I didn’t know what I was looking for or what I hoped would happen. I thought about the glow that I used to swear I could see around Reverend Smith when I was little. I wanted to feel that around me. It was as if I was expecting the ceiling to open and that light to shine down and heal me, to explain everything, to give me understanding and acceptance. And peace.
I didn’t get any of that. I walked out of the church in as much pain and confusion as I had walked in.
I sobbed the entire four-hour drive to Windward Key. I did not want to return there. I did not want to see Walt and Billie.
We arrived in the early hours of a cool fall morning. The walk up the tall town house staircase was laborious as my feet became heavier with each step. But arriving in the middle of the night brought with it the welcome avoidance of an embrace with my parents. I battled with a cruel mix of emotions that teetered between sorrow and exasperating anger.
The next morning, I sat numbly on the couch as Sam explained things to Fish. Chris had covered his identity well, and it had taken the Alaska State Troopers nearly two weeks to find us.
The trail grew warm when an Alaskan named Jim Gallien saw an article in the Anchorage Daily News about a young hiker whose body had been found, and he recognized from the details and location that it must have been the same young man he’d given a ride to the previous spring. The Alaska troopers had developed a roll of film they’d found with the hiker, and Gallien had confirmed the young man in the self-portraits was one and the same. Chris had told Gallien he was from South Dakota, so the investigators had searched for his family there.
A South Dakota wheat farmer named Wayne Westerberg, who had been Chris’s good friend and employer, heard a radio report about the recovered hiker and feared it was Chris—or rather, Alex, as he had known him. He called the authorities and gave them the social security number Chris had written on a W-4 tax form. Through that social security number, the police learned Chris was from Virginia, and since Walt and Billie weren’t living in Annandale anymore, the McCandless number that came up in their directory was Sam’s. The authorities faxed Sam Chris’s self-portrait, and he recognized his brother immediately, though the young man in the picture looked different from the Chris he had last seen at Windward Key.
So, late in the afternoon of September 17, Sam had been faced with the terrible task of informing Walt and Billie that their son was dead. He had also called our shop, later admitting to relief that I hadn’t answered and regret that he had to pass on the awful assignment to Fish.
FISH HAD TO RETURN SOUTH to the long list of cars awaiting his attention at the shop. I stayed in a stupor in the living room of the town house most of the day as events took place around me. Sam and his wife, Michele, took over with strength and grace. They put aside any differences they had ever encountered with Walt and Billie and did what needed to be done. Sam took calls from the police in Fairfax, Virginia, and the coroner’s office in Fairbanks, Alaska. Chris’s dental records were required to make a conclusive identification, and Sam saw to those arrangements as well. My mom had refused to look at the picture until the dental records confirmed beyond a doubt that it was her son.
She sat in the kitchen when the time came for Sam to bring the picture over to her. He laid it on the table. I watched her entire body tremble as she looked up to see if she recognized the image. Tears dripped from her nose and chin as she tried to fight the release, then an ungodly wail left her body. Sam put his arms around her and she crumpled from the chair onto his shoulder. My father stood by in his own unfamiliar element, trying to figure out how to control the uncontrollable, unsure of how to handle his own pain, much less hers. Their reliable standby of denial was not an option this time. I ran over to my mom and embraced her, finally taking in the common loss.
The phone rang constantly, and Michele drafted a family statement for the press. Why in the world are people so interested in his story? I wondered, and I wished there was no story to issue a statement about. Mom and Dad requested I get onto a plane with Sam the following day. We were to go to Alaska and retrieve Chris—his remains, his belongings, anything at all he’d left behind. I was surprised my parents were not going themselves, but I didn’t question the plan. I wanted to go. I wanted to fly across the country to discover that it was all a colossal mistake—or perhaps that Chris had succeeded in pulling off a brilliant scheme to finally separate himself once and for all from the oppression of our parents, just as he’d said he would. There would be a note for me explaining his ingenious plan and how to get in touch with him.
I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH about the flight out of Washington, D.C., or the connecting flights that finally landed us in Alaska. I do remember thinking how enormous and distant a single state must be in order to justify having an entire airline named after it. Our first stop in Fairbanks was the coroner’s office. I had never dealt with the formalities of death before, and the experience at the bureau was less ceremonial than I had anticipated. As I sat across the desk from the coroner, I found her casual outdoor attire and the rustic environment of her workspace comforting.
She gave us the possessions that were recovered with Chris’s body, among them a .22 rifle, a pair of binoculars, a fishing rod, a Swiss Army knife, a book of plant lore in which Chris had recorded a terse journal, his Minolta camera, the pictures the state troopers had developed in order to help identify the body, five rolls of undeveloped film, and several well-read and tattered paperback books. There was no note waiting for me.
I was taken aback by the gun. I had never been that close to one before, and I didn’t realize that Chris had owned one. But the books and journal were so representative of the brother I loved, I felt the return of the smile that had been absent from my face for the past three days. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago were included alongside lighter reads like Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man and even some Louis L’Amour.
Chris loved to read and could delve into highbrow philosophy or quick-read westerns with equal zeal. As a kid, he’d had a blue bookcase filled with his perfectly organized Hardy Boys mysteries, and he also loved to read Ray Bradbury. As I sat reading Little House on the Prairie or Black Beauty, he looked up from “A Sound of Thunder” to tell me about how the simple act of stepping on a butterfly could substantially alter the future of humanity. “Everything we do affects everything,” he explained seriously. Then he turned to reading something lighter, like Old Yeller, and tossed it to me to read when he was finished.
As the coroner explained things to us, I kept my head up and watched her lips move. Her sentences held little meaning, but certain words sliced through the air like a scalpel: “Starvation.” “Sixty-seven pounds.” “Decay.” “Autopsy.” “Cremation.” Her description of something called the Stampede Trail and an abandoned bus filled me with confusion. The coroner was polite and sensitive, yet this was clearly routine for her. My rattled mind wandered. I could not imagine having her job, but I supposed she took a certain satisfaction in helping families resolve things and take one more step toward closure. As the process continued, I focused on the nameplate on her desk: FREJA LOVISWEAN. I wondered how far someone with that name had traveled to wind up in the Alaska interior, and why. Sam was on point to verify statistics and sign the necessary papers to take custody of Chris’s things. I was responsible for collecting Chris’s ashes in Anchorage the next day.
Sam and I went to a hotel somewhere, went to dinner somewhere, talked about the plan for the next day. The restaurant was nice but not overly so. We sat at a table the shape of a half-moon, part of a series along the edge of the large dining room. The concave leather booth had a high back and welcomed me into a feeling of insignificance . . . I could just stay there and hide. I realized this trip was the first time I had ever been alone with Sam, who was twelve years older than me. He was kind and attentive. We didn’t talk about what Chris had done or why. We didn’t compare notes on our childhoods. We didn’t speculate about what had driven
Chris to such extremes, nor did we theorize about any of his decisions. It was just time to eat, so we ate.
I had a very difficult time sleeping alone in my hotel room that night. I saw Chris’s ghost around every corner, behind every door. But these visions were not warm and peaceful. My traumatized brain invented images of Chris in a zombie-like state, decomposing, his guts exposed through his clothing, his flesh falling from his bones as he walked toward me, his outstretched arms reaching for me. I imagined his suffering. I felt terrible for the pain that he must have gone through, on so many levels. He loved life more than anyone I had ever known, and now his was over. The coroner had said it was likely he had died slowly. That meant he’d been aware of his impending death, and it was more than I could bear. Although there had been no note left for me, Chris had posted one at his camp, explaining that he was too weak to hike out, begging any hikers that might pass by to remain to save him when he returned from his search for food nearby. When the coroner had shown us the desperate message, I immediately thought of that day on the beach when we were kids, watching him shivering in the cold, being helpless to comfort him. I cried myself into a restless sleep.
The next morning Sam and I flew on to the largest city in the largest state, to carry out the largest task of my life. Aside from constantly reminding myself of the need to stay strong and keep it together, I had given up trying to prepare for what would surely be the most devastating and difficult occurrence of my existence. But when the envoy from the mortuary delivered Chris’s remains, it was strangely consoling. An absolute relief came over me. Oh. This is it? This isn’t him. This isn’t all that he was. The container was not ornate as I had expected. His ashes weren’t even in an urn. They were in a dull dark brown box made of plastic. The container was much bigger than I had anticipated, yet it wasn’t daunting. As I held what they claimed was all that remained of my brother, I noticed the plain white label on one side. In neatly typed block letters was the name: CHRISTOPHER R. MCCANDLESS. Chris’s middle initial was J—Johnson, for our mother’s maiden name—and it pissed me off that they had carelessly made such a mistake. But my annoyance was short-lived. Nothing about this package identified who he was to me, and besides, Chris would have laughed at the typo.
Alone for a moment, I took a pen from my purse and respectfully reshaped the R into a J.
Then I removed from my suitcase a small backpack that I had taken along many trails and had brought to Alaska for one specific purpose. I turned the box from the mortuary on its side and began to gently place it into my pack. Not having realized exactly how the container was constructed, I panicked when the side with the identification label shifted slightly out of its housing, alarmed that my brother’s remains might spill out onto the floor, or float into the air, as ash will do. But the vestiges of my closest sibling were contained within a clear plastic bag, complete with a red twist tie that looked like it had just been pulled off a loaf of bread. The ashes were not of a powdery nature at all. They were more like gravel. A final sense of knowing that I was not holding all that was left of Chris ran through me.
Still, I held the backpack close through the entire trip back to Virginia.
CHAPTER 9
SAM AND I RETURNED from Alaska accompanied by the mystery that was attached to Chris’s belongings. No one was sure what to make of the items. Dad put every article, from the rifle to the journal, through a thorough inspection. His eyes focused with a detached concentration, dissecting the reasons why Chris would have possessed each one. Once his examination was complete and the display methodically organized, Mom walked around the table touching each item gently. She brought them to her face, one by one, eager to attain some sensory connection to her son. Each family member who arrived at Windward Key approached the anthology delicately and took the time they needed.
We hoped we would have more answers than questions after we developed the rest of his film. He’d been missing from our lives for more than two years, and the snapshots—photographs Chris had never seen—would tell us more about what he’d been doing.
I held that first envelope of photos from the drugstore for a long time before opening it. As much as I wanted to see Chris in them, every image would remind me that I would never see him again, and my mind refused to comprehend it. I didn’t want to—couldn’t—fathom that I’d never see him in the flesh or feel his protective hugs.
But just as his ashes were an unexpected comfort, as I sifted through the images, they too brought a smile that contradicted my tears. The first thing that struck me was how happy Chris looked. The contemplative, often angry face from our childhood photos was gone. He looked free, completely at ease. No one was forcing him to pose in front of the camera, to wear a suit or a smile. But he did smile. In fact, he beamed. I remembered that look, from a time when we went to Colorado as kids and hiked at Longs Peak with our parents, Shannon, and Quinn. Shawna had come along for the ride into the mountains but opted to stay in the Suburban, perfectly happy to prop her feet up and relax while reading fashion magazines. It had been an idyllic summer day in the Rockies. We stopped for lunch at the beginning of the Boulder Field, a long and wide stretch of stone deposits left behind by the destructive path of ancient glacial flows. My brothers and I scrambled over hunks of sedimentary deposits of earth in every size, testing the stability before putting all our weight onto one, then moving on to the next. It was like an exhilarating puzzle. Chris and Quinn were determined to make it all the way to the keyhole before descending. Dad allowed it but was adamant that they go no farther. The rest of us watched as the two brothers made their way up to the keyhole entrance and raised their arms triumphantly. They gazed through to the abyss for a short time before they scrambled back down to where the rest of us were enjoying the hard sun. The smiles on Chris’s and Quinn’s faces burned just as brightly.
Now here was that smile again. In one photo that appeared to be taken not long after Chris had left Atlanta, he stood thigh-deep in rich blue lake waters. In another, he wore a straw hat, sturdy hiking boots, and a grin as the Sierra Nevada spread out behind him. A humorous shot showed him holding up a drink as he sat in a beach chair at the side of a road, looking to hitch a ride, and another was of some beautiful wild horses. But the picture that affected me most of all was one in which he stood on an open road with no cars, people, or buildings in sight. The exhilaration in his eyes and the gorgeous snow-covered mountain range that rose behind him left no doubt as to where he had been heading. Despite the images from the last roll becoming more difficult to look at as I neared his final shot, those pictures told me what I’d known the whole time: Chris had left to find peace and happiness. He’d left a good-bye note among his possessions, thanking the Lord and saying he’d had a happy life. I didn’t know everywhere he’d been, but despite the dissonance of emotions banging through me, I was glad he’d found what he was looking for.
Otherwise, I was still in shock, wearing a false half smile and trying to keep it together for my parents’ sake. Compliant Carine emerged full force, and it felt easier to just go through the motions. My mother gave me and my siblings the task of summarizing our brother’s existence onto four poster boards for Chris’s wake, to be held the next day.
Mom handed me a large storage box of old photographs without having had the strength to look through it herself first. Shelly, Shawna, Sam, and I dug through the memories, organizing photos by date, and thus began the exhumation of our childhood together.
Board one was dedicated to Chris as a baby. “Well, here’s the beginning.” Shelly sighed and handed me a small picture of my mother, dated in April 1968. Mom stood proudly in a bathing suit, holding Chris—a tiny, underweight seven-week-old—up for the camera. Shelly’s lips tightened, and I knew why the photo upset her. While Mom was showing off her postpartum figure, Marcia had also just given birth—to Shannon. An image of Marcia at this time—exhausted after her fifth delivery and under command of our dad—would tell a very different story from the one Billie was a
iming for.
“Oh my gosh, look at this one,” Shawna quickly intervened with a giggle. “I forgot just how cute he was as a baby!” She held up an eight-by-ten sepia-toned image of Chris, caught in what would prove to be a rare formal pose for the camera. He rested tummy-down, and the onesie he wore melded so perfectly with the white puffy blanket that he appeared to have been inserted directly into a marshmallow. Chris had propped himself up on one arm to have a look around, his hand in a gentle fist just in front of his ear. His huge brown eyes smiled cleverly at the camera while his lips appeared ready to say something well beyond his years.
Board two was for early childhood and grade school. I picked one of Chris with me in front of a spindly Christmas tree. We were dressed for church, our arms wrapped around each other, our grins wide as we stood among the gifts Santa had left behind. I found another seasonal picture of us, this one with our parents, taken when I was just one and Chris was four. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, was “Us at beach Christmas Day 1972—waiting for turkey to finish baking at home.” I thought about how all our siblings must have felt that day, at home with Marcia, wondering where their dad was. I buried it deep into the not-for-wake pile.
The next up for assessment was another picture taken at a beach. This was years later with several of our siblings at a waterfront house on the West Coast that Dad had rented for a family vacation. After the photo was taken, we’d all been locked out of the house. Mom and Dad were fighting inside, and an audience was not wanted that day, so we were forced to stay out on the sand. All Marcia’s kids, who had inherited her fair complexion, burned terribly in the sun and spent the rest of the vacation nursing huge blisters on their backs and shoulders.
I found another picture of Chris and me—we were buried in a colorful shed of autumn foliage, Chris’s hands entangled in Buck’s fur. “We used to make gigantic piles of leaves in the backyard at the Annandale house,” I said, “and run into them again and again.” My siblings smiled and passed it around so everyone could see.
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