I’m still alive, which after reading about Chris McCandless feels like something worth mentioning, because he isn’t. I only found out about him a few months ago, even though he died back in 1992. His story is in Jon Krakauer’s book and in Sean Penn’s movie, Into the Wild. No spoiler here, the book tells you he dies right at the beginning.
Since then I keep going back to it. Everybody online has an opinion about him. For some he’s a hero who followed his dream, for others a spoiled kid with a loose screw, and I keep switching sides depending on the day.
Heads or tails
Chris flipped a coin and it came up tails. He was smart and read a lot (Tolstoy and Jack London went with him), and he did reach some conclusions out there, just not the ones he planned, and too late to do anything with them.
His one rule was no shortcuts. He left everything behind, family and car, documents and money, and even his name, calling himself Alexander Supertramp. It’s hard to say if that was right or wrong without knowing how it ends, and for him the ending was part of the deal, or at least the risk of it was.
Yes, I’m obsessed with “wild”
Someone told me I’ve been obsessed with the word “wild” lately. Guilty, I even ranted about it in another post.
So is walking into the unknown with improvised gear and almost no preparation just a fancy way of signing your own death certificate? Hmmm, maybe. So is smoking two packs a day, or riding a bike to work in Brazil.
We make a lot of rules to keep ourselves from blowing the whole thing up, from don’t smoke to don’t kill, and then we spend half our lives breaking them. Chris broke them in high definition. He even wrote to a friend that he might not come back, and he didn’t, although his story did, which is the only reason I know his name.
Hacking the world
He questioned the script everybody follows. Maybe he wanted to change the world, but his world was a small one, the people and things around him, and he underestimated how much a single decision could change all of it.
Nobody around him really supported the plan, which makes sense, they wanted to be part of his future and he was busy ripping pages out of the script.
I still don’t know which side I’m on. Ask me again after my next trip…