I get a lot of podcast recommendations from my friends who work in public radio. Sometimes the recommendation comes as a texted link to a specific episode, other times as a series binge on a long drive.
It was through one of those recommendations, however, that I found myself tuning in last week to an episode of “You’re Wrong About” about Chris McCandless, which was published earlier this year.
Like a lot of American teenagers, I read “Into the Wild” in high school and remember being struck by both the compelling central character and the literary powerhouse that is Jon Krakauer. It’d be disingenuous to say the story didn’t, in part, inspire my own move to Alaska after graduating from college (although the Disney classic “Brother Bear” was also formative).
The book, which started as an article written by Krakauer for the magazine “Outside,” chronicles the final years of Chris McCandless who, after graduating from college in 1990, began a two-year pilgrimage as part of which he ambled around the western United States with the ultimate goal of embarking on a major adventure in Alaska.
In 1992, McCandless died on the Stampede Trail, west of Healy, after spending more than 100 days off the grid. Emaciated and unable to cross the swollen Teklanika River, McCandless’ body was found by a group of moose hunters inside of a decommissioned Fairbanks City Transit System bus that had been repurposed as a shelter and was located about 18.6 miles from the trailhead.
A sparse journal, undeveloped rolls of film and a small library of heavily annotated books that included Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” were recovered with McCandless’ body and provided insight into what he was chasing by walking into the wild.
Depending on whom you ask, McCandless is either an arrogant hippie who subjected his family to great suffering by being reckless, or he’s a contemporary Thoreau rejecting the status quo and seeking a simpler life in nature.
So many people have been moved by McCandless’ story that, in 2020, the iconic bus in which McCandless died was removed from the Stampede Trail and relocated to Fairbanks’ Museum of the North in an effort to reduce the amount of people attempting the trek to the so-called “Magic Bus.”
Queuing up the episode of “You’re Wrong About,” which markets itself as a series that “reconsiders a person or event that’s been miscast in the public imagination,” I wasn’t sure which side the two hosts would take.
Both hosts are sympathetic to the person McCandless was and to the mission he was on.
“He’s someone whose cultural punishment seems way out of proportion to what he did on this planet … I don’t think you can argue that he hurt anyone besides himself,” podcast host Sarah Marshall asserts within the first five minutes of the episode.
In reviewing they drew heavily from a 2014 book written by Chris’ sister, Carine, called “The Wild Truth,” as well as a forward to that book written by Jon Krakauer, and independent efforts by Krakauer to set the record straight about what actually killed Chris.
Intrigued by their new take on a figure so prominent in Alaska canon, I decided to re-read “Into the Wild” and check out “The Wild Truth” from the Soldotna library. Neither disappointed.
“Into the Wild” was just as compelling as I remembered and, if anything, felt more relevant than ever. I’m currently the age that Chris McCandless was when he died, and often find myself seeking clarity in the splendor of Alaska’s vast landscape.
The strongest feeling I have about McCandless is that both opinions can be true; it’s possible to learn from the mistakes he made while on the Stampede Trail while also admiring what he was trying to do.
“The Wild Truth” should undoubtedly be read concurrently with “Into the Wild” for a better understanding of how Chris McCandless was running from something as much as he was running toward something else. Across the book’s more than 270 pages, Carine McCandless does not hold back.
She is candid about the extreme physical and emotional abuse she and Chris endured at the hands of their parents, decades of manipulation and lying, including the discovery their dad’s bigamist lifestyle, and, after the success of “Into the Wild,” their parents attempts to capitalize on the new narrative of them as victims of Chris’ behavior.
“My parents drank in the sympathy they received,” Carine writes.
There are important explanations by Carine about how she has tried to balance honoring her family with setting the record straight about Chris’ life, including why she directed Krakauer to leave scenes of childhood abuse out of “Into the Wild.”
The book is a glimpse into the life of Chris McCandless as a human being and brother first, and the guy from “Into the Wild” second. It’s as much a memoir about grief and living with the trauma of abuse as it is about the legacy of the famed Chris McCandless story. I’ve said it before of memoirs, but I always think there is value in someone telling their own story. “The Wild Truth” attempts to do that.
At the very least, it’s a reminder that there’s usually always more to a story. It’s easy to write off Chris McCandless as a know-nothing kid who received more attention than he’s worth. But sometimes the real story isn’t so easily defined.
The hosts of “You’re Wrong About,” summed up Chris pretty well, I think, at the end of their episode.
“He’s just an example of, like, a human soul struggling very earnestly with the baggage that it has been given in this lifetime,” Marshall concludes. “However you relate to it, I feel like we have some basic human understanding that our life’s work here is to try and learn how to love and to love ourselves and to give and accept love. I feel like this to me is so clearly a story of someone trying to do that and dying tragically in the process.”
“Into the Wild” was published in 1996 by Villard Books. An abbreviated version of McCandless’ death was written by Jon Krakauer as “Death of an Innocent: How Chris McCandless lost his way in the wilds,” which was published in January 1993 by Outside Magazine.
Reach reporter Ashlyn O’Hara at ashlyn.ohara@peninsulaclarion.com.
Off the Shelf is a bimonthly literature column written by the staff of The Peninsula Clarion.
