Into the Wild : progress notes

 

Well, I am almost finished this relatively thin book. And even though I have seen the movie, it is an enthralling read. The point of difference between the book and the movie, is that Jon Krakauer doesnt just tell the story, but instead makes a study of  the solitary wandering dreamer in many of us.

There are two chapters in the middle of the book that depart from the narrative of  Chris McCandless' unfortunately short life. The first tells of another restless wanderer and adventurer in the 1930's who walked into the Utah desert as a 17 year old and was never seen again. His body has never been found. The second, tells the authors own story of a lone trek he took in his 20's to climb a peak in Alaska called "the Devils Thumb." His first hand account of being a young man, searching out an alternate life to the drab, conformist existence offered to him by society and his fathers expectations is probably part of the reason he wrote the book on McCandless.  The experience of looking death in the face when you are utterly alone is well articulated, coming as it does from personal experience. The thought that you might never be found, the universal terror of people everywhere, is chillingly real. Neither is Krakauer blind to the naive romanticism of  McCandless's adventure. And in fact he poses this as a question. Was McCandless demise  the Hubris of youth? The naive romantic notions of a dreamer obsessed with grandeur? In short, was he just stupid?


Its not a stretch to say that I have been something of a solitary dreamer myself. As a young boy, I was taken on regular drives to visit my Grandmother in the Barossa Valley an hour and a half outside of Adelaide. If you take a particular route, there is a creek that runs almost the entire length of the hours journey from the foot hills. The scenery alternates between something akin to a Hans Heysen painting, and sheer gorges of  blasted rock rising up beyond your view from the car window. The thin ribbon of asphalt, known as the Gorge road, can be dangerous. With many blind corners and very steep gradients, it twists and turns through some stunning natural scenery cutting its way through the quartz rock, clinging impossibly to sheer hillsides and rock ledges, It slowly rises through twisting hills and gullies until your ears pop. 

Sitting alone in the back seat of my nanna's pea green  mini on those long drives, my imagination was free to roam the hillsides and gullies in the silence and dark of the back seat. The fanning headlights illuminated the shadows of the bushland just off the edge of the road, and I remember fantasizing about escaping from my constrained, poor little boy life, down into the stands of gnarled eucalypts, blackberry thickets and bushland by the creek to live.  And those fantasies never included other people. It was always just me...Alone.
   That drive to my nanna's farm ( a place I hated to visit) was a regular trip in my childhood and so the fantasy became a regular feature of  the journey. It was a way to escape the impending boredom and loneliness of School holidays spent there. While the adults talked and laughed and smoked cigarettes in the front seat, and later, while my cousins fought and hit each other next to me,  my imagination roamed the creek beyond the side of the road, following its snaking pools and little rapids, and pebbly shores for a good part of the way to my grandmothers farm.

As an adult, in my 20's I had a similar desire to the one Krakauer explores in his book about Chris McCandless. I wanted to do something different. To assert some independence. To get out on my own. To take a risk.