McCandless epitomizes endurance and youth, naïveté and education he stared so intently at the stars, and listened so intently to the sound of the wind shifting across the plains, that he felt himself transported far beyond the place his feet touched the ground. But Krakauer uses a number of tools to show the importance of McCandless, not just as a person, but within the complex fabric of human life. The lessons of empathy, forgiveness, and justice never fully captured his efforts, nor his imagination. He read deeply of the aforementioned authors, but not very broadly, and perhaps missed out on many of the most beautiful lessons that reading can offer. Krakauer's Chris McCandless comes across as earnest and insistent, but perhaps not very intelligent or mature. He traces McCandless' journey, not only in Alaska, but from his childhood onward. For Krakauer pursues the story of McCandless' life and death with relentless questions and carefully carved detail. Jon Krakauer's biographical essay, Into the Wild, deservingly became a best seller, and launched Krakauer into the highest order of American outdoor writing. Less than three weeks later, a group of Alaskans discovered his skeletal, lifeless frame tucked into his sleeping bag and resting quietly in the abandoned bus. McCandless had survived 112 days in the wilderness. In August, he ate potato seeds that seized his system like a vice, and left him severely weakened he could no longer digest enough calorie intake for his bone-lean body to sustain itself. He grew increasingly lean, as did his margin for error. In July, he tried to leave the wilderness, but a stream that ran chest-deep in April had, in the face of an incessant summer sun, grown into a river surging with glacier rot and snow melt. He was proud, but he was also lonely, and scared. He read a stack of paperbacks he brought with him into the wild, with authors like London, Pasternak, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, as well as lighter stuff like Crichton. Moving along an old miner's trail, he eventually found shelter in an abandoned bus. He forced his way into ignorance in hopes of better surprising his senses he sought to develop an anachronistic type of self-reliance. In an age without uncharted territory, McCandless refused to carry a good map, or any navigation or radio equipment whatsoever. In April 1992 Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness.
But after many adventures, he decided to try his hand at yet another. He left his mark on many, and for someone who prided himself as an isolated and independent young man, he nevertheless seemed to pursue genuine connections with many human beings. Among others, McCandless befriended a lonely widower in the deserts of Southern California, a foot-loose romantic couple, and a Midwest machine operator. Krakauer does not merely trace the steps of this journey-he interrogates the psyche and soul of every person he can find who met Chris McCandless along the way. After two years of wandering under an assumed identity, he hitchhiked to Alaska. He ditched his car when it suffered a dead battery (but not before hiding the plates to prevent easy identification). He lightened his load with each step, and abandoned most of his possessions along the way. He then shuffled off his identity and wandered off into the American West. He promised his parents he would apply to law school, but instead he donated $25,000 in savings to charity. The most famous chapter in McCandless' life began when he graduated with honors at Emory University. McCandless sought a transcendental experience he perhaps did not quite find one, but Krakauer patiently salutes his journey nevertheless. Instead of sensationalizing McCandless brief story, Krakauer offered a humane depiction of a boy in search of the love of his life: the American wild. The resulting book, Into the Wild, was one of the most popular pieces of adventure writing of the late twentieth century. In pursuit of McCandless' essence, Krakauer travelled across America, and did not stop working on the story until years after he had completed the initial piece of journalism. Jon Krakauer, author and outdoor thrill seeker, sensed a kindred spirit when he first wrote an article on Christopher McCandless for Outdoor magazine.
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