple as: Don't forget matches, don't sweat in the cold, don't run away from bears. But sometimes there are no learning moments, no explanations. From an account in the
Nome Nugget
of July 30, 1901:

“The death of George Dean by starvation at the mouth of the Agiapuk River and the narrow escape of his two companions, Thierry and Houston, from the same fate makes a strange story. Without wishing to criticize the survivors, it looks as if they did not make that hustle for life which men should. They were so near the course of navigation that they could hear the voices of men as they passed up and down the river.”

Why didn't they…why couldn't they…why wouldn't they? And the wise
Nome Nugget
avoids this trap by shrugging away such unanswerables:

“But it's a strange country, and strange things happen in it.” In 1930, not far south from the Stampede Road, park rangers found the body of prospector Tom Kenney on a bar of the McKinley River. Kenney had disappeared July 19 after separating from his partner. On September 3, searchers discovered Kenney lying on his back with his arms at his side. One shoe was off, and searchers concluded he had been salving his foot—“which would indicate that he had been in his right mind up to the last,” the newspaper reported.

Kenney had traveled about eight miles downriver, making several campfires. He and his partner had been searching for a lost gold placer mine, but toward the end, Tom Kenney surely would have traded all the gold he could carry for the sight of
another person, for some clear notion of the way home. He must have eaten berries. He had killed and eaten several porcupines. At his final camp, rangers found a large pile of unburned dry wood. “It is known that Kenney always kept a diary, but as his pockets were not examined before burial it will never be known whether he set down an account of his wanderings or not,” the
Alaska Weekly
reported.

You can hear the pain of letting go in the words of a prospector and trapper named Tom O'Brien, who died of scurvy in the summer of 1919 on the Whiting River near Juneau. In the book
The Dangerous North
, historian Ed Ferrell includes O'Brien's diary entries that describe teeth rattling in his sore gums, his fever and his aching joints, which conspired to keep him from collecting water, firewood, and food. Day by day he ate one meal of unheated rice or potato soup. He weakened and his mental faculties faded. Finally he realized he was suffering from scurvy, but his relief measures came too late. After two months of recording his trials, he left behind a final entry: “Life is dying hard. The heart is strong.”

So many ways to die in the North, in manners grand and surprising and sad. A moment's inattention, the proverbial series of small miscalculations that add up to one giant screw-up, delusion about one's abilities, hubris, mental imbalance, plain bad luck—that's all it takes.

For a few weeks last spring, I kept track of news articles reporting outdoor deaths. Over the winter, more than thirty Alaskans died in snowmachine accidents, a record. They had lost their way in blizzards, fallen through ice and drowned, been buried in avalanches, collided with each other. An intoxicated man perched on a boat's gunwales fell into the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks when waves rocked the vessel; his body did not emerge for days. Two men suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after they brought a char
coal grill into their tent near Chena Hot Springs. Two young kayakers were missing and presumed dead in the Gulf of Alaska. Campers found the bones of an eighteen-year-old soldier who disappeared while ice fishing near the Knik Arm fifteen years ago. And even as searchers looked for a man who had disappeared in the Chugach Mountains came the news that seventy-year-old Dick Cook, an extraordinary woodsman described by John McPhee as the “acknowledged high swami of the river people,” had drowned in the Tatonduk, a river he knew intimately. Some days it seemed surprising that people survive the outdoors at all.