After graduating from college, Chris McCandless vanished from his former life and took to the road. The next that his family heard about him was several years later, when he was discovered to have starved to death in the remote Alaskan wilderness.
I love Krakauer’s writing, astute and lyrical, and the way he tells this story makes me feel like I’m peering into the abyss of mortality he describes encountering on his ascent of Devils Thumb. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books of all time. I have more complex feelings about this one.
I am fascinated utterly fascinated by the characters described in this book because the life that McCandless lived – rootless, solitary, bereft of the comfortable paddings of civilization – is more or less the antithesis of my own preferred mode. Yet as we follow in his footsteps, I’m continually torn between wanting to experience the adventure and splendor of what he saw and gnawing on my fingers with the anxiety of all the risks he took. You could call McCandless courageous in this sense.
But I can’t help but be frustrated with him too. To purposely choose a hard and wandering life might have been what was right for McCandless, but it rather smacks of privilege too, considering all he would need to do to doff his imposed poverty would be to return home to wealthy Annandale. In some ways McCandless’s desires seem childish, like my own foolish fantasies in early teenager-hood hoping for some tragic event to add depth and excitement to my life. Had he walked back out of the wilderness in August 1992, I wonder how his views might have changed.
And while this last point is not addressed by Krakauer, it occupied my mind continually: for all that McCandless advocated hitting the road to shake up one’s life, it is advice that can really only be followed by men, at least with how women are currently situated in society. Maybe you could escape its strictures in a place so lonely you never saw another person.
But even in McCandless’s time there were people everywhere, and now there’s absolutely nowhere one completely escape notice. Had Chris been female, maybe this would have turned out a true crime book instead.