WaPo reports.
Some people say that bus should be removed. It attracts pilgrims, some of whom, in their spiritual quest, like McCandless himself, take insufficient care of their earthly body. But the bus is a shrine. It means something to people. Don't destroy meaning.
The article quotes Eve Holland, who's written about pilgrimage to the bus-shrine: "I think that there are probably better ways to sort of honor the spirit of Chris McCandless. Finding your own adventure maybe, rather than trying to follow this very well-trodden path." Well, that is what McCandless did, and he died. Must people find more original ways to risk their lives?
This is a kind of travel that has a human individual at its center. People go to a geographic place not because of its natural wonder but because of what somebody once did there. You might say, stop idolizing human individuals. It's all in your head, this idea that some person who's gone is somehow here in spirit. But this is an attack on all spiritual journeys.
From Holland's article:
The trail is nobody’s idea of a lovely hike – one of many things that mystify the Alaskans who watch the McCandless pilgrims set off each year. (“Of all the places you could hike in Alaska …” one local had said to me two nights earlier, shaking her head in disbelief.) The Stampede Trail is a boggy thoroughfare for motorized off-roaders. During the day that I spent on it, I counted seven bus-bound hikers, 22 four-wheeling moose hunters, two guided Jeep tours and one guided ATV tour. Hiking there today is no way to capture the solitude and engagement with nature that McCandless was seeking. As I slogged back to my waiting car, I could not see the point of the pilgrimages. Nor could I fathom how the loss of more young lives honored his memory.If there are believers and a shrine, don't destroy it.
The pilgrims, of course, see the journey differently. A spiral notebook left in the bus by the McCandless family when they visited by helicopter in 1993 has since been filled with handwritten entries, each praising McCandless and the impact his story has had on the writer's life.... One undated entry, written in pencil, is addressed directly to McCandless:
“Christopher J McCandless, AKA Supertramp, I envy the ability you had to put this world aside and live out your dream, something so many of us lack. If your spirit still looms here, if this is your eternal paradise and you watch us come and go year by year season by season, I hope you help instill some of your awesome qualities in each of us that make the grueling trip to your resting place.”
Dan Grec, an Australian who now lives in Canada [said,] “I really associate with Chris not liking the world, not liking society, and not turning his back on it, exactly, but wanting to pick and choose the parts he wanted to be involved in.... The most vivid thing that I remember... you think it’s going to be like a funeral. But there’s something going on there that I don’t understand – some kind of happiness or energy. That’s why I want to go back – I’d like to spend a week there and just soak it in.”
Grec is what you might call a true believer....
Posts
74 comments:
I suppose needing to believe in something and believing in a fucking idiot is a perfect pursuit in this age of the world. You could visit Orleans and imagine the moment Jeanne D'Arc rode onto the field. You could visit Ulm and imagine Sophie Scholl playing her flute outside the prison. But no, you visit Alaska to make a Chris McCandless pilgrimage. And get swept away in the river.
If you publicize the risks only the true believers will show up. The mere believers will say it’d be cool and all, but...Hopefully the true believers will take the time to learn about risk taking in the wilderness, like fording rivers.
The thru hike thing is way hot this summer. Instagram away...
No one or no thing is a worthy shrine if visiting it causes death or harm to the worshipper/ visitor/ participant. Visiting a shrine should be an elevating experience, not a deadly one. Some shrines are mere tourist traps for ignorant people.
Freedom has always been messy, often dangerous to life and limb. But it's still freedom. Protect those, that due to age are disability, cannot protect themselves, then freedom takes over.
Young marrieds are still showing off to each other. But taking big risks is seldom rewarded by a long life.
"Don't destroy meaning"
What does that mean? What about Confederate statues they mean something. Should we keep all those. What about gender Norms those mean something.
Looks like a murder.
When I lived in Philly, anyone that came to visit wanted to see Independence Hall. The men who met there are long gone, but the place still meant something to my friends and family.
They also wanted to touch the Liberty Bell. Did it bring good luck?
How many people die each year, because they think nature is tame? I'm waiting for the tale of how some poor fool will die fording this river because they stopped in the middle to pull out a selfie stick.
Removing the bus won't stop people from visiting and risking injury and death. Some among us are hell bent on saving us from ourselves. They should tend to their own business, leave the rest of us alone.
When I walk beside her, I am the better man
When I look to leave her, I always stagger back again
Once I built an ivory tower so I could worship from above
When I climbed down to be set free, she took me in again
There's a big, a big hard sun
Beating on the big people
In the big hard world
When she comes to greet me, she is mercy at my feet
When I see her bitter charm, she just throws it back at me
Once I dug an early grave to find a better land
She just smiled and laughed at me and took her blues back again
When I go to cross that river, she is comfort by my side
When I try to understand, she just opens up her hands
Once I stood to lose her when I saw what I had done
Bound down and threw away the hours of her garden and her sun
So I tried to warn her, I turned to see her weep
Forty days and forty nights and it's still coming down on me.
"Hard Sun" from the "Into the Wild" soundtrack
I wish people didn’t idolize McCandless so much. He wasn’t a very good writer. Yes he did a creditable job surviving out there for as long as he did but he was ultimately a tenderfoot in over his head. If we’d gotten Wordsworth out of it fine but we got a more or less typical teenager’s diary. It was a sacrifice for mediocrity.
I HATED that book. I hated that young man's utter narcissism. The author made him out as a modern hermit or a martyr to the frantic pace of modern life or something - but he was just a young guy who, like young guys (of whatever sex) throughout history, felt that HIS experience of life, HIS truth, as they say, was more authentic and valuable than anyone else's. Most of us grow out of that in time - start realizing that while other people's inner life is not the same as our own, it's just as real. But not Chris. No, he loaded up a big bag of rice and headed off to have a Spiritual Experience, heedless of the consequences to his family and friends, probably heedless of any risks a potential rescuer would have to take to get him out of his self-imposed pickle (I'm thinking now of all the ill-prepared hikers every year).
And he died for his stupidity and is somehow now the goal of a spiritual pilgrimage, having put HIMSELF at the center of the universe. Maybe he WAS a hermit, living in such a desert as that.
I read the book. I saw the movie. I grew to detest the selfish, showy twerp.
Ironically, it was McCandless’s decision not to risk crossing a raging river that left him stranded on the other side starving to death.
She may have exercised better judgment if she were motivated by the book, which was much more honest about McCandless’s fear and loneliness, instead of by the movie, which turned him into a Christ figure.
Civilization is one long experiment to protect ourselves from the ravages of nature. There will always be some subset of the population who want to reject civilization and favor a return to nature. Only then will they learn its true brutality.
I think they're all Bozos on that bus.
The river kept McCandless from crossing back because it was too high.
Aren't rivers when "high" less rapid?
Spiros Pappas said...
Looks like a murder.
Without reading the article that occurred to me as well.
"McCandless’s cause of death was thought to be starvation...."
But further research has shown that it was terminal stupidity.
J. Farmer, yes, of course. And always some subset who have to learn it for themselves instead of learning from everyone who already died from the lesson. While I think McCandliss was a foolish person, I do feel sympathy for him because he seems to have been one of those. But to make *personal experience* your god as well as the practice of your religion not only diminishes the incredible human achievements of communication and society but also elevates youthful ignorance over wisdom. We have, in my opinion, way too much elevation of youthful ignorance these days.
(You could counter that wisdom comes to someone who HAS had a personal experience. True. But two things: first, some people have experiences thrust upon them, and the wisdom they gain is no less valuable for their not having chosen the challenge they had to face. And second, the survivor of such a challenge is in a position to share not only what he learned but what he'd do differently, and spare some other young fool. So the young fool would do well to seek out the old fool.)
Didn't know there was a movie, but agree with several above about the book. The one time I got in trouble in the woods for a few hours, all of my leisure thoughts involved self-reproach. I hate to think someone would make a shrine from that.
Oh, and the world must be doing pretty well if two Belarusians can get to Alaska and do something as unnecessary as this.
Chris McCandless died of stupidity and so did Veramika Maikamava — if she wasn’t killed by her husband, accidentally or otherwise.
A Shrine to what faith?
Darwinism?
I think she just picked up a nomination for a Darwin Award.
"Oh, and the world must be doing pretty well if two Belarusians can get to Alaska and do something as unnecessary as this."
All the best things are unnecessary.
I think it's lovely that 2 Belarusians came to care so much about an American folk hero.
They could have spent their honeymoon somewhere else and drowned — some beach, which would also have been unnecessary.
Marriage itself is unnecessary.
but the statue of Nathan Bedford Forest is a shrine. It means something to people. Don't destroy meaning
fify!
I'm sorry for her, and her widower.
As for McCandless, I've never been particularly taken with his story, which I read as a huge fan of Krakauer's Eiger Dreams and Into Thin Air. It's not that I can't identify with someone who gambles with their life to have an extraordinary adventure in the wilderness, and loses. (I feel like I'm more often defending those people in the comments to this blog.) I think the difference is preparation and competence. In a really hostile environment you can do everything right and still die. But McCandless was too free a spirit to get even some very basic points right, which for me puts his story too far on the side of, Well that was dumb.
Rory:
"The one time I got in trouble in the woods for a few hours, all of my leisure thoughts involved self-reproach."
Ever see The Edge? A mixed bag in my view but I enjoyed it.
Charles, a badass bookworm: "You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame."
Stephen: "What?"
Charles: "Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives."
It’s much safer to go to the Field of Dreams in Iowa. No one drowns there.
"The one time I got in trouble in the woods for a few hours, all of my leisure thoughts involved self-reproach."
Yep, been there.
I was given the book but have never been able to read it. From what I do know, the guy's an idiot.
If that many people want to walk out to the bus, build a footbridge over the river.
It wouldn't be the first bridge to nowhere.
Book was good but McCandless was a selfish idiot. He is not a folk hero.
"Marriage itself is unnecessary."
Civilization would disagree.
Is that really your belief or were you just outgassing?
"All the best things are unnecessary" .... "Marriage itself is unnecessary"
(Van Morrison, Behind the Ritual.)
Drinking wine in the alley, drinking that wine,
Making time, talking all out of my mind
Drinking that wine, making time in the alley
Behind the ritual, You find the spiritual,
You find the spiritual behind the ritual, in the days gone by
Certain drunks get celebrated, certain hermits too
Their words are parsed, passed around, courses offered at the U.
The anxious hairdresser, the resigned shop clerk
Don't keep relevant diaries for us to see
They live out their lives, go in to work, maybe eat at the diner,
Before dying in a three car accident on Hwy 173.
Aren't rivers when "high" less rapid?
No. A river is water running downhill finding the path of least resistance. The water is gonna run downhill whether there's a little or a lot. If the slope of the river bed is steeper, the water runs faster. When the water is high it covers the rocks, the "rapids" disappear and it can seem more sedate, but its still moving just as fast and has even more power to carry away pilgrims and what not.
That second line isn't Van. Sorry bad editing.
In any case, I would agree that some of the "unnecessary" aspects of life are the best parts of it, but it is odd which of those "unnecessary" aspects some people find foolish whilst others find a marvel.
Sports religion travel hobbies of all stripes etc. To each, their own.
The bus has become a shrine.
I was there right after McCandless although only on the short road that leads to the trail. I took my kids on a tour of Alaska in June, 1992 in a motor home I rented in Anchorage. We went north to Denali and south to Homer. We camped in the bus and I forget why we pulled into the short gravel road. McCandless had not been found yet and was probably still alive in that bus. I read the book and remembered that road from the description. I like Alaska and have an Alaska medical license. I nearly bought a home there.
That kid was crazy and self destructive.
The self destruction is the heart of the story, though. It's as much a part of the story as the idealism, or the narcissism.
Krakauer wrote a very good book about a superficially boring story because he saw a lot of himself in McCandless. Is it so hard to believe that other people see the same things?
Timothy Treadwell was nuts. It comes across even in his self filmed video. But Grizzly Man is one of the most memorable movies I've ever seen.
The human psyche is like a piano. There are black keys as well as white keys. You need both kinds to make music.
I used to live down the street from Walden Pond. It's a "pilgrimage place". Not very dangerous, but a major source of disappointment for a lot of people. From the site of the original Thoreau's cabin, you can see the Boston and Maine train chugging along from Concord to Boston on tracks that were just as frequently used in Thoreau's time. It's about a mile and a half from the cabin to downtown Concord. The most difficult part of the walk is getting across Route 2. The road was there in Thoreau's time, but instead of rush hour traffic you can hear, one had to watch out for horses and people walking, and an occasional rider delivering mail. There's a replica of Thoreau's cabin, but it's not exactly on the cabin site. It's closer to a parking lot. Seeing the look on people's faces when they realize what a fraud Thoreau was about where he actually "went into tse woods" has made me skeptical about how much money I'd be willing to spend or how much risk I'd be willing to take to "honor" someone who says they did something like McCandless did. But Walden Pond is a very pretty spot. And safe. If disappointing to Pilgrims.
Most shrines are disappointing. Only very few places and people deserve to be enshrined.
Maybe just the way the author spun it, but in the book everyone who met McCandless liked the guy. Positive memories. A few even admired his quest....Maybe even envious.
I can understand why the bus is a shrine.
A few years back I was talking with a ranger at Denali and he mentioned that he lived in the Stampede Trail. I asked about McCandless. At first he was cautious in his speech, probably because he didn't want to offend me. Once I said that I thought the guy was an unprepared idiot, the ranger started complaining about all the pilgrims they have to rescue each year.
Sometimes you light out for the territories and sometimes the territories put your lights out.
The bus is kinda like one of those little ant traps, is it not?
Swept away? Does no one carry carabiners and paracord in their ruck anymore? Looks like evolution in action to me.
It’s fun to make fun of people who die due to choices that most people could predict would lead to death. But McCandless, youthful self-absorption notwithstanding, had a purpose. He wanted to live free, but he also wanted to see just how little people need. The less you need, the freer you are.
He made some critical mistakes, but he also made some valuable discoveries. Valuable if you value a life of adventure without a budget, anyway.
Eleanor, I’ve only read a bit if Walden (I find it a boring slog), but I love that he talked about sending his laundry into town.
Yeah, that was life on the edge.
In reading Jon Krakauer's book it was clear that he, himself, had been swept away by the romantic legacy of McCandless, who was clearly a very disturbed young man.
Blogger Oso Negro said...
I suppose needing to believe in something and believing in a fucking idiot is a perfect pursuit in this age of the world.
It was a stupid movie about a fucking idiot—indeed.
I’m torn: if we remove the bus fewer fucking idiots will die trying to reach it; but perhaps the world is better withp fewer fucking idiots.
I don’t know—6 to 5 and pick ‘em.
Blogger Zach said...
The self destruction is the heart of the story, though. It's as much a part of the story as the idealism, or the narcissism.
Krakauer wrote a very good book about a superficially boring story because he saw a lot of himself in McCandless. Is it so hard to believe that other people see the same things?
True dat. I liked Krakauer's book. It didn't sugar coat. I came away with several different emotions about McCandless. Krakauer didn't really glorify him.
But then, I read it while older after a few times of almost cashing in my chips so I could see that.
BTW, I think it's pretty settled that he died of, essentially, rabbit starvation; Krakauer tried to argue later on that he'd been eating some poisonous berries or something. I think that's just an attempt to make his death a bit more tragic-sounding.
I had no idea--literally-- who this guy was, what he did, why anyone wrote a book about it, why anyone read a book about it, why anyone made a movie about it, why he became a hero, why his death site became a pilgrimage destination, etc etc . . . no offense.
As to his self-destruction, he just set the pattern for the pilgrims--and it sounds like the visitors have already destroyed much of the place anyway.
Narr
Look at the bright side--if they ever erect a statue it won't weigh much!
Don’t enshrine crazy destructive people, others will try to emulate them. Good life lesson.
I remember getting ready to watch the movie, thinking this is going to be great. Really good reviews, my kind of genre'.
So, here we go with the struggle to survive. The human spirit finds a way.
Then came the ending.
Fuck that movie.
McCandless' is a cautionary tale, but not everyone gets that.
"I’m torn: if we remove the bus fewer fucking idiots will die trying to reach it; but perhaps the world is better withp fewer fucking idiots."
I believe fucking idiots have a right to kill themselves doing fucking idiot things. No lose to the world (net gain, actually). I can see the point of removing the bus to lighten the burden on the Park Service.
Could have been worse. She could have waded into the river, sunk into the silt bed, and got stuck there as the hypothermia and rising water takes over. That happens regularly in the Turnagain Arm inlet as people ignore the warning signs, cross over the barriers, and step onto the mud only to sink in, because something as big as Alaska is difficult to see unless you get closer to it.
McCandless went into the wilderness unprepared. The wilderness doesn't give a fuck who you are so you better be prepared.
She admired and emulated a mentally unbalance, suicidal young man, so what a surprise!
Anybody familiar with the Investigation Discovery channel knows that...
...he pushed her.
Charles: "Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives."
a few years, there was an old lady that was through hiking on the Appalachian Trail. It appears that she went off the right (east) side of the trail to go out of sight, and poop. She got lost, and went they found her corpse, the dogs showed that she'd hike MILES in circles, with each orbit getting her further and further from the trail . All she'd had to do , was
a) poop within sight of the trail (it's not THAT busy!), or;
b) head WEST and she'd HAVE TO cross the trail
but instead,
she went completely out of site of the trail, and HAD NO IDEA HOW not to travel in a circle in the woods
This was above Harper's Ferry, so she'd hiked more than half of the trail.
My guess was, that after she crossed her path the third time, she died of shame
Theis
Anybody familiar with the Investigation Discovery channel knows that...
You mean the Murder Channel. Those of us who watch all call it the same.
Saw the movie, didn't read the book. Like Yancy Ward, I saw it as a cautionary tale. It had compassion for McCandless, but it was still a cautionary tale. For that matter, Into Thin Air can also be seen as a cautionary tale. In the movie McCandless comes across, to me, as being both hopelessly naieve and emotionally disturbed. Whether or nor that was Sean Penn's intention is anyone's guess.
"The Edge" was a terrific adventure/survival movie. Two great actors at the top of their form working off an excellent script by a great writer, David Mamet.
Natural selection at its finest.
Attention Roughcoat! This is the book I have at home History of Warfare by John Keegan. However, I may have it mixed up with another book I've read, too. I read a LOT. I found it fascinating but you may already have read it.
Before going into the wilderness, read "To Light A Fire" by Jack London. Wilderness will kill you if you give it a chance. It may kill you even if you're very careful.
“All the best things in life are unnecessary.”
Like the moon landing?
mockturtle:
Thanks! Yes, I have read that book. I've read all of his books. I have great respect for Keegan as both a writer and a military historian. Also, he was a really nice guy, very modest and personable. "History of Warfare" was and remains controversial because it's a sustained critique of Clausewitz. It ruffled many feathers. Keegan was also controversial because he had the temerity to be prolific, writing military history that appealed to the general reading public. Military scholars who lacked his writing skills and who didn't score with the general reading public were jealous of his success. Also he was an Irish Catholic, which made him doubly unpopular in the community of British military scholars, which is overwhelmingly Protestant and very, very English. Finally, he was firmly, explicitly, and outspokenly pro-America. E.g., in both the first and final lines of his "Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America" he states: "I love America." That's how he begins and ends his book. Whenever he visited America he used stay at the house of good friend of mine, himself a well-known and prolific military historian. For my friend, it was like having the Einstein of military historians bunking in his home.
Recommend you read his "The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme." Widely hailed as a masterpiece of military history writing and scholarship, even by those who don't like him.
And I think Keegan was right and Clausewitz was wrong about the nature and origin of warfare. It's in our DNA.
Thanks for the recommendation! I shall order it tout de suite before I forget the title. Agincourt is one of my very favorite battle.
Sorry about the book--not really weapon-intensive. I think I had it mixed up with another one I read along the same lines. Glad you also enjoyed it and I look forward to reading all of his work. Thanks again! :-)
mockturtle:
My pleasure. Glad to turn you on to Keegan. See also "The Mask of Command," which includes a chapter on Grant, whom Keegan regards as one of history's best and most formidable military commanders (and a good man to boot); and "The Price of Admiralty." But you're not going to go wrong with anything he's written.
P.S. Keegan converted me to his view vis-a-vis Clausewitz and the origins and nature of war -- even though I still have high regard for Clausewitz as a giant in the field of military theory.
Mr. D said...
It’s much safer to go to the Field of Dreams in Iowa. No one drowns there.
Drown, no. But we do have swarms of bicyclists, 7,000 to 10,000 strong, peddling down the backroads, drinking towns out of beer, and eating every piece of pie in their path, baked by church women
While smaller in numbers, you will encounter packs of old men riding down the roads on the tractors of their youth. Natives understand them to be harmless, but to the uninitiated, it is disconcerting.
"Don't destroy meaning" is an interesting standard. Symbols and monuments you've decided are ugly have meaning to some people but I doubt that prevents you from cheering their removal and/or destruction, Professor. Maybe you're just shorthanding something like "don't destroy meaning when the meaning, or the people to whom the thing has meaning, aren't ugly."
I suppose I'm agnostic on the removal of the bus. I imagine if you remove it, the people to whom it's so meaningful will find some other thing to make pilgrimage to. This isn't Mecca. There's a decent chance Piotr Markielau will go back to the spot even if the bus is removed. It's meaning for him is the place where he watched his wife die. Poor guy.
I never read the book, but I watched a fair bit of the film Into the Wild. My impression was that it was the glorification of an overly romantic idiot. Shame it cost him his life. Poor guy.
If the chatter here in Fairbanks is any indication, I wouldn't be surprised to see some locals come together and drag the thing out this winter.
"But the bus is a shrine. It means something to people. Don't destroy meaning."
The rules you Leftists construe...
Post a Comment