WALDEN AND THE STAMPEDE TRAIL

The 6^th of September marks the ending of two stories of life in the wilderness 145 years apart. The first, on the 6^th September 1847, is the more admired and successful event. It was on that day that Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond. The second, on the 6^th September 1992, was the discovery of the body of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young man who had dreamed of a life in the Alaskan wilderness.

Thoreau produced a book of his thoughts and experiences during his two years of living on the shores of Walden Pond, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance. He stated:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau was steeped in the transcendental movement of the 1830’s and ‘40’s which was developed as a protest against the general state of culture and society and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the belief in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Thoreau in Walden spoke of the debt to the Vedic thought directly, as did other members of the movement:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

The writer John Updike commented in 2004:

A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.

Thoreau embarked on his two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres (57,000 m²) that Emerson had bought, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home. As you can see, Thoreau did not stray all that far from civilization.

 McCandless, on the other hand, was from El Segundo, California and he did stray some considerable distance from home. He adopted the name Alexander Supertramp and hiked into the Alaskan wilderness with little food and equipment, hoping to live a period of solitude. For years, McCandless dreamed of an "Alaskan Odyssey" wherein he would live off the land of the Alaskan wilderness, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992, McCandless hitchhiked from Enderlin, North Dakota to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive on April 28, 1992 by Jim Gallien, a local, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the head of the Stampede Trail. Gallien was concerned about "Alex", who had minimal supplies (not even a compass) and no experience surviving in the Alaskan bush. Gallien repeatedly tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment and supplies. However, McCandless ignored Gallien's warnings, refusing all assistance except for a pair of Wellington boots, two tuna melt sandwiches, and a bag of corn chips.

After hiking along the snow-covered Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus (about 25 miles west of Healy) used as a hunting shelter and parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park, and began to try to live off the land. He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle with 400 rounds of .22LR hollowpoint ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books, and some camping equipment. He assumed he could forage for plant food and hunt game. McCandless poached porcupines and birds. He managed to kill a moose; however, he failed to preserve the meat properly, and it spoiled. Rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat, like jerky, as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he smoked it, following the advice of hunters he had met in South Dakota.

A self-portrait of Christopher McCandless in his camp on the Stampede Trail was found undeveloped in his camera after his death.

He too, kept a journal containing entries covering a total of 112 days. They disclose his changing fortunes from the ecstatic to the grim. On August 12, 1992, McCandless wrote what are apparently his final words in his journal: "Beautiful Blueberries."

He tore the final page from Louis l’Amour’s's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, which contains an excerpt from a Robinson Jeffers poem titled "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

The mountains are dead stone, the people

Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,

The mountains are not softened or troubled

And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

On the other side of the page, McCandless added, "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus by Butch Killian, a local hunter, on the 6^th of September, 1992. McCandless had been dead for more than two weeks and weighed an estimated 67 pounds (30 kg). His official, undisputed cause of death was starvation.

The story of Christopher McCandless has now become myth and he has bee made into an heroic figure though books Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1993) and films, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) and a documentary by Ron Lamothe, The Call of the Wild (2007). He also inspired TV episodes and music by folk singers Ellis Paul and Eddie From Ohio.

From another point of view Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote:

I am exposed continually to what I will call the 'McCandless Phenomenon.' People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent [...] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament [...] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.

Hero or idiot, in my view McCandless should have found his solitude closer to home like Thoreau, or at least learned more about the life he sought to lead, as indicated by Peter Christian. Perhaps he didn't want to, as indicated by his final thoughts. This You Tube entry has had over a million views. Perhaps another view has been formed.