“What’s this?” I asked. “You didn’t tell me that my character was going to narrate the film.”
“I know,” Sean said. “I didn’t want it to influence your initial approach. But it has to be you. Your voice is nuanced throughout Jon’s book. You understood Chris more than anyone.”
Tears sprung to my eyes. He gets it, I thought. I also felt the immense accountability of being placed in a position to help him genuinely portray Chris. It was important enough to me to welcome the weight that it brought.
I collaborated with Sean and renowned poet Sharon Olds to draft the final narrative along with actress Jena Malone, who would portray me in the film. When all was said and done, there was only one segment of the narrative that I did not approve of, because it was something I never would have said.
Sean faced the difficult task of referencing Chris’s discovery of our true family history, and in such a way that made clear it had been the catalyst for his distancing himself from our parents. But he also did not want to completely expose them. As a result, there’s one section that mistakenly implies that we did not know our brothers and sisters growing up. I discussed this with Sean extensively and even wrote some different lines as well as an entire scene that I felt were plausible options to take the place of the objectionable narrative. Sean decided that to completely flesh out the details of how our two families overlapped within the time constraints of the film would seem to be just an intent on his part to sensationalize the family drama. He felt that it wasn’t his place to tell that story. I worried that I had let down Chris, our siblings, and Marcia by protecting my parents in the past, and I did not want to make that same mistake again.
Finally Sean said, “The moment I interrupt the story of Chris and his journey to try to explain all that happened within your two families, the audience will immediately lose focus on Chris, and the movie then becomes about your parents. Yes, the truth is important, but it’s so wild on its own that it would take another entire movie to explain, or another book, or both.”
I conceded that Sean knew a thing or two more about making movies than I did, and I certainly did not want this stunning visual representation of Chris’s life to become all about the painful past he had worked so hard to escape from. Whenever we discussed how to handle these difficult issues, I could tell through Sean’s impassioned words that he believed his beautiful movie would spark some healing in my family. But Mom and Dad had not learned anything from Chris’s death, nor had they been appreciative of the restraint in Jon’s book, and I was skeptical that this would turn out any differently.
SO MUCH OF THE ATTENTION surrounding Into the Wild had been placed on me, and I felt as if my siblings had always been swept under the rug—that their relation to Chris was glossed over and thus viewed as less important. Yet their existence in our lives was essential to understanding why Chris had acted so intensely on the raw emotions that wove throughout his childhood.
During one of my visits to Denver, while the whole family was at Shelly’s, I sat at the dining room table across from Stacy. We’d just finished clearing the plates from dinner, and our other siblings were busy in the kitchen or in the yard with the kids.
Marcia sat quietly in her chair in the other room, knitting. As I glanced at her, I remembered a certain sweater I had often swiped from Dad’s closet while in high school. Warm, soft, and comforting, it was my favorite, and I wasn’t surprised when I learned Marcia had knitted it. Tonight she was making a sweater for whichever grandchild was next in line to receive a new one. I knew Heather and the child I was carrying would be included on that list, too.
Marcia was always quiet and rarely spoke first, but she was quick to join in a card game and laugh along with everyone else. I loved to see her happy. I knew my existence was part of a painful chapter in her life, but she was too kind to ever acknowledge that connection.
So, as I sat with Stacy, guilt was heavily on my mind.
“When Chris and I got older,” I confided, “and we came to understand about the affair, about the things that Mom and Dad had done . . . we felt so bad. We’d been completely ignorant as to what we must have symbolized, as your mom babysat Chris or you guys came over to our house. When we were kids, you never looked at us with resentment. And still you guys don’t see me as even a step or a half. I’m your sister and I feel that. And Heather feels that. You guys never got pissed off or jealous or treated Chris and me poorly. You never took any of that out on us, and it would have been so understandable if you had.”
“Don’t you get it?” Stacy said sweetly, reaching her hand across to mine. “It’s because of who raised us.”
Tears streamed down my face as she continued. “Our mom got us away from all of that. It’s true that we didn’t have much money, and that was tough sometimes.” She looked toward the family room, where Marcia sat focused on the rhythm of her yarn and needles, and she lowered her voice. “Maybe our house wasn’t always spotlessly clean and Mom sometimes struggled with providing structure. It’s hard work to be a single mom and keep up with six kids. But she always provided us with plenty of love, and we learned that was the most valuable thing we could have ever hoped for. You and Chris may have had it better financially, but we got the better deal.”
WHILE THE SCRIPT PROCESS was nearing its end and before filming of Into the Wild began, we had occasion to make an entirely different kind of movie. I was one day past my due date when the contractions started. Robert videotaped the cheerfully decorated hospital room and each noisy machine hooked up to me, along with my alternating expressions of excitement and wide-eyed preparation for pain, all while providing his typically humorous commentary.
I had announced my intention to continue my clean streak of a life without drug use during childbirth. That quickly changed to an assertion that I certainly deserved synthetic relief after having held out for so long, now that I was facing the task of pushing something the size of a watermelon through something the size of an apple.
“Can you please go find the anesthesiologist?” I saw my pathetic expression looking back at me through the camera lens.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry,” Robert said, putting the camera down. “You’re sure about that?”
“Oh God, yes!” I winced and hunched over as much as I could while a foot tried to come through my belly button.
After the epidural fairy came to visit, all was good and peaceful and right in my world again. Robert held my hand and coached my breathing, and it was nice to have that quiet time together. I had denied his mother’s request to be in the room for the birth, and I knew she was upset by it. I actually would have had no problem with her presence, but I was very strongly against my own mother being in the room. Robert and I had decided that it would be less stressful to avoid invitations and explanations, and just make the broad statement that we wanted it to be just the two of us.
Our baby girl came out about an hour after the doctor instructed me to start pushing. The nurses put her to my chest almost immediately, as I had requested, and I tried to comfort her while she cried a hearty wail. I put her to my breast to see if she could get some milk, but it was too early. The nurse took her away quicker than I expected. They tagged her arm and carried her out of the room to clean her up and weigh her. My doctor smiled as she continued to work on me. Everything seemed routine.
A few family members and friends started to make their way in. The doctor disappeared for a moment while the nurse finished cleaning me up. Someone walked Heather in, and while I hoped she hadn’t seen anything that scarred her for life or made her promise herself to never have kids, I was glad to see her.
Then a nurse walked into the room, one I’d never seen before. She gave me her name—which I did not register—and told me she worked in the neonatal intensive care unit. That I got.
“Where’s my baby?” I asked.
The nurse looked around the room and asked someone to take Heather out. Heather looked straight over to me.
“No. Sh
e can stay. What’s wrong?” The words fell out of my mouth in a slow cadence, not really wanting to be answered.
That’s when they told us our little girl had Down syndrome. I was in shock. I had been so cautious during my pregnancy—coping well with stress, exercising properly, eating healthily, never drinking any alcohol or even a single soda. There had been no signs of trouble at my doctor visits, and screening tests for common concerns had been negative. I didn’t know anything about what caused Down syndrome. The doctor explained that it happens at conception—it was part of her DNA.
I looked around the room to my husband, to my friends, to anyone, for strength. Everyone was staring at each other or straight ahead, not knowing what to say. The nurse proceeded to explain that our baby had been taken to the intensive care unit because she likely had heart defects and gastrointestinal disorders.
“I want to see her right now!” I insisted.
“I’m sorry,” said the nurse, “but she has to stay down there, and you can’t be allowed to get out of this bed until you can move your legs on your own.”
“Damn it! I knew I shouldn’t have asked for the epidural!” I said and started to sob.
Aside from my crying, the room was silent. And then my little Heather, one month shy of turning seven, walked over to me, took my hand in hers, and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. She’s gonna be just fine, because you’re gonna take great care of her just like you take care of me.”
HEATHER’S PREDICTION CAME TRUE. During three days in the hospital, while the doctors ran tests and waited for results, her little sister surprised everyone with her determination and ability to thrive. Aside from some minor and ordinary newborn complications, she proved to be perfectly healthy. As the doctors explained the extensive therapies that would be required to deal with her disability I felt the importance of ensuring she was surrounded only by love, support, and positive energy.
It was clear she had her uncle’s strong spirit, and we decided to name her Christiana.
Part Four
Truth
Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich
food and wine in abundance, and obsequious
attendance, but sincerity and truth were not;
and I went away hungry from the inhospitable
board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
passage highlighted by Chris
CHAPTER 15
ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS
S.O.S.
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 ?
(Note written on the back side of a page torn from Louis
L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man, found with Chris’s
remains. His last journal entry was “Beautiful Blueberries.”)
CARINE!” JON KRAKAUER’S VOICE buzzed through the phone. “I finally found out what happened to Chris’s backpack!” The news startled me to the point that I almost dropped the phone into the bath water I was drawing for Christiana.
Two and a half weeks after Chris had died inside Fairbanks 142, after not seeing or speaking to another human for one hundred and twelve days, six Alaskans found themselves in an unexpected meeting outside the derelict bus. An overwhelming stench of decomposition, along with an ominous note taped to a window glass, kept them from examining the interior. According to Jon’s findings, one man who’d mustered the nerve to peer through the window to investigate further recalled seeing an expensive backpack among the rifle, paperback books, and other items that were found with Chris’s body. But the Alaska State Troopers who had extricated Chris’s remains from the isolated vehicle had not returned with a backpack for the coroner to turn over to his family. When Jon visited the bus for the first time, he recognized many items that remained there as having belonged to Chris, but his backpack was nowhere to be found.
Fifteen years after Chris’s death, Jon received a call from one Will Forsberg. A dog musher from Healy, Forsberg spends serene winters with his wife and dogs in a cabin six miles south of where the bus rests. Jon had spoken with Forsberg while researching Into the Wild, and while he had not mentioned this previously, the Alaskan now claimed to have Chris’s pack.
During the recent call, Forsberg had told Jon that he had visited the bus shortly after Chris’s death. After noticing the pack had been left behind, he took it back to his cabin, where, after deciding it could be useful, he simply hung the backpack outside on a nail under the eave of his roof.
The mystery-solving phone call came to Jon after he had first learned, through the Internet, that Forsberg reportedly had the items. Having not heard back from Forsberg after several droning requests left on his answering machine, Jon phoned my parents and suggested they give it a try. When he offered them Forsberg’s phone number, they declined. Jon’s next call was to me. I called Forsberg as soon as I hung up with Jon, and after several phone calls between Forsberg, Jon, and myself, the backpack was on its way to my front door.
I understood why Jon had called my parents first with the opportunity to retrieve the backpack, and I appreciated why that was appropriate. Jon always struck me as a man of veracity, who accepted a natural order when it came to such things. I had witnessed him put forth great efforts to share a mutually respectful relationship with my parents, despite the irrational behavior they sometimes aimed at him.
I also greatly admired his belief in the importance of truth, even as I had asked him not to divulge my family’s traumatic history. Jon had spent three years of his life following and researching Chris’s journeys before publishing his book about them, and his fixation on uncovering and dissecting every detail could often be described as obsessive. Perhaps the greatest example of his zeal was his bullheaded determination to unravel the mystery of exactly how Chris had died.
Jon’s initial approach to this question was to assume the accuracy of the coroner’s report, which stated that Chris had starved to death. But as Jon examined Chris’s journal entries and photographs of the food he’d hunted and foraged, Jon came to believe that the coroner’s report failed to consider crucial evidence about the cause of his death. Further, determining the precise cause of Chris’s death mattered, because it could potentially say a lot about how prepared—or foolhardy—he had been. Jon remembered his own youth filled with risk-taking adventures, and he queried other adventure seekers about their opinions of Chris. Was he just an ill-prepared, arrogant tenderfoot? Or was there something more to what drove him?
When visiting the bus, Jon cited Chris’s blunders to his friend and travel companion Roman Dial, who by all accounts is an incredibly accomplished and well-respected outdoorsman in Alaska. Jon felt Roman’s response was important enough to include in Into the Wild:
Sure, he screwed up . . . but I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I’ve never done it. And I’d bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either . . . Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather—most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.
According to Chris’s terse journal entries, on July 30, 1992, he suddenly fell ill—an illness that weakened him to the point that he could not hike out or hunt or forage for food. These entries persuaded Jon that starvation alone was not responsible for his rapid demise. Chris stated unequivocally in his ninety-fourth journal entry, approximately eighteen days before his death, that his extreme illness was the “fault of potato seeds.” He added that he was “extremely we
ak” and was experiencing “much trouble just to stand up.” This foreboding statement led Jon to explore a number of theories in an effort to either prove or disprove Chris’s claim.
After ascertaining that Chris had properly identified the wild potato and had not mistaken it for another, putatively toxic species, the wild sweet pea, Jon sent seeds he’d gathered from the wild potato plants growing around the bus to be tested for toxic alkaloids. When an Alaskan chemist derisively announced, “I tore that plant apart. There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I’d eat it myself,” Jon explored the possibility that a toxic mold had contaminated the seeds Chris had stored in a dirty plastic bag before eating them. When that theory was also shot down, Jon sent the seeds to a lab in Michigan to be tested for other, less obvious toxins. Finally, after several false leads and months of expensive chemical analyses, Jon conclusively determined by means of liquid chromatography—tandem mass spectrometry that the seeds contained a toxic, non-protein amino acid known to cause serious illness in both animals and humans.
And why did Jon spend tens of thousands of dollars, devote months of his life, and subject himself to public ridicule trying to figure out the precise cause of Chris’s death? I believe that he did it for Chris. I believe that Jon genuinely cares about the morality and necessity of truth, as Chris did. And never does such a search for truth seem more compelling, and more crucial, than when it involves probing the personal enigmas that exist within each of us. Some people need to seek that truth and share it, regardless of the consequences.
WITH THE MYSTERY of Chris’s backpack finally solved, I was provided with definitive answers to a few lingering questions—questions I was often asked by those who remained skeptical about Chris’s ultimate ambitions. When I spoke with Forsberg, he explained that several years after taking the backpack from the bus, he discovered Chris’s wallet inside, zipped underneath the interior lining, which apparently was utilized by Chris as a makeshift hidden compartment. Inside the wallet, Forsberg found several forms of identification and three crisp one hundred dollar bills—further evidence that while Chris was determined to challenge himself to survive in the harsh wilds of Alaska, he fully intended to walk back out.
The Wild Truth Page 22
