Just finished reading this book, Into The Wild, by John Krakauer, right?
It’s the true story of this college kid who went on a journey of discovery, right? A walkabout, an “on the road,” Jack Kerouac kind of thing, where he took a rifle, a ten pound bag of rice, a knife, and a parka, and disappeared into the wilds of Alaska to go live off the land and find himself.
They found him dead a while later. He didn’t know diddly about Alaskan wildlife, seasonal information, or much of anything else, and he starved to death. By the time he’d realized he was gonna die, he was too weak to do anything about it. Two weeks after he died, some hunters found him.
My wife Chaosia’d wanted me to read the book, for some reason. “Boy, what a chump,” I said. “Yeah, this one needed some Darwin, and now the average IQ of the human race goes up a fraction of a percent.”
“What makes you say that?” said Chaosia.
“Well, just LOOK at this kid,” I said. “Goes off into the Alaskan wilderness without enough food, without the right supplies, doesn’t even have a map, doesn’t know anything about the local wildlife or the local weather patterns, gets trapped by the spring thaw when it swells the rivers, and finally starves to death. Why’d this author write the book about him, anyway? Kid was a moron.”
Chaosia looked at me critically. “Didn’t you hitchhike to Mexico City when you were, what, nineteen?”
“Well, yeah, but I was on the main highways. I had traveler’s checks. I wasn’t gonna starve.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me that Mexico was a weird place because some Mexicans would pick you up and give you a ride and take you home for dinner, and other Mexicans would pick you up and try to kill you?”
“Um…” I said.
“Aren’t you the one who left the country for three months once using someone else’s passport and no one who knew your right name had any clue where you were, because you thought your old man would have a cow so you arranged for the evidence to show that you were taking summer school classes at college?”
“Ah…” I said.
“Aren’t you the one who came THIS close to wrestling a bull alligator on a dare that time in Florida when you were twenty, and the only reason you didn’t is because you were drunk and while you didn’t think being drunk would affect your ability to wrestle the alligator, you had long since decided that you shouldn’t make important decisions while drunk?”
“Um, no,” I said. “That was the guy I was with. I was the one who dared him to wrestle the alligator.”
“Now, tell me,” said Chaosia, ignoring my response, “tell me again about young people doing foolish macho things and taking big risks for dumb reasons?”
“Um,” I said. I was terribly afraid she’d bring up the time I climbed the outside of the old University Administration building durn near clear up to the roof one night, because the spotlights were turned off and I was tripping my brains out on the Mighty Gelatinous Cacaphony. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was fifty feet off the pavement without so much as a safety line until I was already on the roof. I’d been eighteen when that happened.
I hadn’t been worried about dying at all; I only got scared when it occurred to me that I could break my neck and be paralyzed. I went down much more carefully than I’d gone up. Slower, too. Chaosia’d thought I was the biggest fool in the world when she’d heard THAT one.
“That kid in the book had a lot in common with you, y’nitwit,” she said. “That’s why I wanted you to read the book. The author managed to explain – in terms I could understand – to ME-- why young men DO things like that.”
I flipped back through the book. Looking at it that way, it occurred to me that she had a point; the kid in the book was considerably more lofty-moralled than I had been – I was far more devoted to the pursuit of wine, women, and fun, whereas the kid in the book had thought of himself as a sort of modern-day Thoreau – but he’d devoted his salad days to finding meaning in the world and in himself, and to redefining himself on his own terms, rather than allow others to define him.
He’d defied a potent parental authority figure to do so, and had no regrets… up until he’d cut his margin a little too fine, and died.
He’d been stupid, yeah… but so had I. And I understood why he’d wanted… even needed… to do these things. He needed to get out and have some adventures before he got old, before he got nailed down with a job and a life and a family and a raft of material possessions. At least, that had been MY reasoning. I needed to go out and have enough fun to last me through middle age, at least.
Worked, too.
Now, though, at the age of forty, it occurred to me that I had become what I feared most when I was nineteen. I’d become the kind of guy who didn’t understand why young men did the crazy… and, yes, stupid… things I did when I was nineteen… and was so far out of touch with that nineteen-year-old that when I read about a guy just like him, I found his adventures less romantic than simply idiotic and suicidal.
Took some time to sit down and think and digest that.
Anyone else ever do anything like that at that age? Weird, dangerous, even suicidally stupid stunts that made perfect sense at the time?
And why’d you do it?