I started Into The Wild today. I'm not quite sure where to insert this but figure I'll just do it here. I'm not sure if I hate McCandless or Krakauer here, but I definitely hate at least one of them (this is page 66; I already hated McCandless about fifty pages ago). "Rough congress with nature" pisses me off. Nature has no fucks to give about anyone. What I hate about McCandless is he seemed to think of himself as some sort of individualist, but so far at page 66 all he's done is bounce from one person who helps him out a bit to another person who helps him out a bit. We know how this ends: he leaves a note asking for someone to help him, and when nobody happens by to help him, he dies.it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature
I've never read Into the Wild. Well, not the book, anyway. I read the article. Two things struck me: 1) Krakauer never met McCandless, and never interacted with anyone enough to know McCandless. 2) Krakauer's shtick was to tell the world exactly who McCandless was. innocent and seemingly insignificant blunders he would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in July or August as anonymously as he walked into them in April. Instead, the name of Chris McCandless has become the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family is left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love. I've known guys like Christopher McCandless. They're goofs. They fuck around until they decide shit's gotten a little too real and then they peel it back. Christopher McCandless hung it out past the point where he could reconsider and he's dead now. That's it. That's the only difference. McCandless eschewed the safety net and it took him four months to starve. That Krakauer has been obsessed with this failure and ways to make it not Chris McCandless' fault says a lot: Krakauer really wants this to be the cruel fate of the universe conspiring to take down a seasoned outdoorsman, not a goofy 24-year-old kid who didn't have the sense to bring a map. Then shit got fuckin' meta when Outside published a lengthy article about people who risk their lives paying homage to Chris McCandless. I can't hate Christopher McCandless. He was a dumb kid who didn't get a chance to learn from his mistakes, who read too much Tolstoy and not enough Jack London. Krakauer? Krakauer is a hagiographer.For most of 16 weeks McCandless more than held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two
The troopers told me that 75 percent of all of the rescues they perform in the area happen on the Stampede Trail. “Obviously, there’s something that draws these people out here,” one of the troopers, who asked not to be named, told me. “It’s some kind of internal thing within them that makes them go out to that bus. I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand. What would possess a person to follow in the tracks of someone who died because he was unprepared?”
innocent and seemingly insignificant blunders he would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in July or August as anonymously as he walked into them in April. Yeah, Krakauer is an idiot for saying that. His blunder was not walking out after four or eight weeks. My take isn't that Krakauer wanted to make McCandless an accomplished outdoorsman but that he wanted to make him out to be the type of person who would find a solution to overcome whatever came his way with the suggestion that we all should try to do the same. Then the "fates conspired against" stuff I agree. I've never known anyone quite like McCandless. The closest I can think of is a high school friend who once told us, "I have a great idea to make a lot of money, all we need is a dead body." He was the type who did ok at stuff but never really went anywhere. He didn't necessarily blame the world, but the impression was his break was just around the corner. One more complaint I should have said originally: for all his desired independence, McCandless still relied on the bus for his shelter, a bus other people had hauled out there.For most of 16 weeks McCandless more than held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two
I wonder if it's generational. McCandless was six years older than me. That means he was in 10th grade when Challenger happened, 8th grade at the Sarajevo Olympics, 7th Grade in the Lebanon barracks bombing and 22 when we bombed Iraq the first time. We were all right in that formative era when the world changed - in 9th grade debate class I argued against the reunification of Germany. It was the kind of crazy time where Fukuyama was arguing for "the end of history." And I knew lots of guys like this. It was the original GenX "fuck this shit" approach that led to characterization in Slacker, Reality Bites, etc. McCandless is 100% a character out of Douglas Coupland's Generation X (which came out the year before he died). It wasn't that they were accomplished outdoorsmen. It was that they didn't care, couldn't be made to care, and were busy opting out of society 100% because they had no faith that it could be improved or engaged with in anything but a negative way. They weren't "off-the-gridders" so much as they were burnouts. Maybe it had something to do with how much more common acid was back then. That, I believe, is the thing that Krakauer worships. It's the fatalistic attitude that if this life isn't worth living you're better off dying than trying to adapt. Krakauer wants McCandless to be a countercultural hero, not a poacher burnout that doesn't believe in maps. If his struggle is noble his life isn't in vain; if his struggle is ignoble then The Man was right all along and The Man must never be right. Richard Proenneke's book had been out 19 years by the time McCandless headed out. It was a thing. Dick Proenneke basically proved it could be done - and that with aplomb - if you knew what you were doing. But if you know what you're doing, you're not pure of heart or some shit.
McCandless was twelve years older than me. My generation was around for the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, but I think I was too young to understand the significance of either. My generation saw world events like the impeachment of a president over a blow job. I read Generation X in college, and I agree McCandless would fit in perfectly. I'll have to go back and re-read it. My generation had its share of burnouts but not in a GenX sort of way. Our burnouts smoked pot or because alcoholics and worked dead end jobs, walking away from society only metaphorically. I completely agree with your assessment of Krakauer and the idea that McCandless's ignorance was somehow more noble. It isn't just that a book about a well prepared person spending for months in the woods wouldn't be as compelling, I think Krakauer would be almost disappointed.
I would love to see a Krakauer book about a bunch of guys who have their shit together and triumph over adversity through planning and foresight. But then, that would be a Michael Lewis book. I remember precisely the moment when the world ended. It wasn't the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89. It wasn't the dissolution of the Soviet Union in '91. It was Sotheby's auction of the Soviet space program in '93. Only 45 years elapsed between the first terrifying beeps of Sputnik and the first hit of the gavel dispatching the crown jewels of Soviet technology to the highest bidder but those 45 years defined our lives. My great grandparents escaped the Tsar. We had friends whose grandparents got out of Moldova just in time, taking with them the crown jewels of some lesser duchy. Non-Iron-Curtain Europe was generations back to us and there it was, a blip in the back pages of Newsweek, a human interest story about Gagarin's space suit available to the highest bidder. They shelled the Kremlin and nothing happened. Everything we knew was wrong and there was a lot of searching. it would be facetious for me to argue Christopher McCandless was at all interested in the Cold War but there was a very real sense that the universe was changing if you were young and impressionable in the early '90s.