Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  Beneath the bed was a small blue suitcase, a Starline, the kind your grandmother might have taken on weekend trips. The lid was busted off the hinges. Christopher McCandless’s mother had filled it with survival gear and left it, and over the years other people had removed things or added to it. Joe dragged the suitcase out, plopped it on the bed and called out an inventory as he sorted through the jumble, beginning with a crumpled silver survival blanket: “The Jiffy Pop tinfoil thing. Look right here: saltwater taffy. Holy Bible. Cheesecloth. A map saying ‘You are here. Walk this way out to get food.’”

  He was joking, I think.

  “Emergency first aid kit. The mittens. The headnet. Waterproof matches. The squirrels have gotten to the Ramen. Vaseline. Sewing kit. Jungle head net. Toothpaste. Cigarette papers. Princess Cruises Suntan Lotion SPF 30.”

  There was more: firestarter, tissue paper, soap, a can of tuna. Then Joe grew bored and went outside so Charles could take his picture posing by the famous bus with a can of Spam in his left hand.

  “That’s almost bad luck,” Connie said quietly, and I had to agree.

  Kris and I took turns reading aloud comments left by those who came after the visit by Krakauer and McCandless’s parents. Some were epistles, others aphorisms. The earliest dated to January 1994 and was left by a pair of Alaskans who came by snowmachine: “Cloudy, & 42 degrees. Emergency supplies in good order.”

  In May, people started recording more intimate thoughts:

  “Like Chris, I came to Alaska looking for some answers as I near my last year in college. A very emotional day and a highlight of my summer up here in the wild land of Alaska. Constant thoughts of my family and friends.”

  “I’ll return next year and try to set myself free again.”

  “The vibes I felt from the bus made me sit and think for hours. I wasn’t able to sleep until I felt every emotion possible: amazed, sadness, wonderment, happiness, and many more…”

  Charles looked over my shoulder and read. “I wish I could come in here and have an inspirational moment,” he said. “I wish my life was Zenned out.”

  “‘Only time will tell how Chris McCandless’s life has affected mine,’” Kris read. She snorted and looked up. “It’s garbage! I mean, am I too cynical?”

  We were. We were too cynical to read entry after entry from people looking for meaning in the life and death of a man who had rejected his family, mooched his way across the country and called himself “Alexander Supertramp” in the third person. I struggled to imagine the emotional currents that had carried people here to this bus, so far from their homes, to honor his memory. Later, a friend who had been born in Alaska and exiled to Maryland for five years tried to explain the overwhelming smallness and sameness of life on the suburban East Coast, where lawn care excites great interest; no wonder someone like Christopher McCandless seems adventurous and spiritual and inspiring, despite being dead.

  Several visitors mentioned that Into the Wild had prompted their trips, but the book must have motivated nearly all of the pilgrimages, because why else would people attach any significance to the bus? They had come from Europe, California, Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Utah, Ontario, North Carolina.

  One man made the journey after reading a book review while sitting in a doctor’s office in Ithaca, N.Y. “It was then I knew the bus was a place I must visit,” he wrote. “Christopher’s story changed the way I look at a lot of things, moreover it changed my perception of ‘need.’ I will be forever in your debt Alex! May you wander your travels in peace.”

  A fellow from Belgium wrote: “I’ve come from Europe to follow the footsteps of a ‘pilgrim,’ as says Krakauer, and I’d almost say a prophet!” He then criticized the materialistic attitude of Alaskans and urged them to read Tolstoy “instead of prostituting their country to tourism.”

  I laughed at that. The Belgian and the others had themselves turned the bus into a perverse tourist destination now so well known that it’s mentioned in The Milepost. They urged each other to protect the vehicle as a memorial, to leave things untouched. “His monument and tomb are a living truth whose flame will light the ‘way of dreams’ in other’s lives,” someone wrote. It was not hard to imagine that before long visitors would be able to buy t-shirts saying “I Visited The Bus” or “I Survived Going Into the Wild.” So many people seemed to have found their way out here that an espresso stand didn’t seem out of the question.

  Astounded by page after page of such writings, we counted the number of people identified in the notebooks. More than 200 had trekked to the bus since McCandless’s death, and that didn’t account for those who passed by without comment. Think of that: More than 200 people, many as inexperienced as McCandless, had hiked or bicycled along the Stampede Trail to the bus—and every one of them had somehow managed to return safely.

  Only one person even vaguely questioned this paradox: “Perhaps we shouldn’t romanticize or cananize (sic) him…. After all, Crane and I walked here in no time at all, so Chris wasn’t far from life…not really.” But then, perhaps unwilling to seem harsh, the writer added, “These questions are in vain. We shouldn’t try to climb into another’s mind, attempting to know what he thought or felt.”

  Others criticized Alaskans for doing just that: “I am quite offended when I hear that people mock his story as one of stupidity and carelessness. Every man and woman has desires and hopes for happiness in life, but sadly, only few succeed.”

  A newcomer to Alaska wrote, “No wonder Alaskans did not understand the call to which most men feel at some point in their lives. No wonder they did not understand Chris McCandless. If you cannot fell it, mine it, or rape it, and in the very end profit from it, then it must be ludicrous and ill-conceived. Idealism, when harnessed for good unselfish acts, results in great men; the greatest and most influential of our times. Chris was on the verge of that path…”

  Many people promised in their comments to call their families as soon as they could, so who’s to say their journeys were wasted? Yet I felt exactly as a friend did as he read my notes later: repulsed and fascinated.

  The practical entries, and there were just a few, were penned by Alaskans who noted the weather conditions, the river’s depth, and so on—the sort of information useful to other backcountry travelers. Jon Nierenberg, a Stampede Trail resident, left a detailed description of how to cross the Teklanika River when it runs high—a problem that had defeated McCandless. Added in pencil was the advice, “Also, there’s the park boundary cabin six miles away—upstream on the Sushana River. Food there. Don’t trash the place.”

  A few people didn’t feel obligated to join the soul-searching. “Too spooked to stay,” one guy wrote. Another said, “This place is a mess.” And another noted, “It sure is a long way out here. I’m glad I flew in.”

  But most comments were written by those experiencing some sort of emotional release:

  An unwritten code of the North decrees that you don’t steal, especially from a man’s cabin. If an emergency forces you to hole up in a vacant cabin, you leave it as you found it—replenishing the firewood, replacing any food used, and somehow explaining your presence and expressing appreciation to the owner. Unless your life is in danger, you never take a rifle, axe, sleeping bag, or snowshoes from another’s cabin… Now that the old-fashioned Code of the North is being discarded, a new man-made peril faces the wilderness traveler. The cabin into which a wayfarer stumbles at 40 degrees below zero may be without life-sustaining food, fuel, or sleeping bag.

  And so a special quality of life in the Far North is being lost, and apparently our only recourse is to hire more policemen and use bigger locks just as every other state does.

  —Edward J. Fortier, Point McKenzie trapper and Alaska journalist

  “It’s a good place to die.”

  “I cried so much I couldn’t believe it.”

  “This bus has a sacred feeling to it and I feel grateful to be able to visit the place where Chris lived and died.”

 
“I started my journey here hoping two things. 1) somewhere out there I would find myself 2) that I would find some hope for the future. Now I am here at the bus and I am happy because the future looks up. And I know who I am. Now it’s time to go home to the ones I love and help bring truth to the light.”

  “The beginning of my journey is my departure from this abandoned bus. I feel alive and free—a freedom too beautiful to express in mere words.”

  “I didn’t begin to understand Alex’s quest until today. Along the way I have discovered peace and tranquility and realized for the first time that the journey is the best part. Unexpectedly filled with emotion upon finding the bus, choking back tears, I can return to life and civilization with fresh eyes. Alex, you have inspired me and changed my life forever. If only there were more like you. Left bottle of Jack Daniels.”

  “Chris may have fucked up, but he fucked up brilliantly. Nonetheless, family and freedom would have been better.”

  And on and on.

  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 dumbshit” 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, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.

  But it’s more complicated than that. I can almost understand why he rejected maps, common sense, conventional wisdom, and local knowledge before embarking on his venture. Occasionally when I hear others make fun of Christopher McCandless, I fall quiet. My favorite book growing up was Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, based on a true story about a nineteenth-century Chumash Indian girl who survived for years alone on an island off the California coast. How often had I imagined myself living in that hut of whale bones, catching fish by hand and taming wild dogs for companionship? It’s common, this primal longing to connect with a natural world that provides and cradles, that toughens and inspires.

  Yet this is the easiest thing to criticize—the notion that wilderness exists to dispense epiphanies and spiritual cures as part of the scenery. Live here long enough, and you’ll learn that every moment spent admiring endless vistas or wandering the land is a privilege, accompanied by plenty of other moments evading mosquitoes by the millions, outlasting weather, avoiding giardia, negotiating unruly terrain, and thinking uneasily about the occasional predator. Walking cross-country through alder thickets or muskeg may be the hardest thing you do all year, as you fight against the earth’s tendency to grab hold of you for itself.

  And of course it’s hard to eat out there. A friend who trapped in his youth likens the bush to a desert, nearly empty of wildlife. One winter he ate marten tendons for days because his food ran out. Read the journal of Fred Fickett, who accompanied Lt. Henry Allen on a 1,500-mile exploration of the Copper, Tanana, and Koyukuk river valleys; it is the story of hungry men.

  May 20, 1885: “One of our dogs found a dead goose. We took it from him and ate it.” May 22: “Had rotten salmon straight for breakfast. It was so bad that even the Indian dogs wouldn’t eat it.” May 28: “Had a little paste for breakfast, rotten and wormy meat for dinner, rotten goose eggs and a little rice for supper… about 1/4 what we needed.” May 30: “Indian gave us a dinner of boiled meat from which he had scraped the maggots in handfuls before cutting it up. It tasted good, maggots and all.”

  There’s a reason the Natives sometimes starved in the old days—and they knew what they were doing. There’s a reason that many homesteaders and bush rats collect welfare to supplement hunting and fishing. There’s a reason we gather in cities and villages. So many people want to believe that it’s possible to live a noble life alone in the wilderness, living entirely off the land—and yet the indigenous peoples of Alaska know that only by depending upon each other, only by forming a community, does survival become possible.

  People have been dying in the wilderness for as long as people have been going into it. There are always lessons to be learned from such sad stories, even lessons as simple as: Don’t forget matches, don’t sweat in the cold, don’t run away from bears. But sometimes there are no learning moments, no explanations. From an account in the Nome Nugget of July 30, 1901:

  “The death of George Dean by starvation at the mouth of the Agiapuk River and the narrow escape of his two companions, Thierry and Houston, from the same fate makes a strange story. Without wishing to criticize the survivors, it looks as if they did not make that hustle for life which men should. They were so near the course of navigation that they could hear the voices of men as they passed up and down the river.”

  Why didn’t they…why couldn’t they…why wouldn’t they? And the wise Nome Nugget avoids this trap by shrugging away such unanswerables:

  “But it’s a strange country, and strange things happen in it.” In 1930, not far south from the Stampede Road, park rangers found the body of prospector Tom Kenney on a bar of the McKinley River. Kenney had disappeared July 19 after separating from his partner. On September 3, searchers discovered Kenney lying on his back with his arms at his side. One shoe was off, and searchers concluded he had been salving his foot—“which would indicate that he had been in his right mind up to the last,” the newspaper reported.

  Kenney had traveled about eight miles downriver, making several campfires. He and his partner had been searching for a lost gold placer mine, but toward the end, Tom Kenney surely would have traded all the gold he could carry for the sight of another person, for some clear notion of the way home. He must have eaten berries. He had killed and eaten several porcupines. At his final camp, rangers found a large pile of unburned dry wood. “It is known that Kenney always kept a diary, but as his pockets were not examined before burial it will never be known whether he set down an account of his wanderings or not,” the Alaska Weekly reported.

  You can hear the pain of letting go in the words of a prospector and trapper named Tom O’Brien, who died of scurvy in the summer of 1919 on the Whiting River near Juneau. In the book The Dangerous North, historian Ed Ferrell includes O’Brien’s diary entries that describe teeth rattling in his sore gums, his fever and his aching joints, which conspired to keep him from collecting water, firewood, and food. Day by day he ate one meal of unheated rice or potato soup. He weakened and his mental faculties faded. Finally he realized he was suffering from scurvy, but his relief measures came too late. After two months of recording his trials, he left behind a final entry: “Life is dying hard. The heart is strong.”

  So many ways to die in the North, in manners grand and surprising and sad. A moment’s inattention, the proverbial series of small miscalculations that add up to one giant screw-up, delusion about one’s abilities, hubris, mental imbalance, plain bad luck—that’s all it takes.

  For a few weeks last spring, I kept track of news articles reporting outdoor deaths. Over the winter, more than thirty Alaskans died in snowmachine accidents, a record. They had lost their way in blizzards, fallen through ice and drowned, been buried in avalanches, collided with each other. An intoxicated man perched on a boat’s gunwales fell into the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks when waves rocked the vessel; his body did not emerge for days. Two men suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after they brought a char coal grill into their tent near Chena Hot Springs. Two young kayakers were missing and presumed dead in the Gulf of Alaska. Campers found the bones of an eighteen-year-old soldier who disappeared while ice fishing near the Knik Arm fifteen years ago. And even as searchers looked for a man who had disappeared in the Chugach Mountains came the news that seventy-year-old Dick Cook, an extraordinary woodsman described by John McPhee as the “acknowledged high swami of the river people,” had drowned in the Tatonduk, a river he knew intimately. Some days it seemed surprising that people survive the outdoors at all
.

  Army Air Force co-pilot Leon Crane parachuted from a crashing B-24 bomber on the Yukon River drainage in December 1943. Thirty years later, Yukon River residents told writer John McPhee about a man who had walked out of the bush in winter: “Guy jumped out of an airplane, and he would have died but he found a cabin.” McPhee tracked Crane down in Philadelphia through military records and told Crane’s story in Coming Into the Country. Only Crane survived the crash. He waited eight days for rescue, with his parachute for shelter. When he realized no one knew where he was, he started walking. Crane happened on two cabins, one well-stocked with food and equipment, during the eighty deep winter days he spent surviving and making his way out of the wilderness.

  —Ellen Bielawski

  And yet there we were, we crude Alaskans, scoffing and making jokes in Fairbanks 142, shaking our heads and posing with cans of Spam. We want it both ways. We want to impress others and ourselves with scary tales of death defied at every turn, to point out that Alaska is so unforgiving that a person could die just a few miles from help, and still we scorn those drawn to that mystique, those poor, foolish slobs who manage to die out of ignorance or stupidity or even bad luck. Perhaps that’s because we know that one day—just like that, really—we could so easily become one of those poor, foolish slobs ourselves.