2013 read #78: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
210 pages
Published 1996
Read June 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

As a teen, I was fixated on wilderness. I obsessed over the Appalachian Trail and its sibling long-distance paths: the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide, the North Country, the Ice Age, the Florida. I delineated plans to connect the national scenic trails into a single continuous three or four year zig-zag across the US. Not content with that, I marked a road atlas with a plethora of bushwhacking routes and "base camps" for extended sojourns away from society, then pored through National Geographic maps to pinpoint likely routes and base camp locations in far northern Canada and in Australia, Mexico, Belize, Argentina. My conception of how wild the American wilderness could be was naive in the extreme, as was my idea of how easy it would be to traverse the Canadian Arctic or the Australian bush. "Resupply" never even entered my vocabulary; looking back on it all, I have no idea how I thought to feed and supply myself on these solo expeditions, or for that matter how I'd reach Baffin Island or Patagonia in the first place. Once the map was filled up with destinations, I daydreamed of hopping freight trains and building a secret cabin in the Montana wilderness.

The wilderness seduced my imagination in large part because I could not conceive of anything else. My father raised me so far outside the normal course of American society that I wanted as little to do with it as I wanted to do with him once I should leave him. "Getting a job" or "going to school" never crossed my mind when I imagined my future. I hated my father; I feared society, when I even thought about it at all. I had only one possible track in mind: I would churn out a bunch of novels, climb the bestseller lists, and make enough money to sustain years of wilderness voyages and remove myself entirely from human interaction for months or years at a time. Rejoining the society my father had kept me isolated me from never seemed to enter my calculations.

What changed my mind was a combination of facing the reality of feeding myself as an adult, and discovering girls. Well, that, and the fact that I'd been so sheltered my whole life that actually subsisting in the wilderness was as far from my realistic competence as getting my crummy, childish sci-fi stories onto the bestseller lists.

All this is to say I can identify with Chris McCandless' impulses, but not his abstract suburban philosophical motivations. I no longer understand the white middle class need for "meaning," even while I do feel the same sense of awe and transcendental understanding when I venture on my piddling little day-hikes today. Abstract philosophy probably made more sense to me when I was an adolescent and needed a framework for understanding human existence. Now, McCandless' bloodless, sexless imitations of Thoreau just make me feel a bit sorry for him.

I see Krakauer's self-insertion into his Into Thin Air narrative fits with his general journalistic style. Also, I see the movie adaptation of this book was so faithful, I felt I'd read the first few chapters before.