In Wildness: Chris McCandless, Cheryl Strayed, and journeys of discovery.

On September 6, 1992, a hunter walking along the Stampede Trail in Alaska came across an abandoned 1940s bus which had been there for a long time. Inside he made a horrifying discovery: the dead emaciated body of a young man who was identified as Christopher McCandless, a/k/a “Alexander Supertramp,” age 24. McCandless had hiked into the Alaskan bush months before as part of a journey of self-discovery, but unprepared for the harsh conditions of wilderness living, he either starved to death or more likely was poisoned by something he ate. His story famously became the subject first of a 1993 article for Outside magazine and later a book, Into The Wild, by journalist Jon Krakauer, which was made into a movie in 2007 directed by Sean Penn. McCandless’s story is well-known, and the bus on the Stampede Trail, which has since been removed, was for a while sort of a pilgrimage site for young people who admired McCandless and his wilderness quest. That said, many others regard his actions as extremely foolish and his death meaningless. As a result, in popular culture Chris McCandless has become quite polarizing.

I both read the book Into the Wild and saw the movie based on it recently. The story was in my mind because not long ago I saw a different film, based on another book about a wilderness journey of self-discovery, called Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, which was highly regarded and nominated for several 2014 Academy Awards. Wild is based on the 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, who is portrayed powerfully in the film by Witherspoon. In 1995 Strayed, her life in disarray as a result of a divorce, drug use and the death of her mother, walked over 1000 miles from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods in Washington state, and emerged much stronger both spiritually and physically. Vallée’s Wild was an excellent film, highly uplifting at its conclusion whereas Into The Wild is a tremendous downer, and seemed lacking in anything worthwhile to say. I thought about the contrast of these two stories, and about the cultural and literary phenomenon of wilderness journeys of self-discovery in general. Stories like McCandless’s and Strayed’s speak to us in an interesting way that has a lot to do with how we live our lives in modern America—and what we may be missing from them.