Christopher McCandless hitchhiked his way to the Alaskan wilderness where he died of starvation in 1992.
Into the Wild is the national bestseller written by Jon Krakauer, and its focus is the bizarre circumstances surrounding the disappearance and eventual death of Christopher McCandless, who was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990.
By all accounts McCandless was a bright and determined individual, who frequently pushed himself and his friends to extreme physical limits. As captain of a cross country team he taught his teammates that strenuous exercise is necessary not just for the body, but for the soul. This kind of determination stayed with him through his senior education and he showed his increasing displeasure of the materialism of U.S. society.
After completing his university studies he simply dropped off the radar, and started wandering across the United States with no clear idea of where he was going. Along the way he held a variety of jobs in South Dakota, California and Nevada and when he got tired of the demands of regular employment he moved on. Life on the fringe appealed to him, and he frequently survived on little more than his wits.
McCandless maintained almost no consistent contact with his family, and when on the road between jobs he kept books written by Jack London and Leo Tolstoy. Their unconventional views fascinated him and when his body was found in an abandoned bus near Denali National Park in Alaska, a piece of wood was found nearby with a short message carved into it. It read "Jack London is King."
Krakauer's research into the life of McCandless and the cause of his rebellious behaviour are excellent, and the book gives several in depth views of the lives of other explorers who were not so lucky when they attempted to map out unforgiving regions with little more than basic survival skills. One such example is the story of Sir John Franklin who was sent by the British Admiralty to map Arctic Canada in 1819. Before he knew it, winter had set in and at least two of the expedition members were killed, then eaten. Franklin had survived this trip. Several years later in 1845 he returned to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage, but neither he nor any of the men under his command were seen alive again.
Nature has no respect for those that are unprepared. Franklin refused to use the resources that the land provided, and McCandless had relied too heavily on the land without adequate knowledge.
This approach proved fatal for McCandless in late 1992 when realizing that the Teklanika River was much higher than when he first crossed it the previous April. It was the only way he knew to hike out of the bush, and he admitted that he was a weak swimmer. He was forced to turn back, and take shelter in the bus. Starvation set in and by August he was too weak to walk. Krakauer reported in an article he wrote for Outside magazine that McCandless had eaten H. mackenzii, the sweet pea plant, which is poisonous. In his book Into the Wild he then confirmed that the seeds of the wild potato plant, H. alpinum is what killed him. The two plants are similar and to the inexperienced eye it would be easy to mistake one for the other. But McCandless was cautious up to a point. He was careful to select the H. alpinum, the roots of which are not harmful but when they became too tough to eat he unwittingly ate the seeds, which caused him to starve.
The death of McCandless was made public in the January, 1993 edition of Outside magazine. John Krakauer is also the author of Into Thin Air, an account of a group of climbers on Mount Everest who perished in 1996.
