by Jon Krakauer
These days Roman teaches at Alaska Pacific University, in Anchorage, and enjoys statewide renown for a long, brash string of backcountry escapades: He has—among other feats—traveled the entire 1,000-mile length of the Brooks Range by foot and paddle, skied 250 miles across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in subzero winter cold, traversed the 700-mile crest of the Alaska Range, and pioneered more than thirty first ascents of northern peaks and crags. And Roman doesn’t see a great deal of difference between his own widely respected deeds and McCandless’s adventure, except that McCandless had the misfortune to perish.
I bring up McCandless’s hubris and the dumb mistakes he made—the two or three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him his life. “Sure, he screwed up,” Roman answers, “but I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I’ve never done it. And I’d bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather—most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.
“I guess I just can’t help identifying with the guy,” Roman allows as he pokes the coals with a stick. “I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager. And I’m sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his critics. Which is maybe why they’re so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them a little too much of their former selves.”
Roman’s observation underscores how difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth. As Everett Ruess’s father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, “The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett.”
Roman, Andrew, and I stay up well past midnight, trying to make sense of McCandless’s life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive. Gradually, the conversation lags and falters. When I drift away from the fire to find a place to throw down my sleeping bag, the first faint smear of dawn is already bleaching the rim of the northeastern sky. Although the mosquitoes are thick tonight and the bus would no doubt offer some refuge, I decide not to bed down inside Fairbanks 142. Nor, I note before sinking into a dreamless sleep, do the others.
THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
It is nearly impossible for modern man to imagine what it is like to live by hunting. The life of a hunter is one of hard, seemingly continuous overland travel.… A life of frequent concerns that the next interception may not work, that the trap or the drive will fail, or that the herds will not appear this season. Above all, the life of a hunter carries with it the threat of deprivation and death by starvation.
JOHN M. CAMPBELL,
THE HUNGRY SUMMER
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK,
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND
WITH CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS;
UNDERSCORING BY MCCANDLESS
After his attempt to depart the wilderness was stymied by the Teklanika’s high flow, McCandless arrived back at the bus on July 8. It’s impossible to know what was going through his mind at that point, for his journal betrays nothing. Quite possibly he was unconcerned about his escape route’s having been cut off; indeed, at the time there was little reason for him to worry: It was the height of summer, the country was a fecund riot of plant and animal life, and his food supply was adequate. He probably surmised that if he bided his time until August, the Teklanika would subside enough to be crossed.
Reestablished in the corroded shell of Fairbanks 142, McCandless fell back into his routine of hunting and gathering. He read Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and Michael Crichton’s Terminal Man. He noted in his journal that it rained for a week straight. Game seems to have been plentiful: In the last three weeks of July, he killed thirty-five squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs, all of which he supplemented with wild potatoes, wild rhubarb, various species of berries, and large numbers of mushrooms. But despite this apparent munificence, the meat he’d been killing was very lean, and he was consuming fewer calories than he was burning. After subsisting for three months on an exceedingly marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric deficit. He was balanced on a precarious edge. And then, in late July he made the mistake that pulled him down.
He had just finished reading Doctor Zhivago, a book that incited him to scribble excited notes in the margins and underline several passages:
Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.
“NATURE/PURITY,” he printed in bold characters at the top of the page.
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled “refuge in nature” in black ink.
Next to “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…. And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that McCandless’s long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. It can be interpreted to mean that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community. But we will never know, because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read.
Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, there is an ominous entry in the journal: “EXTREMLY WEAK, FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Before this note there is nothing in the journal to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances. He was hungry, and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health. Then, after July 30, his physical condition suddenly went to hell. By August 19, he was dead.
There has been a lot of conjecture about what caused such a precipitous decline. In the days following the identification of McCandless’s remains, Wayne Westerberg vaguely recalled that Chris
might have purchased some seeds in South Dakota before heading north, including perhaps some potato seeds, with which he intended to plant a vegetable garden after getting established in the bush. According to one theory, McCandless never got around to planting the garden (I saw no evidence of a garden in the vicinity of the bus) and by late July had grown hungry enough to eat the seeds, which poisoned him.
Potato seeds are in fact mildly toxic after they’ve begun to sprout. They contain solanine, a poison that occurs in plants of the nightshade family, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and lethargy in the short term, and adversely affects heart rate and blood pressure when ingested over an extended period. This theory has a serious flaw, however: In order for McCandless to have been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many pounds of them; and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato seeds, if he carried any at all.
But other scenarios involve potato seeds of an entirely different variety, and these scenarios are more plausible. Pages 126 and 127 of Tanaina Plantlore describe a plant that is called wild potato by the Dena’ina Indians, who harvested its carrotlike root. The plant, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum, grows in gravelly soil throughout the region.
According to Tanaina Plantlore, “The root of the wild potato is probably the most important food of the Dena’ina, other than wild fruit. They eat it in a variety of ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it especially dipped in oil or lard, in which they also preserve it.” The citation goes on to say that the best time to dig wild potatoes “is in the spring as soon as the ground thaws….During the summer they evidently become dry and tough.”
Priscilla Russell Kari, the author of Tanaina Plantlore, explained to me that “spring was a really hard time for the Dena’ina people, particularly in the past. Often the game they depended on for food didn’t show up, or the fish didn’t start running on time. So they depended on wild potatoes as a major staple until the fish came in late spring. It has a very sweet taste. It was—and still is—something they really like to eat.”
Above ground the wild potato grows as a bushy herb, two feet tall, with stalks of delicate pink flowers reminiscent of miniature sweet-pea blossoms. Taking a cue from Kari’s book, McCandless started to dig and eat wild potato roots on June 24, apparently without ill effect. On July 14, he began consuming the pealike seedpods of the plant as well, probably because the roots were becoming too tough to eat. A photograph he took during this period shows a one-gallon Ziploc plastic bag stuffed to overflowing with such seeds. And then, on July 30, the entry in his journal reads, “EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED….”
One page after Tanaina Plantlore enumerates the wild potato, it describes a closely related species, wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii. Although a slightly smaller plant, wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart. There is only a single distinguishing characteristic that is absolutely reliable: On the underside of the wild potato’s tiny green leaflets are conspicuous lateral veins; such veins are invisible on the leaflets of the wild sweet pea.
Kari’s book warns that because wild sweet pea is so difficult to distinguish from wild potato and “is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food.” Accounts of individuals being poisoned from eating H. mackenzii are nonexistent in modern medical literature, but the aboriginal inhabitants of the North have apparently known for millennia that wild sweet pea is toxic and remain extremely careful not to confuse H. alpinum with H. mackenzii.
To find a documented poisoning attributable to wild sweet pea, I had to go all the way back to the nineteenth-century annals of Arctic exploration. I came across what I was looking for in the journals of Sir John Richardson, a famous Scottish surgeon, naturalist, and explorer. He’d been a member of the hapless Sir John Franklin’s first two expeditions and had survived both of them; it was Richardson who executed, by gunshot, the suspected murderer-cannibal on the first expedition. Richardson also happened to be the botanist who first wrote a scientific description of H. mackenzii and gave the plant its botanical name. In 1848, while leading an expedition through the Canadian Arctic in search of the by then missing Franklin, Richardson made a botanical comparison of H. alpinum and H. mackenzii. H. alpinum, he observed in his journal,
furnishes long flexible roots, which taste sweet like the liquorice, and are much eaten in the spring by the natives, but become woody and lose their juiciness and crispness as the season advances. The root of the hoary, decumbent, and less elegant, but larger-flowered Hedysarum mackenzii is poisonous, and nearly killed an old Indian woman at Fort Simpson, who had mistaken it for that of the preceding species. Fortunately, it proved emetic; and her stomach having rejected all that she had swallowed, she was restored to health, though her recovery was for some time doubtful.
It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mistake as the Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated. From all the available evidence, there seemed to be little doubt that McCandless—rash and incautious by nature—had committed a careless blunder, confusing one plant for another, and died as a consequence. In the Outside article. I reported with great certainty that H. mackenzii, the wild sweet pea, killed the boy. Virtually every other journalist who wrote about the McCandless tragedy drew the same conclusion.
But as the months passed and I had the opportunity to ponder McCandless’s death at greater length, this consensus came to seem less and less plausible. For three weeks beginning on June 24, McCandless had dug and safely eaten dozens of wild potato roots without mistaking H. mackenzii for H. alpinum; why, on July 14, when he started gathering seeds instead of roots, would he suddenly have confused the two species?
McCandless, I came to believe with increasing conviction, scrupulously steered clear of the reportedly toxic H. mackenzii and never ate its seeds or any other part of the plant. He was indeed poisoned, but the plant that killed him wasn’t wild sweet pea. The agent of his demise was wild potato, H. alpinum, the species plainly identified as nontoxic in Tanaina Plantlore.
The book advises only that the roots of the wild potato are edible. Although it says nothing about the seeds of the species being edible, it also says nothing about the seeds being toxic. Nor have the seeds of H. alpinum have ever been described as toxic in any other published text. But the pea family (Leguminosae, to which H. alpinum belongs) happens to be rife with species that produce alkaloids—chemical compounds that have powerful pharmacological effects on humans and animals. (Morphine, caffeine, nicotine, curare, strychnine, and mescaline are all alkaloids.) And in many alkaloid-producing species, moreover, the toxin is strictly localized within the plant.
“What happens with a lot of legumes,” explains John Bryant, a chemical ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, “is that the plants concentrate alkaloids in the seed coats in late summer, to discourage animals from eating their seeds. Depending on the time of year, it would not be uncommon for a plant with edible roots to have poisonous seeds. If a species does produce alkaloids, as fall approaches, the seeds are where the toxin is most likely to be found.”
During my visit to the Sushana River in 1993, I collected samples of H. alpinum growing within a few feet of the bus and sent some dried seedpods from this sample to Dr. Thomas Clausen, a colleague of Professor Bryants in the Chemistry Department at the University of Alaska. Although preliminary analysis by Clausen and a graduate student, Edward Treadwell, indicated the seeds contained traces of an alkaloid, subsequent, more thorough testing turned up no indication of any alkaloids whatsoever, toxic or otherwise.
I was baffled. Given the alarming, unambiguous entry McCandless had scrawled in his journal on July 30, I found it hard to believe that the enormous quantity of seeds he’d eaten just prior to that date played no role in his death.
Upon reading further about the connection between R. leguminicola and swainsonine, I had an epiphany: It wasn’t the seeds of the wild potato that had done McCandless in; he was probably killed instead by mold that had been growing on those seeds. The dried seeds I’d sent Clausen and Treadwell had tested negative because they weren’t moldy. But there was ample reason to suspect the seeds on which McCandless dined during the last two weeks of July may have been contaminated with R. leguminicola.
He had begun to gather and eat large quantities of wild potato seeds on July 14, during an extended period of rainy weather. Between meals he stored these green seedpods in damp, unclean Ziploc bags—an excellent culture for the proliferation of mold. If the wild potato seeds McCandless ate were contaminated with swainsonine from an eruption of R. leguminicola, it means the guy wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he has been made out to be. It means he didn’t carelessly confuse one species with another. The plant that poisoned him wasn’t toxic, per se; McCandless simply had the misfortune to eat moldy seeds. An innocent mistake, it was nevertheless sufficient to end his life.