The Wild Truth

by Carine McCandless

  Eight children remember it that way.

  Your refusal to acknowledge this, and continuation of the same dramatic negative cycle, has pushed your children and grandchildren away. No one expects the past to be rewritten. We just don’t want it repeated again & again & again, and we do not want it to negatively affect our own children . . .

  It makes me very sad that I do not feel comfortable calling you up to tell you that Christiana’s therapy is going so well, to tell you to come over quick to see her rolling over, to hear her talking, or to see how cute she looks in her high chair eating cereal and even drinking out of a cup. You should be at Heather’s soccer games and should not have to go up to the school to give her a present.

  I will end with this. Chris told me once of the five-page letter he wrote to you both, in a last desperate attempt to get you to understand his feelings. His hopes that it would be worth all of that effort—his pouring out of his soul, his dragging back into the front of his mind the things he had safely tucked away into the back—were lost, when the only response he got from you was a sarcastic postcard from a ski resort . . . That is when you lost him forever. I hope you do not make the same choice again.

  Please LISTEN & SEE!!! With love & hope, Carine

  Soon after, I received their reply:

  Carine,

  You have been uncharacteristically uncommunicative for some time now. In fact, this isolation tendency has been growing significantly for at least two years, predating our present disagreements. . . . Your belated note to us merely exacerbates an already damaging situation.

  They continued on, through various forms of communication: sometimes with a peaceful and loving tone, expressing dismay over our emotional distance and protesting that I had refused their attempts to mend our relationship; other times with sarcasm and vile threats, assuring me that due to my “despicable” actions, I was ruining Christiana’s future by destroying her opportunity to inherit any of their money.

  They always closed with the same sentiment—that regardless of how I was treating them, they would continue to pray for me to find my way to God’s grace in hopes that He might have mercy on my soul, and that they would be waiting with loving hearts and open arms, for me to see the error of my ways.

  I looked to my faith, and into my heart. I thought about Chris and the responsibility I felt to be a survivor. But that obligation—that instinct—had shifted from my role as a daughter to my accountability as a mother and a sister.

  I thought about the importance of truth.

  I thought about the meaning of shared happiness.

  And that is how the war came to its end.

  EPILOGUE

  Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

  What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do

  not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

  —Henry David Thoreau,

  Civil Disobedience

  WITH THE WAR OVER, it was time for the history lessons. When Christiana was able to start a full day-school program, I accepted an invitation to join the Random House Speakers Bureau. Jon’s book was now printed in more than thirty languages and had been required reading in schools across the country for over fifteen years. As I visited high schools and colleges, I saw how hungry the students were for a better understanding of Chris. They wanted to know what drove him to the decisions he made. Teachers and professors wanted to provide their students with a personal connection to Chris’s life and death, so that his triumphs and his mistakes could be more than words in a book. I realized early on that something simple blocked that connection: the students didn’t have the whole story.

  I had helped perpetuate misunderstandings about Chris’s life. I felt guilty that I hadn’t been stronger and more willing to let Jon tell the whole truth from the beginning. But in gentler moments, I remembered I was only twenty-one when I met Jon and still hopeful that my relationship with my parents would take a different course. Chris had taught me to learn not only from their mistakes but also from my own. The important thing was that I tell the whole truth now.

  From working with students and from the messages I received about Chris from people all over the world, I came to understand that his legacy could do so much more to help people if its primary focus was based on that which was most important to Chris: TRUTH—a word he’d carefully written in large block letters in one of his beloved books. Now I speak honestly about my part in hiding much of that truth. I have worked hard to forgive myself for that infraction, while fully examining the reasons that I did so and why I can do so no longer.

  At the end of every lecture presentation, after every Q&A session, I can always count on at least one student straggling behind, waiting for the others to get their final questions answered. I always allow this last student to approach at his or her own pace while I pack up slowly. Perhaps the most powerful of these meetings happened on a visit to Westfield High School, the largest in Virginia, in the same town where Chris and I grew up.

  “Excuse me, Ms. McCandless?” The young man’s eyes finally met mine. “Umm . . . I just wanted to thank you for being so honest with us.”

  “Of course,” I replied, looking into a young face carrying a familiar burden.

  “I’m dealing with the same thing at home.” We spoke for a while about his own struggles as a member of an abusive household. New occurrences like this kept domestic violence a part of my life, but now it was on my terms.

  “Umm . . . just one last thing.” He paused for a while, clearly gearing up to ask me something important. “I was wondering . . . have you ever been able to forgive your parents?”

  I had spoken to thousands of students over the past several years. It was not the most personal question I had ever been asked, but it was by far the most difficult. And I was not sure that I could give him an honest answer, because I was still trying to figure that one out for myself.

  I struggle with the definition of forgiveness. I debate with myself as to whether it is a matter of compassion, of understanding, or of simply being willing and able to forget. But with forgetfulness comes recurrence. I wrestle with my faith, which instructs me to show mercy to those who have not asked for it and pardon those who have not earned it. As painful and complicated as it is, the conflict dissipates when I look at my children. I know in my heart and soul that my primary responsibilities—above all else—are to protect them and to teach them. Through any adversity, against all odds, and until my last breath, I will measure myself on how well I serve this purpose.

  As a mom, I’ve often used something I call the “Billie check” when struggling to control my anger and frustration. My mom rarely raised her hands to us as Dad did, but she was just as scary. Recently I came home after a grueling work week and noticed that Heather had yet to pick up her wet towel from the bathroom floor, she’d gotten mascara on the white counter, and the mortar-like remnants of a fruit smoothie sat in a glass on the back of the toilet. I could feel myself boiling over as I heard the TV on in the family room and pictured her sprawled out on the couch in front of it. This is typical teenage stuff, I said to myself as I did the Billie check. Don’t take your anger—about taking on more work than you have time for, about your lack of sleep, about how long it’s been since you had time to sit in front of the TV—out on your daughter.

  So, I didn’t. “Heather?” I called down the hallway.

  “Yeeees?” she answered, knowingly.

  “Can you come here for a minute please?” I continued. She came down the hall with an expectation of what was to come. I recognized there was no fear in her eyes, and I was proud of myself for that. “Hello there, sweetheart,” I said with a hint of sarcasm. “Do you recall me asking you to clean the bathroom this morning?”

  “Yes,” she answered, looking down just slightly, then around the bathroom.

  “And was I speaking English at that time?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she concurred, smiling a little.

  “And is En
glish still your primary language?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she answered.

  “Oh good! So, you did understand me. I was concerned the French you’re studying in school had taken over completely, and I don’t remember much of it myself. Whew!” I walked to the kitchen, leaving Heather to her cleaning, fully prepared that we’d have the same conversation again when it came to her room.

  Christiana is thriving, and she and Heather continue to have a close and protective relationship. Together they have already taught me more than I can ever hope to teach them. When I look at them, I think about Chris and me, but I also think about Sam, Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, Shannon, and Quinn. My extended family today is closer than ever. That family doesn’t involve the people who biologically produced me; it includes those who molded me. We’ve had cause throughout our lives as children, as adults, and now as parents to band together time and time again. Perhaps the greatest bequest that Walt and Billie have offered us, in the end, is how their actions have brought us all together.

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO I visited the area where Chris spent his last days, the purest and most peaceful days of his life. It had taken me fifteen years to emotionally prepare myself for the trip, and my brothers and sisters helped give me that strength.

  I made the trip with Jon in the summer of 2007, right before the movie was due to hit theaters across the world. Just as Jon’s presence was of great comfort to me throughout my experience with the book and film about Chris’s life, it felt incredibly appropriate to have him beside me on the day that I would visit the site of Chris’s death.

  I wondered what was going through Jon’s mind as we watched the ruggedness of the Alaskan backcountry spread out beneath us. I knew it was not in Jon’s character to take the easy way in. My own adventurous side felt a bit cheated as we floated high above the thick spruce and alder in a safe and warm helicopter. I would rather have immersed myself in the challenge but only if it had made sense. Despite my deep love of nature and outdoor adventures, I had never visited the outback of Alaska before, nor had I hiked in similar territory. I accepted my level of naïveté, and since I did not take the time to properly train and prepare, I knew that I should not hike in. The most important goal of that trip was for me to get back home to Heather and Christiana, and Chris’s voice in my head was my strongest reminder.

  Glaciers were visible in the distance, but there was no snow on the ground as there had been when Chris hiked through this terrain. From up above, hearing nothing but the high-pitched hum of the aircraft’s rotors and our pilot’s conversant narrative through my headset, it was hard to imagine what Chris experienced. The pictures he had taken shifted through my mind. My chest tightened as Jon pointed out the Teklanika River. The churning waters were still brown with silt from the late spring thaw.

  The skids touched down on the rocky banks of the much tamer Sushana River, the waterway that ambles beside the abandoned bus that Chris had made his base camp for more than one hundred days. We were still a short walk from where the derelict vehicle rests. The toes of my thick boots scuffed along the shoreline. I picked up a few small colorful rocks and examined them for their aerodynamic properties, then tossed them across the top of the water as Chris had once taught me to do, hopeful for the skip. But my skills were rusty and the rocks simply plunked into the cold, slow current to meet the river bottom once again.

  As I made my way up the short trail, Jon allowed me the time and space I needed to digest what was waiting just beyond the overgrown vegetation. As I entered a clearing, I saw it, just to my right. Fairbanks City Transit System bus 142 was parked beside a thicket of aspen and scraggly clumps of fireweed with blushing blooms. The green and white paint was peeling from over forty years of battling the elements. Rust devoured the metal as it crept across each point where yellow primer was exposed. I slowly turned, full circle, taking deep breaths to soak in the pain and the peace. I could see what had attracted Chris to this serene and beautiful place, and I remembered how he could be alone without being lonely. But sadness returned as I recalled his journal entries that revealed he was lonely and scared toward the end. In front of the bus sat the chair in which Chris took his now infamous self-portrait—the sole image Jon used in Into the Wild—during a happier time here, one leg comfortably propped up on the other, his wide smile lighting up an expression of absolute content. I cemented the image in my mind as the memory I would take from this place.

  The whining of mosquitoes at my ears motivated me to move on, and I asked Jon to show me the location of the cave where Chris tried in vain to protect the moose meat from hordes of flies and their maggot offspring. The bus sat about ten yards from a small cliff overlooking the Sushana. We scrambled over the precipice toward the water on a narrow and scarcely used trail. Despite the throng of insects that followed, it was a beautiful setting, with the soft sounds of water running over and between rocks, meandering through forest as far as the eye could see. I imagined Chris pausing to take in the secluded view as he hauled his bath and drinking water up and over the edge. A small opening appeared in the bedrock not far from the top, where Chris had removed enough of the compacted dirt for his improvised smoking pit. The weight of his despair bore down on me as I stood in the same footing where he would have agonized over the failure of his attempt.

  Back atop the overhang, I stared across the clearing and steeled myself to examine the interior of the bus. As I entered, I looked directly to the mattress where Chris took his last breaths. Tears blurred my peripheral vision as I walked slowly to the back. As I sat on the makeshift bed and cleared my eyes, I tried to imagine Chris here: stoking the fire in the oil-drum stove, having his meals, reading his books, and writing in his journal. Some of the windows were broken, some were missing, allowing the cool damp air and mosquitoes inside. The floor was strewn with leaves and dirt. I felt the urge to clean it up. But not the energy.

  As my gaze traveled upward, I saw graffiti covering the worn sheet-metal walls, much of it scrawled by pilgrims inspired by Jon’s book to visit my brother’s final resting place. Many had come from distant points around the globe. While the messages had their differences—some were quite heartrending, while others appeared to have been written with elation—they all led me to believe that what draws individuals to this place is not so much about connecting with something they’ve found in Chris but rather to reconnect with something they’ve lost in themselves.

  I heard Jon moving around outside the bus and it struck me that I owed him a debt that I could never repay. The fact remains that if Jon had not written such an intriguing book, my family and I would have been able to just grieve in silence. However, the world would have lost the inspirational story of my brother. And I would be stuck only with every day’s sadness, without the constant influx of gracious strangers and their stories to offset that grief.

  I also would never have had the emotional strength to track my brother’s journey and follow his path, as Jon did. There is so much I never would have known about the last years of his life and, perhaps most importantly, the last hours of his life. I would still be without the peace that I have in my own heart, from knowing the peace that Chris found in his, before his death. Jon wrote:

  One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

  The note Chris held was the one the coroner had given us so long ago. Chris had torn a page from one of his favorite books—Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man—and written in very neat, very large block letters:

 
; I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD.

  GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!

  On the backside of this page were some printed lines that L’Amour had offered from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

  Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

  Something more equal to the 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 nor troubled

  And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.

  Although Chris addressed others in his final message, I believe that the act of writing it was more for himself than for the world. His final act of self-awareness. His final act of truth.

  TO ME, LIFE IS LIKE A BOOK. We all have the same first and last chapters. What makes up the story of our lives, and the legacy we leave behind, are the pages in between.

  It is tragic that my brother died so young. But although he dreaded his impending death, he still died at peace, because the paths he had chosen throughout his life had kept him true to himself. And in the end, whenever that end comes, isn’t that the best any of us can hope for?

  I believe Chris went into the wilderness in search of what was lacking in his childhood: peace, purity, honesty. And he understood there was nowhere better for him to find that than in nature.

  At forty-two, I often feel like I am living for both Chris and me, as the span of his entire life has roughly been the first half of my own. He never had the opportunity to experience a long adulthood or to be a parent. I realize now that my adulthood is where I have sought out what was lacking in my childhood: necessary lessons of worth, strength, and unconditional love.