Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer. 1996. Anchor. 231 pages. [Source: Public Library].
I’ve been dancing around Into the Wild for nearly 20 years. I was introduced to Jon Krakauer in 2000 with his recounting of a disastrous trek up Mount Everest, Into Thin Air. I was fascinated and traumatized by it. *shrug* For just as many years, I’d been seeing Into the Wild on various book lists and finally took the plunge.
Luckily, I didn’t find myself sobbing while reading this book. Instead, I traded it for a latent sense of sorrow. Reading this felt odd because it comes with a spoiler — Chris McCandless is dead. He dies alone in the woods of Alaska, and isn’t found for several weeks. It seems a particularly tragic and anticlimactic ending for someone who set out into the woods with an almost inspirational zeal for what would come next in his life.
The bulk of the book, for me at least, was spent hoping to get answers to all my knee-jerk questions. Why’d he go into the Alaskan wilderness with little to nothing in the way of supplies? What happened in the woods that killed him — was it really that treacherous or did youthful hubris play a part? How could this have been prevented? How has his family coped with his loss?
It goes without saying that it’s an emotional and reflective read. Krakauer’s use of quotes to open every chapter — some of which come from the last books McCandless read before his death — helps frame the journey. Most of them are from other authors who extolled the value and brilliance of nature or rebuked social life (The Call of the Wild comes up often). Through the journals he left behind, the reader learns what McCandless’ experienced during his trek. It’s clear from reading that Krakauer finds something of a kindred spirit in McCandless; he’s much less reluctant to write him off as foolish and/or reckless while others seem not to understand his motives.
Aside from McCandless’ story, I found it interesting to read about the Alaskan wilderness. The Google Earth app was by my side the entire time, letting me get a close-up view of where McCandless spent his last months of life, which paired well with the rich descriptions given by Krakauer.
What happened to Chris McCandless was certainly shocking, and this book lends more mystique to his story. It provides a fair and sensitive examination of McCandless that tries to piece together the pieces of his story, but doesn’t sugarcoat the myriad ways it could have ended differently. It absolutely gets my recommendation.
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