Occasionally I paused while flipping through the notebooks and looked out a busted window to watch how the mid-afternoon sun glazed the snow. We needed to return before dark, so I started skimming the entries, my eyes catching only certain words: Peace. Solitude. Meaning.
It was hard work, resisting the longing that rose from the scribbled words. I spent some moments puzzling over this comment written by a man from Ontario: “[Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time.”
This may be our oldest, truest survival skill: the ability to tell and to learn from each other’s stories, whether from Aesop’s fables, quest narratives, Greek mythology, the Book of Genesis, office gossip, the wisdom of elders, or made-for-TV movies. In some ways, Alaska is nothing but stories. We have constructed many of our ideas about this place, and about ourselves, from creation stories, gold rush stories, hunting and fishing stories, pioneer stories, family stories, clan stories. Even the animals told tales in the old Story Time, which is long behind us now.
Pay attention to what people say in bars and across dinner tables and around campfires, and often they are really telling survival stories of some sort or another: how I crossed the river, how I lost the trail, how I got my moose, how I fixed my boat, how I left home for the north, how I beat the storm, how I made it through another cold and lonely winter, how I became a true Alaskan. What all these stories mean, though—that’s up to you, the listener.
We can’t know exactly why Christopher McCandless died. What matters now is what people want to believe about his death. Krakauer hypothesized that toxic seeds of the wild potato plant weakened him, and early test results seemed to support that. But chemists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks further studied wild potato seeds, as well as seeds from the similar-looking wild sweetpea, and their work seemed to eliminate the poisoning theory.
“I would be willing to bet money that neither species had toxic metabolites that would account for the fate of McCandless,” chemist Tom Clausen told me in an email. His conclusions appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner but never received wide coverage. Clausen added, “I believe McCandless died not from toxic foods but from foolishness. I hate to be so blunt about the dead but he clearly went ‘into the wild’ unprepared.”
But the idea that McCandless was poisoned accidentally has become critical to his legend, because it means he wasn’t stupid, wasn’t seeking death. When I mentioned the research to the bus driver, he gave me an obstinate look and said, “The question is still open.” He could not surrender the “right” story.
The one thing we can say about McCandless is that his biggest mistake may have been his failure to listen to the right stories. He ignored advice about the scarcity of game, the practicalities of bear protection, the importance of maps, the truths of the land. He was too intent on creating the story of himself.
And yet, that story has such power, such meaning for so many people, that they feel drawn—called personally—to travel across the globe and hike the trail all that way to the bus to look for Christopher McCandless or Alexander Super-tramp or themselves. They endure mosquitoes and rain and tough walking and bad river crossings and the possibility of bears. The burden the pilgrims carry to the bus is so heavy, laden with their frailties and hopes and desires, with their lives that don’t quite satisfy. And when they arrive, they sit in that cold bus and think, and sometimes they cry from loss and longing and relief.
Well, so many of them are young, and they’re lost, somehow, just as he was.
As he was dying, Christopher McCandless took a picture of himself propped against the bus. He held up a good-bye note, a smile on his gaunt face, and from this photograph Krakauer concluded that “Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.” But only Christopher McCandless could have known what truth was in his heart, there at the end. All we can say is that whoever he was, he’s not that person anymore. Jon Krakauer made a story about him, by way of telling his own, and every pilgrim since his death has shaped him into something different as well. I’m doing it right now, too.
For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did—most of us came here in search of something, didn’t we? Haven’t we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can’t afford to take his story seriously because it doesn’t say much a careful person doesn’t already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there—but it won’t mean much unless you come back.
This is what bothers me—that Christopher McCandless failed so badly, so harshly, and yet so famously that his death has come to symbolize something admirable, that his unwillingness to see Alaska for what it really is has somehow become the story so many people associate with this place, a story so hollow you can almost hear the wind blowing through it. His death was not a brilliant fuck-up. It was not even a terribly original fuck-up. It was just one of the more recent and pointless fuck-ups.
At 3 P.M., after we’d read through the notebooks, taken our silly and disrespectful photographs and eaten our lunches, we climbed back on our snowmachines and left. We rode against the wind as the light softened and dimmed all around. It grew colder, but it was still a good day to be outside, with spring on its way. I could feel fond about winter, now that it was dwindling. What I really wanted was to keep going beyond the bus, across the Sushana River and maybe down into the park.
As we followed our tracks home, I kept thinking about poor Christopher McCandless, entombed by the tributes of his pilgrims, forever wandering between the world he wanted and the world that exists, still trapped by other people’s desires to make him something he is not—which is why he came out here in the first place.
Too late he learned that the hard part isn’t walking toward the wilderness to discover the meaning of life. The hard part is returning from the consolations of nature and finding meaning anyway, a meaning lodged within the faithfulness of our ordinary lives, in the plain and painful beauty of our ordinary days.
Some day, I told myself, I might return. I’d do what few people do anymore, which is to pass by that junky old bus with only a sidelong glance and see what else is out there.
When she was a girl growing up in Juneau, Sherry Simpson’s secret ambition was to walk the entire rim of Alaska’s coast. Later she thought she could settle for trekking the border between Canada and Alaska, from the southern end all the way to the tippy-top. As it turns out, the older she gets, the happier she is simply exploring the North one mile and one page at a time. She is the author of The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories, and her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including Sierra, Backpacker, Alaska, Creative Nonfiction, American Nature Writing 1995 and 1997, Under Northern Lights, and Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women. She currently teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts. This story was originally published in The Anchorage Press.
PART FIVE
THE LAST WORD
NANCY LORD
In the Giant’s Hand
A long-time resident recalls a place of perfect paradise.
ARRIGETCH, WE KNEW BEFORE WE ARRIVED, MEANT “fingers of the hand extended” in the language of the Nunamiut Eskimos, the caribou hunters who once broadly inhabited the land. The Arrigetch peaks in Alaska’s central Brooks Range were anomalous gray granite upthrusts, mountaineers’ hard-rock dreams, as dramatic a landscape as can be found anywhere on earth.
Today, their photographs grace one nature calendar after another, and a national park—Gates of the Arctic—surrounds them, the sparkliest jewel cluster in a many-jeweled crown. But in 1971, the Arrigetch were still off the maps of most Americans, still part of that great wild North
that, even on real, topographic maps, existed only at the 1:250,000 scale. An inch spanned four miles, and still there were broad blank spaces marked only with contour lines and the earth colors of vegetation and rock. The blue threads of unnamed creeks wound through unnamed valleys under unnamed mountains, and there was nothing like a road or airstrip or even a trail in sight. The Brooks and the Arrigetch were epic countries then, places of outermost dream.
A June day, that ancient year. The sky is blue. The air is warm. For the moment, there’s enough breeze to keep most of the mosquitoes grounded in the tightly woven tundra. Snow patches still fill hollows and streak the north-facing slopes, but they’re melting as I watch, tinkling as their skeletal crystals collapse against rock. Green spears and tiny, pastel alpine flowers rush to fill in behind the retreating snow. It’s all like some heavenly garden as I work my way along the pathways of licheny rock slabs and nappy ground, down from the benchland where our tents flutter their bright primary colors, to the valley floor and the creek that creases its bottom. Rivulets of water run everywhere, down the faces of rocks, into cascading waterfalls, spilling from one basin into the next. Small birds flit, and bees buzz. One solitary caribou lifts its alert head and springs away on clicking hooves. The air is so incredibly clear, like looking through ice water—almost a magnification. Those silvery granite peaks rise all around, as though just yesterday some god or giant pushed them through the crust. Rumblings of rockfall attest to the work-in-progress nature of this nature; freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, and gravity exerting its pull. Talus stacks up deeply, precariously, at the mountains’ feet.
I climb to the top of a boulder and spread myself over its sun-warmed surface. It pleases me to think that I may be the first person ever to climb up and sit on top of that particular rock. The Nunamiut who roamed these valleys probably didn’t do a lot of frivolous rock-sitting, and few other people have entered here—to my knowledge only one previous group of recreationalists. Everything about the entire valley and surrounding peaks, sky, and last, lost, never-never land pleases me; if I had to construct an image of paradise, this would be it.
From the distance comes the clear, clean ringing sound of a piton being pounded into rock. Others of my party have availed themselves of the practice cliffs close to camp, to test the rock and their own climbing skills. We are here, after all, as climbers—ten of us from a new little college in Massachusetts: two who teach in the school’s Outdoors Program, the wife of one, and seven students who have just completed their own and the college’s first year. Our leader, David Roberts, a veteran of numerous Alaska climbing expeditions, had taught us, back in the smoothed-over Berkshires, the rudimentary arts of negotiating rock walls and had, now, brought us to a place of Olympian proportion. David was, at the time, only twenty-seven years old. When I think back from middle-age—an age when anyone under thirty seems suspect, at the least frighteningly short on maturity—I’m astonished. Who allowed us all to go off and do something so grand?
Lest you think some disaster befell us, let me assure you that it did not. For five weeks the ten of us climbed, hiked, camped among bears, and swirled downriver in plastic rafts, and we suffered nothing worse than blisters, mosquito bites, and the occasional storm of irritation with one another.
We were, still, in wilderness, in a time before global positioning systems and personal rescue beacons that reported via satellite. We carried a substantial rifle—a 30.06—for bear protection, but no radio. Had any of us fallen sick or been injured, the closest help lay two days distant. There was not, in those days, even much plane traffic; in our weeks in the Arrigetch, the only plane we saw was the one that made our airdrop onto a rock field, bursting our boxes and spraying our one bag of sugar into oblivion.
David, when I last saw him, reminded me that, of everyone on that trip, I was the only one who approached Alaska as something more than an attractive summer playground. He remembered me going on, like someone immodestly in love, about how fabulous the country was, how paradisiacal, how there could be no other place on earth so exactly what I considered ideal and idyllic. I reminded David that, when I packed up and moved to Alaska two years later, he warned me against doing so. What he’d said was, living in Alaska will rot your brain.
See me there, on top of that never-touched-by-humanhands boulder, filling my whole self with that pure Alaska spring air, my heart so big in my chest it might push right through my ribs. See me leap down and nearly weep at the flutter of bell-shaped flowers. I drink of the running water, gaze at the lofty peaks, dream of remaining forever in that perfect valley.
Am I over the top in my enthusiasms? Absolutely. Even as I fantasize staying in the Arrigetch for all time, I must know that the brief summer interlude is just that, and that arctic winters are interminably long, sunlessly dark, and spit-freezingly cold. Still, I hold an image of myself curled up in an earthen house under caribou blankets, savoring moonlight and sculpted snowdrifts.
I was not, really, a climber. I had learned to enjoy attacking rock like a puzzle, trusting my body to find handholds and fist-jamming cracks, to stand on my feet. I was reasonably fearless when belayed from above, willing to try any move, capable of finding my way up easy routes. I liked the teamwork, the coaching and coaxing, the feel of rope at my waist and, while belaying another, feeding assuredly through my hands. I liked simply being on rock, pressing palm and fingertips to the grainy surface, admiring the way plants worked tenacious roots into the smallest cracks on the tiniest ledges; I loved, in the Arrigetch, being surprised by an exquisitely white snow bunting that shot out of its nest near the top of a cliff. But I was not ambitious when it came to climbing, and not particularly competitive. I had no great desires to reach the tops of those granite fingers—except, perhaps, to see over the other side, to gaze upon more of my beloved land.
I did climb some, there in the Arrigetch. I practiced on the cliffs and on boulders, and I partook of the one climb we all did together—up to the col between two peaks named the East and West Maidens, where we split into four groups, two for each peak. I summited the East Maiden, not much of a technical feat. We might have simply walked the ridge, but we were cautious; we roped up and protected the route. At the top we found the cairn and bottled note of the only previous ascenders, from 1964. The view of the vertical back side made me hold my breath—that deep dive to another green and river-braided valley and, beyond, more rows of blue mountains fading gradually to pale and paler, turning under with the earth’s very curve. We ate our candy bars and retreated. Clouds moved in, and snow flurried down on us. We retraced our chopped steps down a long snow couloir and picked our way back over a longer and shifty boulderfield.
Other days, with various combinations of companions, I explored our valley, hiked to another col between two peaks, hiked to the pass at the head of the valley. The day that David and Ed Ward, our other climbing instructor, made a first ascent of a monolith called Shot Tower, I hiked to its base to watch them negotiate its difficult midsection. Back at camp, near midnight, I watched with binoculars as they, tiny as flies in the dome of a cathedral, finally stood on top and waved. In my innocence, I had never doubted that they would.
Four of us organized a five-day trek, from our valley over the pass, through the next valley and back to camp, about a twenty-five-mile circuit. We saw small numbers of caribou and traveled, at times, on their grooved trails lined with discarded antlers and dry bones, bits of caribou hair blowing in the breeze. Aside from another cairn and note at the top of the pass, left by the same party that had climbed The Maidens in ’64, we saw no other sign of humans, not so much as a jet’s contrail overhead. Laboring under my pack through heat, thunderstorm, and mosquitoes, I lost myself in the idea of valley after splendorous valley. We forded creeks and bathed in pools, studied our map and located the right pass to complete our circle. The last day we found ourselves deep in bushwhacking country, with no animal trails through the tangles and mosquitoes so thick we could kill forty with a swat. I thought
I might die. But then we climbed out of the brush and the bugs, back to base camp, that place that still looked a lot like heaven.
I kept a journal that summer, a journal I didn’t look at again until I decided to try this essay—only to discover that the pages were filled with overwrought teenage emotion rather than useful detail. I did not record the name of a single plant (except the fabulous fireweed) or bird (not even the snow bunting) or any other bit of natural history smaller than caribou. I also did not take any photos that summer—or even own a camera. The life of the moment was all I wanted, and I was sure that such moments would be mine forever—because I would never forget, and because I would return to the Arrigetch many more times. I would become, I wrote in my journal, a park ranger or an archaeologist or a camp cook.
My one concession to naming things lies at the heart of my journal—a map I drew of our valley, showing the circling of peaks, each with the name bestowed by climbers before us and known to David—Citadel, the Camel, Disneyland, Badile, Battleship, Pyramid, the Prong, sixteen altogether on my map. I show the creek running down the center of the valley, the pass at the head, and our four tents pitched on the bench below the Maidens. It’s a fair representation, I think, and in my head today stands for the place itself, which otherwise would be far vaguer, shrouded in forgetful mist.
After three weeks in the mountains, we packed up our tents, sleeping bags, and climbing equipment, hoisted our loads, and hiked out, three days to a lake where we traded our climbing gear for plastic rafts with wimpy toy paddles. For ten days a slow current carried us down 180 miles of winding river. Fireweed blazed along the banks, we napped, we swam, we watched two young wolves playing. It rained, and we gathered around a driftwood fire and got smoke in our eyes while we ate more noodles with tuna and described for one another the tastes of fresh apples, peaches, asparagus. We reached an Athabascan village with a volleyball court and an airstrip, and we got on a scheduled plane and flew to Fairbanks and drove back to Massachusetts.
Travelers' Tales Alaska Page 24