Review: Into the Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Jon Krakauer’s two most famous books, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, are both stories of failures to survive in harsh environments. One would think that such stories, though thrilling, would leave little room for controversy; but somehow that is not the case. His account of the Everest disaster attracted criticism because his version of events—his apportioning of praise and blame—did not always match other survivors’. This book, meanwhile, was criticized for two principal reasons: first, Krakauer’s story of McCandless final weeks in Alaska may go beyond the evidence; and second, he portrayed McCandless in a highly favorable light.

I’ll take them in reverse order. A fervid outdoorsman himself, Krakauer obviously sympathized deeply with Chris McCandless, and this book shows the young man as a kind of flawed hero. Many readers feel quite differently, seeing him as an arrogant, naïve, and misguided young man whose stubbornness unnecessarily put his family through hell. As Krakauer notes, however, the deep antipathy that some readers feel for McCandless seems a bit excessive. After all, if he was misguided, he certainly paid the price for it. And among all of the misdeed of our sorry species, going unprepared into the bush hardly seems like the worst sin.

In any case, one hardly needs to admire McCandless to find his story worthwhile. Indeed, I think this book is most valuable when read as a case study of a certain psychological type. It is a mindset most prevalent among young men, though hardly exclusive to them. At his age, I remember being a toned-down version of McCandless myself: reading Tolstoy and Thoreau and feeling superior to everyone, wanting nothing more than to explore, seeing no value in being tied down in a relationship or a job when a world of experiences awaited me.

Many people, I suspect, go through a phase like this, even if they don’t take it as far as McCandless. And most of us come out the other side learning why life can’t just be wandering and rhapsodizing. This is what happened to Krakauer, and what happened to me, and maybe what happened to you. It might have happened to McCandless, had he lived.

Indeed, I think many of us are apt to look back on our ideological young selves with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. How could I ever think that Dostoyevsky would solve all my problems? How could I have been stupid enough to go hitchhiking in a foreign country? And so on. But I suspect that some of the pain that these reflections cause is the recognition that we became the very thing we abhorred. Growing up almost inevitably means compromising our values, and settling into our little corner of the world, wherever that happens to be.

What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that the pure and idealistic vision of so many young people is not invalid, it’s just too demanding. In other words, though we gain the ability to have rewarding lives as functioning members of society when we settle down, we do lose that sense of wonder—the feeling that all we need are words, ideas, and experiences.

And it should be said that many people in this mold have contributed mightily to society. Tolstoy and Thoreau are two obvious examples, and they are widely admired. Had McCandless lived, maybe he would have written a celebrated book, too. Celebrated or not, it is worth noting that even these great figures have their share of the pathetic. Thoreau was a brilliant writer and an original thinker; he also camped out in what was effectively Emerson’s backyard. I’m sure, for example, that if you met someone living in a small cottage on the edge of town as preachy and as self-obsessed as Thoreau, you’d likely find very little to admire.

Whether we view these people as heroes or kooks largely depends on how they’re framed. Krakauer chooses to see McCandless as heroic in his straining to live on his own terms. But for the other side of the coin, watch Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the story of Timothy Treadwell, another man killed in the Alaskan wilderness. Herzog’s portrayal of Treadwell shows him to be wildly irresponsible and hopelessly deluded, perhaps not even fully sane. And I think both perspectives are true. McCandless was both heroic and pathetic, both admirable and irresponsible, both clear-eyed and deluded. In the end, it is the old story of Don Quixote, who is simultaneously morally superior to everyone around him, and undeniably out of touch with reality.

Anyway, that’s my take on the question of whether McCandless is admirable. This only leaves the second question of whether Krakauer’s account of McCandless’s final days goes beyond the available evidence.

The main source of evidence of McCandless’s stay in Alaska is the journal he kept. However, the entries are extremely short, often just a word or two, and are mainly a record of the animals he killed and ate. To flesh out the story, Krakauer often had to guess what a journal entry might mean. To give just one example, on Day 69 McCandless wrote “Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared.” Krakauer supposes that McCandless had decided to head back toward civilization, but was stopped by the Teklanika River, which was swollen by the snowmelt.

Some publications, such as the Anchorage Daily News, take Krakauer to task for this and the many other assumptions he makes while interpreting this diary. On Day 92, for example, the entry simply reads “Dr Zhivago,” which Krakauer announces is the last book McCandless ever finished. But of course, we can’t really know that. As a result, Krakauer has been accused of writing a kind of fiction rather than journalism, at least in this section. For my part, however, I think his interpretations of the diary entries are quite reasonable, even if we can never know for sure if they are correct.

Krakauer is particularly vexed as to the question of what killed McCandless. On day 94 it says: “Extremely weak. Fault of pot. seeds. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy.” In the book, Krakauer proposes that McCandless had eaten the seeds of the so-called Eskimo potato plant, which contained toxic alkaloids. Subsequent testing later refuted this hypothesis. Unwilling to let it go, Krakauer recruited scientists and even co-authored a scientific paper, in which they report that the seeds actually contain a toxic amino acid. He believes this is what killed McCandless.

However, unremarked upon in this book—and it is a notable omission—is the entry on day 89, which says “DREAM” in giant letters. Arrows point from this word to “many mushrooms,” and underneath it is a garbled entry that reads “2 infinity holes, 1 at the belt, 1 at the foot, gives frequency.” This strange entry would seem to indicate that he had taken hallucinogenic mushrooms and had a psychedelic experience. And if McCandless was eating mushrooms, it is easy to conclude that he inadvertently ate a poisonous variety. After all, telling mushroom species apart is notoriously difficult.

But why does this matter? Well, it seems obvious that Krakauer wants to believe that the potato seeds, not mushrooms, were the culprit. This is because the toxicity of wild potato seeds was not well-known, while eating unidentified mushrooms is obviously a dangerous idea. In other words, if the potato plant did Chris in, it would mean that he was less reckless and unprepared than many think. I must admit, however, that the omission of any reference to the DREAM entry is hard to justify.

In the end, I think this is a story about being young, idealistic, and rash. When I was about Chris’s age, I quit my Ph.D. and moved to Spain, spending all my savings in order to traipse around the country. My future was inconceivable, and the idea of real consequences—much less death—too abstract to contemplate. Now, nearly ten years later, I have a steady job and a relationship, and feel far less wanderlust. I’ve come to appreciate, like I never could then, that the small joys of being around people you love, in a community where you feel at home, are just as valuable and as uplifting as the any brilliant book or beautiful landscape. It’s quite possible that Chris would have come to the same conclusion. Now, his life stands as a monument to what most of us leave behind.

Cover photo by Erikhalfacre – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13274101

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