I remember reading “Into the Wild” when I was in 11th grade, and being very captivated by its 14-year-old tale of Chris McCandless and his love of the outdoors and the road. After watching the film last night, and coming back to the story for the first time in about 10 years, I’m still leaning to my initial gut reaction: the guy led a wondrous life, had a great heart, wanted to go on this romantic journey, and all of those things, but I’m siding with the Alaskans on this — the guy was foolish to go into the wild, as it were, so woefully unprepared.
I was surprised to learn that the bus that McCandless camped out in is still around, and that it’s become something of a shrine.
But in the end, and I really don’t mean to sound totally heartless when I say this, this captivates my sentiment:
For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did – most of us came here in search of something, didn’t we? Haven’t we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can’t afford to take his story seriously because it doesn’t say much a careful person doesn’t already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there – but it won’t mean much unless you come back.
This is what bothers me – that Christopher McCandless failed so badly, so harshly, and yet so famously that his death has come to symbolize something admirable, that his unwillingness to see Alaska for what it really is has somehow become the story so many people associate with this place, a story so hollow you can almost hear the wind blowing through it. His death was not a brilliant fuck-up. It was not even a terribly original fuck-up. It was just one of the more recent and pointless fuck-ups.
