Into the Wild

Get asked about this one more than any other book I’ve had up here, usually by the rare hiker who spots the cover on the shelf and wants to know if I think the kid was an idiot or a saint. I think the book is more interesting than either answer, and I think most people asking haven’t read it, just seen the movie or heard the shorthand version.

Krakauer reconstructs McCandless’s two years after he gave away his savings and cut off his family, ending with the 113 days alone in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska, where he starved. The reporting is the strength of it. Krakauer tracked down the people who fed McCandless and gave him rides and worried about him along the way, and those interviews are what keep the book from being either hagiography or a cautionary pamphlet. The kid comes across as genuinely good with people when he wanted to be, and genuinely careless about the specific skills that would have kept him alive.

The digressions are where I go back and forth. Krakauer spends chapters on other young men who died alone in wild places, including an extended account of his own near-fatal solo climb of the Devils Thumb, and I understand why: he’s arguing that this impulse isn’t a pathology unique to McCandless, that a certain kind of person is built to go looking for the edge of what they can survive. I’ve met a few of those people passing through on the trail below the tower. But the parallels stretch thin by the third example, and I found myself wanting less Krakauer and more McCandless.

The wolf lichen berries theory, which Krakauer revised across different editions trying to pin down exactly what poisoned or weakened McCandless, tells you something about the book’s honesty. He kept correcting himself in public rather than let the first theory calcify into legend. Not every writer would do that once the book had already made him famous.

What I keep coming back to, sitting up here with a radio and a supply drop and four miles between me and the nearest person, is how thin the margin actually is. McCandless had a rifle, plant guides, and eight years less caution than I’ve got. The bus he died in was less than thirty miles from a hikers’ cabin with a hand-operated cable crossing he didn’t know about, over a river that would have been passable a different month. Distance and small facts are the whole story out here. This book takes that seriously without turning it into a lecture, most of the time.