Chris McCandless: guru or knucklehead?

Great Debates
1

This thread is for those who have read Jon Krakauer’s excellent book “Into The Wild.”

Brief Summary: ITW is about a young man named Chris McCandless who, upon graduating from college with honors, decides to pursue an ascetic way of life. Taking some money and his car and discarding most of his possessions, he spends the next few years criss-crossing the country, taking a variety of odd jobs to survive, and occasionally finding himself near death (an example would include trying to canoe in Baja without provisions, but eventually rescued.)

His final feat was to hitchhike to Denali. With minimal provisions (a .22 rifle, large bag of rice, various tools - and no map and no idea where he was) he found an old abandoned bus where he camped for several months, forraging for berries and hunting. At this point he decides that he has found whatever he was looking for, and attempts to leave - but by this time, a small stream he had crossed hiking in had turning into a raging river due to the summer thaw. As a result he found himself isolated, and increasingly weak due to a poor food supply. He ended up starving to death and was later found by some locals.

I’m not doing the book justice; Krakauer is a great writer and does a fine job with this book. It was originally a magazine article in Outside, which had the effect of helping Krakauer with some leads as to where McCandless was during his journey.
That being said: Krakauer writes romantically about McCandless, partially because he (Krakauer) also did some not-too-bright things as a kid in the wilderness, mentioned in the book. He writes of McCandless as someone who was trying to follow the path of Thoreau and Tolstoy, and trying to survive via first principles. Take this, add in a healthy dose of the pioneer spirit that Americans love, and you end up with the protagonist painted as a tragic character who abandoned the materialist life in search of deeper meaning. Taking a few minutes to read the reviews of this book on Amazon confirm that many people (especially younger readers) view McCandless this way.

Then you have the older crowd, usually ones who have spent time in the wildnerness, many from Alaska. They point out that McCandless was woefully unprepared - he did not take a map with him*, nor did he have the proper tools for hunting, or enough food. In fact, for most of his journey, he had done various dumb things that may have gotten him killed or seriously injured had not someone taken pity on him. One could even argue that this was the case in Alaska; had he not found the bus, he wouldn’t have had adequate shelter to survive as well as he did.

  • McCandless did not take the map for an explicit reason; the ultimate extension of “first principles”, he wanted to find a place that was completely unknown, the kind of spot marked by a question mark on old maps. Since there is no such place today, he came up with a clever alternative: hike to a very isolated place and not take a map, so - at least to him - it would be like a big question mark. The lack of map cost him his life; if he had one, he would have known about nearby cabins - some with food - and also a pulley system that would have taken him across the river that blocked his path to the highway.
    I read this book last year, and have come to the conclusion that, in some ways, the critics don’t go far enough. McCandless was continually rescued by those who were knowledgeable about how the world worked rather than his own view. He was more of the “God’s fool” type, and I think to some extent he believed this himself. He didn’t do very much thinking on his own, relying instead on the ascetics for his philosophy and those around him for his survival. I don’t believe he had a proper respect for nature and the wilderness, instead taking (as many readers did) a romantic view that it would provide.

McCandless reminds me of the old joke about a woman whose home was going to be flooded. The woman rejects various offers of assistance - a car, a boat, even a helicopter as the waters envelop even the roof, always telling her would-be rescuers that she has faith that God will deliver her. In the end she drowns, and is sent to Heaven, where she asks God why he didn’t rescue her. A frustrated God says that he sent a car, a boat, and a helicopter; what more did she want? McCandless was continually rescued, but instead of learning from his experience, thought himself invulnerable.

2

I think Chris McCandless was neither guru nor exactly knucklehead. To answer briefly I think he was someone whose proclivities and abilities were a poor fit for the time he was born into.

Mr. carlotta went to high school with Chris McCandless and was on the cross country team when Chris was captain. We have both read Into the Wild.

According to my husband, Chris was trying to get “off the map” even in high school. He would lead the cross country team through the suburban wilds of Annandale, purposely trying (and often succeeding) to get them lost. He would encourage team members to run barefoot (Mr. carlotta would never do this), often leading to injuries.

My husband thinks Chris was manic. He would read several books a day and possessed boundless energy. He was constantly talking.

From my husband’s descriptions and the book, I have a picture of someone in my head who is very unusual. He had little interest in the rewards our society has to offer.

So he didn’t want to fit into our materialistic, car-based, industrial culture. I kind of agree with him here, but lack the vision and energy and force of personality to live at odds with it. It’s not as though we’re given a choice about which culture we’re going to get to live in.

If Chris had been born in say, the 18th century, his restlessness and eagerness to be someplace unknown would’ve been a perfect match for colonial America.

There are probably lots of people like Chris, who don’t happen to die in a newsworthy manner or leave behind well-written journals, so we don’t hear about their strategies to live outside our culture while still in it; we don’t hear about their principles, they manage to stay under the media’s radar, which is exactly the way they want it.

Do I think people should follow Chris’s example? No, not really. I am real believer in being prepared and taking precautions.

Do I think Chris was mentally ill? Possibly. Possibly just a poor fit to modern day society.

Do I think Chris was a knucklehead? Not really. He knew he was taking risks. Risk is what he wanted. While I think he was sorry to die, he relished all his adventures and probably would’ve kept it up until something else killed him.

I think it was his right to live as he wanted as long as he did not harm others. He should’ve stayed in touch with his family–that was the main harm he did–to the people that loved him. I think he had as much right to live the way he did as people do to bungee jump, to race cars, to smoke (away from nonsmokers :slight_smile: ), to eat too much, etc.

3

I read the book a few years ago and really enjoyed it (after having read the original article in Outside magazine several years before that). I seem to recall thinking that Chris was very close to being onto something, but got too caught up in being anti-establishment, if you will. Exploration is great. Pushing boundaries is great. Sometime even seeking isolation for spiritual growth can be a great experience. In the end, though, he seemed too concerned with rejecting society and technology, just for the sake of rejection, rather than trying to discover something new.

But the best think about the book is that it got me to read Into Thin Air. As much as liked Into the Wild, the Everest book was way better.

4

I agree except on one point - seeking isolation.

Say you wanted to be isolated from humanity for a few months - you really wanted to get away from people and spend some time by yourself. Maybe you even want to try to intentionally get yourself “lost” where you didn’t know about your immediate surroundings, except for the way out when you were done.

So you pick what you think is a fairly isolated place - Alaska, say - and hike out on a trail, hoping to not see another soul until you are damn ready.

And then, after a few miles of seeing not a soul, you come across an old bus that pretty clearly has been lived in occasionally.

Do you welcome the bus, or do you think to yourself, “dammit, I came all the way out here hoping to get away from everyone and here is a damn hotel”?

I don’t think Chris’ behavior was consistent with what Krakauer was trying to portray. He was anti-establishment but I think he expected the establishment, or a representative thereof, to come to his aid whenever he was in trouble. Chris may have chosen the bus as a base, not just because it was certainly convenient, but others clearly knew about it and in a pinch could once again rescue him.

5

I have read Into the Wild, and have a strong opinion about Chris, but I am watching the Super Bowl and don’t want to compose a response now.

However…

As someone who went to HS in Northern Virginia, this is quite humorous. “OK, did we turn left at the 7-11, or was it the Burger King?”

6

His eagerness to be someplace unknown isn’t what makes him either a knuckle head. It’s just plain stupid to go out in the wilderness without being properly prepared. Even explorers and trappers of the 18th and 19th century knew that. In my mind there are only a few options to explain his behavior. He was either naive, stupid, or off his rocker.

Marc

7

I read this book a few years ago, and have recently started reading it again. This really is a tragic story. The main thing you get from it is that his death was senseless. However, if he had had some common sense, it would have never happened.

I am not sure whether Chris was naïve, had no common sense or whether he wanted to die. But I do thing was something strange going on in his head. He certainly wasn’t thinking clearly. I am convinced he was mentally ill in some way. He was out of touch with reality, for sure.

What really was tragic is how he just cut his family off. He seemed to have a loving, caring family. A sister he was very close to. But he just disappeared without a word to them. I think that was extremely selfish of him. He spent so much time writing letters to various characters he met along the way, but couldn’t send word to his parents? It made me angry.

Also, I do disagree with the romanticizing of the story. Although at the same time, as a reader, you’re constantly thinking of how stupid this or that was. You scoff at how he refuses good advice or a helping hand from well-meaning people. He thought he was invincible, which clearly was a delusion. It has always worried me that someone would read the book and go off to try to do the same thing.

I thought the same thing too, also having grown upin Northern Virginia! I’m thinking, “suburban wilds of Annandale? Huh?”

Anyway I am glad someone started this thread. Into the Wild is one of my favorite books, and I have always wondered about what was really up with this guy. Was he mentally ill?

8

by “suburban wilds of Annandale” I was trying to be funny.

We’ve recently moved to Annandale temporarily and let me assure you, it is easy to get lost…cul-de-sac confusion.

Even though I was trying to be funny, if you look at a map of the area (which I do constantly attempting to find my way around) you will see that there are many green areas set aside, parks and stream valleys.

The house we are living in is one block off a 6 or 8 lane section of Braddock Road, less than a mile from the beltway, but it backs up onto to woods and we frequently see deer and last week we saw a fox. So there are lots of “wild” areas to try to get lost in.

9

I could (but won’t) go on a spooky coincidence tear here, given that I reread the book last week…

I find Chris to be enigmatic. Just a few examples: He professed love for his sister Carine, yet abandoned that relationship. He supposedly couldn’t bear to part with his yellow Datsun, yet when he abandoned the car he left a note calling it a piece of shit. He would read carefully the works of Tolstoy, London, Thoreau, as well as at least a book or two on edible plants, but didn’t read carefully how Inuit peoples live off the land in Alaska.

I think the enigmas associated with him and his experiences are compelling enough to draw us to the story. It makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense. Chris was bright, but clueless. There’s no closure even with his death, so we’re left to ponder the puzzle pieces that are there, even though they don’t fit together and many are missing.

Apparently Into the Wild is now fodder for more than a few courses in environmental philosophy and environmental writing. At least one Alaska university course takes field trips to Fairbanks 142. According to one participant, Chris’ boots are still under the bunk, as is the suitcase of supplies left by his parents.

10

I just don’t understand what exactly you’re suppose to get out of his book. I just don’t feel like reading a book by some loon who went and killed himself in the Alaska wilderness. So please, those of you who have read this book, what insights did you gain?

Marc

11

Cautionary example? That’s what I got mostly from this book. I’ll write more later when I get home. I loved this book.

12

Krakauer is a good writer, and it’s worth reading from the perspective that it’s a well-written piece.

Of course, technically Chris didn’t kill himself. He lived off the land for over 100 days having brought in only a rifle, a small sack of rice, some sandwiches given him by a person who gave him a ride while Chris was hitch-hiking, and a book on edible plants. Whatever he was seeking by going to Alaska, death doesn’t seem high on his list.

As a parent, I take from the book a lesson to avoid hubris in my relationships with my children. Chris’s dad and Krakauer’s dad were both fairly determined that their kids follow a path to success long established by their parents. In Chris’ case law school, in Krakauer’s, Harvard Medical. Not wanting to be pushed into somthing they weren’t interested in, both rebelled. There are others related to parenting, but they all sound trite as I try to type them in here.

It’s really more of a mystery story. Who was this kid? Why did he do this? Why didn’t he keep in touch with his sister? Why did he make such blunders when he otherwise was a very capable person?

13

To take a map when I go into the Alaskan wilderness. The book was ok, though I thought he was trying to glamorize his life. It also shows that just because you have a brain doesn’t mean you are smart enough just leave everything behind. I’ve read a number of books like this, except most of the people are much better prepaired.

14

I’ve read Into The Wild too, and the above lesson was made abundantly clear to me as well. To wit, Krakauer says on p. 195:

So not only was this guy royally unprepared by not even a map of the area he was hiking through, he was totally out of his element, as he hadn’t the faintest idea how to survive in the wilderness. Also, McCandless was too stupid to realize that he was eating toxic berries and poisonous plants, which were slowly incapaciatated him.

Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I found Krakauer’s melodramatic treatment of the subject matter analgous to McCandless’ bravado dealing with the wilds of Alaska – severely lacking in circumspection.

As well as to show you that while McCandless may have been ‘book smart’, he hadn’t a shred of common sense or wilderness smarts, which is why a guy with a headful of nonsense was found dead by hunters with a note like this:

After reading ITW, which I found to be thoroughly pointless, I thankfully came upon Bill Bryson’s uplifting A Walk in the Woods. Bryson’s hilarious personal account of hiking 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail IMO, bests Krakauer’s breezy paean to foolishness and nihilism hands down by proving what a little common sense and preparation, combined with a realistic sense of your limitations can do.

15

Actually, an addendum at the end of the book speculates that he was getting by until he ate a poisonous plant that looked extremely similar to a safe one (even the book he was using didn’t distinguish between the two). The symptoms Chris wrote about in his journal fit better better with this hypothesis, rather than the wild sweet pea theory Krakauer had put forward in his initial Ourdoors article.

Anyway, I tend to lean more toward knucklehead than guru on McCandless, but not absolutely. He had an inflated opinion of himself (the notes he wrote in the margins of his books don’t indicate any deep philosophical insights) and I don’t think he really knew what he was getting into. On the other hand, while I don’t think he was trying to kill himself, I think he was aware that death was a possibility, and accepted it. What bothered me, though, was the way he abandoned not just his family, but all the people he encountered who cared about him. The part about Ron just broke my heart.

16

[Nitpick] Evidence suggests that he didn’t eat poisonous plants, nor did he confuse one edible plant with its toxic doppleganger. It is most plausible that his emaciated system could not process a chemical compound in the seeds of the non-toxic “wild potato” plant, seeds, in fact, that previously were not know to contain this substance. Chris was clueless about a lot of things, and appears to have purposefully set off for his trip woefully unprepared, but he was not stupid.[/Nitpick]

He’s no guru, though. Just a bright young guy who may have had a type of mental illness and one who let his emotions and crack-pot theories run his life. That said, who knows the type of life he might have led if he’d made it through this ordeal.

17

I too went and got this out of the library to read it again yesterday, and what I’m getting out of it so far is that he was in no way a “guru”. Generally a “guru” has a coherent worldview, a belief system that hangs together, even if it’s an off-the-wall one, like “Aliens changed our DNA during the Sumerian era.” This is why gurus attract followers–the guru can say, “I believe X”, and all the potential followers can look over “X” and decide for themselves whether “X” is groovy or bogus.

But all I am seeing is a young man who simply went hammering off in all sorts of random directions, both physically and metaphysically. Other than some sort of deep-seated imperative to get as far away, again both physically and metaphysically, from his parents as possible, I don’t see any kind of program or agenda, or belief system other than, “I hate my parents, I have a fear of emotional commitments, I like to travel, I think Thoreau and Jack London are really kewl, and I wanna go live off the land in Alaska.” I know a lot of 14-year-olds who feel the same way, but nobody is buying books about them and calling them “gurus”.

And I thought the lecture to “Ron Franz”, telling this 80-year-old man that his lifestyle was all wrong and what he needed to do was sell all his possessions and turn himself into a homeless tramp, was just–bizarre. It displayed a complete lack of comprehension of what it really means to be a homeless tramp, completely on your own with no support system at all. But coming from someone who obviously already didn’t understand the way the world really works, it wasn’t surprising.

“Off the grid” is all very well for footloose and fancy-free twenty-somethings who can pick up occasional minimum wage jobs flipping burgers at McD’s, or cleaning dead rats out of a grain elevator, but eighty-somethings can’t really go there.

I also noticed that he didn’t seem to grasp the extent to which he was wholly dependent, throughout his “journey”, upon the “kindness of strangers”. People gave him rides, jobs, clothes, food, money, but he seemed to simply–not notice–when this was happening, and to blissfully continue on his “journey” secure in the–to my way of thinking–rather childish conviction that somehow rides, jobs, clothes, food, and money would magically appear whenever he needed them. And since he didn’t really strike me as a grownup making a grownup decision to get off the grid, I found myself wondering just how much in the back of his mind was the childish thought, “If I really get stuck, I can always phone home.” I wondered just how much he was really renouncing his parents and all they stood for. It seems to me that if he really wanted to renounce all the comfy suburban trappings, that psychologically he would have needed to inform them of what exactly he was doing. “Greetings from SoCal, I’m living with a bunch of homeless nudists and I don’t need you”, “Greetings from Dakota, I’m working in a grain elevator and I don’t need you”, etc.

18

While McCandless may have been able to distinguish poisonous from non-poisonous plants, he apparently wasn’t able to tell which parts of an edible plant were safe to eat, and which weren’t.

As the expression goes, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” To wit, McCandless he erred by eating the wild potato plant’s toxic seed pods. Your assertion that his “emaciated system couldn’t process a chemical compound in the seeds” that “previously were not known to contain this substance” is a clear misreading and misunderstanding of the book on your part. Indeed, the book said no such thing.

Contrary to your assertion, it has been known for a long time that the alkaloid toxin swainsonine, was present in the seeds of the wild potato plant, and that while the plant itself is edible, the seed pods aren’t, as they have long been recognized as toxic by botanists, agronomists and ranchers alike. And these seeds weren’t just toxic to to McCandless as you assert – they’re toxic to all human beings and animals.

According to ITW: "A person with a better grasp of botanical principals would not have eaten them [the seed pods], but it was an innocent error. It was, however, sufficient to do him in. [p. 194]

I don’t know how you define stupid, but if you’re clueless about something that’s crucial to your survival, you are ipso facto stupid – no if’s, and’s or but’s about it --regardless of whether that stupidity is congenital or temporary, and regardless of whether you may be ‘smart’ in other areas, as Chris clearly was. Unfortunately, Chris’ surfeit of ‘book smarts’ did not help him in the wilds of Alaska . That Chris acted in an unintelligent, thoughtless, careless, unreasoning and vexatious manner that led to his own death, is without debate. McCandless’ actions, or the lack thereof, are indicative of wanton stupidty, no less no more.

“Bright”? Absolutely not. Disordered is more like it, as it is quite obvious that McCandless suffered from some type of bipolarism or mania. The tragedy is that such disorders are easily treatable, and if it had been identified in Chris early on, it could’ve been easily brought under control with anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, we will never know.

19

Please reconcile your statement above with this:

Please make up your mind as to which it is - - seeds or berries; toxic plants or unsafe parts of edible plants. Nitpick seems relevant to me.

I seem to recall Krakauer’s having the wild potato seeds tested by a lab after the fact and it was then discovered that they had the mild toxin in them. Heretofore the seeds hadn’t been of much interest to the botanists since folks hadn’t been eating them. Guess I could go back and post chapter and verse, but don’t think it’s worth it.

[quote]

and

from above seem to contradict each other.

Dumb people don’t graduate with honors from Emory. Hell, dumb people don’t even get into Emory.

At least we seem to agree that Chris wasn’t a guru. I’m not squarely in the knucklehead camp, while you are convinced of his stupidity. As Chris isn’t here to rebut either one of us, guess this is moot.

20

Perhaps, but I’ve met my fair share of people who do well in classes but seem dumber than a box of rocks when it comes to the real world.

This is why I believe he stayed at the bus. Remember the note he pinned to it when he was dying and went off to look for food? He wasn’t just hoping for help; he was expecting it, because before someone always managed to show up just in time to pull his butt out of the fire.