The Press Box - Jon Krakauer on the 25th Anniversary of ‘Into the Wild’

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by Jon Krakauer, author of ‘Into the Wild,’ for its 25th anniversary. They discuss the story of Christopher McCandless, the book's impact on McCandless's story and Krakauer, and what has unfolded in the 25 years since. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Jon Krakauer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. This is the Press Box. Now, normally on this podcast, you hear us talking about the media, about the news, about TV hosts, that kind of thing. But today we've got our very first Press Box special episode. It's an episode about how a great nonfiction book was created. The book in question is Into the Wild, which John Crackhauer published this week, 25 years ago. My how time flies. And we're lucky enough, mostly thanks to Brian, to have Krakauer here

to tell us just how writing the book came about. Now, if you don't know End of the Wild, here's your 30-second primer. In 1992, the body of a 24-year-old man named Christopher McAnlans was found on a bus in the Alaskan wilderness. McAnlis died of starvation. There weren't many clues to his identity other than a diary, a book by Tolstoy, an author he loved, and wrote. And roles of film that McAnlis used to take pictures of himself. So enter John Crackauer, who was in a 38-year-old magazine writer, when he started reporting on McCandless. And very quickly, Crackauer figured out that he wasn't just writing a story about a disaster in

the wilderness. Crackauer was writing a story about someone he identified with, someone who was so much like Crackauer as a younger man that, as he said later, it made the hair on his neck stand-up. Now, this book's 25 years old. as we mentioned, you said if you don't know into the wild, I'm tempted to say if you don't know into the wild, you might have been living off the grid in a bus for some period of time. But it has been 25 years.

When you and I were coming up, when we were hanging out or in my case working in bookstores in the 90s, it was impossible to avoid into the wild. Of course, it was then made into a movie that Sean Penn directed, Emile Hirsch starred in it. The movie itself could make a whole podcast because it was a very kind of particular time in big time indie movie making.

But the book, the book was just everything. I mean, you could, for years after it came out, the book was in the front of all the Barnes and Nobles around anywhere. I mean, and everybody, it felt like it had this book. There was a sort of canon of literary nonfiction that the 90s were built on. and whether that was Philip Gerevich,

you know, The Perfect Storm, Professor and the Madman, the Mark Karlansky books, what are the other ones? Angelus Ashes, obviously, Oliver Sacks, Bill Bryson, you know, these great sort of naturalist writers, midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, obviously.

There you go. This sort of narrative nonfiction that was very, that was purely, it was journalism, first and foremost, but it was readable. It was, I mean, there's some of the books on this list that you'd be forgiven if you weren't paying attention if you thought they were novels,

if you had never read them, right? Because they just get mentioned in the same breath or they get made in the movies in the same way. It was a very, it felt like an incredibly vital time in publishing. And this book, Into the Wild, was sort of, I don't know if it wasn't the first, It maybe not, it maybe wasn't the best, but it was seminal.

It was it was, it was, it identified so much of the era. It was, it was sort of the pinnacle in a lot of ways. I can confirm having wandered into Barnes & Noble the other day because I misplaced my copy somewhere over the years that Into the Wild is still on the front table, David. And then both the person at the information desk and at the cashier when I came by told me individually, you know, that's a really, really great book. You're going to really, really enjoy that book. And I nodded and said, yes, I have and I am. A couple things that stuck out to me rereading this book before I talked to Crack Hour. One was the reporting in it. Christopher

McCannless is somebody who vanished. He graduated from college in Atlanta. He got into his car. he drove away and he never contacted his family again. He wound up ditching the car, burning his money. He did odd jobs. And so what Crackhour had to do was go and recreate the life of somebody who was literally off the grid. Remember, this is 1992, no Instagram, no Twitter, none of those things that we use to find people now or sort of, you know, figure out what they were doing at a moment of time. In fact, his disappearing act, and this is not a spoiler, but it's, it turns on his use of the postal services, like forwarding service, right? I mean, like his parents

were writing them letters and, and he had them, he had the post office hold them for three months before they returned them to the sender, right? There are parts in the book where he gets mail sent to general delivery at a place that he plans on being in a couple of months, right? I mean, this is very, very pre-internet. The other thing, David, that hit me was the power of crack hours writing. And it's powerful without being covered in dessert topping, if that makes any sense.

He's able to do so much. Listen to this one passage about why McAnlis didn't take a map with him when he walked into the Alaskan wilderness. In coming to Alaska, McCandless yearned to wander uncharted country

to find a blank spot on the map. In 1992, however, there were no more blank spots on the map, not in Alaska, not anywhere. But Chris, with this idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma.

he simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the Terra would thereby remain incognita. I love it. Yeah, I mean, without extrapolating too, too far, I mean, there's a lot of very, there's a lot of kind of naturalist writers, nature writers, travel writers,

adventure writers that, that, you know, lean on the purpler prose. Crackhauer is very much, well, I mean, he's a mountain, climber, right? I mean, he's, he's, there was a kind of stoniness to his prose. He's very straightforward. He's very pure. But at the same time, when the flourish is what's called for, there comes the flourish. Like, he's a writer of necessity almost. This is a story above all the other things he written. This felt like a story that he really had to tell. And, I mean, listen, we don't have to get too deep in the weeds of

marketing or whatever, but the cover of the book, of every edition of the book, I believe, has the first lines of the book printed on the cover, right? I mean, as if, like, this, it's not marketing copy. These are the words of the introduction. I mean, the first lines of the introduction. It is a book that is about writing almost as much as it about, as it is about the story that's being told. I'll tell you where I think that prose style emerges from in End of the Wild. It's because Crack Hour has, has this genuine connection with McCandless. You and I've read so many magazine stories and so many nonfiction books over the years

where the writer says, I'm not going to be used to Tilly looking through the monocle. I'm going to grapple with the emotional stakes of the story. And at the end, you don't really believe that they have, and you don't really believe that they have that real connection. And you wind up just with this big mountain of purple pros, like you mentioned.

This story, I think the right word is disarmament. in how Krakauer uniquely understands McAnlis and how it seems like he is absolutely the person to tell this story. I mean, this was a big moment in publishing history for kind of memoirs, right? I mean, this is a moment, this is kind of broadly defined a moment where we got, you know, Angela's Ashes and Mary Carr's big books, Dave Eggers, you know, Girl Interrupted, Prozac Nation. There's so many examples. this book was not a memoir, but there was a lot of, it was sort of cut from a similar cloth.

There was so much personal engagement with the subject and so much sort of introspection implicit in the writing. That, again, this wasn't the first time that had been done, but you can draw straight lines back from so much of what we read today to what crack arrow was doing 25 years ago.

A couple of things to look out for in this interview, David. We identify the McAnnellist story, of course is a John Crackhauer story. But in 1992, he was competing with a New Yorker writer, one who had way more resources than he did to publish the first full-length treatment of McCannless's story. Also, Crackhauer talks about how he writes,

how he has what he calls this obsessive, compulsive quality that leads him to rewrite every sentence a hundred times. Crackhauer talks about how into the wild the book was initially received by publishers, hint, not well. And at the very end of the interview, Krakauer, who went on to write Into Thin Air and under the banner of heaven, says he isn't going to write any more books. And then he now seeks meaning and purpose in different ways. It was so much fun to talk to him. Here's John Crackauer on End of the Wild.

I'll start here, John, 25 years after End of the Wild was published, do you ever just pick up the book and read it? No. But I have a reason to pick it up and read it. You know, I've been revising it ever since I first wrote the piece for outside story. And the last significant revisions were in 2014, I think. So, yeah, I've had occasion to read it in chunks. I don't know when the last time I actually sat down on Reddit front to back. I can't, you know, like many of my writer friends, it's very painful for me to reread.

what I've written, especially something I wrote, first wrote in 1992, whatever that is, 28 years ago. So, you know, I even just last night when I was open, open the book to start reading some things. And I was, I immediately in the first paragraph, saw things I should change. And if I had the ability, I do, I would. So, yeah, I don't really enjoy going back and reading my work. Let's talk about the early part of your career before End of the Wild. You once said, I'm a self-taught writer. How'd you teach yourself to write? By reading.

I mean, you know, I never went to, I have never taken a writing course. I haven't taken very many English courses. I was never a good student, but I read a lot. And once I decided to try freelancing, I, you know, I was excited by kind of this, it's not even really new, but it was new to me, nonfiction that read like fiction, You know, nonfiction that was absolutely scrupulous about adhering to the facts, but it was written in a way that had literary flourishes and was stylish and made you want to just keep reading the next sentence and the next sentence.

And so when I started freelancing or got the idea to freelance for a living, which is out of financial necessity, I would go back and read books by my favorite authors or articles. And when a passage really got me, I would reread it over and over again and try to figure out what's going on. And that's how I taught myself to write. And I think initially, again, like many beginning writers, I would not really imitate the writers I admire or even try to imitate them. But I would try to, you know, that voice, whatever distinctive voice, whether it was John McPhee or Barry Lopez or. Dillard or Andy Pruh, whoever, I would, you know, try to not really imitate it, but sort of try to be like that. And in the course of doing that, I would learn that I couldn't, you know, I would, then I would revise what I'd written in sort of an imitation of some better writer.

But as I revised it, it would change. And so by the time I'd revised it a lot, it would no longer even resemble the original writer. And I realize I have my own voice. But by trying to create a voice, I did that. I mean, and I don't know how conscious it was to create a voice, but, you know, I, I, my first writing was literally to make a living. So I wrote, this is before the internet, and thank God, because these pieces were horrible, most of them. They were to pay the bills. And I learned how to write for all kinds of different magazines from like a advertising thing put out by Nissan, you know,

it was an ad vehicle to sell Nissan trucks to writing for Smithsonian or Rolling Stone. And I learned, man, you got to write differently for every magazine you write for. I learned how to do that. I learned how to give editors what they needed or wanted to sell, to get people to read stuff. I mean, that was a really good education to have to pay the bills. Really, you're motivated. You learn sort of your writing has to be compelling. You can't afford to be precious.

You can't afford to pretend you're a great artist. You just, you're trying to people, you want people to send you a check. And that's how I learned to write. And this period starts in 1983 after you were a carpenter for several years? Yeah, I really started. I was never, I didn't have ambitions to be writer in college. I was a slacker in college. I wasn't really a slacker, but my interests weren't academic.

I went to an experimental college, Hampshire College, which if I hadn't gone there, I probably never would have been a writer. But I ended up after college broke in Boulder, Colorado without a car or any, many money or place to live and I got hired as a carpenter by a guy I met in a restaurant and I'd been a carpenter before and I was a carpenter for the next eight or ten years that was my income and and I was motivated to become a writer because there was a huge recession in Colorado when I was living at the time in 1980 and man there was no work and I became a commercial fisherman in Alaska it was a carpenter in Alaska and then I got married and and those jobs didn't have much appeal and

a friend of mine, my mentor, college friend, professor, climbing partner, David Roberts, convinced me to try freelancing. He had quit teaching to do it, and he had read the one thing I really wrote in college was an 80-paid essay that served as my senior thesis at this experimental college, Hampshire. It was about this expedition to Alaska in which I made a new route on a mountain called Moose's Tooth that no one's ever heard of. And what's interesting about Hampshire, it was all about experiential education. And the essay I wrote, the 80-page essay wasn't really the final thesis. It was the climate self. It was experiential education. But I wrote an 80-page piece of writing, and Roberts thought it was not too bad.

And so he convinced me, you ought to try freelancing. And so he flew out to Colorado to try to literally to convince me, you know, because I was out of work. And I was married. My wife didn't have a job. And we broke. not to and I was talking about maybe I should take the LSAT and become a lawyer and you laughed and said no way you know you're not a lawyer and so he flew out and convinced me to try freelancing and I did and that's you know I kept being a carpenter that was in 1980s or maybe the spring of 81 but that summer

I submitted my first query letter to a magazine it was to outside magazine for a piece some climbing friends of mine mug stump and Gibbredwell had I'd climbed another route on this mountain, the Moose's Tooth, that had been the subject of my senior thesis that I'd climb six years before. And that, you know, he said, yeah, we'll give you this assignment on spec. Let's see what you do. And I wrote a short piece that was published. That was my first real published piece in a magazine. And I was paid some pittance for it.

But I was fired up. And so I kept being a carpenter for the next couple of years. Because of that piece, outside asked me to write a second article. And the editor who asked me was a new associate editor named Mark Bryant. who asked me to write a piece about what it's like to be stuck in a tent in a storm and an expedition. And that piece became tent-bound. And that, I think that was published in 1981 or 82, probably 81. At the same time, I was writing other query letters and doing whatever I could to exaggerate my accomplishments as a writer.

Didn't fool anyone, but I got assignments at a bunch of other magazines pretty early. So by 1982, November of 82, I hung up my tool belt and started writing full-time. And for the next eight or ten years, it was tough sledding. My wife had her own sewing business. We were living in Seattle then. And we never made more together than $15,000 for the first 10 years of my writing career. So it's not like, you know, I had instant success. But that's how I got my start.

I started, I wrote about what I knew at first. I've been a carpenter, so I got assignments at Architectural Digest. I wrote about architecture for other magazines. I wrote about commercial fishing because I've been a fisherman in Alaska. My first Smithsonian assignment was about commercial fishing. I wrote about the outdoors, of course. But I also, I didn't want to get pigeonholed. I tried not to get pigeonholes as an outdoor writer.

So I took an, anytime I saw a story that wasn't about the outdoors, I leapt at it and tried to get that published to try to change the perception at all. all I could write about was climbing. And I don't know if I ever been successful. I think I'm still thought of as the guy I wrote that book about Emma and Everest, but so be it, you know. So here's how I heard the story, John, of how you got on to the Chris McCannelagh story, which becomes Into the Wild.

Mark Bryant, who you mentioned by 1992 is now the editor of Outside Magazine. Later, my editor at Play Magazine. Mark is a great journalist and a great, great guy. We could do a whole podcast about him. We sure could. Yeah. He comes across. this little wire story in the New York Times that begins like this. Last Sunday, a young hiker

stranded by an injury was found dead at a remote camp in the Alaskan interior. No one is yet certain who he was. So Mark reads that intriguing story and then he calls you? Well, not quite. Okay. This was, I'm looking at my notes here and I see that that story was on, September 10th, 1992, the Anchorage Daily News first posted a story about this, the hiker, as he was called. And then a day or two later, the New York Times published it. And so before he called me, he called another writer, Chip Brown, and asked Chip if he would like to write it. And Chip said, no, there's no story there. I'm not going to write it. And interestingly, Chip Brown had been a year ahead of me at Hampshire College and had been mentored by the Zip.

named David Roberts. And unlike me, in Hampshire, I was a climber first, and I didn't even think about writing. Chris, Chip was a serious writer. He and a friend named Tom Kazaya started the campus newspaper, the Hampshire College Climax. They imitated in New Yorker. They had their own column called Talk of the Town and the College Paper. And Chip had quickly gone on to a distinguished career. He's a great writer. And he won a National Magazine Award a couple years earlier before the McCannel's story came up writing for Esquire, I think. So, you know, I wasn't offended at all that Mark, I understood why Mark asked him first. And then he turned it down.

And then Mark asked me, and I, you know, I had another story to write. I wasn't sure, but I, something about that piece in New York Times moved me too. So I said, you know, let me just look into it and see. And the more I looked into it, the more I sense, there's a real story here. then I was really taken by the missing hiker. So I immediately got back to Mark and said, within a couple days, I want to do this. And then, lo and behold, Mark got a call from Chip Brown saying,

oh, you know that story you asked me if I wanted to do? And I said, no, well, I thought I should let you know. I've actually, I'm doing it now for Tina Brown to New Yorker. And, you know, that, I don't know Mark was philosophical. I don't think he was that pleased by that, but, you know, whatever. that's no that wasn't really any kind of ethical violation and and i knew chip and chip justly regarded me as i'm sure he didn't see me as competition at all i mean i was the slacker you're younger than him who hadn't done much and so but for me it was wow the new yorkers

doing this we're doing it i said mark we got to be first you know we got to be first and mark's like no it's more important to write a really good piece being first doesn't matter said yeah but it does matter. I would really like to be first. I want to try. I want to go full speed ahead. And Mark said, all right, let's see what happens. So right away, it was, and, you know, the New Yorker had tremendous advantages over outside. It was a much more widely read and widely respected publication. It had unlimited budgets under Tina Brown. They could publish, they did publish weekly. So their schedule wasn't, you know, pretty much we had to either get it in the November issue, which closed in mid-October, or the actually December issue, which closed in mid-October,

or the January issue. And they could do it, they could crash it and do it fast. So my original deadline, I got a publishing contract. We want 8,000 words. We went it by October, mid-October, basically, October 21st, I think, 1992. And, man, that was like three weeks from that point. It was three weeks literally from the time I signed my contract. But I'd already been working on it.

And this was a complicated story that, all these loose ends. And so I immediately contacted the family. And being a climber who had made this solo ascent of a mountain called the Devil's Thumb when I was 23 in 1977 really helped me. I showed them the article I'd written. I showed them the book of climbing articles I'd written. I said, look, I might understand your kid. People are saying he was suicidal.

He was crazy. He had mental illness. I don't think so. I think he was a lot like me. I went into a, I was much more. reckless, went to a much more dangerous thing, hiked alone into the glaciers of Alaska for three weeks, and I climbed this mountain by myself, and I wasn't suicidal and I know I'm not crazy. I think I can add something to this story, and they said, okay, so they agreed. I flew to

Maryland to interview them. I called his sister to interview her. I went to South Dakota when I found leads there, so I was just constantly on the move. And outside gave me a budget of $1,500. They were not a wealthy magazine. So I was like, you know, literally hitchhiking at times. And, and I kept thinking, fuck, Chip is, he ended up, you know, he, he hadn't thought nothing of flying to Alaska and chartering a helicopter to fly into the bus and, you know, he did whatever he needed to. And I couldn't, didn't have the time or the money to do that. So I focused on what I thought was the elements of the story as I learned them. And I just pursued them full speed ahead and I was writing as I went and it was it was you know crash from start to end and

surprisingly you know I just talked I called Mark an hour ago to fact check my memories and he told me some things and confirmed some things but he said yeah we wrote that really fast you wrote that really fast we had there was maybe one revision you know one rewrite it really and you said you know we didn't spend any time talking about how to structure it you seem to know how to structure it from day one, and we just went with it. There wasn't really time to mess with it. And it ran in their, it was their nominal January 1993 issue, which came out the second week of December 1992. And, you know, the publisher had questions. Is this, this is depressing as anyone going to read this? But it ended up, you know, being a big hit for the magazine. So that's how,

that's how that happened. And you beat the New Yorker? Yeah, by two months. by seven or eight weeks yeah which was and you know Chip wrote a really good piece I mean if you read mine and you read his we all talk we talked to all the same people you know we did all the same research

we had a slightly different approach as I said he was you know he went to Hampshire he was obsessed about writing and dabbled in the outdoors and climbing I had no interest in writing anything even term papers but I was obsessed with climbing

So he came at it like a normal journalist. It was a sympathetic piece, but it had this ex-cathedra tone, you know, kind of looking down from above. And mine was the opposite. I mean, at Mark's suggestion, you know, by this point I had really, I was as I was right, as we were writing and editing it, Mark, you know, I explained him, I'm like this guy. I get what he was doing. I really, I want this to be a personal piece. I don't want to, you know, is that okay? Oh, yeah.

And he said, you know, in fact, I think you need to explain to people in the piece why you're so obsessed with him. So it was at his suggestion that included some of the personal stuff about my own history with my father. And that was a big issue for McAnlis about, you know, my own recklessness as a kid. And that was really good advice. And that, you know, that made our pieces really different, my piece from the New Yorker piece. And what point in your reporting did you realize that you and McCannellon said a lot of common? You know, I sensed right away. I just, unlike most people, I didn't immediately think, God, what an idiot. Because people called me an idiot. And when I went to Alaska, I hitched a ride on a

fishing boat, Petersburg, Alaska, got a ride to the beach, it just walked up this glacier for 30 miles. I didn't have a radio. I didn't even have plans to be picked up. I just assumed I'd walk back to the beach and wait for a boat to come by, which is what happened. So, you know, I, the more I learned about, And especially when I met with his family and read his diaries and saw his photos, which are basically a photographic journal, I realized, no, you know, I get this kid. He's on, he is on a, you know, a quest. He is on a quest as I was. You know, it was about testing himself. Why? People were like, why didn't this guy even have a map? And I, well, because there's no blank spots on the map anymore. And the only way to have a blank spot is to leave the map behind. That made perfect sense to me. To most people that made. makes no sense. So, you know, that's, that's when I, I mean, I got really excited. That's why, even when the piece had been published, you know, we had to, I could have, I had cut off my research, you know, at the last possible minute. Mark was, no, stop, John, write the fucking thing, you know. And so I did. And but I had, you know, I was kept learning stuff. And I wasn't

ready to drop the story. So I pretty quickly, after the piece was published, decided, man, there's a book here and I want to write this book. Because I envied, you know, You know, I, magazine writing was kind of, you know, it just wasn't, I admired, I read books. That's what I really liked. And I wanted to write my own book like the authors I admired. And I saw, this is the opportunity. What did your friends say when you said, I think there's a book in the McCannelor story? You know, most of my friends were like, whatever, dude.

They weren't that, they didn't care one way or the other. It's, like, whatever you want to spend your time with, you know, it's, it's, I was in a good place by now. I'd started, you know, this, I had just gotten a gig at Playboy, an editor at Playboy magazine that called me up and offered me a monthly gig writing a monthly column about fitness, for which I would be paid $3,000 a month. So immediately, that was, you know, that's $36,000 a year. That's twice as much as I ever made in a year. So I said, whoa, this is my chance. They'll take me a week each month to write this stupid column. And that I can easily live on. And so, you know, I've got the means now to really write this book.

And I, so, you know, I basically, not basically, I sent in the magazine piece as my book proposal. And an editor at Ballard Books, the division, an infrared at Random House, a guy named Doug Stumpf, said, huh, I like this, we'll give you, I think it was a $30,000 advance, which to me was like, excellent, I can live forever on $30,000. turned out not to be true. But I, you know, I, this is the only book I ever enjoyed writing. I mean, I really mean that. It was, and it wasn't even so much the writing as the research. I'd get, because one of the great advantages of having written this magazine piece was it generated more mail than any article in the magazine's history, which, you know, told me there was interest. But more importantly, people who had met Chris in his rambles wrote to the magazines that I knew that.

this kid. And a couple of those people were really, really crucial to writing the book. There was this old man who in the book I gave him a gnome de plume, Ron Franz, I called him, who wrote this, you know, really moving letter about how, you know, he had spent time with him in the desert in California and had given him a ride to, you know, head north and how he was just crushed that Chris had died. He'd try to drink himself to death. And so that stuff's all in the. book and that's because I wrote that article. So, you know, I was, I was motivated. So I just, I did a new, like when I, that old man, when I got his letter through the magazine, I hopped in my truck. I lived in Seattle at the time and drove right down to Anza Barago in California Desert by

the Salt and Sea to try to find him and interview him. And, and that was really fun. I mean, I love reporting. I love doing the investigations. I do not like sitting down to write. And the a canless book, it's a short book. It's the shortest book I've ever written. It's only 65 or 70,000 words. And, you know, I had this, I decided while the article worked, I'm just going to take that article. That's my outline. And I'll insert stuff. I'll expand stuff where I have more and I'll insert stuff that I thought I wished I could insert. And that, you know, the blueprint for the article, the organization of the article, the book is the same. I mean, it's not like I changed the structure. I didn't change much at all. I added a lot. I made it, you know, 10 times as long maybe or something. It strikes me that the reporting challenge you had with McAnlis is this is somebody who vanished on purpose. He left his family. He didn't communicate with him. And he goes off on these travels.

So you were essentially trying to report on somebody who did not want to be found. Is that right? That's exactly right. I mean, his family was frantic. His father had defense department contracts. His father, Walt McAllis, was a brilliant, I don't know what, an engineer, I guess. And he was one of the primary designers of phased array radar, which is the radar that NORAD used at the time and probably still uses to track incoming missiles.

So he knew people at the DOD, and he found a, you know, a investigator for the Department of Defense to try to track Chris down. This guy, you know, he's a spy. And he couldn't, you know, he would turn up stuff like Chris was arrested for hitchhiking in California in 19. I don't know what year it was, 91 or something. And this guy said, yep, here's the report. He was caught hitchhiking at this town on the stretch of highway. But, man, Chris covered his tracks. He just, his parents did not find out, and they tried really hard where he was or where he'd been.

You know, he was at one point early, you know, he went to the desert first and to Lake Mead and hiked around Lake Mead. And he got his car stuck in a wash and a flash flood. had ruined it. And so he started going on foot. And most people would have been, God, I've just lost my fucking car. What am I going to do? And he was like, yeah, this is an opportunity.

He took all his money out of his wallet. And he took a photo of himself burning it. You know, he got rid of all his IDs. He took the plates off. He documented all this in photos. This is how we know this. He took the plates off the car and hid them. He buried a bunch of stuff in the desert.

He had a, you know, and then he set off on foot. hitchhiking, you know, working for people up and down the coast, South Dakota. You went all over the place. And I just, because of the leads I got from the article, you know, I met people who had met him. They tended to be drifters and hobos and, you know, not the pillars of society. And they were all, I was struck by these people, some of them spent a few days with them. Some of them, over a period of months, would see him for a week or two at a time. Every one of them was just blown away by him. They were just so moved by his presence and were so crushed by his death. I was like, whoa, who was this guy?

I mean, that was a major part of who he was that I tried to capture by interviewing the people he met. And the more I learned, the more I became fascinated with him. And there was stuff that was unknowable. There was stuff I had to speculate about. There was periods where he just went blank. For a while, he worked at a McDonald's in Bullhead City, Arizona. And, you know, no longer was he burning his money. Then he was saving his money for his Alaska trip.

He worked for this remarkably interesting guy in South Dakota, Wayne Westerberg, who's in the book. He's a big figure in the book and the movie. He worked for him, you know. Guy had a grain elevator. He harvested grain. So Chris, you know, he did initially burn all his ID and his money. But, you know, when eventually, you know, he had library cards.

He sometimes used his real name and the detectives never found him. him and then he went to Alaska and Wayne Westerberg really wanted him. This was in the winter and spring of 1992, I guess. And Westerberg wanted him to work through the harvest, you know, just work through the spring. I'll give you a first class ticket to Fairbanks. You'll be great. And Chris said, no, that'd ruin it. I got a hitchhike. So Westerberg couldn't talk him out of it. He hitchhiked from Carthage, South Dakota. And all this stuff, you know, because when before he left for Alaska in that last stint of work in South Dakota where he made a bunch of money to fund the trip, he left, he gave Westerberg all these photos he'd taken, this photo album, and that proved to be

invaluable. You know, that was the story of his journey, more than his writing, because he wasn't much of a writer. His photos and the postcards and little notes he would send to people in the journal he kept in Alaska, which was a page and a half in the back of a book about edible plants, where the clues to the story. And that's not much, but it was enough to tell it pretty well, I think. So I want to ask you about that journal, because this is found on the bus with Chris's body in 1992. It has 113 entries in it that describe his time when he's alone in the wilderness. Could you have done this story, at least the way you did it without that journal? not the way I did it I mean that journal it was cryptic you know it was his entries were a few words

you know it's just but that had the key that and eventually allowed me to unlock what killed him you know he talked about he talked about he was very it was these short entries but they were very emotional you know when he was out of food he'd talk about it you know when the when he couldn't find berries he'd talk about it he kept a he had good code that was easy to figure out. It wasn't really a code. It was just a short hand for the animals he saw and didn't kill the animals he killed for food. I killed five squirrels, three ducks, you know. So you could tell what he was eating. He took photographs of the seeds he gathered and the mushrooms and the animals he killed, the moose he killed when he killed a moose. You know, a lot of

a lot of Alaskans gave me and him a ton of shit because they say, yeah, he said he killed the moose, but it was really a caribou. You know, the guy didn't even know. the difference between a fucking moose and a caribou, which they're very different animals, you know. And this was one of those things that went around the internet when the internet came around. And, you know, even before the internet, it was, the Alaskans just disparaged him. Well, those photos show, I mean, I, you know, those photos show it was clearly a moose. These, it was the Alaskans that didn't know the difference between a moose and a caribou, you know, who criticized him. So all that stuff was invaluable.

I mean, it was just one of those, I've learned as an investigative journalist that, you know, You hear about a story and you think it's been done to death. But everyone stops at some point, no matter how diligent. And if you're willing to go further to dig another six inches down, you will find usually, maybe always, you know, just a wealth of stuff. And that's been my, I am not a talented writer. I mean, I'm a talented self-editor. I'm not being, this isn't false modesty.

My first drafts are unreadable in my second and third and fifth drafts. But I am obsessive compulsive. and I've rewritten every sentence in every book I've written probably a hundred times, and that's not an exaggeration. So I, and I don't like the writing, but I do it because otherwise the books would suck. But I love the obsessive investigating. That is fun, you know. And even when it's boring shit, FOI, print of information requests or going through documents

and spreadsheets, you know, you've got to be OCD, but it's kind of, it's fun. And you learn stuff. And it's really exciting when you figure out something that hasn't been figured out before. So you mentioned the whole debate about McCannless, which essentially is like, was he this naive guy who was on this doomed mission to live in the wilderness or did he have the qualities that you gave him? What was so interesting to me rereading your book is that debate essentially starts at the moment he has dropped off at the St.P Trail in Alaska. The guy dropping him off, Jim Galleon, essentially thinks this guy does. know what he's doing you know he's going to he's going to get in trouble that's right he and he i mean that galleon was an essential source he was really good and we know about him because um

in chris's journal the first entries mentioned just as galleon and i think there's something else it's and he doesn't have dates in his journal but i know from postcards he sent to to his friends just before the day before he set out it was uh april 18th or 27th, I think, and he'd bought this book of wild plants. I retraced his steps. I found the last campsite he had from matching his photos. It was a lot of work along the highway between Fairbanks and where he's in the Stampede Trail. And I found, you know, I walked in the bookstore and there was the postcard he bought and sent to Wayne Westerberg saying, I now walk into Wild. If you don't hear from me, now you know, I want to know you were a great man if I don't survive this. So, you know, and there was the

book of edible plants and and all these clues and there was in the in his journal written in this book of edible plants galleon is on the first entry so and the cops the state police found galleon i didn't find him but he was a really good source he's a really interesting guy is a union electrician blue collar you know alaskan through and through native alaskan very accomplished hunter and woodsman and he and he had he realized you know he picked up this guy um outside of fairbank at this campground. He's hitchhacking with a gun in his backpack, you know, and he picks him up. And they started driving.

And he thinks, at first he thinks the guy's a nutcase. He wouldn't tell him his name. He was very circumspect, but he was very open about what he wanted to do. You know, all he had for a map was he showed Galley on this road map he'd gotten from a gas station that had this faint line. I mean, this is a map of Alaska

from a gas station, you know. And the Stampy Trail is, you know, 100 miles is like quarter of an inch. So it's not like it's got any detail, but he showed him where he wanted to go and Galleon would point out to him, you know, all you got the 22 rifle. You know, it's going to be really hard to kill him loose with that, let alone if a bear attacks you, you're toast, you know, and it's the spring. Bears are coming out and they're hungry, dude. And he's given him an advice. And he's, he senses there's something about this kid. He's not crazy. He's reckless and he's

inexperienced, but he's not crazy. And Galleon gave him a lot of advice, good advice, and Chris took it. He didn't take all his advice. Gallian said, why don't you let me drive you to Anchorage? He was going to drive him 250 miles out of his way, 250 miles back to the Stampede Trail. Let me buy you some real gear. And he was sincere. And Chris said, nope, I don't need it. I got everything I need. Galleon convinced him.

You know, Alaskans, I worked as a commercial fisherman a carpenter. And we all, you know, it's wet there. So you have these brown rubber boots called extra tough boots. Everyone has them. And Galleon had a pair, of course. And he said, you know, those Walmart boots you got aren't going to cut it. Why don't you take these? They'll keep your feet dry.

So gave Chris his boots. He gave him, his wife and made him two ham and cheese sandwiches or something. He made Chris take these, you know. So he really, and he said, he told me, you know, I just assumed this guy is going to last a couple days. He's going to get cold and wet and hungry. He's going to come out like any normal person would. And he told Chris, he said, look, and he knew him as Alex, because Chris said, yeah, my name is Alex. I'm from South Dakota when he's really from Virginia.

And he said, just give me a call when you get out so I'll know you're okay. And Chris promised he would. He said, yeah, I'll get your boots back to you. We'll do. And that was it. And it wasn't until the police found the body and the journal in the book of edible plants. And they saw the name Gallion. They did some good police work.

And they found Jim Gallion. And then they figured out who Chris was from a bunch of other stuff. They figured out who he was not too long after they found the body on September 6th. But there's a lot that no one figured out for a long time. So there's this whole body of criticism about how you treated McAnnellous in the book. Did any of that make you rethink anything? No. And any of it make a particular impression on you?

No, I mean, I have spent, even before this, this is 1992. I had spent a lot of my years in Alaska. I never established residency, but I had worked up there as a commercial fisherman. I'd worked up there as a carpenter in the bush, not in the cities. I was out on islands in southeast Alaska. I built a school. I was the lead carpenter for a school and for a fish hatchery. I worked around a lot of blue-collar Alaskans.

I've been on many climbing expeditions. I'd been a journalist in Alaska by this point. So I knew Alaskans. I knew exactly how they were going to react, and I wasn't taken aback. And I had my own strong sense of what he was doing. I mean, you know, when I went, When I climbed the devil's thumb, my third expedition alone from the town of Petersburg, and people there just thought I was another stupid hippie who was going to die.

And when I came back and went to the bar, the same bar, they were like, huh, you. I guess you didn't die. But it wasn't like, and I said, I was all like, yeah, man, I'm going to tell them stories about climbing the devil's thumb. Because from Petersburg, the devil's thumb was like, boom, it's like. And they were like, yeah, whatever, dude. No one cared, you know. It wasn't like I was just I was a hippie who somehow.

didn't die. And so I, you know, I knew he would be criticized and that was all right. I mean, I, you know, it's unfortunate that the criticism really hurt his family, especially his sister. And this brings up another really important part of the book because, you know, when I wrote the article, I didn't have time to visit his sister in Virginia Beach, but I did convince her to talk to me on the phone for 20, 30 minutes. And she was very wary, but she gave me some important stuff that I used in the magazine article. And from that brief conversation, it was clear that she knew more about Chris than she was way closer to her brother than her parents were. I mean, they didn't know him. She did. So when I got the book contract, she was one of the first persons I called.

And she was like, no, I'm not going to talk to you. She liked the article, but it was like, nah, you don't, you know, you don't understand my family. It is fucked up. And I don't, I don't really want to go into that. And so, but she eventually said, okay, you can come to Virginia Beach and I'll talk to you for an hour. And I flew to Virginia Beach from Seattle. And we started talking. I got there probably around noon, early afternoon. And man by midnight or whatever, we were still talking. And she, I said, you know, I got to catch a flight tomorrow. Maybe it's time to wrap this up. You said, no, wait, I think you might get it. I trust you. And she went back and brought out these letters that Chris had written to her, not after he dropped off

the map, but beforehand as they were growing up. And she'd never shown them to anyone. They were harrowing. They described this abuse in this family that was absolutely horrifying, emotional, physical, you name it. Really, really messed up family. And, you know, this stuff explained explicitly why Chris, as he put it, divorced himself from his family and wanted nothing more to do with them and didn't. You know, a lot of the blowback was, how could Chris do this to his family, this loving family? And they did love him in their unfortunate way. There was a lot of love. I mean, family love is often pathological.

And this was a prime example. But, you know, Corrine said, you know, I can't, you, before she showed me anything, he said, you have to promise me you will not use any of this in the book. And I said, sure, I make these kind of agreements all the time with subjects. And then she showed it to me and I was, I was literally speechless. I was almost in tears, you know, and she was like, and I said, Corrine, this is important. I can't, I don't want, you know, I want to try to, things with my family are okay right now. I want to try to repair things. This is not, you can't use this?

And I said, well, can I hint at it, you know, obliqually? And she said, well, yeah, but, you know, any of that stuff, you got to show me. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I make these kind of agreements all the time. I mean, and so I couldn't report in the book. None of that's in the book. You know, if you read it between the lines, especially now knowing that stuff, it's there. I mean, I talk about Walt. He's a, he's an authorit.

authoritarian. He's a narcissist. He's a control freak. But I didn't say it explicitly. And so none of that's there. Eventually, with my encouragement and help, Corrine wrote her own book published, I don't remember, four, five, six years ago called The Wild Truth, which all this stuff is out there. And that, I like, I tell everyone, if you want to know more about Chris, read this book, because you will think differently of them. And, you know, that's unfortunate. Corrine, way to those however many years, 20 years, but she did. And I'm proud of her doing it. It was a courageous act and it sheds a lot of light on Chris. When I first read into the wild, the two chapters that just grabbed me by the lapels were the ones about your adventure on the devil's thumb, which you mentioned.

You're about Chris McAnliss's age. You go to Alaska with this idea that you're going to do this thing. And essentially, the book stops McAnlis's narrative and then we hear about you for a couple of chapters. Did you, was the plan always to put that right there about two thirds of the way through the book? No, that was the one thing I didn't know what I was going to do. I mean, again, the germ of this idea was from Mark Bryant who said, you know, it would really be helpful. People aren't going to understand why you don't think he's a nut like everyone else. So he encouraged me, you know, to put in a little something about my own Alaska misadventures that I'd survived. And then I decided, you know,

I don't even if I decided. I just started writing this. And I'd already written about that climb. You know, I, that, those two chapters are really similar to a piece that was published in my first book, a collection of climbing articles. So I'd already written it. And I thought, you know, why not just insert this, change it a little, revise it? And I, you know, that just seemed a logical place.

It wasn't like I spent a lot of time. The book, you know, I like books that aren't in chronological order. I mean, I've always liked books like that as kind of perverse, but I get a lot of, you know, it's, it's kind of funny. This book now is required reading for poor high school students and middle school students in literally thousands of schools. And I get email from these students. Their teachers often, you know, at their end of teaching a section about Into the Wild will send, you know, they'll ask their students to write letters to the author. And these letters are priceless. And a lot of them say, I hate your book.

Why did you even insert that stuff about yourself? This is supposed to be at Chris McCanness, you know, that was just stupid or, you know, just, ah, you know, it was miserable. Why did you make, you know, all that stuff? But I get it. People, you know, I felt, I didn't feel like I liked the idea of sort of this break. And I warned people in the introduction, you know, in fact, before warned, I'm going to inject stories of my own life to try to give you insights. So, you know, and I, I knew that was a little out of the ordinary, but so what? I mean, I wasn't worried about, you know, you have to realize the only book I published before is a collection of climbing articles called IGREMs that initially sold 2,000 copies first printing.

And, you know, it just disappeared. And so it's not like I considered a real book. And so for me, you know, I had nothing to lose in a lot. I just, this was my chance. It might be my only chance to write a book. So this is it. I was going to throw everything I had at this to make it good. I mean, I, you know, it's, it's, I, I, just in looking at it last night, I think, God, I was, I was kind of, kind of full of myself when I wrote this.

I mean, I was cocky and, you know, I was, I was, I was just projecting this confidence that I didn't really have, but I was just not holding back. And I would not write, I would not have written that book like this today, but I'm glad I did. glad I took those chances and wrote it like that. I mean, I was scrupulous about getting the facts writer trying to. But I took liberties with the style. And I was inspired by, you know, all these new journalists and even fiction writers. I mean, I like the idea of just, you know, playing around with structure and form. You finish writing the book and you turn it in and your publisher says what?

So Doug Stumpf, my publisher, you know, I turned it in, I don't know, I think my deadline was the end of 1993. I think I had like a year or maybe two, maybe it was 94, maybe it was 95. It might have been, no, it was more, it was more, anyway, it was 94 or 95. I turned in and Doug says, this is fantastic. I love it. I'll get back to you. I think great. out in a month or two, we'll be publishing it, you know? And so after like six months or a year,

I don't hear anything. And I, Doug, what's up? Is, oh, yeah, I've been meaning to call you, you know, I just got offered this job as the number two editor at Vanity Fair. And it's just too good an opportunity to pass up. So I'm going to be leaving Villard and going to take work at this magazine. But don't worry, you know, your book will be in good hands. Everybody loves it. It's going to be great. You know, great. So then the, the, new publisher editor of Valar Books is a guy named David Rosenthal who comes in. And I didn't know the publishing business. I don't know. But he did what most publishers do in a situation like that. He killed the 60 contracts of unpublished books that Doug had pending. Because in publishing,

you know, Doug will get to credit if they're successful. If they're a drain on the bottom line, it'll be David Rosenthal's budget. So he just, with that, I don't think he even looked, just boom, we're done with these. And, And so my agent said, you know, bad news, John, Rosenthal's not, doesn't want to publish your book. But don't worry. I know, you know, all these other people will have no trouble. Well, once the books have been killed, it has this taint. And, you know, John sent it to a lot of places and no one would publish it.

He sent it. I know who I'll send it. I know this famous editor. He's a brilliant, he's no longer alive, but he was considered a brilliant famous editor at Pantheon Books, this highbrow imprint. He'll get what this is about. And then he sent me this editor's letter to John, my agent, saying, John, I don't know how to tell you this, but I find this book unreadable,

certainly unpublishable. You know, what is this guy doing? It's about Chris McCanness, and he randomly injects this. I don't, you know, and so I was crushed. Well, luckily for me, David Rosenthal, who turns out is a brilliant publisher. and his sort of Girl Friday, his second, his lieutenant, a senior editor named Ruth Fessich. And she, you know, happened, she was killed, but for some reason she decided she'd read it anyway, got it out of the slush pile. And she went to David and said, you know what?

This is kind of interesting. Let's just throw it on the ceiling and see if it sticks. Those were her words. And but for that, the book may never have been published. And it did stick. And I got lucky. I had some lucky breaks. You know, like all books, they send it out for review.

And this is going to be a tough one. You know, it's unknown writer, weird book. But they always have an embargo. You know, you cannot publish your review before the pub date, basically. And I got lucky in the New York Times, the guy they assigned to review it really liked it. And he broke the embargo and published it early. So it got attention that it might have not, it wouldn't have gotten. It's the New York fucking Times, and they have this very positive view early.

And you can, you know, Rosenthal didn't complain at all. It was the best thing that happened. And so it's luck like, I mean, serendipity plays a huge part in all this stuff. I mean, I have many writer friends who are no shit, a lot better writers than me. You know, they have their distinguished careers, but they didn't get lucky with these bestsellers, you know. So you got to be lucky. I mean, I have some talent, certain talents, my O. CD, my self-editing. I know how to tell story. I know how to tell one, what sentence should come after

the next. I have an idea how to do that. But that's, you got to be lucky, too, to have the breaks I've had. How did the success of the book make you feel? I felt great. I mean, for, you know, they sent me on a book tour. For my first book, I couldn't even get local bookstores in Seattle, carry it. I found one bookstore, 100 miles north in a little village by the freeway that had a little bookstore. So, yeah, come up next Saturday. We'll have some of your books. And you can do sign. So I get there and there's a table with me and this guy had written a cookbook. His stack of his cookbooks, the stack of my book. I spent all day, not one person bought a book. His books are selling like hotcakes. So that was my experience before with book marketing. So now they send me on a book tour. It was great. I liked this book. There was controversy, but it wasn't personal. It was just it was all great. And the book tour was going on. on, you know, the book was published in January. It lucked on to the New York Times bestseller list in February at number 17 of the top 15 books because it was close enough in sales to 16 and 15 that they included it. So it kind of clawed its way into the bottom of the list. And once the book's on

the list, that's like, that's a huge advantage. So the book became a minor bestseller, not a, you know, small, I don't know how many weeks it stayed in the list, not many. And Rosenthal it's now March and he was like, man, we just got on the list. We're going to send you out on another tour. I said, sorry, David, I have an agreement with Outside Magazine that, you know, and at the end of March, I have to be in Kathmandu. I'm going to climb out Everest for this assignment. I'm promised.

I've been training for a year. I'm doing it. He said, no, you're stupid. This is your big chance. You're never going to have a best of like this again. Don't go to Everest. That's a waste of time. Stay here.

We had this fight. And I said, I have an obligation. Fuck you. I'm going. And I went. And that was 1996. And that became the infamous 1996 Everest fuck up, the Everest disaster that I wrote about that became Into Thin Air. A lot of people think Into Thin Air was my big break.

No, In The Wild was. It was a bestseller. I left. And Into The Air was a nightmare. For me, everything about that book, not everything, but it was a nightmare. I came back from Everest with PTSD that I wouldn't acknowledge or recognize. I was really fucked up from that book. It became a number one New York Times bestseller and made me rich, but I paid a huge price. And I wish I'd never gone on that trip. So Into the Wild was this, I look back on that as this blissful, you know, publishing as it's supposed to be. And yeah, so I'm very fond of Into the Wild. It's amazing that that. So January 1996, Into the Wild is published, May, 960.

you climb Everest. And by December of that year, you have written and turned in into the air. By December 1st. December 1st. Yeah, I had to, you know, I had to recover for a little bit when I got home. I was so fucked up. But the article was due like, you know, by mid-July. So I wrote that.

And right away, I was unhappy with the article, you know, with the same reasons. I was, I had to scramble. I had to interview all the people on the mountain who would talk to me. And it was very divisive. there was a lot of hard feelings already to try to, you know, fact check. And by the time I sent it in December 1st and then I was in Antarctica for two months on an expedition without any communications. I get back.

They're doing the final edit. And I see stuff that I already know is wrong that I can correct. But all the time I'm doing more research and realizing, you know, there's stuff I didn't get right. And so I had an after. I mean, it was just, it was an intense year. in 1996 and 97 when the Evers book was published. So lots of people read into the wild and then they venture out into the wilderness to visit this bus that Chris McCandless lived on. In 2019, a hiker actually died in the river.

The McCanness was turned back by in the book. So last summer, the Alaska Army National Guard finally decides to move the bus to an undisclosed location. What did you make of that decision? I understood it. I was very ambivalent. I was very ambivalent about the whole, you know, the bus, it was when I first went there in the summer of 93, several months after McCalless died, it was an unbelievably beautiful spot, pristine fireweed growing out of Will's. And then my book, people started, you know, were fascinating with McCanness and started going to the place where he died. And then what really kind of raised the student level was the movie Sean Penn made, which I really like.

But that brought a whole new level of attention to the bus. And pilgrims started coming in throngs, you know. In recent years, the local Keeley's little village by the start of the Stampede Trail. They were doing three rescues of summer. Two people ended up dying trying to get to the bus. It was a drain on resources. Many, many people went to the bus. Not all of them were pilgrims.

In recent years, it sort of became a thing to do, just an Instagram moment where people hadn't even read the book, so they, you know, people go to the book and they leave these suitcases full of mementos and, but also Alaskans who hate mechanics go there and they've shot out, they had shot out all the windows, there's all this nasty graffiti, there was trash everywhere, you know, people that defecated all around it. So the place was trash. So in some sense, I reluctantly acknowledged flying the bus, no one consulted with me, but I think it was a good thing that was flown out of the bush. It was painful for it affected me. You know, when I heard Chris's, we had no advanced warning, but Chris's sister with whom I'm very close, Corrine, called me up the morning and said,

John, you're not going to believe this. An hour ago, the bus was just flown out of the bush to an undisclosed location. And they didn't tell me until it was already gone. And she was, you know, just really crushed. That was the place where her brother died, you know. But she came around to the same view I have. And now we've been raising money to restore the bus. So a museum in Fairbanks has the bus now and they're restoring it. And they have promised, they promised Corrine, she's been on it. You know, if you just leave it outside, it'll be vandalizing. And Alaskans hate Chris. And they acknowledge that. So they say they're going to restore it and protect it and make it so people can go to the actual bus where he died and, you know, pay their respects or whatever. And so that seems

like a compromise to me. I mean, it's not the same. And I'm sure some people go to the site where he died, and that's cool. It won't be the throngs. There won't be the Instagramable bus there. So I think it was a good compromise for an unfortunate situation. Two last questions for you. I was struck by a quote you once gave the LA Times. Happiness means nothing to me. I just want to have meaning and purpose. That's right. Do you still feel that way? Happiness means nothing to you? Yeah, more than ever. I mean, I'm 66, about sure in 67, and I'm not writing any more books. I'm done. I want to spend what good years I have left, not in my basement or I am right now, you know, obsessing over sentences that are painful to write. I want to write less, live more. And so, yeah, and it's not about

happiness. I'm just looking for, you know, I've learned from, I got involved in group therapy with a veterans group after I wrote my book about Pat Tillman, the veterans. some veterans I got to know persuaded me to join their group therapy every Tuesday. And that was immensely helpful to me. And the therapist was a young Buddhist-trained therapist named Tricia Dittrick, who I learned a lot from about living in the moment and trauma and all kinds of stuff. And, you know, there's all these Buddhist slogan. I'm not, I'm a cynic.

I'm not religious. But, you know, sort of like alcoholics. There's all these slogans that are really helpful, even though they're sort of, banal and seem, you know, but one of the slogans was, you know, I don't, I've never trusted happiness. There's this line in this, uh, tender mercies, this, this Robert DeVall movie, brilliant movie. And this line where Duval's daughter, things are going great for him. He's gotten over his drinking and he's found a good woman. And then his daughter, who's an alcoholic, um, dies in a car wreck.

And he's out hoeing his garden. And he says, don't trust happiness. Never have, never will. And that's sort of in my slogan, because every time things seem too good, I'm happy, boom, the shit hits the fan. And Tricia Dittrick, this Buddhist therapist, one of the things she taught me was, John, man, you got to trust happiness. You got to trust sadness, man. You got to embrace it all. It's just you got to learn to live in the moment and sit with your emotions.

That's what life is. And that sounds banal, as I said. But I really, that's my kind of, in these years, that's what I'm trying to do, you know. And it's not about happiness. It's about having meaning. And meaning isn't, you know, God, I hope my books survive me and people are reading them in 500 years. They're not going to be reading in 500 years. They're not going to be reading them in 50 years.

Maybe not one year. It's not about that. It's about this is all the life you've got, you know. And I'm involved with Mark right now with a kind of small or developing this philanthropic thing. My wife and Mark and I, Mark Bryant, and I've got stuff like that going on. I'm involved in a lot of, I've been involved in the American Hamlaan Foundation with stopping the trafficking of young girls in Nepal, with helping Sherpa. So I have, I have a lot of meaning and purpose in my life. And a lot of that does, you know, is not cheerful stuff.

But yeah, that's, I think I've got, it's taking me till I'm in my fucking 60s, but I'm, I think I'm starting to figure out life. All that said, was it hard to just stop writing books? No. I mean, you know, my last book about campus rape, Missoula, Rape and the Justice. this is in the college town was really painful to write. It was really painful for my wife. You know, and I afterwards, he just sort of said, you know, I don't know if I have an in me to write another book. And she's like, please, let's stop writing books. And that makes sense. And at first, I was like, can I really do this? I got OCD. But in the four or five years since I made

that decision, it seemed, you know, easier than ever to keep. I can't imagine writing another book right now. I mean, I can't imagine what would, you could put a gun to my head. I would just say, shoot me. I'm not going to write another book. John Crackower, thank you so much for coming on the press box. And my pleasure. Well, that's a big ending, as we say in the business. There's a real, this is the end of the wild is not a long book.

He talks about this in the interview, actually. I mean, it's a fleshed out magazine piece. but there's a real sense of finality to it. And he also has been revising it for 25 years. But it does, at the end of the book, there's some books that you desperately want there to be 20 more pages, and I would read a thousand more pages of this, but there's some books that when they end,

you just sort of close the book and sigh, and you just like nod to yourself silently, and that's it. And this is one of those books. Now, I don't know how to do. directly correlate that to someone deciding not to write anymore, but it does kind of feel like there's some through line there, right? I mean, this is a, it's, it's kind of wild to be talking about this book and to realize at the same time that he's written his last word. Well, he has a, he has, you know, a couple chapters in the book about climbing this mountain in Alaska, the devil's

thumb that he did when he was about Christopher McAnalist's age. And what he said about that, and he said many times, is that he thought he was going to climb this mountain. mountain as a young man. And then life was going to make sense. Right. Every, every, something, something would be revealed. Something would, everything would be okay in a sense. And it's funny as I was reading, uh, into the wild, uh, there's a rough parallel between that, climbing that mountain and thinking everything's going to be great once you hit the summit to writing, whether it's an article or a book. You know, we writers all tell her, tell ourselves that all the time, right? I just finished this. Yeah. And I publish it. And people,

like it, then something in my life will reveal itself. There will be some, you know, it will be something learned, something gained, and something permanent about that. And it turns out to be just as big a fantasy as summoning the mountain. I mean, I can speak from a little bit of personal experience. You know, when people come to me and ask me my advice on writing books, and I don't say don't. I might have said that at some point, but I do encourage people to think deeply about it. You know, I mean, it's, it's, um, the revere, the, the, the, crack car talking about revising his book was interesting, kind of instructive in a lot of ways. One, you know, I mean, there's that famous quote that is attributed to Da Vinci where he says, uh, art is never completed, only abandoned, right?

I mean, and, and, uh, that's what we all, I mean, it's, it's something that every writer, especially when you, when you're, any artist, right, constructing something that big, you, you, you always at some point just have to let it go. Now, it's a, and, it's, it's something, a really rare occurrence. It's not, it's not rare at all that you would want to revise a book. It's very rare that you have the pull to get to revise your book that many times, you know, over and over again. Most people just have to let it go. And, you know, you talk about how, how the internet, you know, lasts forever. If you write something online, it's always there to be easy, it's easy to cut and paste into a hit piece. But you can blog again. You can revise your ideas

in a blog that is hyperlinked from the bad idea to the new, to the new good one. A book is, permanent in so many ways that it's really it's hard i mean tweeting's easy because you can change your mind right i mean you can't really like change the thesis of a book and it is anything you do of that depth and and especially as later books that were longer and and on these bigger ideas it's it's exhausting it's it's emotionally draining and i can see how you know someone would choose to to walk away now some people might say it's easy to you know you could write more into the wilds You could find smaller subjects and sort of do those little perfect small things. But I mean, even this book, what 60 or 70,000 words was, as you can hear him tell it, I mean, just an exhaustive and exhausting process.

If you're finding this podcast for the first time, David and I have new pods every Monday and Thursday. And usually an emergency podcast or two in between. Check us out. Subscribe. We hope you'll like it. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic as always by Erica Servantus.

We're back Monday, David, with more. lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, buddy. See you later, Brian.