Alexander Supertramp: A Postmodern Hero?

My remarks:

The passage below is a true story of Christopher Johnson McCandless who hitchhiked his way to the Alaskan wilderness where he died of starvation in 1992. Chris McCandless was the subject of the book, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer (1996) and of the movie, Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn (2007.) Before he made his famous Alaskan Odyssey, later turned out to be an epic to many, he wandered under the name ‘Alexander Supertramp’ through Arizona, California and North Dakota, in the United States, alternating between holding down jobs and living entirely on his own without human contact. He took great pride in his ability to travel with very limited money, equipment, and food.

I took some parts from several references in composing this article and recomposed them into an entirely different passage (at least from the point of view I serve it.) Unlike the book and the movie versions, that tend to romanticize the story, I prefer to serve the story as it was. In serving it, I have tried to be unbiased and attempted to guide you to draw your own perceptions.

Please note that this is not a movie review. This only is another perspective of Chris McCandless's story according to my point of view.

At last, I hope the story will give us some insights into life contemplation.

__________________________

ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP: A POSTMODERN HERO?

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.”

Alexander Supertramp
May 1992

September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, a decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 30 kilograms, and he had apparently died of starvation. A piece of wood was found nearby with a short message carved into it. It read "Jack London is King." He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man's identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless.

Part 1: Who was Alex Supertramp?

The phenomenal Alex Supertramp was born as Christopher Johnson McCandless on the 12th of February 1968 in El Segundo, California to Walt McCandless and Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson. He had one younger sister, Carine McCandless. In 1976, he moved with his family to Annandale, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. located in Fairfax County, after his father was employed as an antenna specialist for NASA. His mother worked as a secretary at Hughes Aircraft where Walt worked, later assisting Walt with successful home-based consulting company in Annandale. Despite the McCandless family's financial success, Walt and Billie were often fighting and sometimes would contemplate divorce. Chris also had several half-siblings living in California from Walt's first marriage. Walt was not yet divorced from his first wife when Chris and Carine were born, but Chris did not discover his father's affair until a summer trip to southern California.

He graduated from Wilbert Tucker Woodson High School in 1986. On June 10, 1986, McCandless embarked on one of his first major adventures in which he traveled throughout the country only to arrive at Emory two days prior to the beginning of fall classes. He went on to graduate from Emory University in 1990, having majored in history and anthropology. His upper-middle-class background and academic success was the impetus for his contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of American society. In his junior year, he declined membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, on the basis that honors and titles were irrelevant. McCandless was strongly influenced by Jack London, Leo Tolstoy, W. H. Davies, and Henry David Thoreau, and he envisioned separating from organized society for a thoreauvian period of solitary contemplation.

After graduating in 1990, he donated the remaining USD 24,000 (approx. IDR 240 millions) of the USD 47,000 (approx. IDR 470 millions) given to him by family for his last two years of college to Oxfam International, a charity, and began traveling under the name "Alexander Supertramp." McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator. He alternated between having jobs and living with no money or human contact, sometimes successfully foraging for food. He survived a flash flood, but allowed his car to wash out - although it suffered little permanent damage and was later reused by the local police force - and disposed of his license plate. He also paddled a canoe down remote stretches of the Colorado River to the Gulf of California. McCandless took pride in surviving with a minimum of gear and funds, and generally made little preparation. He was, however, frequently fed or otherwise aided by people he met on his travels.

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.

McCandless wrote in his journal:

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greather joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

Part 2: The Alaskan Odyssey

For years, McCandless dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey" where he would live off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992, McCandless hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by Jim Gallien, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. Gallien was concerned about "Alex", who had minimal supplies (not even a magnetic compass) and no experience of surviving in the Alaskan bush. Gallien repeatedly tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment and supplies. However, McCandless ignored Gallien's warnings, refusing all assistance except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melt sandwiches, and a bag of corn chips. Eventually, Gallien dropped him at the head of the Stampede Trail on Tuesday, April 28, 1992.

After hiking along the snow-covered Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus used as a hunting shelter and parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park, and began his attempt to live off the land. He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle with 400 rounds of .22LR hollowpoint ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books, and some camping equipment. He assumed he could forage for plant food and hunt game. Despite his inexperience as a hunter, McCandless poached some small game such as porcupines and birds. Once he killed a moose; however, he failed to preserve the meat properly, and it spoiled. Rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat, like jerky, as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he smoked it, following the advice of hunters he had met in South Dakota.

His journal contains entries covering a total of 112 days. These entries range from ecstatic to grim with McCandless's changing fortunes. In July, after living in the bus for three months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then considerably higher and swifter than when he crossed in April. There was a hand-operated tram that crossed the river 400 meters away from where he made attempt to cross the river. McCandless was unaware of this because the only navigational aid he had possessed was a tattered road map he had found at a gas station, but he had left it on the dashboard of Jim Gallien's truck. Then, McCandless lived in the bus for a total of 113 days.

On August 12, McCandless wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal: "Beautiful Blueberries."

He tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which contains an excerpt from a Robinson Jeffers poem titled "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened or troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

On the other side of the page, McCandless wrote:

"I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus on September 6, 1992, weighing an estimated 30 kilograms. He had been dead for more than two weeks. His official cause of death was starvation. Biographer Jon Krakauer suggests two factors may have contributed to McCandless's death. First, he was running the risk of a phenomenon known as "rabbit starvation" due to increased activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting. However, Krakauer insists starvation was not, as McCandless's death certificate states, the only cause of death. Initially, Krakauer claimed McCandless might have ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum Alpinum). However, extensive laboratory testing proves conclusively there was no alkaloid toxin present in McCandless's food supplies. In later editions of the book, therefore, Krakauer has speculated the poisonous fungus Rhizoctonia Leguminicola could have grown on the seeds McCandless ate, aggravating his already weak physical conditions and leading to his possible death by starvation.

Part 3: Was Supertramp a visioner or merely an unstable youngster?

Inspired by the the Supertramp’s ironic story, Jon Krakauer, a remarkable adventure writer, decided to write McCandless’ story in details and attempted to reveal the phsychological background behind McCandless’ actions and decisions. Krakauer's book made Christopher McCandless a heroic figure to many. By 2002, the abandoned bus (No. 142) on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped became a tourist destination. Sean Penn's film Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer's book, was released in September 2007. In October 2007, a documentary film on McCandless's journey by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, The Call of the Wild, was released.

Old bus or no, Fairbanks 142 has become something of a reliquary, a shrine to which many have come seeking understanding: of McCandless, of the wilderness, of themselves. A memorial plaque to McCandless is screwed to the inside of the bus, bearing a message from his family that ends with the phrase "We commend his soul to the world." Inside a beat-up suitcase on a table are a half-dozen tattered notebooks. The first entries, from July 1993, in red pen on paper yellowing with age, are personal notes from his parents.

McCandless has been a polarizing figure ever since his story first broke in 1992. Because he chose not to bring a map and a compass (items which most people in the same situation would have considered essential), McCandless was completely unaware that a hand-operated tram crossed the otherwise impassable river 400 meters from where he attempted to cross. Had McCandless known this, he could easily have saved his own life. Additionally, there were cabins stocked with emergency supplies within a few kilometers of the bus, although they had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled, possibly by McCandless. Yet, Denali National Park spokesman denied that McCandless was considered a vandalism suspect by the National Park Service. The most charitable view among McCandless's detractors is that he was somewhat lacking in basic common sense, i.e., venturing into a wilderness area on his own without adequate planning, preparation, and supplies was almost guaranteed to end in disaster.

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 and 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 Hedysarum McKenzii, the sweet pea plant, which is poisonous. In his book Into the Wild he then confirmed that the seeds of the wild potato plant, Hedysarum Alpinum are 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 Hedysarum 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.

Unlike Krakauer and many readers, who have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless, some have expressed negative views about those who romanticize his fate. Alaskans have been particularly skeptical.

Alaskans fault Krakauer for romanticizing McCandless, thereby encouraging others to model themselves after his life. Before the film has even been released, it has become common to blame Hollywood for further glamorizing a senseless tragedy. As Dermot Cole, a columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, puts it, "To sell the story, they've made it into a fable. He's been glorified in death because he was unprepared. You can't come to Alaska and do that."

Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: "I am exposed continually to what I will call the 'McCandless Phenomenon.' People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent. When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he had had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament. Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide."

Butch Killian, one of the moose hunters who discovered McCandless's body in September 1992, considered it just another day in the bush and doesn't understand why such a big deal has been made out of the story. He told that he had never read the book and had no idea that it had been a bestseller, that thousands of people had felt a deep identification with Krakauer's portrait of McCandless. "I don't know what his problem was, but it wasn't surviving. If he's a hero, he's a dead hero." Killian doesn't think that a visit to the site will provide many answers. "So many people have asked me to take them out there. What in the world would you want to go back there for? It's nothing but an old bus."

Jon Krakauer defends McCandless, claiming that what critics point to as arrogance was merely McCandless's desire for "being the first to explore a blank spot on the map." Krakauer continues that there remain extremely few areas on the world map that would be called 'blank'.

Sean Penn, who in 2007 directed the Supertramp’s portrayal movie, Into The Wild, thinks the story is about something profound and universal in the human spirit, a longing for freedom and a pure connection to the natural world that's been lost. "I'm not trying to romanticize him," insists Penn, who has little patience for McCandless's critics. "There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did. We're not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty damn well. Did he make mistakes? Sure. A lot of people do. But however many miles he needed to walk to become a man was up to him. So I think he did very well by any standard, including Alaskan."

Part 4: The legacy

With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp," cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, a place that he thought to be a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. For many years after his body was found, his story continues to resonate as an epic tale, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend.
With the mythology that has grown up around the story, it is easy to forget that McCandless was a real flesh-and-blood person. He clearly believed in self-mythologizing, in the power of storytelling and self-invention. Had he lived, perhaps he would have gained enough perspective to tell the story himself, rather than leaving it for others to tell. As it is, he has entered the realm of myth, and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them.

Years after his tragic death, the McCandless Phenomenon continues to be a disputable matter among people. Many have thought of him to have been a real life hero who sought for the true essence of life by committing solitary contemplating ventures; people who consider him as reckless, foolish, and an inconsiderate idealist are not lesser than his proponents, nevertheless.

And you? What do you think? Was he a visionary monk or was he just a raging young man?
December 22, 2009

____________________________________

References:

EllisPaul.com. Speed of Trees tracklist. Retrieved August 26, 2007.

George Mason University English Department. Text and Community website. Christian, Peter. Chris McCandless from a Park Ranger's Perspective. Retrieved August 26, 2007.

Krakauer, Jon (1997). Into The Wild. New York: Anchor. pp. 166. ISBN 0-385-48680-4.

Krakauer, Jon (1997). Into The Wild. New York: Anchor. pp. 188. ISBN 0-385-48680-4

Krakauer, Jon (1997). Into The Wild. New York: Anchor. pp. 191. ISBN 0-385-48680-4

Krakauer, Jon (1997). Into The Wild. New York: Anchor. pp. 197. ISBN 0-385-48680-4

Krakauer, Jon (January 1993). "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds.". Outside. http://outside.away.com/magazine/0193/9301fdea.html. Retrieved 2008-04-04.

Millennium episode. Luminary. Retrieved August 26, 2007.

Paramount Vantage Films. Into the Wild. 2007

Power, Matthew. The Cult of Chris McCandless. Men's Journal, September 2007. Retrieved August 26, 2007.

Simpson, Sherry. I Want To Ride In The Bus Chris Died In. Anchorage Press, February 7 - February 13, 2002, Vol. 11 Ed. 6.

Terra Incognita Films. The Call of the Wild. Retrieved September 15, 2007.

The Story and Biography of Chris McCandless. http://www.christophermccandless.net/

"YouTube Video, the Bus in May, 2008". shanesworld. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-t0eQ6BPC8. Retrieved 2009-06-09.