I have a few people that I want to bring to the forefront. They are both intriguing people who refuse to live vicariously, who refuse to only dream. One man is Chris McCandless. I discuss him extensively later on. Along with him, a similar character with more experience: Les Stroud (many know him from his show Survivorman). While Stroud is great in what he does. I feel that he only scratches the surface of a great adventure. He is certainly limited by the restraints he places on himself, after all. Luckily, the only way to truly experience living off the land is to do it oneself. What you see Stroud doing is a prototype, a starting point of a great struggle. Its as close as you get while remaining in "the safety of an armchair". I respect him because he shows the world what he does. He is careful and humble, which is unfortunately something that McCandless lacked (though these qualities certainly come with age. Stroud may very well have been a McCandless, but who, as Roman Dial states, was lucky enough to survive).
Once I read Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country, Thoreau's Kaatdn, and a few other books that have had excerpts from them emblazoned in the chapter pages of Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild, I will recommend them. For the time being, I can only recommend the excerpts from those books. Below is a re-posting regarding Chris McCandless.
Like Jon Krakauer, I, too, desire to set the record straight in regards to a man that wandered into the Alaskan wilderness and, after 113 days succeeding, dies and is found 19 days later. I have selected a few telling excerpts from the last chapter of the book, with emphasis in bold and clarification in brackets.
Among the letters lambasting McCandless, virtually all those I received mentioned his misidentification of the caribou as proof that he didn't know the first thing about surviving in the back-country. What the angry letter-writers didn't know, however, was that the ungulate McCandless shot was exactly what he'd said it was. Contrary to what I reported in Outside, the animal was a moose, as a close examination of the beast's remains now indicated and several of McCandless's photographs of the kill later confirmed beyond all doubt. The boy made some mistakes on the Stampede Trail, but confusing a caribou with a moose wasn't among them.
Roman [Dial], thirty-two, inquisitive and outspoken, has a doctorate in biology from Stanford and an abiding distrust in conventional wisdom. He spent his adolescence in the same Washington, D.C., suburbs as McCandless and found them every bit as stifling. He first came to Alaska as a nine-year-old, to visit a trio of uncles who mined coal at Usibelli, a big strip-mine operation a few miles east of Healy, and immediately fell in love with everything about the North. Over the years that followed, he returned repeatedly to the forty-ninth state. In 1977, after graduating from high school as a sixteen-year-old at the top of his class, he moved to Fairbanks and made Alaska his permanent home.
These days Roman teaches at Alaska Pacific University, in Anchorage, and enjoys statewide renown for a long, brash string of backcountry escapades: He has -- among other feats -- traveled the entire 1,000-mile length of the Brooks Range by foot and paddle, skied 250 miles across the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in subzero winter cold. traversed the 700-mile crest of the Alaska Range, and pioneered more than thirty first ascents of northern peaks and crags. And Roman doesn't see a great deal of difference between his own widely respected deeds and McCandless's adventure, except that McCandless had the misfortune to perish.
I bring up McCandless's hubris and the dumb mistakes he made -- the two or three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him his life. "Sure, he screwed up," Roman answers, "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, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period of [a few months], 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 [and would have, were it not for a freak accident involving a toxin from a mold that is known to grow on a perfectly-benign seed of an artic plant].
"I guess I just can't help identifying with this guy," Roman allows as he pokes the coals with a stick. "I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his critics [(many that sent letters to the author of the Outside magazine, Jon Krakauer, viciously-disparaging McCandless)]. Which is maybe why they're so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them [those in Fairbanks and other parts of Alaska who were the main source of the harshest letters regarding Chris] a little too much of their former selves .
Roman's observation underscores how difficult it is to for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth . As Everett Ruess's father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, "The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett"
One of his [Chris McCandless] last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours -- because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down -- it's not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.
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His pure ascetic nature and compassion (though his neglectment of his family was completely unacceptable, sending them into a "morass of anger, misunderstanding, and sorrow" [Krakauer, Into The Wild] regardless of whether or not the father hid a second marriage from him and the rest of the family) are something we can all be inspired by. I personally am enamored of Alex Supertramp. If anybody would like to talk to me about him and/or the book (or any of my other literary favorites, as listed on my facebook info section, for that matter), I would be more than delighted.
I have seen no extensive literature concerning Les Stroud, though I most certainly will contribute my meager portion the more I learn about him. I now post a few quotes from his shows and interviews.
In the adventure known as life, there are those who live it vicarously and enjoy the ride from the safety of an armchair, and that's good. There are those who have a few chances to realize incredible and life-changing experiences, and though they don't repeat them, they carry with them a growth and personal philosophy for the rest of their lives. And there are those, for whom a taste is never enough, for whom the lust for adventure is nearly insatiable, and if you add to that the overwhelming desire to create and share, then you get where I was at. For the end of one adventure only signifies the beginning of another.
I would like to relate all of this to the little experience I've had. The pine forests of the Carolinas are probably a tame as one can get. I wish I could experience more. For now, that is not an option. It is for now a quest for beauty and not really a test of my constitution.
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