How Chris McCandless Died
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote:
"When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament [... ] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.[11]"
Sherry Simpson, writing in the Anchorage Press, described her trip to the bus with a friend, and their reaction upon reading the comments that tourists had left lauding McCandless as an insightful, Thoreau-like figure:
"Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the "he had a death wish" camp because I don't know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the "what a dumb--" territory, tempered by brief alliances with the "he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest" partisans. Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero[13]"
"Adventure is just bad planning." - Roald Amundsen
For that, I think I'd look to Norman Maclean's _Young Men and Fire_ where he talks about smoke jumpers:
"It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling...
"For many former Smokejumpers, then, smokejumping is not closely tied up with their [eventual] way of life, but is more something that is necessary for them to pass through and not around and, once it is unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The 'it' is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the 'business of the world,' which isn't all that special or hard but takes time. This 'it' is the something special within that demands we do something special, and 'it' could be within a lot of us."
If people here are reading this and haven't already realized some parallels between not just McCandless and smokejumpers but also entrepreneurs I'd be surprised.
Now, you can draw distinctions between McCandless and smokejumpers, too: the later train and drill and prepare, probably as well as Amundsen could be satisfied with. And their work has a practical end. But their work is still an adventure because they also operate in an area of high risk, and as a result they sometimes pay a high cost.
And they don't do this job for entirely practical reasons. They do it because they have a need for an internal narrative that settles certain things and establishes a kind of identity, they do it because they need something off the beaten track for middle class success.
McCandless was clearly looking for that. I think it's fair to ask if he'd been a little less romantic about it and a little more thoughtful whether he might have had both his survival adventure and his survival.
Then again, unless you're Batman or some other protagonist whose superpower is acute anticipation by authorial fiat, it's mitigated by the limits of the best laid plans.
When best laid plans fail they are forgiven because there were at least plans.
As far as I know, Roald Amundsen was not affiliated with any military. Ironically he died while trying to rescue other, less competent, explorers.
I do recognize a degree of courage in a young man going into the wild to heal the angst and alienation plaguing his soul. Yet I bristle at the suggestion such is automatically heroic or independent thinking, and (implicitly or explicitly) the less wounded amongst us can be dismissed as "sheep", as some admirers have done in this discussion.
I am sorry, but I see no evidence that McCandless ever had a single original thought in his head. He never completed the "hero's journey" in either the literary or practical sense -- he failed to achieve enlightenment and return with his boon, to help himself and/or others. He failed. He may have had some courage to admire, but he ultimately failed when it came to the big important stuff.
McCandless was an adolescent in a man's body -- he was not proven capable of handling adult responsibilities. That is not necessarily a negative in itself -- we are where we are in life, and being honest about it and doing something about it is a fine thing. But I am not going to be patient with people lecturing genuine adults about how this adolescent has deep insights into life. Sorry, but that is just wishful thinking by people who mistake ignorance and low intellectual standards for originality.
Who is "deriding them for not being independent thinkers?" Maybe others who go on quests are independent in their own way, none of the comments here are trying to say one way or the other. What the comment DOES imply though, is that there are a lot of people who don't try anything like that at all, no matter the level of preparation.
The nobel part is that he actually left everything behind while most of us are drowning into urban life.
He wasnt a hero in traditional sense of 'saving, helping' other people. He is a hero who had what it takes to leave society behind while we cannot let go of smallest of things.
Please, at least agree with me that what he did was daring. So damn daring that makes him a hero to me.
What struck me most powerfully was that he did actually discover the meaning of life (or at least one aspect of it) when he says "happiness only real when shared". So it appears that he did actually figure out how to have a meaningful life, but unfortunately never actually got to put it into practice. That is the saddest part of the whole story for me.
You make it look like its a sin to live in a city.
The conclusion is that he died from a specific set of circumstances that few people knew were deadly. I think that directly counters the notion that he "he had no respect for the challenge" because I believe people arrive at that conclusion backwards: he died doing it, so he must have been foolhardy.
Yeah, I can. Most of us can. 'Sheep' is such an over-used term that covers so much. Getting a full time job for a company doesn't make your a 'sheep', you can still leave a happy and meaningful life. People say (though I have no personal experience) that having children is the most meaningful thing you can do in your life. If you do, maybe nothing else matters?
The point is, it's ironic to me that you're deriding all the "BS in modern society". To me, the biggest load of BS in modern society is this first world preoccupation with "meaning", "purpose" and all that other junk.
The vast majority of people out there don't even have the time to stop and think about these things. None of us can judge what McCandless did with his life because none of us are him and know how he felt as he was dying. But if I was him, I would have regrets.
Like Chris McCandless's one that resulted in death? Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely. I'm not qualified to judge whether depression and dietary diseases are better than death, but I think it's at least worth debating.
And few people pursue material gains for the purpose of simply having them. Like I said, for a great many people in the world, being a parent is hugely meaningful. It leads them to pursue material gains in order to provide for their children and watch them grow in comfort. That does not make them 'sheep'.
If they are then everyone is a sheep. You are an "anti-'sheep'" sheep.
I would highly debate it's few. There's a reason AdBusters struck such a nerve.
You can still respect the attempt, consider the ideals, and identify specific mistakes (which most of his intellectually stunted detractors fail to do).
What is so wrong with that?
>>The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases
Do you think poor people don't fall ill? Or that when they fall ill they don't need pay hospital bills?
>> There are more meaningful pursuits.
Like? Care to give examples?
People consume more when they are filling a void and it consumes them exacerbating their problems.
Fitting in with society is good in some ways and bad in others.
Here are some concrete examples of situations when it's bad to be a sheep:
- in my home country (Northern Ireland) people tend to vote for one of the two sectarian parties. In the 2010 election only 7% of people votes for non-sectarian parties. The problem is that the sectarian parties are supporting violence, intolerance and ignorance (some directly, others indrectly). Most people (over 90% in this case) are sheep, so they simply vote whichever tribe they were brought up in, even though it is tearing apart their society.
- Recently I was chatting to the directors of a local club who had perpetrated a scam (or "loophole" as they called it) to avoid paying a few thousand dollars in sales tax. I'm pretty sure the scheme is illegal, and the treasurer just resigned because of it. The previous president also thinks it is illegal. Anyway, when I was chatting to these guys they were saying how well democracy works because 67 people voted for this scheme and only 3 voted against.
For more example have a look at the second Iraq war, healthcare in the USA (and partisanship in US politics in general), the housing boom, not to mention silicon valley with its "me too" VCs investing in a raftload of crappy startups that aren't doing anything original.
Chris unfortunately died before he had a chance to really live his life - he was still trying to figure things out and discover his purpose in life. However if he had lived I think it is quite likely he would have made some great achievements.
The flock itself has value; you don't have live with someone else, but as jusben1369 points out, if he'd so much as broken his leg falling down the steps of the bus he'd have ended up just as dead. Regular contact with a neighbor would have saved him, but he had no reserves and no margin for error.
People from my home state think California is an awful place. I moved here for work and couldn't imagine living anywhere else--imagine if I'd of took their word.
Hmm, yes.
Aside from that, what is your point? Did you even bother to read the article, which despite mentioning this detraction, has nothing to do with it? Or were you just looking for easy upvotes?
In fact, it invalidates those criticisms against McCandless.
Did you actually read the article? That's not what it says. It suggests he became paralyzed by a neurotoxin, an event which no one could have foreseen at the time. Having a map wouldn't have cured his paralysis. I'm not even convinced he was lost.
Yes, had he not eaten the seeds, he (possibly) would still be alive... but he still would have been an idiot.
Only if you stretch the term "unprepared" beyond what people understand the Park Ranger to mean.
Maybe "less than optimally prepared" for the scope of what he was trying to do, but "unprepared" is not fair. "Unprepared" basically puts him in the same category as people who die from hypothermia because they wear cotton clothes.
Personally, I find the details completely beside the point. McCandless sacrificed everything to test his philosophical conjecture and I have nothing but respect for that. I honestly would've thought there'd be more empathy for it here.
Well, it's point is Christopher McCandless is a celebrity, lets work out how he died.
There is little science going on here, other than using science to work out how celebrity McCandless died.
Image if those scientists used their knowledge for real pressing issues that affect many people.
Not saying scientists should be boring and not allowed to do superficial things like all people. But take it for what it is.
Which is probably why people go back to the bigger picture.
Sounds like this issue isn't that superficial... it has affected a lot of people.
According to the article, McCandless was using a reference book to determine which plants were safe to eat; the book listed wild potato as non-toxic, because it was not yet understood that it contained ODAP. If it had been known, McCandless would not likely have eaten wild potato, would not have been poisoned, and would likely not have died in the way that he did.
I tend to agree with the sentiment although I appreciate the his quest.
As a side note, I can understand how someone gets into a sticky situation in the theme of adventure. A friend's little brother (in his 20s, lot so little) decided to hike the Appalachian Trail this summer. Unfortunately he found out about a month in that he was ill-prepared for the calories it takes to hike the sometimes over 20 miles-per-day and the physical toll as well. He had to quit much earlier than expected.
I think the argument boils whether Chris was unprepared (mentally and equipment-wise) to go into the Alaskan wilderness. If you read "Into the Wild", and the newer "Back to the Wild" book which has entries from his diary and photos from his cameras, I think it's clear Chris was very prepared mentally - he knew exactly what he was trying to do, and he knew exactly how dangerous it was. He spent months working out, climbing mountains with his heavy pack, and researching wild edible berries and game in preparation for what he wanted to do. This shows he had a clear mind going in.
So essentially, he was trying to do something dangerous, with the minimum amount of gear possible.
This is no different from the countless people that attempt to climb Everest or K2 without oxygen and perish in the attempt. Those people are not considered dumb asses. Neither are the countless thousands and thousands that perish getting out there and pushing themselves as best as they can.
A person's level of preparedness for any life adventure is clearly their own choosing. Who are we to say that someone was foolish for attempting to push the boundaries of what they thought they were capable of?
Even worse, if someone were to be the first to summit some mountain or other without oxygen, they would be hailed a hero. If they died, they'd be a dumb ass. The outcome should not have any baring on if they were "prepared enough" or not - only they can make that choice for themselves.
--
As a side note, have you even spent any time in Alaska or with Alaskans? I live up here. If you were to go more than 10 yards from a highway and didn't have a quad, rifle, chainsaw, axe, saw, three pairs of boots, sixteen gloves, spare everything, spare gasoline, 300lb wall tent & stove, sat phone and a spot satellite messenger and you so much as broke a fingernail, Alaskans would very quickly point out you're a complete dumb-ass for being so horribly unprepared. Even worse, you go by yourself.
We're all going to die, you know.
Stats on deaths with/without oxygen: http://faculty.washington.edu/hueyrb/pdfs/jama.pdf
But then we can remove over 7 billion people who have never made a basic mathematical error, as you're right - the ability to do arithmetic is a critical skill in extreme mountaineering.
This leaves us with a world population of 1. It must feel great to be the only inerrant mathematical mountaineer in the world - was that skill learned, or is it innate?
(Mt. Everest's filthy secret: It's a dump http://theweek.com/article/index/244854/mt-everests-filthy-s...)
Interesting article too, thank you for sharing.
I personally think people need to get out there and have their own adventures. For person 1 an adventure might be getting outside their comfort zone and talking to a stranger they find attractive in their apartment building. For person 2 adventure might be doing a 5 mile day-hike in a National Park, where-as for person 3 an adventure might be sailing around the world.
The fact all of those have been done before doesn't diminish the scale of the adventure for the individual, nor does it give us any right to comment on whether we think it's a worthy pursuit or in fact "adventure" at all.
Everybody needs to do what's right for them, with the level of planning and preparedness that's right for them.
Yes, what a noble way to go! Except for the poor saps that have to deal with your mess after you're gone.
The Sherpas are paid to maintain the mountain for the tourists who climb there. Customers negotiate for whatever services the Sherpas are willing to provide. If you want to find injustices you'll have to look deeper than a simple choice to attempt to summit without oxygen.
Folks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Boukreev, who are certainly not dumb-asses, have what seems to be an arguably reasonable viewpoint on supplementary oxygen: It gives you a very false sense of security, and that false sense of security (because of oxygen or whatever) is what really kills people.
Are you implying giving up (or in fact not trying at all) is the best approach?
Are you implying that surviving is more important that reaching the summit?
Wait. Why exactly are they not considered dumb asses? I sure do consider them that.
Other guy climbs a mountain that others have climbed, also unprepared -- hero, pushing the boundaries, expanding humanity's reach. Please...
You're saying he's unprepared because he didn't take every single possible device to aid him (oxygen).
What about all the people that take every single thing possible, spend years and years training, are extremely prepared, and still die anyway.
Are they dumb asses?
Less so. Depending how informed and prepared they are.
Now people can kill themselves if they want to. Certainly only so much can be done to warn or stop them, but it also doesn't make them immune from being called dumb asses.
For example I don't see how knowing the risks and choosing to ignore them while climbing a mountain and getting killed in the process is more noble or worthy of praise than getting drunk and wanting to launch fireworks from your shirt pocket and getting killed in the process.
This. A lone human is many, many times more vulnerable than even a couple. There is a reason why we tend to stick together.
In this particular case, the article seems to be trying to exonerate McCandless because the poison that killed him was unknown at the time. But if he'd gone with someone else, or even organised someone to drop in occasionally, he'd have survived. His loner instinct made his death almost inevitable, dumbass or no.
Interesting aside: given the high price of loner genes, we still have loners. Evolution is an amazing process.
What about Dick Proenneke [0], another notable 'Alaska Loner'. He spent 30 years living 'Alone in the Wilderness'. Albeit in the relative safety of a cabin he'd built and he did have semi-frequency supply drops.
Completely coincidentally, one of my close friends where I now live in the far North was with the girl who tragically drowned trying to cross the Tek River in summer 2010.
Also co-incidentally, just today I gave an interview for someone writing an article on the anniversary of Chris' death. She was at the Tek river a few days ago, and watched three backpackers get swept downstream, luckily without major injury.
It's amazing how this place and Chris' story have impacted so many people's lives. I'm making plans now to go back in the winter/spring, when the river will be frozen and the scenery will be spectacular.
[http://theroadchoseme.com/the-magic-bus]
EDIT/UPDATE: I'll add that there is no doubt in my mind Chris helped me find the courage to quit my Software Engineering job, sell all my stuff and spend 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina. No doubt it was the best decision of my life so far.
My report is: http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap-pt-...
And there are much more up to date reports and costs at http://wikioverland.org/Pan_American_Highway
If you're serious about this kind of travel, http://wikioverland.org has everything you need to know.
I'm interested in your username. Does that indicate your name?
My last name is Grec, and I'm always on the lookout for more :)
However the reason he (and the rest of us) were ignorant of the danger of the potato seed is that the potato seed isn't dangerous to anyone except those in a severe caloric deficit and still undergoing physical exertion.
In other words he applied knowledge gained in one situation (normal persons eating potato seed) to a situation far outside of the experiments that seemed to show no issues with potato seed.
Call it ignorance instead of stupidity if you want, but he's still just as dead (and apparently wouldn't have died had he maintained something other than a caloric deficit which must have eventually led to his death anyways).
"After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down."
Meaning the only reason he started eating the potato seeds in the first place was because his other sources of nutrition weren't cutting it. So if he hadn't eaten them, he would have at least needed to find another source of calories.
"Oh well", he said, "I'll just hang back here". His original plan was to travel through Alaska - which is a weird thing to want to do, by foot, in anything but the wintertime - Alaska turns into a giant swamp. It's one of the reasons why locals thought McCandles a little dim.
What could have saved him, was this: there was an old cable basket system a little ways up river that he could have used to cross. He never knew about it. It seems he didn't even wander that way, to stumble upon it.
"A basket-pulley system built and left by the U.S. Geological survey high above the River, the basket has been chained to a pole on McCandless’ side by locals to stop people from hunting in the area. Had McCandless found the basket and broken the chain, he would’ve been able to cross even with the river at its higest point. " (Into The Wild)
Put it this way, scuba diving is dangerous, everybody knows that. Furthermore, I am ignorant about diving gases and equipment; that stuff simply isn't something I know much about. This ignorance is not dangerous to me, because I have no intention of diving. If I did intend on diving, I would have to be stupid to not rectify my ignorance first.
"After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead."
Stupidly, he remained ignorant. That ignorance resulted in a weakened state, which allowed the seeds to be dangerous.
Yes, he took a risk. But I don't think it's a significantly different risk from other risky activities young men in their early 20s do, ranging from unusual sports to the military.
Well, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that selling books wasn't why Krakauer was compelled to tell that story.
Reading Krakauer's accounts of his own life, in both Into The Wild and in Eiger Dreams, it's pretty clear he felt the same urge to challenge himself with the wilderness that McCandless did, and that the books are Krakauer's attempts to understand that drive.
Those books are mainly journeys of self-understanding that happen to be available for other people to read.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-00...
Ordinary cooking and pressure cooking of pre-soaked seeds
were found to be most effective in reducing the levels of
all the natural toxicants examined...
These findings and the high water solubility suggest that
a simple and effective means of detoxifying Lathyrus by
removing this neurotoxic amino acid may be practicable.However, while working and saving for my trip I saw Phish and ended up going on Phish tour '95 instead.
Whether you head into the wilderness or follow your favorite band - IMO life on the road is a great building block for life.
There's hardly a period that goes by where I don't somehow think about my time spent on the road.
(...and I still see Phish every year ;-))
"EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED."
McCandless wrote "POT SEED" and the author inferred that he meant potato seed? Is that a given...?
Also, doesn't this author seem a bit sloppy? First, he asserts in an 8400-word article that McCandless died from sweet pea seeds, which he shrugs off because he was on a tight deadline. Then he says he made a "rash" decision to suggest in his book that the wild-potato seeds contain swainsonine?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedysarum_alpinum&...
There's even a bit of back and forth as people argued about mentioning McCandless in the page :)
How can you be so quick to rubbish what McCandless achieved, calling him stupid and unprepared, then go straight back to reading the next "Why I sold my home to Bootstrap my dating App" blog post to grace the front page or "How I finally achieved my dream" and then be full of praise and admiration.
Don't you see, McCandless was a young guy with a dream and a philosophy and actually had the balls to go and try it for himself. He's become a bit of a cult icon because he showed exactly the same disregard for the rules and society norms that make Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson such heroes.
To everyone commenting along these lines, I look forward to not-reading your next blog post; "How I could have done x, if only I'd tried"
Now he has his own wikipedia page and inspires people.
I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded?
Do you have any examples? Ted Kaczynski doesn't count.
I have one: Sooyong Park.
You know why he's not widely admired? Because people don't know much about him because no one's been able popularize a good narrative about him. Some it it is just marketing, and the extent to which he succeeded or not is a minor detail.
Also, what Park did was dangerous, too, filming tigers in the Siberian wilderness. He easily could have died accidentally in similar fashion to McCandless. He was prepared be he still could have been killed many times.
Just curious if there was a way that, rather simply, these could have been made completely edible had Chris done it.
Also, differentiation between acute toxicity (would kill within a month) or chronic issues (inflammation, deficiency, hormone altering, etc).
Apparently what causes most deaths by ODAP poisoning is that it survives droughts better than most crops making starving people eat it. The very group most susceptible to the poisoning.
That's good.
Jon Krakauer just really wants to believe that McCandless could have survived if he hadn't been a dumbass.