by Jon Krakauer
On September 10, three days before news of the dead hiker appeared in the Times, the story was published on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News. When Jim Gallien saw the headline and the accompanying map indicating that the body had been found twenty-five miles west of Healy on the Stampede Trail, he felt the hairs bristle across the base of his scalp: Alex. Gallien still held a picture in his mind of the odd, congenial youth striding down the trail in boots two sizes too big for him—Gallien’s own boots, the old brown Xtratufs he’d persuaded the kid to take. “From the newspaper article, what little information there was, it sounded like the same person,” says Gallien, “so I called the state troopers and said, ‘Hey, I think I gave that guy a ride.’”
“OK, sure,” replied trooper Roger Ellis, the cop on the other end of the line. “What makes you think so? You’re the sixth person in the last hour who’s called to say they know the hiker’s identity.” But Gallien persisted, and the more he talked, the more Ellis’s skepticism receded. Gallien described several pieces of equipment not mentioned in the newspaper account that matched gear found with the body. And then Ellis noticed that the first cryptic entry in the hiker’s journal read, “Exit Fairbanks. Sitting Galliean. Rabbit Day.”
The troopers had by this time developed the roll of film in the hiker’s Minolta, which included several apparent self-portraits. “When they brought the pictures out to the job site where I was working,” says Gallien, “there was no two ways about it. The guy in the pictures was Alex.”
Because McCandless had told Gallien he was from South Dakota, the troopers immediately shifted their search there for the hiker’s next of kin. An all-points bulletin turned up a missing person named McCandless from eastern South Dakota, coincidentally from a small town only twenty miles from Wayne Westerberg’s home in Carthage, and for a while the troopers thought they’d found their man. But this, too, turned out to be a false lead.
Westerberg had heard nothing from the friend he knew as Alex McCandless since receiving the postcard from Fairbanks the previous spring. On September 13, he was rolling down an empty ribbon of blacktop outside Jamestown, North Dakota, leading his harvest crew home to Carthage after wrapping up the four-month cutting season in Montana, when the VHF barked to life. “Wayne!” an anxious voice crackled over the radio from one of the crew’s other trucks. “This is Bob. You got your radio on?”
“Yeah, Bobby. Wayne here. What’s up?”
“Quick—turn on your AM, and listen to Paul Harvey. He’s talking about some kid who starved to death up in Alaska. The police don’t know who he is. Sounds a whole lot like Alex.”
Westerberg found the station in time to catch the tail end of the Paul Harvey broadcast, and he was forced to agree: The few sketchy details made the anonymous hiker sound distressingly like his friend.
As soon as he got to Carthage, a dispirited Westerberg phoned the Alaska State Troopers to volunteer what he knew about McCandless. By that time, however, stories about the dead hiker, including excerpts from his diary, had been given prominent play in newspapers across the country. As a consequence the troopers were swamped with calls from people claiming to know the hiker’s identity, so they were even less receptive to Westerberg than they had been to Gallien. “The cop told me they’d had more than one hundred fifty calls from folks who thought Alex was their kid, their friend, their brother,” says Westerberg. “Well, by then I was kind of pissed at getting the runaround, so I told him, ‘Look, I’m not just another crank caller. I know who he is. He worked for me. I think I’ve even got his Social Security number around here somewhere.’”
Westerberg pawed through the files at the grain elevator until he found two W-4 forms McCandless had filled out. Across the top of the first one, dating from McCandless’s initial visit to Carthage, in 1990, he had scrawled “EXEMPT EXEMPT EXEMPT EXEMPT” and given his name as Iris Fucyu. Address: “None of your damn business.” Social Security number: “I forget.”
But on the second form, dated March 30, 1992, two weeks before he left for Alaska, he’d signed his given name: “Chris J. McCandless.” And in the blank for Social Security number he’d put down, “228-31-6704.” Westerberg phoned Alaska again. This time the troopers took him seriously.
The Social Security number turned out to be genuine and placed McCandless’s permanent residence in northern Virginia. Authorities in Alaska contacted law-enforcement agencies in that state, who in turn started combing phone directories for McCandlesses. Walt and Billie McCandless had by then moved to the Maryland shore and no longer had a Virginia phone number, but Walt’s eldest child from his first marriage lived in Annandale and was in the book; late on the afternoon of September 17, Sam McCandless received a call from a Fairfax County homicide detective.
Sam, nine years older than Chris, had seen a short article about the hiker in The Washington Post a few days earlier, but, he allows, “It didn’t occur to me that the hiker might be Chris. Never even crossed my mind. It’s ironic because when I read the article I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a terrible tragedy. I really feel sorry for the family of this guy, whoever they are. What a sad story.’”
Sam had been raised in California and Colorado, in his mother’s household, and hadn’t moved to Virginia until 1987, after Chris had left the state to attend college in Atlanta, so Sam didn’t know his half brother well. But when the homicide detective started asking whether the hiker sounded like anyone he knew, Sam reports, “I was pretty sure it was Chris. The fact that he’d gone to Alaska, that he’d gone off by himself—it all added up.”
At the detective’s request, Sam went to the Fairfax County Police Department, where an officer showed him a photograph of the hiker that had been faxed from Fairbanks. “It was an eight-by-ten enlargement,” Sam recalls, “a head shot. His hair was long, and he had a beard. Chris almost always had short hair and was clean-shaven. And the face in the picture was extremely gaunt. But I knew right away. There was no doubt. It was Chris. I went home, picked up Michele, my wife, and drove out to Maryland to tell Dad and Billie. I didn’t know what I was going to say. How do you tell someone that their child is dead?”
CHESAPEAKE BEACH
Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
BORIS PASTERNAK,
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND
WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS.
“NEED FOR A PURPOSE” HAD BEEN WRITTEN
IN MCCANDLESS’S HAND IN THE MARGIN ABOVE THE PASSAGE.
Samuel Walter McCandless, Jr., fifty-six years old, is a bearded, taciturn man with longish salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Tall and solidly proportioned, he wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a professorial demeanor. Seven weeks after the body of his son turned up in Alaska wrapped in a blue sleeping bag that Billie had sewn for Chris from a kit, Walt studies a sailboat scudding beneath the window of his waterfront townhouse. “How is it,” he wonders aloud as he gazes blankly across Chesapeake Bay, “that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?”
The McCandless home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, is tastefully decorated, spotless, devoid of clutter. Floor-to-ceiling windows take in the hazy panorama of the bay. A big Chevy Suburban and a white Cadillac are parked out front, a painstakingly restored ’69 Corvette sits in the garage, a thirty-foot cruising catamaran is moored at the dock. Four la
rge squares of poster board, covered with scores of photos documenting the whole brief span of Chris’s life, have occupied the dining-room table for many days now.
Moving deliberately around the display, Billie points out Chris as a toddler astride a hobby horse, Chris as a rapt eight-year-old in a yellow rain slicker on his first backpacking trip, Chris at his high school commencement. “The hardest part,” says Walt, pausing over a shot of his son clowning around on a family vacation, his voice cracking almost imperceptibly, “is simply not having him around anymore. I spent a lot of time with Chris, perhaps more than with any of my other kids. I really liked his company even though he frustrated us so often.”
Walt is wearing gray sweatpants, racquetball shoes, and a satin baseball jacket embroidered with the logo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite the casual attire, he projects an air of authority. Within the ranks of his arcane field—an advanced technology called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR—he is an eminence. SAR has been a component of high-profile space missions since 1978, when the first SAR-equipped satellite, Seasat, was placed into orbit around the earth. NASA’s project manager for that pioneering Seasat launch was Walt McCandless.
The first line of Walt’s résumé reads “Clearance: Current U.S. Department of Defense Top Secret.” A little farther down the page an account of his professional experience begins: “I perform private consulting services aligned with remote sensor and satellite system design, and associated signal processing, data reduotion and information extraction tasks.” Colleagues refer to him as brilliant.
Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an undercurrent of nervous energy. Even from across the room it is apparent that some very high voltage is crackling through his wires. There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came.
When Walt talks, people listen. If something or someone displeases him, his eyes narrow and his speech becomes clipped. According to members of the extended family, his moods can be dark and mercurial, although they say his famous temper has lost much of its volatility in recent years. After Chris gave everybody the slip in 1990, something changed in Walt. His sons disappearance scared and chastened him. A softer, more tolerant side of his personality came to the fore.
Walt grew up in Greeley, Colorado, an agricultural town on the high, windswept plains up near the Wyoming line. A bright child, and driven, he won an academic scholarship to Colorado State University in nearby Fort Collins. To make ends meet, he held down an assortment of part-time jobs through college, including one in a mortuary, but his steadiest paycheck came from playing with Charlie Novak, the leader of a popular jazz quartet. Novaks band, with Walt sitting in on piano, worked the regional lounge circuit, covering dance numbers and old standards in smoky honky-tonks up and down the Front Range. An inspired musician with considerable natural talent, Walt still plays professionally from time to time.
In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I, casting a shadow of fear across America. In the ensuing national hysteria Congress funneled millions upon millions of dollars into the California-based aerospace industry, and the boom was on. For young Walt McCandless—just out of college, married, and with a baby on the way—Sputnik opened the door to opportunity. After receiving his undergraduate diploma, Walt took a job with Hughes Aircraft, which sent him to Tucson for three years, where he earned a master’s degree in antenna theory at the University of Arizona. As soon as he completed his thesis—“An Analysis of Conical Helices”—he transferred to Hughes’s big California operation, where the real action was, eager to make his mark in the race for space.
He bought a little bungalow in Torrance, worked hard, moved quickly up the ladder. Sam was born in 1959, and four other children—Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, and Shannon—followed in quick succession. Walt was appointed test director and section head for the Surveyor 1 mission, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon. His star was bright and rising.
By 1965, however, his marriage was in trouble. He and his wife, Marcia, separated. Walt started dating a secretary at Hughes named Wilhelmina Johnson—everyone called her Billie—who was twenty-two years old and had dark, striking eyes. They fell in love and moved in together. Billie got pregnant. Very petite to begin with, in nine months she gained only eight pounds and never even wore maternity clothes. On February 12, 1968, Billie gave birth to a son. He was underweight, but healthy and animated. Walt bought Billie a Gianini guitar, on which she strummed lullabies to soothe the fussy newborn. Twenty-two years later, rangers from the National Park Service would find that same guitar on the backseat of a yellow Datsun abandoned near the shore of Lake Mead.
It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor’s candy drawer.
In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Billie remembers, “because it meant he had to do extra schoolwork. So he spent a week trying to get himself out of the program. This little boy attempted to convince the teacher, the principal—anybody who would listen—that the test results were in error, that he really didn’t belong there. We learned about it at the first PTA meeting. His teacher pulled us aside and told us that ‘Chris marches to a different drummer.’ She just shook her head.”
“Even when we were little,” says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, “he was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial—he always had friends, and everybody liked him—but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely.”
When Chris was six, Walt was offered a position at NASA, prompting a move to the nation’s capital. They bought a split-level house on Willet Drive in suburban Annandale. It had green shutters, a bay window, a nice yard. Four years after arriving in Virginia, Walt quit working for NASA to start a consulting firm—User Systems, Incorporated—which he and Billie ran out of their home.
Money was tight. In addition to the financial strain of exchanging a steady paycheck for the vagaries of self-employment, Walt’s separation from his first wife left him with two families to support. To make a go of it, says Carine, “Mom and Dad put in incredibly long hours. When Chris and I woke up in the morning to go to school, they’d be in the office working. When we came home in the afternoon, they’d be in the office working. When we went to bed at night, they’d be in the office working. They ran a real good business together and eventually started making bunches of money, but they worked all the time.”
It was a stressful existence. Both Walt and Billie are tightly wound, emotional, loath to give ground. Now and then the tension erupted in verbal sparring. In moments of anger, one or the other often threatened divorce. The rancor was more smoke than fire, says Carine, but “I think it was one of the reasons Chris and I were so close. We learned to count on each other when Mom and Dad weren’t getting along.”
But there were good times, too. On weekends and when school was out, the family took to the road: They drove to Virginia Beach and the Carolina shore, to Colorado to visit Walt’s kids from his first marriage, to the Great Lakes, to the Blue Ridge Mountains. “We camped out of the back of the truck, the Chevy Suburban,” Walt explains. “Later we bought an Airstream trailer and traveled with that. Chris loved those trips, the longer the better. There was always a little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it.”
In the course of their travels, the family visited I
ron Mountain, Michigan, a small mining town in the forests of the Upper Peninsula that was Billie’s childhood home. She was one of six kids. Loren Johnson, Billie’s father, ostensibly worked as a truck driver, “but he never held any job for long,” she says.
“Billie’s dad didn’t quite fit into society,” Walt explains. “In many ways he and Chris were a lot alike.”
Loren Johnson was proud and stubborn and dreamy, a woodsman, a self-taught musician, a writer of poetry. Around Iron Mountain his rapport with the creatures of the forest was legendary. “He was always raising wildlife,” says Billie. “He’d find some animal in a trap, take it home, amputate the injured limb, heal it, and then let it go again. Once my dad hit a mother deer with his truck, making an orphan of its fawn. He was crushed. But he brought the baby deer home and raised it inside the house, behind the woodstove, just like it was one of his kids.”
To support his family, Loren tried a series of entrepreneurial ventures, none of them very successful. He raised chickens for a while, then mink and chinchillas. He opened a stable and sold horse rides to tourists. Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting—despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie says, “but we had to eat, so he did it.”
He also worked as a hunting guide, which pained him even more. “Men from the city would drive up in their big Cadillacs, and my dad would take them out to his hunting camp for a week to get a trophy. He would guarantee them a buck before they left, but most of them were such lousy shots and drank so much that they couldn’t hit anything, so he’d usually have to shoot the deer for them. God, he hated that.”
Loren, not surprisingly, was charmed by Chris. And Chris adored his grandfather. The old man’s backwoods savvy, his affinity for the wilderness, left a deep impression on the boy.
When Chris was eight, Walt took him on his first overnight backpacking trip, a three-day hike in the Shenandoah to climb Old Rag. They made the summit, and Chris carried his own pack the whole way. Hiking up the mountain became a father-son tradition; they climbed Old Rag almost every year thereafter.