Into the Wild

by Jon Krakauer

  The literature of veterinary medicine does not lack for cases of animals felled by swainsonine poisoning after grazing on forage contaminated with R. leguminicola. The most obvious symptoms of swainsonine poisoning are neurological. According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, livestock that have ingested swainsonine show signs of “depression, a slow staggering gait, rough coat, dull eyes with a staring look, emaciation, muscular incoordination, and nervousness (especially when stressed). In addition, affected animals may become solitary and hard to handle, and may have difficulty eating and drinking.”

  The effects of swainsonine poisoning are chronic—the alkaloid rarely kills outright. The toxin does the deed insidiously, indirectly, by inhibiting an enzyme essential to glycoprotein metabolism. It creates a massive vapor lock, as it were, in mammalian fuel lines: The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy. If you ingest too much swainsonine you are bound to starve, no matter how much food you put into your stomach.

  Animals will sometimes recover from swainsonine poisoning after they stop eating contaminated forage, but only if they are in fairly robust condition to begin with. In order for the toxic compound to be excreted in the urine, it first has to bind with available molecules of glucose or amino acid. A large store of proteins and sugars must be present to mop up the poison and wring it from the body.

  “The problem,” says Professor Bryant, “is that if you’re lean and hungry to begin with, you’re obviously not going to have any glucose and protein to spare; so there’s no way to flush the toxin from your system. When a starving mammal ingests an alkaloid—even one as benign as caffeine—it’s going to get hit much harder by it than it normally would because they lack the glucose reserves necessary to excrete the stuff. The alkaloid is simply going to accumulate in the system. If McCandless ate a big slug of these seeds while he was already in a semi-starving condition, it would have been a setup for catastrophe.”

  Laid low by the moldy seeds, McCandless discovered that he was suddenly far too weak to hike out and save himself. He was now too weak even to hunt effectively and thus grew weaker still, sliding closer and closer toward starvation. His life was spiraling toward the brink with awful speed.

  There are no journal entries for July 31 or August 1. On August 2, the diary says only, “TERRIBLE WIND.” Autumn was just around the corner. The temperature was dropping, and the days were becoming noticeably shorter: Each rotation of the earth held seven fewer minutes of daylight and seven more of cold and darkness; in the span of a single week, the night grew nearly an hour longer.

  “DAY 100! MADE IT!” he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving such a significant milestone, “BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD.—NO GAME.”

  If McCandless had possessed a U.S. Geological Survey topographic map, it would have alerted him to the existence of a Park Service cabin on the upper Sushana River, six miles due south of the bus, a distance he might have been able to cover even in his severely weakened state. The cabin, just inside the boundary of Denali National Park, had been stocked with a small amount of emergency food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for the use of backcountry rangers on their winter patrols. And although they aren’t marked on the map, two miles even closer to the bus are a pair of private cabins—one owned by the well-known Healy dog mushers Will and Linda Forsberg; the other, by an employee of Denali National Park, Steve Carwile—where there should have been some food as well.

  McCandless’s apparent salvation, in other words, seemed to be only a three-hour walk upriver. This sad irony was widely noted in the aftermath of his death. But even if he had known about these cabins, they wouldn’t have delivered McCandless from harm: At some point after mid-April, when the last of the cabins was vacated as the spring thaw made dog mushing and snow-machine travel problematic, somebody broke into all three cabins and vandalized them extensively. The food inside was exposed to animals and the weather, ruining it.

  The damage wasn’t discovered until late July, when a wildlife biologist named Paul Atkinson made the grueling ten-mile bushwhack over the Outer Range, from the road into Denali National Park to the Park Service shelter. He was shocked and baffled by the mindless destruction that greeted him. “It was obviously not the work of a bear,” Atkinson reports. “I’m a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like. This looked like somebody had gone at the cabins with a claw hammer and bashed everything in sight. From the size of the fireweed growing up through mattresses that had been tossed outside, it was clear that the vandalism had occurred many weeks earlier.”

  “It was completely trashed,” Will Forsberg says of his cabin. “Everything that wasn’t nailed down had been wrecked. All the lamps were broken and most of the windows. The bedding and mattresses had been pulled outside and thrown in a heap, ceiling boards yanked down, fuel cans were punctured, the wood stove was removed—even a big carpet had been hauled out to rot. And all the food was gone. So the cabins wouldn’t have helped Alex much even if he had found them. Or then again, maybe he did.”

  Forsberg considers McCandless the prime suspect. He believes McCandless blundered upon the cabins after arriving at the bus during the first week of May, flew into a rage over the intrusion of civilization on his precious wilderness experience, and systematically wrecked the buildings. This theory fails to explain, however, why McCandless didn’t, then, also trash the bus.

  Carwile also suspects McCandless. “It’s just intuition,” he explains, “but I get the feeling he was the kind of guy who might want to ‘set the wilderness free.’ Destroying the cabins would be a way of doing that. Or maybe it was his intense dislike of the government: He saw the sign on the Park Service cabin identifying it as such, assumed all three cabins were government property, and decided to strike a blow against Big Brother. That certainly seems within the realm of possibility.”

  The authorities, for their part, don’t think McCandless was the vandal. “We really hit a blank on who might have done it,” says Ken Kehrer, chief ranger for Denali National Park. “But Chris McCandless isn’t considered a suspect by the National Park Service.” In fact, there is nothing in McCandless’s journal or photographs to suggest he went anywhere near the cabins. When McCandless ventured beyond the bus in early May, his pictures show that he headed north, downstream along the Sushana, the opposite direction of the cabins. And even if he had somehow chanced upon them, it’s difficult to imagine him destroying the buildings without boasting of the deed in his diary.

  There are no entries in McCandless’s journal for August 6, 7, and 8. On August 9, he notes that he shot at a bear but missed. On August 10, he saw a caribou but didn’t get a shot off, and he killed five squirrels. If a sufficient amount of swainsonine had accumulated in his body, however, this windfall of small game would have provided little nourishment. On August 11, he killed and ate one ptarmigan. On August 12, he dragged himself out of the bus to forage for berries, after posting a plea for assistance in the unlikely event that someone would stop by while he was away. Written in meticulous block letters on a page torn from Gogol’s Taras Bulba, it reads:

  S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU.

  He signed the note “CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?” Recognizing the gravity of his predicament, he had abandoned the cocky moniker he’d been using for years, Alexander Supertramp, in favor of the name given to him at birth by his parents.

  Many Alaskans have wondered why, in his desperation, McCandless didn’t start a forest fire at this point, as a distress signal. There were two nearly full gallons of stove gas in the bus; presumably, it would have been a simple matter to start a conflagration large enough to attract the attention of passing airpla
nes or at least burn a giant SOS into the muskeg.

  Contrary to common belief, however, the bus doesn’t lie beneath any established flight path, and very few planes fly over it. Over the four days I spent on the Stampede Trail, I didn’t see a single aircraft overhead, other than commercial jets flying at altitudes greater than twenty-five thousand feet. Small planes did no doubt pass within sight of the bus from time to time, but McCandless would probably have had to start a fairly large forest fire to be sure of attracting their attention. And as Carine McCandless points out, “Chris would never, ever, intentionally burn down a forest, not even to save his life. Anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn’t understand the first thing about my brother.”

  Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire. In advanced stages of famine, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to cold, physical and mental exhaustion. The skin becomes discolored. In the absence of key nutrients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain, inducing convulsions and hallucinations. Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.

  On August 12, he wrote what would prove to be the final words in his journal: “Beautiful Blueberries.” From August 13 through 18, his journal records nothing beyond a tally of the days. At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the page were some lines L’Amour had quoted 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 or troubled

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

  On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

  Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.

  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.

  Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.

  EDWARD WHYMPER,

  SCRAMBLES AMONGST THE ALPS

  We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.

  There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

  ANNIE DILLARD,

  HOLY THE FIRM

  The helicopter labors upward, thwock-thwock-thwocking over the shoulder of Mt. Healy. As the altimeter needle brushes five thousand feet, we crest a mud-colored ridge, the earth drops away, and a breathtaking sweep of taiga fills the Plexiglas windscreen. In the distance I can pick out the Stampede Trail, cutting a faint, crooked stripe from east to west across the landscape.

  Billie McCandless is in the front passenger seat; Walt and I occupy the back. Ten hard months have passed since Sam McCandless appeared at their Chesapeake Beach doorstep to tell them Chris was dead. It is time, they have decided, to visit the place where their son met his end, to see it with their own eyes.

  Walt has spent the past ten days in Fairbanks, doing contract work for NASA, developing an airborne radar system for search-and-rescue missions that will enable searchers to find the wreckage of a downed plane amid thousands of acres of densely forested country. For several days now he’s been distracted, irritable, edgy. Billie, who arrived in Alaska two days ago, confided to me that the prospect of visiting the bus has been difficult for him to come to terms with. Surprisingly, she says she feels calm and centered and has been looking forward to this trip for some time.

  Taking a helicopter was a last-minute change of plans. Billie wanted badly to travel overland, to follow the Stampede Trail as Chris had done. Toward that end she’d contacted Butch Killian, the Healy coal miner who’d been present when Chris’s body was discovered, and he agreed to drive Walt and Billie into the bus on his all-terrain vehicle. But yesterday Killian called their hotel to say that the Teklanika River was still running high—too high, he worried, to cross safely, even with his amphibious, eight-wheeled Argo. Thus the helicopter.

  Two thousand feet beneath the aircraft’s skids a mottled green tweed of muskeg and spruce forest now blankets the rolling country. The Teklanika appears as a long brown ribbon thrown carelessly across the land. An unnaturally bright object comes into view near the confluence of two smaller streams: Fairbanks bus 142. It has taken us fifteen minutes to cover the distance it took Chris four days to walk.

  The helicopter settles noisily onto the ground, the pilot kills the engine, and we hop down onto sandy earth. A moment later the machine lifts off in a hurricane of prop wash, leaving us surrounded by a monumental silence. As Walt and Billie stand ten yards from the bus, staring at the anomalous vehicle without speaking, a trio of jays prattles from a nearby aspen tree.

  “It’s smaller,” Billie finally says, “than I thought it would be. I mean the bus.” And then, turning to take in the surroundings: “What a pretty place. I can’t believe how much this reminds me of where I grew up. Oh, Walt, it looks just like the Upper Peninsula! Chris must have loved being here.”

  “I have a lot of reasons for disliking Alaska, OK?” Walt answers, scowling. “But I admit it—the place has a certain beauty. I can see what appealed to Chris.”

  For the next thirty minutes Walt and Billie walk quietly around the decrepit vehicle, amble down to the Sushana River, visit the nearby woods.

  Billie is the first to enter the bus. Walt returns from the stream to find her sitting on the mattress where Chris died, taking in the vehicle’s shabby interior. For a long time she gazes silently at her son’s boots under the stove, his handwriting on the walls, his toothbrush. But today there are no tears. Picking through the clutter on the table, she bends to examine a spoon with a distinctive floral pattern on the handle. “Walt, look at this,” she says. “This is the silverware we had in the Annandale house.”

  At the front of the bus, Billie picks up a pair of Chris’s patched, ragged jeans and, closing her eyes, presses them to her face. “Smell,” she urges her husband with a painful smile. “The
y still smell like Chris.” After a long beat she declares, to herself more than to anyone else, “He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”

  Billie and Walt wander in and out of the bus for the next two hours. Walt installs a memorial just inside the door, a simple brass plaque inscribed with a few words. Beneath it Billie arranges a bouquet of fireweed, monkshood, yarrow, and spruce boughs. Under the bed at the rear of the bus, she leaves a suitcase stocked with a first-aid kit, canned food, other survival supplies, a note urging whoever happens to read it to “call your parents as soon as possible.” The suitcase also holds a Bible that belonged to Chris when he was a child, even though, she allows, “I haven’t prayed since we lost him.”

  Walt, in a reflective mood, has had little to say, but he appears more at ease than he has in many days. “I didn’t know how I was going to react to this,” he admits, gesturing toward the bus. “But now I’m glad we came.” This brief visit, he says, has given him a slightly better understanding of why his boy came into this country. There is much about Chris that still baffles him and always will, but now he is a little less baffled. And for that small solace he is grateful.

  “It’s comforting to know Chris was here,” Billie explains, “to know for certain that he spent time beside this river, that he stood on this patch of ground. So many places we’ve visited in the past three years—we’d wonder if possibly Chris had been there. It was terrible not knowing—not knowing anything at all.

  “Many people have told me that they admire Chris for what he was trying to do. If he’d lived, I would agree with them. But he didn’t, and there’s no way to bring him back. You can’t fix it. Most things you can fix, but not that. I don’t know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”