Magic Bus

'SOCIETY
YOU'RE A CRAZY BREED
I HOPE YOU'RE NOT LONELY
WITHOUT ME'

Eddie Vedder

CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS - ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP

Christopher Johnson McCandless (12 February 1968 – 18 August 1992) was an American wanderer who with little food and little equipment, hiked into the Alaskan wilderness to live a life of solitude. Less than five months later he died near Denali National Park, of starvation. In 1996, Jon Krakauer wrote a book about his life, Into the Wild, which inspired a 2007 film of the same name directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch as McCandless.

Childhood
McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father, Walt McCandless, worked as an antenna specialist for NASA. His mother, Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson, was his father's secretary and later helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company.

From early childhood, teachers noticed McCandless was unusually strong-willed. As he grew older, he coupled this with an intense idealism and physical endurance. In high school, he served as captain of the cross-country team, urging teammates to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were "running against the forces of darkness....all the evil in the world, all the hatred."[1]

He graduated from W.T. Woodson High School in 1986 and from Emory University in 1990, majoring in history and anthropology. His upper middle-class background and academic success masked growing contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of American society. In his junior year, he declined membership in Phi Beta Kappa, on the basis that honors and titles were irrelevant. McCandless was strongly influenced by Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, and he dreamed about leaving society for a Thoreau-like period of solitary contemplation.


[edit] On the road
After graduating in 1990, he gave $24,000 of the $42,000 bequest of a family friend for his last two years of college, to the charity Oxfam International and began traveling, using the name "Alexander Supertramp" (Krakauer notes the connection with WH Davies, Welsh author of 'Autobiography of a Super-Tramp' published in 1908). McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator. McCandless alternated between having jobs and living with no money and little or no human contact, sometimes successfully foraging for food. He survived a flash flood but lost his car (the car was not actually lost; because of McCandless' lack of knowledge of mechanics, he thought it was unrepairable) along with kayaking down remote stretches of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California. McCandless took pride in surviving with a minimum of gear and funds, and generally made little preparation.

For years, McCandless dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey" where he would live off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992 McCandless hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by James Gallien, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. Gallien was concerned about "Alex", who had minimal supplies (not even a magnetic compass) and no experience of surviving in the Alaskan bush. Gallien repeatedly tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment and supplies. However, McCandless ignored Gallien's warnings, refusing all assistance except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melts, and a bag of corn chips. Eventually, Gallien dropped him at the head of the Stampede Trail. The date was Tuesday, April 28, 1992.

After hiking along the snow-covered Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus used as a hunting shelter parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park ( 63°51′36.13″N, 149°24′50.62″W)[2] and began his attempt to live off the land. He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle, with plenty of .22LR hollowpoint ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books, and some camping equipment. He assumed he could forage for plant food and hunt game. Despite his inexperience as a hunter, McCandless poached some small game such as porcupines and birds. Once he killed a caribou; however, he failed to preserve the meat properly and it spoiled. Rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat, like jerky, as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he smoked it, following the advice of hunters he had met in South Dakota.[3]

His journal contains entries covering a total of 189 days. These entries range from ecstatic to grim with McCandless' changing fortunes. In July, after living in the bus for several months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then considerably higher and swifter than when he crossed in April. There was an easy method of crossing a short way down the river. Unfortunately, McCandless was unaware of this because the only navigational aid in his possession was a tattered road map he had found at a gas station, which did not contain the type of detailed topographical information which could so easily have saved his life. [2]

On August 12, McCandless wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal "Beautiful Blueberries". He tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which contains an excerpt from a Robinson Jeffers poem entitled "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.
On the other side of the page, McCandless added, "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

On September 6, 1992, two hikers and a group of moose hunters found this note on the door of the bus:

"S.O.S. 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, Chris McCandless. August?"[1]

His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus, weighing an estimated 67 pounds. He had been dead for more than two weeks. His official cause of death was starvation.

Biographer Jon Krakauer suggests two factors may have contributed to McCandless's death in August, 1992. First, he was running the risk of starvation due to increased activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting. [4] However, Krakauer insists starvation was not, as McCandless' death certificate states, the primary cause of death. Initially, Krakauer claimed McCandless might have ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum alpinum). However, extensive laboratory testing proves conclusively there was no alkaloid toxin present in McCandless' food supplies. In later editions of the book, therefore, Krakauer has speculated a fungus Rhizoctonia leguminicola could have grown on the seeds McCandless ate. However, there remains no evidence to support Krakauer's theory, and all forensic data suggest starvation.

His journal entry for that date reads, "Extremely weak. Fault of pot[ato] seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy." McCandless had been digging and eating the root of the wild potato—Hedysarum alpinum, a common area wildflower also known as Eskimo potato, which Kari's book told him was widely eaten by native Alaskans - for more than a month without ill effect. On July 14 he apparently started eating the pealike seedpods of the plant as well, again without ill effect.


[edit] Cultural legacy
Krakauer's book made Christopher McCandless a heroic figure to many. By 2002, the abandoned bus (No. 142) on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped became a tourist destination.[5][6] Sean Penn's film Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer's book, was released in September 2007. In October 2007, a documentary film on McCandless's journey by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, The Call of the Wild, was released.[7] McCandless's story also inspired an episode of the TV series Millennium,[8] the album Cirque by Biosphere, and folk songs by singers Ellis Paul,[9] Eddie From Ohio,[10] Harrod and Funck,[11] and Eric Peters.[12]

Unlike Krakauer and many readers, who have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless,[13] some Alaskans have negative views about those who romanticize his fate.[6][14] Because he had not bothered to buy a map and a compass (items which most people in the same situation would have considered essential) McCandless was completely unaware that a hand-operated tram crossed the impassable river ¼ mile from where he attempted to cross. Had McCandless known this, he could easily have saved his own life.[1] Additionally, there were cabins stocked with emergency supplies within a few miles of the bus, although they had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled, possibly by McCandless, as detailed in Lamothe's documentary. The most charitable view among McCandless' detractors is that he was somewhat lacking in basic common-sense i.e. venturing deep into an isolated, unforgiving wilderness area without adequate planning, preparation and supplies was almost guaranteed to end in disaster.

Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”[15]