Chris McCandless with Blair Braverman

This week, survival correspondent Blair Braverman tells Sarah the story of a Supertramp. In 1996, Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild described a young man, Chris McCandless, who changed his name, walked into the Alaskan bush, and died after mistakenly eating a toxic plant. Or did he? Now, Sarah and Blair talk about the McCandless archive and its legacy in conversations around wilderness, Alaska, violence, and more.

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Transcript

Sarah: It starts off as a prose poem, and then it takes a hard turn into limerick.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Chris McCandless. We are joined today by our fan favorite survival correspondent, Blair Braverman. Blair joined us recently to talk about Baby Jessica, and before that to talk about the Survival of the passengers of Flight 571 after it crashed in the Andes. She talks about survival in all the ways we're used to thinking about it, and so many ways we're not. And I'm so happy to have her back. She is also the author of a recent novel called Small Game, which is all about survival and my favorite thing, feelings.  

Thank you so much by the way, to everybody who supports us on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions. We have a new episode coming out soon, which is extremely close to my heart on the state of figure skating in the United States, and co-hosting it with me are my producer, Carolyn Kendrick, and my wonderful ghost guest, Jamie Loftus. We really get into how to fix figure skating, you guys. If you're wondering, you should just listen. 

We have a spring tour coming up. If you want to find out more about the shows or where to get tickets, there's a link to that in our show notes, also in our bios on social media. We'll be going to Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Manhattan and Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, Boston, Burlington, Vermont, and of course Montreal. We hope you can come.  

So back to our episode, today we are talking about Chris McCandless, a figure who many of us know through either the book or the movie Into the Wild. And also through the kind of cultural legacy that he has continued to have and that we're going to try and explore today. And because we're talking about this story, we also have some content warnings for you, specifically for parental and domestic abuse, for starvation and all the effects that has on the body, and for the Holocaust, which we talk about a couple of times.  

Speaking of our content warnings, it's worth pointing out that the movie Into the Wild was directed by and starred two men, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch, who allegedly have very seriously abused women, which is yet another reminder that stories of abuse, stories of domestic abuse, stories of violence against women are unavoidably and absolutely everywhere and part of every story we tell, it seems to me. And here comes another story like that. Thank you so much for coming with us as we try to understand this story. And now here's our episode. 

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes Blair Braverman comes by, and we talk about survival in every form. And she's back. Welcome, Blair. 

Blair: Hi Sarah. 

Sarah: So you've been on three episodes of the show. And I feel like I didn't see this coming, it just happened organically, but we have become a show where survival and its various implications and meanings and the ways we look for it and the places where we don't look for it, but should, has become a theme on the show. And I think that it was always there, but I think that you were the one who made it explicit and then people have responded so strongly to that, that it's yeah, we got to keep talking about it. 

Blair: Oh, I love that because I love talking to you. But I do think it was always there. I think it was always there and we're just teasing it out at the surface a little bit more.

Sarah: We're getting to the literal stories and we're talking about Chris McCandless, who is the subject of the Jon Krakauer book, Emile Hirsch movie, Into the Wild. These were both very big culturally, as far as I can tell, when we were teenagers. So in the 2000s. And I have never met someone who doesn't have a strong opinion about Chris McCandless. And I was thinking today, Chris McCandless to me, and people who listened to this show even somewhat regularly will know this is my highest praise, I think is an honorary bimbo because he's someone whose cultural punishment seems way out of proportion to what he did on this planet. And the fact that I don't think you can argue that he hurt anyone besides himself, and that's a very bimbo experience.

Blair: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That seems absolutely right on. This is a story that a lot of people know, at least the broad outlines of, and you do too, right? You have some understanding of this story. What's your understanding of it?

Sarah: Okay, so my understanding, this was something that I first heard about as a teenager because I was a crunchy little teenager with crunchy little friends, and we loved fantasizing about living in a tree to keep it from getting chopped down and stuff like that, which honestly, I still think I should be doing. But Into the Wild was a book that I believe came out of the nineties by John Krakauer, a writer who I really like and think is good, and also consistently sells well in airports. And that's not a backhanded compliment. It's just true. 

Blair: He has nailed it. He's a brilliant outdoors person. He sells airport books. Tremendous respect for the guy. 

Sarah: You and I have talked many times about how all we want is to have books that sell well in airports.

Blair: I've always thought as a writer, particularly when I was starting out as a writer, that my goal was to write things that people would read by choice. That always seemed like an actually pretty high bar to me. If people have free time and they're choosing to spend that time with your words, that to me is just the greatest honor. And I feel like airplanes are in the middle there where it's not quite free time, but you're trying to get your head out of the space.

Sarah: I think airport books, to me, are books that are able to really transport you in some way or just really hold your attention. I always like to read Stephen King on a plane. So yes, John Krakauer, he wrote Into the Wild, a very successful book made into a movie when you and I, Blair, were in high school. Which is a beautiful movie, beautifully shot. In the same way I think that Grizzly Man shows you it's really great to live a doomed life. 

And so I used to teach writing classes at Portland State and the thing I found the hardest was the thing and anyone who's taught most age groups will know this, where you're trying to start a conversation desperately and you're pitching all these conversation starting questions, and everyone is just looking back at you like the background anchovies in SpongeBob. And what I realized was that Into the Wild was a great text to discuss because the normal kind of very thick ice was broken because everyone has a strong feeling about Chris McCandless. I remember initially feeling like this is so dumb, this is the folly of teenage boys. I hate it. Why are we valorizing this? These are my 17-year-old thoughts. Then coming around to the part of me that was like, but I want to go off the grid and kayak to Mexicali and whatever. And then finally arriving, I think, at this place where I am currently of I think he was someone who lived by conviction and was more kind of extreme in living up to his beliefs than most of us ever will be. And there's a profound charisma to that. 

And also that he was young and also, that were obsessed with the question of how much it was his own fault that he died, which I think is a fascinating thing to be fixated on. And I know that we're going to talk about how that conversation has changed over the years because I feel like science is discovering new things about Chris McCandless every day.

Blair: The story has changed from when it first came out, from when you and I first encountered it. It's changed a couple times and those changes are subtle, but they do affect people's understanding of it. So I'm going to start the story at the beginning and do a somewhat broad overview, because I know a lot of people are going to be familiar with it or familiar with parts of it from the book or the movie. Before we get into the story, think about what your impression of Chris McCandless is. If you have a strong feeling about him, try to identify that now and see if it's the same at the end, and maybe it will be. But I'd be curious to hear about it.

Sarah: Yeah. As would I, and also, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the story, but a ton aren't. And despite there being a very good book and slightly less good movie about it, we don't have the Blair version. I think that's necessary, personally.

Blair: I'll jump in and I'll start with Chris's parents. His mother's name is Billie. She was a dance student from Iron Mountain, Michigan, Sarah, where I think we've been together. And she thought dance was going to get her out of her small town. She applied to be a stewardess, but she wasn't tall enough. And she finally landed a secretary job at Hughes Aircraft, where her boss was Walt McCandless, who was married to a woman named Marsha, who had three kids and another kid on the way.  

Now immediately they began an affair. Walt told Billie that he was leaving his wife Marsha, which is the classic story that men tell mistresses. He did not leave Marsha. In fact, Marsha was trying to leave him, and he was getting physically violent with her. There was a point he even fractured a vertebra in her back. Deep violence. When Billie got pregnant, Walt ended up having two families at the same time. He split his time between both women and they both knew about each other. And according to Marsha, Walt was proud of having quote produced so many offspring. 

Sarah: Oh God. 

Blair: And his sister Carine was born three years later in 1971. Chris was born in February 1968. And throughout their childhood, their parents were violent, and the kids were forced to witness this when it was over. Billie would say, basically, this is because of Chris. I got trapped with him because Chris was born. Chris grew up feeling horrific about that as if he had ruined his mother's life. 

Sarah: I'm such a broken record about this, but I feel like it's just worth pointing out that this is the period when, and this period lasted for a long time and never really ended when pundits on both sides are like, the divorce rate is sky high in this country. It's really terrible. It's a moral conundrum and it's like, What? This rationale of save the marriage, protect the child, save the marriage, protect the child, right? That marriages remaining intact are obviously necessary to the health and safety of everyone involved. And you just look at it and you're like, isn't it obvious that the divorce rate was really much lower than it should have been? 

Blair: So the other thing about all this violence is that it did not really appear in the book Into the Wild, right? These are things that Chris’ sister Carine has talked about later. She wrote her own book called The Wild Truth that came out in 2014, which is where these details are coming from for me. So the first decades of conversation about Chris McCandless do not take the full story into account. So this family would always keep up appearances. Walt was wealthy, he worked for NASA. 

At one point he would get home in his Cadillac and the kids would hide. Finally Marsha did leave him, and he was with Billie more full-time, and he would make her wear a short skirt and three-inch heels and perfect makeup whenever he got home from work. Colleagues would come over and they would just show off being the perfect family, and they would go to church and show off being the perfect family. And Carine has said that some of the only times they were happy were when they went camping altogether, because they were away from all the stress. They were away from the pressure, they were distracted. They had something to focus on. S

o even as a little kid, nature was the place where Chris escaped. Then when they were a little bit older, they were walking home from church. He and his sister would always take a detour through the woods, and he loved it. He would spend forever just looking at bugs, plants, everything. The woods were always a place of peace for him. They were always a refuge where he could get away from violence.

Sarah: I want to call back to something that you've talked about before I think when we did the Dyatlov Pass episode, about how I have made the point to you in the past that stories of being lost in the woods, stuck in an avalanche whatever, are particularly scary to me because there's no human element, right? There's no one you can fantasize that you can talk out of kidnapping you, which is the kind of thing that I waste my time on. And your point in return, which I think has been very persuasive to me and a lot of other people who heard that episode is that like the lack of intent is what makes it comforting, right? And that's what this makes me think of, that the feeling of being like in the woods is the feeling of there being no dads. 

Blair: It's indifference.

Sarah: You're inside of a being that's so giant that you're this tiny microbe inside of, and I think like the thing that happens with parents and kind of parental abuse situations potentially, is that parents look at you and see the part of themselves that they want to destroy, right? And the forest doesn't want to destroy you for personal reasons. It just won't intervene if you fall in a ravine or something. I didn't mean to rhyme that.

Blair: Just everything you say is poetry. 

Sarah: It starts off as a prose poem and then it takes a hard turn into Limerick.

Blair: Please do a podcast of Limerick at some point. 

Sarah: But yeah, this is information that darkens and contrasts the colors of the picture so much. And also, I understand that this didn't come out initially because there's many reasons why books don't or can't talk about abuse. But I feel like this is the kind of thing that if you grow up in this family, it might just take a while and some amount of aging and learning to be like, oh, that was a very abusive household I grew up in. 

Blair: It was a conscious decision that was meant to be protective. But Chris gets older. I can't speak for him and say his biggest goal, but a very clear goal he has, a huge thing he's trying to do is always escape from his house. He discovers running, he tells his sister, everything in my head gets organized when I run. He tells his friend on the track team, Eric Hathaway, “He’d tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best.” 

So this kid is intense. He has a very strong reputation for his intensity. He gets angry at himself, he's hard on himself about things. He holds himself to a very high standard, we know that he had a high school girlfriend named Julie. And he loved her. He told her he loved her. He was reading Jack London and a lot of literature at the time, and he told Julie he wanted to go to Alaska with her. But she broke up with him because it was a little too intense for her, she didn't want to be as serious as he was, and that was very hard for him. 

Finally, he graduates high school. He's old enough to escape and he just leaves. He spends the summer after high school driving around the southwest. He doesn't come back until two days before he's supposed to start college. He's lost a ton of weight. He's very thin. He has long hair. He has a long beard, and he walks into his dorm room at Emory with a machete and a rifle. 

Sarah: Oh, god. 

Blair: Can you imagine being that roommate?

Sarah: He just walked out of the jungle with a rare orchid specimen in his knapsack. 

Blair: Exactly. And then he cleans up for college. He gets good grades, he cuts his hair. A family friend had given him a college fund, in part because she saw the abuse and wanted to give the kids a way out. And he managed this fund himself very well. He didn't use a lot of it. He lived what people called a monkish life, very simple. He didn't have a phone and he seemed to thrive. He majored in history and anthropology. He edited the student paper. This surprised me, maybe it will surprise you. He co-founded the Young Republicans Club in college. 

Sarah: I didn't remember that or didn't know that. But I knew that he had written something that was supportive to some extent of a Reagan policy or was pro Reagan in some way but also college is a time to have terrible ideas and Republicanism is one of them.

Blair: His values, everything we know about his values is that he cared tremendously about Apartheid in South Africa. He talked to his friends about wanting to smuggle weapons into South Africa to help overthrow Apartheid, which I don't think that panned out, but he cared very much about justice. He seems to be doing well in college because to a certain degree, he has escaped. 

And he's worried about his sister, who's younger than him. He wrote her a letter that said the “events that we suffered are so outlandish in their proportion that it is useless to try to explain them to anybody because they will never believe you. They will think you are some kind of freak, some kind of outrageous liar and exaggerator. They will think that you simply couldn't handle the normal conflicts, which all teenagers and their parents go through.” It was an astute observation on his part because sure enough, as more of the story came out people did say that about him.

Sarah: Yeah. God. 

Blair: And he graduated in 1990. His transcript comes out in June. He has it mailed to his parents after that they don't hear from him for a while. When they still haven't heard from him by August. And remember, he doesn't have a phone. They drive out to visit him and they see a ‘for rent’ sign on his apartment. And then they get home again, and they find all the letters that they've mailed him over the summer have been returned because Chris had the post office hold them so that his parents would take quite a while to realize he was missing. He has made himself disappear. 

Sarah: And good work.

Blair: I know. He did it. He did it. He got away. From this point on, his parents don't know anything about what he's up to. He has vanished. Chris McCandless has vanished. He gives himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp. 

Sarah: I always forget and love remembering that he re-christened himself, Alexander Supertramp. It's so great. I love the idea of being a Supertramp. This makes me happy. I also, I know we're going to get to this, but let me just point out that like the ending of Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. Sean Penn, a man who knows nothing of domestic abuse, ends with Chris in a vision hugging his nice, old dad William Hurt and crying, and it's like, mm. Anyway, not to spoil the story, but yeah. I have some notes.

Blair: But he is not hugging his parents and smiling right now, he has gone west, Alexander Supertramp has gone west, and he has a bunch of adventures. He goes to Lake Mead, he drives off the road down a riverbed to camp. He burns his money, makes a little pile of it. Then he gets caught in a flash flood. He abandons his car, he hitchhikes, he goes to Lake Tahoe, Sierra Nevadas. He hikes part of the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail. Famously he paddles a canoe 400 miles down the Colorado River to the Gulf of Mexico. He slips over the border, gets stuck in a swamp, gets saved by some duck hunting guides. This man is living. 

While this is going on, his parents, Walt and Billie, hire a private detective to find him. The detective finds out that Chris has donated all the remainder of his college fund, around $24,000, to Oxfam. Clearly this is when the family knows without a doubt, he didn't want to be found. And the detective keeps trying to track him, but because Chris is always moving, he can never quite catch up. 

He goes to Las Vegas, he goes to Arizona. He works at a McDonald's where he even sets up a bank account at that point under the name Chris McCandless. He's working at different places. When he gets into town, he'll bury his money and then he digs it up again when he leaves.

Sarah: Just like someone in the Bible would do.

Blair: He buries his camera. That doesn't go so well. He works at a grain elevator in North Dakota for a guy named Wayne Westerberg. And here's how Westerberg described him, “He was the hardest worker I'd ever seen. Didn't matter what it was, he would do it. Hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost a moral thing for him. He read a lot, used a lot of big words, sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go onto the next thing.” 

Sarah: I love that. 

Blair: While he's traveling while he's staying in these different places, Chris is making really deep connections with people. There are people who came to love him during this time, to love him like family, and who wanted him to stay with them. He never did. He would always move on. He would touch people's lives and move on. And then he'd send them postcards and he'd stay in touch. 

And the one thing he always talked about during this big journey is going to Alaska. That was his ultimate goal. So while he's doing all these things, working places, traveling, getting stuck in the Gulf of Mexico, all these things, he's thinking about Alaska. He's getting in shape. He's researching and asking people about living off the land. And finally the time has come for him to go north after two years of travel.

Sarah: And can you talk about, I feel like you understand better than a lot of people and have certainly thought a lot more about it, Alaska, as the license plates say, ‘the last frontier’. And what that means in people's ideas of it and their ideas of what role it's going to play in their life and, becoming the person that they want to be.

Blair: Alaska's a symbol. And a lot of places are symbols, but in Alaska, you really see it, it represents different things for different people. It represents freedom, it represents lawlessness, it represents anonymity, starting over. It represents the closest you can get to true wilderness. I'm not saying these things are accurate or not, but this is what it means in the popular imagination. There's a huge phenomenon of people going north, young people going north to confront these things and learn something about themselves along the way. Chris absolutely saw Alaska as a symbol. He was reading The Call of the Wild, which I can say as a musher, as just a highly inaccurate book.

Sarah: If you have one takeaway, please let it be that, and the Call of the Wild is about a domesticated dog, right? He's a fancy dog who went to private college and now he's in Alaska finding himself, you could say.

Blair: It contributes so much to the alpha myth of dogs establishing authority over each other through violence. And in particular, sled dogs doing that, which, I could go on a whole thing that's not actually how they work together. That's not how you become a lead dog by killing the other dogs. This is not a thing, anyway.

Sarah: But business types like to fantasize that's how it works in nature. So they can backstab everyone and have no real relationships and drop dead of a heart attack at 50. 

Blair: Exactly, it's a human fantasy projected onto dogs that then makes people think it has scientific legitimacy. But you know what, we'll give Chris a pass. The most important thing it's doing is giving him a way out of a terrible situation. And the way out is north. It is a clean slate for him. 

So in April 1992, he leaves South Dakota, he catches a ride in a truck hauling sunflower seeds and hitchhikes his way to Alaska. Now this drive from the lower 48 to Alaska follows a route called the Alaska Highway that goes north through the Yukon and then turns west. It is a hard place to hitchhike. It is hard for him. It is hard for anyone. Sarah, you and I have made that drive together. How would you describe it?

Sarah: It's very dramatic. It's a very vulnerable feeling. I think you just feel like you're exposed to the sight of God. 

Blair: You're driving through massive spaces. There are very few resources. To give you an example of this place where he's hitchhiking, and this was obviously in 1992, so I'm talking about 30 years later. My husband and I make this drive a couple times a year because we're dog sledders, so we go up to Alaska. That's where a lot of dog sledding happens. Then we come home to Wisconsin, we go back again, blah, blah, blah. We've picked up hitchhikers on this route. We have hitchhiked on this route when the truck breaks down. It's sometimes a day's drive between hotels. 

And one day we get to this hotel that we've planned, we haven't seen anyone in so many hours. Not a gas station, nothing. If your car breaks down, you are just going to be stuck there for quite a while. We get to this hotel, we go in, we're like, we need a room. We've stayed there before. And there's nothing else for hours in every direction. And there's some people at the hotel. It's cold in the hotel, is what we notice. The people are like, sure, yeah, you can have a room you can pay in the morning. And they tell us which room to go to. It's unlocked. There's no lock in the door, there's no key or whatever. And it's really cold in the hotel room. It's very cold. It's practically as cold as outside. Their heating must be broken or something. But we just get our sleeping bags, and we sleep on top of the bed. And the plumbing isn't working, but this is all predictable, right? Things break a lot up there. 

And in the morning, we come down and we're hoping there's some sort of breakfast. And we're cold because it's below freezing in our room. And the same people are sitting around in the common area of the hotel. And they're like, “Yeah, so here's this notebook, just write your credit card number in the notebook in order to pay.” And we open the notebook and it's just like a bunch of people have written their credit card numbers in the notebook. And we're like, you know what, we're going to give you cash. And so we give them cash, we keep driving. We don't think about it anymore. A year later, we made that same drive. We plan to stay at that same hotel. We got into the hotel, it's warm, and all the lights were on. It's a totally different vibe. And we're like, what happened last year? You're refurbished or something. And the owners are like, oh no, we were closed last year.

Sarah: This hotel has been dead for 30 years. 

Blair:  And we're like, no one year ago this week we stayed here, and we paid, and we stayed in a room and your heat was broken. And it turns out the hotel had been closed down. There were just squatters in the living room taking people's credit cards and sending them to random rooms because they knew they wouldn't be caught. 

Sarah: Yeah. And which is like expert level, right? Because an amateur like me would just huddle up and be like, this is mine now. But no, you got to make a profit. 

Blair: Resourcefulness. So this is what the Alaska Highway is like. They probably never got caught.

Sarah: Oh yeah, it’s lawless. There's hardly anyone on it and everyone is a character. So I'm honestly happy for Chris that he got to have so much life, and that seems like part of it.

Blair: For sure. And he eventually makes it up. He makes it up to Fairbanks. Now, when he makes it to Fairbanks, he spends a couple days there. He's mainly at the university. He's looking at books. He buys a field guide to plants, and he buys a used gun, a 22-caliber rifle in a parking lot for $125. 

Then he hitchhikes out of town. He gets picked up by a guy named Jim Gallien. And Chris tells Jim he's from South Dakota and that his plan is to live off the land for a while. He has a backpack that's not very big, 25 pounds, a day pack, and a significant portion of the weight is books. 

Sarah: So, what I carry in a tote basically most of the time. Yeah. 

Blair: Yeah. It's like your tote bag. He has a rifle. This rifle is not very big. Like 22-caliber. This is not a big gun. He also has really shitty hiking boots. He has no snowshoes. He has no compass. The driver, Jim, who picked him up is worried about the dude. He's very nice. He actually offers to drive Chris to Anchorage and buy him adequate equipment, which Chris staunchly refuses. But he does agree to take a pair of old extra tufts, which are, if you don't know extra tufts, they're like the classic Alaskan boot. They're neoprene, I think, rubber rain boots. But they're very tough, so at least he has something waterproof for his feet. Chris gets dropped off near something called the Stampede Trail, and he walks into the wild. 

On his second day, he reaches the Teklanika River, which has ice all along its banks. I had trouble figuring out how to pronounce this river. Just so you know, I ended up calling multiple Alaskans and they said ‘Teklanika’ so we're going with that. Even though the internet sometimes says otherwise. 

Sarah: You know what, the internet says a lot of things is what I've noticed about it. 

Blair: That's true. We're going with the Alaskans. So the Teklanika River, probably thigh deep. It's not easy if you have forwarded a thigh deep, fast moving river, that's treacherous. But Chris gets through it. He forwards the river, and he keeps going.  

Sarah: Yeah. And also, if it's April, I assume that water is pretty frigid. 

Blair: Oh yeah. Everything is frigid. 

Sarah: It was snowing like the other day. 

Blair: Eventually Chris finds a bus in the wilderness. Now the bus, it's there because it's a remnant of an old construction project from the 1960s that was abandoned. And it got left behind as a shelter cabin. And a shelter cabin is basically a very simple cabin in the wilderness where anyone can stay. It's unlocked if they need a place to sleep, if they need a shelter that'll save their lives in a storm. I've stayed in a bunch of these in the wilderness. They're not usually buses, but they vary dramatically from super dilapidated shacks to super cozy log cabins. 

Sometimes they go months or longer without anyone stopping by and sometimes a bunch of people will be there on the same day. And there's an etiquette. You want to leave kindling for the next person if you use all the firewood. You don't want to leave it empty, you want to bring in more kindling. Or if you have extra food in a can or something, you might leave it there. So I hope for Chris that there was some stuff in the cabin, but it is a shelter. 

So he writes this inside the bus, capital letters, “TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTE. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALL NOT RETURN BECAUSE THE WEST IS THE BEST. AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE GREATEST ADVENTURE, A CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN, AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION. DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING, BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION, HE FLEAS AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAST TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD, ALEXANDER SUPTERTRAMP, May, 1992.” 

Sarah: I have so many thoughts.

Blair: He's grandiose. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. I love that this is a combination of him describing himself as a Christ figure, not as a prophet, but in his own life. And also using the lyrics to ‘King of the Road’, a classic song. And also the Doors lyrics.

Blair: Wait, there's the Doors lyrics? 

Sarah: Kind of, because ‘West is the best’, I think that was an old car ad from the fifties and sixties. And then like it turns up in, I think the End by the Doors, one of the rambly, talk-singy sort of Jim Morrison, American poet songs. I fucking love the Doors. And the way I feel about this is I think based on the fact that part of me was, and still is an intense teenage boy, and I have done the thing of being like, I am free, I'm getting away from codependency by living on the road and being a tumbleweed blowing in the wind like Jack Dawson.

Blair: I feel like when you came to Alaska with us, you were doing your Chris McCandless. 

Sarah: I was. Exactly. So it's like, how hard can I be on the guy? What's the point of that? I remember in the past being really struck by, I haven't thought of it in a long time, but this idea of him killing the false being within. And really that resonated with me and my read of it and who knows what he meant specifically, but my sense of it is just that any kind of trauma, familial trauma, difficulty in your relationships as you're growing up, I think that can leave you feeling like you don't know who you are. I also understand very deeply the appeal of believing that you can find your true self only through adventuring when in fact, I think that adventures arguably work better as an adjunct to therapy for some of us.

Blair: There's a balance. 

Sarah: There's a balance. You need adventure in one hand, and I don't know, other stuff in another. I don't know what, but I'm really, I'm fully speaking to my younger self here is, I think all of us do about Chris McCandless. But I feel like I so rightly or wrongly see myself in the idea that I will fix myself through this journey that I'm taking and through experiencing the world. And I will find myself out there and I will be freed from the pain of these ties that have been with me throughout my life and really that is part of it, and that draws real. And I think that the need for experience and to challenge yourself and push yourself is so important. But also that, I don't know, you can also do really important work on yourself by living in great physical comfort. And by having routines and going to Costco, you can do both. And Blair, as you know, when you have adventures, you do have to go to Costco a lot. 

Blair: Yeah. Costco's really good for adventures actually. 

Sarah: It's so true. But yes, we're rooting for the guy. 

Blair: We have his journals from his time in the wilderness. They're not necessarily long, but we know that he misses some ducks. He kills a grouse, and he eats it. He kills a squirrel, and he eats it. He is getting better at hunting with his 22. 

Sarah: Has he hunted before this or is he just, in classic Chris fashion, like I'll figure it out.

Blair: I'm not sure. I know he's been training for this trip north, so I imagine he's been training.

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like he's probably shot at least a lot of Coke cans if he's able to even get a grouse at all.

Blair: That would be my hunch. So he's getting better at hunting small game, and his original plan was to travel through the bush. So he leaves the bus. This is not effective because actually the best time to travel in Alaska through the wilderness is in winter, over snow. 

Sarah: Being pulled by dogs, arguably. 

Blair: Yes, arguably being pulled by dogs. And now as the ground is thawing, it's just turning into muck, it's saturated, it's wet, it's hard to move. There are mosquitoes. He only makes it 15 miles and then he goes back to the bus and stays there. And he stays there. He explores the area. He's getting better at hunting. 

Sarah: I think it's impressive that he could find it again, honestly. The way people talk about Chris McCandless reminds me of the way we feel when we watch figure skating where suddenly everyone in America becomes very critical of someone doing something they could never do in their whole life. Ah, stepped outta that triple toe loop. 

Blair: God, triple Flex.

Sarah: But I feel like we're the kind of narrative to this point, there has been a strong faction of he didn't know what he was doing, and he should have known more about what he was doing and it's like, he knew at least more than the average person I think about how to accomplish this. I am positive I would not get that far. 

Blair: No, I'm also positive you wouldn't, I don't think I would. This is difficult. Very few people have done what he has done up to this point. More than a month has gone by. That's an incredibly long time to live off the land with as few things as he brought, particularly if he didn't grow up doing it. So this is very accomplished. 

Famously he kills a moose. And he's very excited. He spends six days trying to preserve it. He should probably have dried it, cut it into strips and dried it. He tries to smoke it. It's a disaster. The meat spoils. It's full of maggots. He wrote, “maggots already, smoking appears ineffective, don't know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the biggest tragedies of my life. It's a colossal waste.” But apart from the moose, his journey and his experiment have gone relatively well. And after two months of doing this incredibly hard thing, he decides his journey is complete. 

On July 3rd, he leaves the bus to hike back up to the road. However, when he reaches the river that he crossed, the water is much, much higher than it was. It's raging. It was probably thigh deep before. Which remember, was already not treacherous but the volume has now increased 10 times over from snow melts. It's not crossable, you would die. It turns into rapids. Chris is afraid of water. But even if he weren't, this is not a crossable river.

Sarah: It says everything about him. I think that he's self admittedly afraid of water, and yet also canoed for 400 miles. And that this is like a type of person that we are all, hopefully know at least one person who's like this, who runs directly as fast as possible into the thing that they most fear. 

Blair: Yeah, absolutely he does. He does not know that if he had gone up river, he probably would've found a place he could cross. This is probably an example of inexperience because I think most people who have spent a lot of time in the back country would think to follow the river up and downstream to look for a crossable place, but he does not do that. And instead he turns around and he goes back to the bus, presumably hoping that if he waits the water level will go down. And he writes in his journal, “lonely, scared.” 

So now he is not really here by choice anymore. Something has shifted. On July 30th, he wrote in his journal, “Extremely weak. Fault of pot seed”, short for potato. “Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy.” This is the first sign that something is really going wrong. There's a note on the door that he leaves. “SOS, 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. Chris McCandless August?” And I think it's interesting that he returns to Chris McCandless at this point.

Sarah: I've always been struck by the fact that he wrote ‘Shall return later this evening’. It's such a polite way to send an SOS. And what do you think about him, him signing his name as Chris again?

Blair: I don't know what to make of it. But I think it means something. 

Sarah: I feel like that's the fairest attempt you can make at history is to say, I think it means something. I don't know what. But we don't have the ability to know. I feel like it's trying to draw more of a conclusion than you have the ability to get to. And specifically the idea that you can't tell a story unless you can say like, why did he do that? And I think that's not true. I think that we can allow people both in our lives and in the stories that we tell and hear, they deserve to have areas of themselves that we accept that we don't understand.

Blair: I guess what I hope it means is that we know he went out there and he changed his name because there was something broken in Chris McCandless. My hope is that this journey healed, that broken thing that he set out to fix and to learn about, and he was able to return to Chris McCandless. The last words he wrote in his journal were on August 12th. He wrote, “beautiful blueberries” and he also wrote notes elsewhere. He wrote, “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye, and may God bless all.” And he wrote, “Happiness only Real when shared.” 

Sarah: When did you first encounter these words and how did you feel about them then? 

Blair: It might have been required reading in high school. In figures like this, I was thinking a little bit about Anne Frank when I was reading about Chris. In the sense that they're very different situations, obviously very different narratives that were left behind, very different intentions. But I feel like they've both had an iconic line emerge that is treated as wisdom because they died.

Sarah: And as their concluding thought, their concluding thesis statement of their whole life in a way. 

Blair: Yes. It's treated as their thesis statement of a life that ended too soon. So for Chris, it's “happiness only real when shared”. For Anne Frank, it's, “I still believe in spite of it all that people are truly good at heart”, or something similar to that. 

Sarah: This is like the make Sarah cry episode. 

Blair: She wrote that before she was murdered. I don't know if she would still write that at the time she died, but she wrote it at one point. And I actually think it's weird that sort of has emerged as her story, because I think-

Sarah:  It is weird. Is that the concluding thesis of the Holocaust? that people are good at heart?

Blair: I feel like that sentence emerged as the moral of the Anne Frank story in order to make gentiles reading about Anne Frank feel better about themselves. But I digress. 

Sarah: I feel like I've spent a lot of time thinking about diaries as a literary form and as a form of history. And that's something that's always fascinated me because like I was someone who spent a lot of time in grad school writing about Pamela, which is a very boring book, but it's a diary book, and that diaries are sort of something that we like to imagine is just the unmediated truth telling of a human soul. But in fact, I think we arrive at truth by thinking a lot by kind of processing through writing and by using writing as a way to refine and explore and put words to how we feel, not to just transcribe what's ambiently happening inside of us. 

Blair: It's interesting to think about Chris's diary because it was not necessarily created as a literary work. It seems like these are just notes he left for himself. And that means there's a lot of open space to project things onto. 

Sarah: And boy have we.

Blair: Early September. Moose season opens. So multiple hunters actually arrive at the bus on the same day, even though nobody has been there all summer. A couple from Anchorage finds the note on the door. And they are too upset to go inside. 

Sarah: Reasonable. 

Blair: But another guy shows up and he goes inside, he finds Chris's body. He's in his sleeping bag. An investigation finds there's no signs of significant internal injuries. There are no broken bones, but he has basically no fat left and his remains weighed 67 pounds.

Sarah: Oh God. What is his height? 

Blair: I am not sure, but some people have speculated that he did the things he did because he was short.

Sarah: I don't think that's why. 

Blair: I’m going to Google it right now. He was 5’6”, which isn't that short. Now, state troopers didn't immediately know who Chris was when they found his body. So stories started appearing in the news about a mystery hiker who had died in the wilderness. It was in the New York Times. It was in the more local news, the Anchorage Daily News. And Jim Gallien, who was the guy who had picked up Chris on his trip out of Fairbanks, saw the news, called the Troopers and said, “I think I picked that guy up.” And he helped them find more information about him. 

Carine, Chris's sister, flew out to Fairbanks to identify the remains. And she's talked about on the flight home how she felt compelled to eat every single thing that was in front of her because she couldn't stand the thought that he had starved to death. She wrote, “I wanted to fly across the country and discovered that it was a colossal mistake, or perhaps that Chris had succeeded in pulling off a brilliant scheme to finally separate himself once and for all from the oppression of our parents, just like he said he would. There would be a note for me explaining his ingenious plan and how to get in touch with him.” And that would've been a character for him. You see it, you see how that would make sense. 

Shortly after the New York Times piece came out, Outside magazine called John Krakauer, who is just an incredible writer, incredible journalist, incredible outdoors person. He gets assigned this story for Outside. And John Krakauer reaches out to Walt and Billie, Chris's parents, they want to learn everything they can about what Chris has been up to, where he's been. And they give John access to all the documents and photos that were part of Chris’ belongings. 

The story came out in January 1993. It's a very long feature called Death of an Innocent, and it gets more mail than any other story in the magazine's history. It is hugely controversial. A lot of the letter writers are pissed off. They think that John Krakauer is glorifying someone who was knowingly stupid, went into the wilderness without preparation. Someone wrote, “McCandless had already gone over the edge and just happened to hit bottom in Alaska.” 

A writer in the village of Ambler named Nick Jans wrote, “McCandless is hardly unique. There's quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike they're almost a collective cliche. The only difference is McCandless ended up dead with a story of his dumb-assedness splashed across the media.” People are really angry, and some people have a totally different response and are in awe of this guy. 

Sarah: And this is what's so fascinating to me about it all is that in America you can harm someone, and people will debate whether it's a problem, but you can harm yourself and people will be so mad at you.

Blair: If you'd been a murderer there, he would've been glorified and had a lot of podcasts about him. He is getting podcasts about him obviously. But one of the reasons people are upset or one of the reasons they say they're upset is that the hunters who found Chris's body had declared that the moose he'd hunted was actually caribou. So people heard that. It was in the story. They were like, oh my God, this guy knows nothing. What was he doing out there? John Krakauer develops the story further. He's turning it into a book. He dives into even more research. He learns the hunters were wrong. The caribou was a moose. These are moose hunters! They were wrong. Chris was right. So this redeems Chris a little bit. John also connects with Carine, Kris's sister, and she shares Chris’ letters with him and tells him all about their childhood, but she asks that he not include these details in the book. She doesn't want him to write about the horrific abuse that they endured as children because she's still hoping to repair her relationship with her parents.

Sarah: That is like the saddest and most believable thing I've ever heard. 

Blair: She's hopeful. And in fact, when the book comes out, it calls Carine’s relationship with her parents “extremely good”. And she's hoping it can be. 

Sarah: Yeah. And now that we know the context, it is telling that John Krakauer, a very articulate guy, resorted to “extremely good”. Moving on. 

Blair: Krakauer, he's talked about this wanting to have the suggestion of abuse in the book without making it explicit. And when I read it now, I thought the suggestion was on the faint side, I wouldn't have picked up on it. This sort of holds true for a lot of its readers. They don't pick up on these undercurrents of abuse. And when the book becomes a bestseller, people get mad at Chris for abandoning his parents. A common theme in the response is, I feel sorry for his parents. I don't feel sorry for him. He was selfish. 

Sarah: Which is a really interesting part of this whole national conversation, which I feel like we're really in the thick of, in an exciting way of, legitimizing the reality and the many faces of abuse and familial abuse. Your parents not deserving the relationship that they perhaps want to have with you or that society is telling you that you are duty bound to have with them. Ryan Ken talked about this a lot and You are a Good episode we did recently about Moonlight, but  this feels like such a part of it is the idea that the worst thing you can do is reject your parents' love and even this idea, I feel like implicit in it, that there's something unnatural about it. Do you get that? 

Blair: Oh, it breaks a commandment. Yeah.

Sarah: I think one of the sort of ways we talk about the American family, whether we know it or not, is that a family, the way we've tended to envision it as a hierarchy with the parents above the children and the patriarch at the top of everything, and that, society as we've built it in America, is run on the idea that we'll have kind of an overarching patriarchy in place that is represented individually in the family. And I suspect that this idea of too many divorces, too many single moms, is based partly on the idea that we can't have all these women and children going rogue without men to tell them what to do. Because part of the argument is that we always frame it as that they don't have as many resources as households with two parents or with a present father. And it's like, yeah, it's too bad that you're the government and can't help them with that.

Blair: If only someone has the power. 

Sarah: But yeah, that feels very in character with America for people to be very upset about that.

Blair: Yeah, absolutely. And even Chris’ parents seem to really embrace this narrative.

Sarah: They would, wouldn't they.

Blair: That they were wronged, that he was selfish and that they were wronged. Carine later wrote that by asking John not to include the details of the abuse in Into the Wild quote, “I had allowed the opportunity for my parents to use John's book as their new Bible. If it wasn't in there, it didn't happen.”

Sarah: Wow. And then you have this outside figure legitimizing the narrative that you want to tell yourself and everybody else. And again, it makes total sense to me that you would keep those details out. And I don't know, it feels like it's a human right to have a relationship with your parents. It makes sense to expect that and to want to try and get that however you can, but that's so awful. 

Blair: Yeah. Now a lot of the discussion, the continuing discussion, the reason that the story has remained relevant is because there has been so much debate about why and how Chris died. And that debate has changed over time. We've had changes in our understanding of the science, mostly because of John Krakauer's research. Now ongoing research. Originally there was a theory that Chris died because he confused the wild potato with the wild sweet pea, which looks similar and is poisonous. Remember he wrote in his journal, “extremely weak fault of wild potato seeds.” 

This is our clue, and this plant mix up is the explanation that's shown in the 2007 movie that comes out about Chris. Which by the way does include more details about the abuse. Now, John Krakauer had a very strong hunch that Chris had not mixed up the plants. That when he'd written “fault of wild potato seeds” in his journal, he knew what he was talking about. The problem was the wild potato seeds. It wasn't that he had been ignorant and mixed up the plants. And John had a theory that there was a toxic alkaloid in the seeds. And after the first edition of the book came out in 1996, a University of Alaska Chemical Analysis of the wild potato seeds, John gathered them, the same ones he'd been eating.

Sarah: Boy, that's some good writing.

Blair: It is. It's incredible research. And just to say all these details about where Chris went and the people he met and the people he talked to, these were all tracked down by John Krakauer. It is his research, it is his work that brings us this story. 

Sarah: And just as a quick sidebar too, John Krakeauer is also the author of Into Thin Air, right? He has two “into” books.  And that is an amazing book that is also the result of a magazine being able to be like, yeah, we're sending you up to climb Mount Everest. It's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Go write a story. 

Blair: That was a magazine assignment? 

Sarah: Yes. But this is the result of there being institutional support for journalism. We know so many of the things we know about each other that help us understand what it means to be human because somebody was able to put an immense amount of time, an immense amount of muscle into figuring all this out. 

Blair: Yeah. Outside is one of the magazines that continues to do very good journalism. Even as everyone's budgets are getting so, so tight. But I don't know if they're sending people up Everest at the moment.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean that should be the goal, certainly. 

Blair: So after the first edition of the book came out, the chemical analysis revealed that the wild potato seeds were completely safe. Totally safe. That they were not the problem. John did not let this go. He developed a new theory. This theory was included in the 2007 edition of Into the Wild, that there was a toxic mold growing on the seeds. That the problem wasn't the seeds themselves, but that they'd been stored in a bag. It was maybe a little damp, and there was a mold that had grown on them that was toxic. This theory also gets debunked. There isn't really a lot of evidence to support it. 

Sarah: It's a nice try. 

Blair: It's a good try. In 2013, a writer named Ronald Hamilton wrote an essay with a whole new theory. Ronald Hamilton had read about an experiment at a Nazi concentration camp where Jewish prisoners were fed bread made from the seeds of the grass pea which is toxic. They had developed a condition called lathyrism which leads to weakness and eventually paralysis because they were consuming a substance called ‘odap’. 

Odap, which was in this grass pea, causes this condition, lathyrism, but it is known to be worse for men between the ages of 15 and 25 who have been eating a very limited diet, while being very physically active. This is sounding like Chris McCandless. John Krakauer learns of this theory. He sends the wild potato seeds to a lab to have them evaluated for odap. The lab found odap, they found 0.394% odap by weight, which is enough to be toxic. So Krakauer wrote this up for the New Yorker, big breakthrough. He receives criticism for not having the research peer reviewed. So he pursues further analysis and he's paying for this himself. This is not cheap research.

Sarah:  This is why you get your books to sell in airports so you can then remain completely obsessed with the topic of one of them and keep doing science about it. 

Blair: I think it wasn't about the science. It's because the discussion of why he died had become a proxy for whether he deserved it or not. If he had been poisoned by the wild potato seed as he wrote in his journal, which is a plant that his book said was safe, then it would not be his fault. And if he had mixed up plants, then he would somehow have had it coming. 

Sarah: I feel so strongly that's like our little, terrified, small creature in the night brain trying to rationalize how I would never die in the wilderness. And it's like yes, you would. 

Blair: We're all going to die either in the wilderness or in civilization. No one's immune.  

Sarah: I know. It's don't you want to die somewhere scenic? Because at the heart of this, I feel like there's really a response of, oh, what an idiot to go around dying. I would never die. That's just dumb. And it's like, oh, I have news.

Blair: Nobody's like, oh, someone got hit by a car. Clearly, they had it coming for crossing the street.  

Sarah: Well in LA they say that. 

Blair: This research indicates, in fact, odap is not in the seeds. Instead there's a substance with the same molecular mass, something structurally similar to odap. What is this? It's still very mysterious. Krakauer goes back to the scientific literature. He found a study from 1960 about a toxic amino acid called L-canavanine. That would match this criteria of being structurally similar. The seeds were evaluated for L-canavanine. It was confirmed that they contained 1.2% L-canavanine by weight, which would absolutely have led to serious symptoms including progressive weakness. 

This conclusion was published with a group of scientists in October 2014 in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. It is peer reviewed. Krakauer wrote in the, afterwards to a recent edition, “had McCandless's guidebook to edible plants warned that H. alpinum seeds contained a highly toxic secondary plant constituent, as L-canavanine is described in the scientific literature, he probably would've walked out of the wild in late August with no more difficulty than when he walked into it in April and would still be alive today. If that were the case, Chris McCandless would now be 46 years old.” And that was written in 2015. He'd now be 52. 

Sarah: And so the premise here is that he was weakened and therefore if he'd found it easier to like forage and hunt for himself during that time then he would've maintained his strength and would've been able to leave.

Blair: I think by weakened, when we're talking about weakened by poison, we're not talking about oh, he's tired. We're talking about his muscles are not working. People cannot walk, they crawl, or they drag themselves along. This is very significant. Weakness. It's not oh, your muscles are sore.

Sarah: I had a moment just earlier today, because I'm in California where it delights me that there's nasturtium in winter. And I grabbed nasturtium leaf as I walked by and ate it because nasturtium leaves are delicious. And then I was like, wait a minute. I was suddenly possessed by doubt about this thing, this plant that I look at like most days of my life and recognize like the back of my hand. I was like, was that? What if it's a varietal that makes you drop dead? But I appear to be fine. And just I don't know, I think plant identification is, I feel like something that if you don't know anything about it, you can imagine that it's easy. But it, as far as I can tell, is devilishly complicated.

Blair: The people I know who have the most humility about plant identification are the experts. There are still articles coming out with new information about him with some frequency. Journalists, including Eva Holland, who's amazing, Matt Power have covered the phenomenon of people making pilgrimages to the bus. Eva Holland wrote in Outside that in one summer alone, a dozen people not just went out there but needed rescue, got into trouble out there. These pilgrims to Chris’ bus. 

And finally in the summer of 2020 the bus was removed from the wilderness to become part of an exhibit at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks. There are many interesting things, but even as the story has evolved over the decades, it still evokes these same strong reactions. People compare Chris to Thoreau, compare him to Jesus. If you look up Chris McCandless on TikTok, there's just hugely popular TikToks of people being like, “Someday I'm just going to pull a…” and  then just a picture of Chris McCandless comes up. People fantasizing about him. 

And then teenagers 15 years ago were fantasizing about being like Chris McCandless. Teenagers now are fantasizing about it. And then there's people who are very vocal about hating Chris. And these people are mostly Alaskans. I think it's interesting that two people who have written very negatively about him are Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian and Alaskan journalist Craig Medred, who calls Chris a “suicidal narcissist, bum, thief, and poacher.”

Sarah: Wow. 

Blair: Both of these people are men who live in Alaska as adults, but are not from there originally. This sort of matches with my experience in Alaska. When I've been up there, I've spent quite a bit of time there, but I'm certainly not Alaskan. I am often told I don't belong, or I can't handle the bush, or I'm not tough enough, or all sorts of things. And the people who tell me that are only ever people who have been in Alaska slightly longer than I have. People who are born in Alaska never ever say those things to me. They're just like, welcome. Let me know if you need to borrow a meat saw. 

Sarah: Have some coffee. 

Blair: Yeah, exactly. So I think there's something here with Chris too, that the things we hate often reflect our own insecurities. And the people who hate Chris the most are people who are trying to prove they're not like him. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's like, oh, I hate gentrifiers. 

Blair: But I understand the Alaskan frustration with Chris also because I think it's terrible to have something real and challenging and big in your life, in this case, Alaska and Alaskan wilderness and see other people flattening it into a symbol. And Chris did see Alaska as a symbol. He loved Call of the Wild. He had an idea of Alaska and what Alaska would do for him. And that was a flattened idea of what Alaska is because he hadn't had a chance to learn about it in depth yet. 

And that's really frustrating if you're Alaskan, to have people just constantly treating your home as a symbol and have this guy be glorified for it. But I would argue that the people who hate Chris for this reason are turning him into a symbol and they're just seeing him as representative of everyone who's ever underestimated the wilderness, ever gone into it unprepared. They're flattening him just as much as he was flattening their home.

Sarah: Totally. And it seems like at least a sizable contingent of the people who feel that way about him are also seeing Alaska as a symbol. And it feels like maybe there's even an element of see, Alaska likes me, and it's like, she does not like you.

Blair: And then there's the practical concern, which is that Alaskans are really tired of having to rescue these people.

Sarah: Fair. I would be also. I don't like it when I have to pick up a package from somewhere. I just find it so interesting the fact that he's so divisive. That there are people whose goat he just gets in a way that murderers, and genociders, and rapists don't get, that they're, what is it?

Blair: He's like the classic campfire conversation in the sense that just like you with your students, if the conversation lags, you say, Chris McCandless and everyone will talk for a long time. But none of it's really about him. People who hate him, it's not really about him. It's about hating, something they don't like in themselves or hating the responsibility they feel they end up being forced to take for people who underestimate wilderness. I think that for people loving Chris, it is about him, but it's also about ourselves. It's about our ideas of wilderness, our ideas of Alaska, our ideas about whether it's possible to start over and leave deep problems and struggles behind. Is there still a place in this world where we can be new again?  

Sarah: I think one of the things that really bothers me about it is that it feels to me like, I don't know, I'm old enough to say he's not a role model, but who is? He's someone who many of us have emulated in one way or another in our lives or wanted to emulate, and that I think maybe he's compelling because he's just an example of a human soul struggling very earnestly with the baggage that it has been given in this lifetime. 

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. And I feel like this to me is so clearly a story of someone trying to do that and dying tragically in the process and I feel like it's sad that he died. And I wish that he hadn't, and I do wish that he had brought more Quest bars or whatever, but whatever. That's not the point. 

Blair: There are ways to start your life over. It's possible. There are ways to end your life as you know it, that don't involve dying, that don't involve accidentally poisoning yourself with potato seeds, but still can give you a life that looks very different from how it does now and far more beautiful.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for joining us for the Chris McCandless story. Thank you so much to Blair Braverman for co-hosting. If you want to get more of her work, you can listen to her other episodes with us, or you can read her book, Small Game. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing and editing this episode. If you want to come see one of our live shows, there's a link to information for you in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being out here in the world. We'll see you next time.