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A review by 3mmers
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
adventurous
challenging
fast-paced
3.0
Into the Wild is one of the most moving and one of the most frustrating books I’ve ever read. Mostly it is the latter.
The book is part investigative report and part biography of the death of Chris McCandless, a Walden-esque nomad and recluse whose badly decayed body was found in an isolated bus near Denali National Park, Alaska. McCandless starved to death 118 days into a survivalist trip, after the mostly-frozen river he had easily waded through in April had swollen to a unnavigable torrent by July. For whatever reason, he was unwilling to seek an alternative river crossing and unable to wait out the deluge, which would have slowed to a passable volume within only a few weeks. His body was discovered by local hunters around three weeks after his death. The incident immediately hit the headlines as the ultimate parable of hubris laid low. After all, what kind of idiot waltzes into the Alaskan wilderness with a bag of rice and a Jack London book and expects to make it out alive? The near-misses of McCandless’ death — in reality, the bus was a well-known landmark to local outdoorsmen, located within 20 miles of the nearest town and 10 of additional resources, he died within a month of coincidental rescue — increase the tragedy, or, depending on your mindset, the schadenfreude.
Krakauer’s initial reportage of McCandless’ death in Outside magazine provoked a tsunami of comments, mostly negative, painting McCandless as an arrogant little shit who fucked around and eventually found out to the smug I-told-you-sos of the peanut gallery. In Into the Wild, Krakauer takes a longer look at McCandless to as why the reclusive survivalist provoked such antipathy, why Krakauer identifies so strongly with him, and whether McCandless really did die of his own stupidity.
I was more sympathetic to Krakauer’s point than much of the commentariat right from the outset. One does not need to delve deep into the youtube comments of videos about any even remotely extreme activity to find armchair philosophers proclaiming noisily, “sorry, but just no. I can’t even feel pity for people like this. They made their choices.” It gets fucking annoying. First, it’s an opinion no one asked for, often literally decades too late (no one cares if you think George Mallory was an idiot for trying to climb Everest in 1922). Second, the reasons people engage in objectively dangerous activities can be hard to appreciate if you’ve never experienced them yourself, but if you have, they are undeniable. In other words, there are actually genuinely good reasons to enjoy remote, dangerous, and solo activities.
Krakauer ascribes his identification with McCandless to his young adulthood as an ice climber, including a risky but ultimately successful solo ascent of a beastly spire of rock called the Devil’s Thumb, also in Alaska. I kind of get it too. There genuinely is something to solo outdoorsmanship that you just don’t get from adventuring with all the safety precautions. My vice is the significantly less dangerous solo hiking. I can’t afford a satellite device and I don’t take a two-way radio, even though I should. My only recourse in an accident is to walk my way out of it. Significantly less dangerous than McCandless’ activities, but not without risk. It’s only been about a month since since a solo hiker died in my area after falling down a slope. But that disconnection, the isolation of self-dependence, clears the way for a transcendent experience of the natural world. One of my first solo hikes was an uncommonly quiet Stanley Glacier (usually this route is very popular, but it was early June and still very cold, so there was no one else on the trail). I got up to the top of the route, with the glacier hanging above me like a giant tongue, and stopped for lunch. The only sound was the roar of the still-wintery wind, funnelled back and fourth across the cirque. The wildlife of the high altitudes made themselves known—distant birdsong, tiny flowers and stunted trees, and the pika. Pika are small mammals that look a bit like a rabbit and a bit like a hamster. They have an ear-splitting alarm call and can be surprisingly bold around humans; they’re also perhaps the most adorable creatures in the world. Sitting there in the silence halfway through a tupperware of soggy pringles, I was overcome with a wave of gratitude for living in the same country as the pika so strong that it brought tears to my eyes. I have moments like this every solo hike I go on, but these are private moments that don’t occur in the company of others. The experience of what I can only describe as 19th century awe is worth the kind of trip that requires every single thing to go right.
So I do empathize with what Krakauer sees in McCandless and in himself. I understand why he wants to extend a more charitable interpretation to McCandless’ actions. The problem is I also totally get where a lot of the critics are coming from, because the kind of guy who insists that the only what to truly live is to live hand to mouth on the road, to forge your way alone through the wilderness as your body withers away beneath you because you think you’re better than anyone who hasn’t got as close to dying as you, is the most annoying fucking guy in the world. That type of guy sucks to be around and you can’t even talk to them because their whole personality revolves around their certainty that no one else understands things like them.
When you meet that type of guy, sometimes you do wish that after so much fucking around they’d finally find out. Even if they’re someone you love. Especially if they’re someone you love.
McCandless’ nomadic journey was inspired by his deep resentment for what he saw as the hypocrisies of his father’s complex relationships and the artificiality of modern life. As Krakauer reports, late in his university career, McCandless discovered that at one point his father had been carrying on affairs with both his current and ex-wife simultaneously, something that disgusted Chris and led him to entirely disregard his parents’ wishes. However, McCandless had always been morally single-minded and unwilling to change his mind or entertain nuance. He also highly prioritized individual action and choice over systematic or collective actions. It is obviously extremely reasonable to be frustrated by the lack of international action over the violent and racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, but McCandless saw the obvious solution as buying as many guns as possible, flying over there, and I guess shooting as many racists as quickly as possible. Again, let’s not quibble about whether shooting racists is a good thing or not, I’m mostly interested in the idea that a few bitch-ass White boys shooting up a country they’ve never been to before would be the only meaningful action to take against racism. For McCandless, individual dramatic action is the only kind of action. He comes across as entirely unaware that other people might have valuable internal lives with priorities and abilities entirely different from his own. There is no space for these people to be making compromised choices based on their personal needs because he does not believe anyone’s personal needs would be different from his own. McCandless is not a sympathetic narrator.
Krakauer finds empathy because he sees himself in McCandless, but I have been shut out from that kind of relatability. I think that’s part of the reason that Krakauer fails to acknowledge just how shitty this ideology can be. I can’t interpret it as an innocent desire for self-fulfilment. This kind of radical individualism is an inherently deeply inconsiderate ideology. The whole point of it is that you should disregard the obligations, norms and expectations of anyone but yourself. Taken so radically, it can be genuinely cruel. McCandless reminds me a lot of my brother, whom I no longer talk to. Like McCandless, my brother was disenchanted with his family life and has distanced himself from them (as have I). Like McCandless, he has always aggressively disregarded anyone’s advice or concerns. Like McCandless, he has been at times disconcertingly interested in the moral benefits of self-inflicted punishment, in particular in low food intake. For me, Krakauer’s tolerance for McCandless was intensely frustrating because this kind of guy sucks to be around in real life. It’s really horrible to be around someone who you know considers you as an npc. I can’t deny that there is a part of me who believes that this ideology of radical self-sufficiency is largely delusion, but that the only way it can be challenged is disaster. In other words, I do understand the longing to see this attitude laid low.
Krakauer is able to find a lot of empathy for this perspective because he relates to where it is coming from. He mentions a tense relationship with his father, against whose high expectations he also rebelled. I think part of the reason I was so frustrated by his tolerance for McCandless is that that is not an ideology in which I am allowed to participate. McCandless’ cynicism for modern life is not something I can relate to because radical self-dependence as an ideology has always been strictly gendered. In other words, this book is nauseatingly male.
Krakauer begins each chapter of Into the Wild with a quotation, mostly quotations highlighted by McCandless in the books he brought with him to Alaska in addition to Krakauer’s own picks. They are mostly the classics of individualism and outdoorsmanship, Walden’s Pond, Jack London, the usual suspects. Of the couple dozen epigraphs included, only one of them was written by a woman, Annie Dillard. It is a little meditation on the passage of time for the epilogue, unlike the others, which are largely about the majesty and danger of the individual in the natural world. It’s a good summary of the presence of gender in the rest of the book. All of the survivalists and recluses that Krakauer profiles are men, and the few women we encounter are somewhat opposing influences. His mother and sister obviously represent the life McCandless saw himself as escaping, and his friend Jan saw him as a son, and encouraged him to reconcile to his family due to her estranged relationship with her own son. I don’t want to question these on a specific level; each person here had an authentic relationship with McCandless and I find it inappropriate to analyse actual lives as though they were fictional constructions. I’m more interested in the way this made me feel on a structural level and the way Krakauer arranges this information in the context of his book. The world of the survivalist is a decidedly masculine one, an arena in which women only participate as moderating figures who try to prevent men from achieving sublime individualism. Every man is an island, but only men. This world feels determined to rebuff and alienate anyone who doesn’t fit the 19th and 20th century picture of a man who needs no one else. Krakauer compares the view from a challenging summit to looking up a woman’s vagina. It’s the nadir of the book.
A huge part of McCandless’ (and the other survivalists profiled in Into the Wild) desire for self-fulfilment in the form of rugged contact with the natural world. I have a hard time feeling empathy for this desire even though it’s something I technically do participate in because even though the behaviour is available to anyone with a pair of boots and a high clearance 4x4, the ideology is exclusively masculine. We’ve inherited the framework that men can find meaning in imposing themselves upon a feminine gendered nature, hence the tasteless vagina simile. While this can be empowering for men, it is alienating for me. The framing of the masculine survivalist adventure as something some men just have to do is deeply uncomfortable. Krakauer positions it as self-evident and natural. Some men just hear the Call of the Wild and, unlike Jack London (who only visited the far north once and spent most of his life in Sonoma county), some of them must follow it. But I don’t like how unchallenged it is. Women’s (and other marginalized people’s) access to the wild has always been conditional and closely regulated. It’s easy to find youtube comments complaining about how mountains should be off-limits because anyone attempting them is so clearly self-destructive, but it’s even easier to find them if the mountaineer is a woman. One a video about a couple who both died after summitting Mount Everest, leaving behind a nine-year-old son, the comments fixated on how his mother was cruel, evil even, to abandon him like that, even though the boy’s father also died on the same climb. As such it was consistently difficult for me to buy in to the idea that McCandless’ ideological motives were self-evidently intelligible, if not necessarily relatable. I felt this on a personal level in addition to an intellectual one. My brother’s interest in extreme independent activities was fostered when mine was not, and his individualistic cruelty was consistently tolerated when I was expected to bite my tongue and smooth things over. Rather than sympathy for McCandless’ motives, my thought is, ‘must be fucking nice.’
Krakauer’s motivation for expanding his initial reportage of the McCandless incident into a book was his conviction that McCandless did not die of his own stupidity because (as Krakauer phrases it) he had been successfully surviving for over three months before that. That’s too long to be luck; McCandless needed genuine ability to get that far. My quibble is with the use of the term ‘surviving’. He lived for around 118 days, but is losing a ghoulish amount of weight ‘surviving’ and scavenging the same little area around his camp site ‘surviving’? In a twisting final chapter worthy of an episode of Bones, Krakauer documents the investigation into how McCandless went from a basically functional survivalist to dead in only a few days. Multiple rounds of scientific inquiry eventually revealed the culprit to be a toxic alkaloid present in large quantities in the seeds McCandless had eaten before his death due to a previously unknown seasonal variation in toxin production by the plant. This toxin is an antimetabolite, a substance that prevents the body from metabolising any food consumed, causing such extreme weakness that McCandless was eventually physically unable to leave his sleeping bag. There is not antidote an antimetabolite; they are a poison the body must weather by itself. If one has enough mass to endure while the antimetabolite leaves the system (a days or weeks long process), then they can survive. If not, they will starve. Part of why McCandless was so susceptible to this toxin was that he had been starving for months already.
Krakauer doesn’t ever explicitly call out McCandless’ deeply strange relationship to food, but for me it was a huge presence within the book. What really stood out was the degree to which self-reliance was embodied by food scarcity for McCandless. His adventure acumen was characterized by subsisting on very sparse, very monotonous diets for an extremely long time. The reason he felt so confident in the success of his Alaska trip was that he’d subsisted on foraging supplemented by only a few dozen pounds of rice for months during a canoe trip through Mexico. It was all about how much hunger he could entire. He mentioned this explicitly; Krakauer quotes a letter sent to a friend in which McCandless lamented that he was no longer enjoying his nomadic lifestyle because he had enough money to buy enough food to eat, and that it had been more exciting when he was scrabbling to eat from day to day. A number of his friends report how he would hungrily consume large amounts of food when he was offered it, since he hadn’t eaten in a while.
A popular response to the McCandless incident was that with his meagre provisions and preparations, he was dead as soon as he crossed the Telinika river in April. Krakauer refutes that, arguing that absent a seasonal variation in toxin previously unknown to science, McCandless would have walked back out again. My assessment differs from both. McCandless was starving from the moment he walked into the wild. He had come there to starve. Did his own bad ideas kill him? In that sense I think they did.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
The book is part investigative report and part biography of the death of Chris McCandless, a Walden-esque nomad and recluse whose badly decayed body was found in an isolated bus near Denali National Park, Alaska. McCandless starved to death 118 days into a survivalist trip, after the mostly-frozen river he had easily waded through in April had swollen to a unnavigable torrent by July. For whatever reason, he was unwilling to seek an alternative river crossing and unable to wait out the deluge, which would have slowed to a passable volume within only a few weeks. His body was discovered by local hunters around three weeks after his death. The incident immediately hit the headlines as the ultimate parable of hubris laid low. After all, what kind of idiot waltzes into the Alaskan wilderness with a bag of rice and a Jack London book and expects to make it out alive? The near-misses of McCandless’ death — in reality, the bus was a well-known landmark to local outdoorsmen, located within 20 miles of the nearest town and 10 of additional resources, he died within a month of coincidental rescue — increase the tragedy, or, depending on your mindset, the schadenfreude.
Krakauer’s initial reportage of McCandless’ death in Outside magazine provoked a tsunami of comments, mostly negative, painting McCandless as an arrogant little shit who fucked around and eventually found out to the smug I-told-you-sos of the peanut gallery. In Into the Wild, Krakauer takes a longer look at McCandless to as why the reclusive survivalist provoked such antipathy, why Krakauer identifies so strongly with him, and whether McCandless really did die of his own stupidity.
I was more sympathetic to Krakauer’s point than much of the commentariat right from the outset. One does not need to delve deep into the youtube comments of videos about any even remotely extreme activity to find armchair philosophers proclaiming noisily, “sorry, but just no. I can’t even feel pity for people like this. They made their choices.” It gets fucking annoying. First, it’s an opinion no one asked for, often literally decades too late (no one cares if you think George Mallory was an idiot for trying to climb Everest in 1922). Second, the reasons people engage in objectively dangerous activities can be hard to appreciate if you’ve never experienced them yourself, but if you have, they are undeniable. In other words, there are actually genuinely good reasons to enjoy remote, dangerous, and solo activities.
Krakauer ascribes his identification with McCandless to his young adulthood as an ice climber, including a risky but ultimately successful solo ascent of a beastly spire of rock called the Devil’s Thumb, also in Alaska. I kind of get it too. There genuinely is something to solo outdoorsmanship that you just don’t get from adventuring with all the safety precautions. My vice is the significantly less dangerous solo hiking. I can’t afford a satellite device and I don’t take a two-way radio, even though I should. My only recourse in an accident is to walk my way out of it. Significantly less dangerous than McCandless’ activities, but not without risk. It’s only been about a month since since a solo hiker died in my area after falling down a slope. But that disconnection, the isolation of self-dependence, clears the way for a transcendent experience of the natural world. One of my first solo hikes was an uncommonly quiet Stanley Glacier (usually this route is very popular, but it was early June and still very cold, so there was no one else on the trail). I got up to the top of the route, with the glacier hanging above me like a giant tongue, and stopped for lunch. The only sound was the roar of the still-wintery wind, funnelled back and fourth across the cirque. The wildlife of the high altitudes made themselves known—distant birdsong, tiny flowers and stunted trees, and the pika. Pika are small mammals that look a bit like a rabbit and a bit like a hamster. They have an ear-splitting alarm call and can be surprisingly bold around humans; they’re also perhaps the most adorable creatures in the world. Sitting there in the silence halfway through a tupperware of soggy pringles, I was overcome with a wave of gratitude for living in the same country as the pika so strong that it brought tears to my eyes. I have moments like this every solo hike I go on, but these are private moments that don’t occur in the company of others. The experience of what I can only describe as 19th century awe is worth the kind of trip that requires every single thing to go right.
So I do empathize with what Krakauer sees in McCandless and in himself. I understand why he wants to extend a more charitable interpretation to McCandless’ actions. The problem is I also totally get where a lot of the critics are coming from, because the kind of guy who insists that the only what to truly live is to live hand to mouth on the road, to forge your way alone through the wilderness as your body withers away beneath you because you think you’re better than anyone who hasn’t got as close to dying as you, is the most annoying fucking guy in the world. That type of guy sucks to be around and you can’t even talk to them because their whole personality revolves around their certainty that no one else understands things like them.
When you meet that type of guy, sometimes you do wish that after so much fucking around they’d finally find out. Even if they’re someone you love. Especially if they’re someone you love.
Krakauer finds empathy because he sees himself in McCandless, but I have been shut out from that kind of relatability. I think that’s part of the reason that Krakauer fails to acknowledge just how shitty this ideology can be. I can’t interpret it as an innocent desire for self-fulfilment. This kind of radical individualism is an inherently deeply inconsiderate ideology. The whole point of it is that you should disregard the obligations, norms and expectations of anyone but yourself. Taken so radically, it can be genuinely cruel. McCandless reminds me a lot of my brother, whom I no longer talk to. Like McCandless, my brother was disenchanted with his family life and has distanced himself from them (as have I). Like McCandless, he has always aggressively disregarded anyone’s advice or concerns. Like McCandless, he has been at times disconcertingly interested in the moral benefits of self-inflicted punishment, in particular in low food intake. For me, Krakauer’s tolerance for McCandless was intensely frustrating because this kind of guy sucks to be around in real life. It’s really horrible to be around someone who you know considers you as an npc. I can’t deny that there is a part of me who believes that this ideology of radical self-sufficiency is largely delusion, but that the only way it can be challenged is disaster. In other words, I do understand the longing to see this attitude laid low.
Krakauer is able to find a lot of empathy for this perspective because he relates to where it is coming from. He mentions a tense relationship with his father, against whose high expectations he also rebelled. I think part of the reason I was so frustrated by his tolerance for McCandless is that that is not an ideology in which I am allowed to participate. McCandless’ cynicism for modern life is not something I can relate to because radical self-dependence as an ideology has always been strictly gendered. In other words, this book is nauseatingly male.
Krakauer begins each chapter of Into the Wild with a quotation, mostly quotations highlighted by McCandless in the books he brought with him to Alaska in addition to Krakauer’s own picks. They are mostly the classics of individualism and outdoorsmanship, Walden’s Pond, Jack London, the usual suspects. Of the couple dozen epigraphs included, only one of them was written by a woman, Annie Dillard. It is a little meditation on the passage of time for the epilogue, unlike the others, which are largely about the majesty and danger of the individual in the natural world. It’s a good summary of the presence of gender in the rest of the book. All of the survivalists and recluses that Krakauer profiles are men, and the few women we encounter are somewhat opposing influences. His mother and sister obviously represent the life McCandless saw himself as escaping, and his friend Jan saw him as a son, and encouraged him to reconcile to his family due to her estranged relationship with her own son. I don’t want to question these on a specific level; each person here had an authentic relationship with McCandless and I find it inappropriate to analyse actual lives as though they were fictional constructions. I’m more interested in the way this made me feel on a structural level and the way Krakauer arranges this information in the context of his book. The world of the survivalist is a decidedly masculine one, an arena in which women only participate as moderating figures who try to prevent men from achieving sublime individualism. Every man is an island, but only men. This world feels determined to rebuff and alienate anyone who doesn’t fit the 19th and 20th century picture of a man who needs no one else. Krakauer compares the view from a challenging summit to looking up a woman’s vagina. It’s the nadir of the book.
A huge part of McCandless’ (and the other survivalists profiled in Into the Wild) desire for self-fulfilment in the form of rugged contact with the natural world. I have a hard time feeling empathy for this desire even though it’s something I technically do participate in because even though the behaviour is available to anyone with a pair of boots and a high clearance 4x4, the ideology is exclusively masculine. We’ve inherited the framework that men can find meaning in imposing themselves upon a feminine gendered nature, hence the tasteless vagina simile. While this can be empowering for men, it is alienating for me. The framing of the masculine survivalist adventure as something some men just have to do is deeply uncomfortable. Krakauer positions it as self-evident and natural. Some men just hear the Call of the Wild and, unlike Jack London (who only visited the far north once and spent most of his life in Sonoma county), some of them must follow it. But I don’t like how unchallenged it is. Women’s (and other marginalized people’s) access to the wild has always been conditional and closely regulated. It’s easy to find youtube comments complaining about how mountains should be off-limits because anyone attempting them is so clearly self-destructive, but it’s even easier to find them if the mountaineer is a woman. One a video about a couple who both died after summitting Mount Everest, leaving behind a nine-year-old son, the comments fixated on how his mother was cruel, evil even, to abandon him like that, even though the boy’s father also died on the same climb. As such it was consistently difficult for me to buy in to the idea that McCandless’ ideological motives were self-evidently intelligible, if not necessarily relatable. I felt this on a personal level in addition to an intellectual one. My brother’s interest in extreme independent activities was fostered when mine was not, and his individualistic cruelty was consistently tolerated when I was expected to bite my tongue and smooth things over. Rather than sympathy for McCandless’ motives, my thought is, ‘must be fucking nice.’
Krakauer’s motivation for expanding his initial reportage of the McCandless incident into a book was his conviction that McCandless did not die of his own stupidity because (as Krakauer phrases it) he had been successfully surviving for over three months before that. That’s too long to be luck; McCandless needed genuine ability to get that far. My quibble is with the use of the term ‘surviving’. He lived for around 118 days, but is losing a ghoulish amount of weight ‘surviving’ and scavenging the same little area around his camp site ‘surviving’? In a twisting final chapter worthy of an episode of Bones, Krakauer documents the investigation into how McCandless went from a basically functional survivalist to dead in only a few days. Multiple rounds of scientific inquiry eventually revealed the culprit to be a toxic alkaloid present in large quantities in the seeds McCandless had eaten before his death due to a previously unknown seasonal variation in toxin production by the plant. This toxin is an antimetabolite, a substance that prevents the body from metabolising any food consumed, causing such extreme weakness that McCandless was eventually physically unable to leave his sleeping bag. There is not antidote an antimetabolite; they are a poison the body must weather by itself. If one has enough mass to endure while the antimetabolite leaves the system (a days or weeks long process), then they can survive. If not, they will starve. Part of why McCandless was so susceptible to this toxin was that he had been starving for months already.
Krakauer doesn’t ever explicitly call out McCandless’ deeply strange relationship to food, but for me it was a huge presence within the book. What really stood out was the degree to which self-reliance was embodied by food scarcity for McCandless. His adventure acumen was characterized by subsisting on very sparse, very monotonous diets for an extremely long time. The reason he felt so confident in the success of his Alaska trip was that he’d subsisted on foraging supplemented by only a few dozen pounds of rice for months during a canoe trip through Mexico. It was all about how much hunger he could entire. He mentioned this explicitly; Krakauer quotes a letter sent to a friend in which McCandless lamented that he was no longer enjoying his nomadic lifestyle because he had enough money to buy enough food to eat, and that it had been more exciting when he was scrabbling to eat from day to day. A number of his friends report how he would hungrily consume large amounts of food when he was offered it, since he hadn’t eaten in a while.
A popular response to the McCandless incident was that with his meagre provisions and preparations, he was dead as soon as he crossed the Telinika river in April. Krakauer refutes that, arguing that absent a seasonal variation in toxin previously unknown to science, McCandless would have walked back out again. My assessment differs from both. McCandless was starving from the moment he walked into the wild. He had come there to starve. Did his own bad ideas kill him? In that sense I think they did.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death
Minor: Eating disorder