You're Wrong About - Chris McCandless with Blair Braverman

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

This week, survival correspondent Blair Braverman tells Sarah the story of a Supertramp. In 1996, Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild described a young man, Chris McCandless, who changed his name, walked into the Alaskan bush, and died after mistakenly eating a toxic plant. Or did he? Now, Sarah and Blair talk about the McCandless archive and its legacy in conversations around wilderness, Alaska, violence, and more.Here's where to find Blair:WebsitePatreonTwitterSmall Game [book]Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalYou're Wrong About Spring TourBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.blairbraverman.com/http://patreon.com/BraverMountainhttps://twitter.com/blairbravermanhttps://www.harpercollins.com/products/small-game-blair-braverman?variant=40090251100194http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

It starts off as a prose poem and then it takes a hard turn into limerick. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are talking about Chris McCandless. We are joined today by our fan favorite survival correspondent Blair Braverman. She joined us recently to talk about Baby Jessica and before that to talk about the survival of the passengers of Flight 571 after it crashed in the Andes. She talks about survival in all the ways we're used to thinking about it and so many ways we're not and I'm so happy to have her back.

She is also the author of a recent novel called Small Game which is all about survival and my favorite thing, feelings. Thank you so much by the way to everybody who supports us on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions. We have a new episode coming out soon which is extremely close to my heart on the state of figure skating in the United States and co-hosting it with me are my producer Caroline Kendrick and my wonderful ghost guest Jamie Loftus. We really get into how to fix figure skating you guys. If you're wondering you should just listen.

We have a spring tour coming up if you want to find out more about the shows or where to get tickets there's a link to that in our show notes also in our bios on social media. We will be going to Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Manhattan and Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Boston, Burlington, Vermont and of course Montreal. We hope you think home. So back to our episode today we are talking about Chris McCandless a figure who many of us know through either the book or the movie Into the Wild and also through the kind of cultural legacy that he has continued to have and that we're going to try and explore today.

And because we're talking about this story we also have some content warnings for you specifically for parental and domestic abuse for starvation and all the effects that has on the body and for the Holocaust which we talk about a couple of times. Speaking of our content warnings it's worth pointing out that the movie Into the Wild was directed by and starred two men Sean Pan and Amiel Hirsch who allegedly have very seriously abused women which is yet another reminder that stories of abuse stories of domestic abuse stories of violence against women are unavoidably and absolutely everywhere and part of every story we tell it seems to me and here comes another story like that. Thank you so much for coming with us as we try to understand this

story and now here's our episode. Welcome to your wrong about the podcast where sometimes Blair Braverman comes by and we talk about survival in every form and she's back. Welcome Blair. Hi Sarah. So you've been on three episodes of this show and I feel like I didn't see this coming it kind of just happened organically but we have become a show where survival and its various implications and meanings and the ways we look for it and the places where we don't look for it but should has become a theme on the show and I think that it was always there but I think that you were the one who made it explicit and then people have responded so strongly to that that it's like yeah we got to keep talking about it. Oh I love that

because I love talking to you but I do think it was always there. I think it was always there and we're just teasing it out at the surface a little bit more. Right we're getting to the literal stories and we're talking about Chris McCannless who is the subject of the John Crackauer book and Emile Hirsch movie Into the Wild. These were both very big culturally as far as I can tell when we were teenagers so in the 2000s and I have never met someone who doesn't have a strong opinion about Chris McCannless and I was thinking today Chris McCannless to me and people who listen to the show even somewhat regularly will know this is my highest praise I think is an honorary bimbo because he's someone whose cultural punishment seems way out of proportion

to what he did on this planet and the fact that he did I don't think you can argue that he heard anyone besides himself and that's a very bimbo experience. Oh yeah yeah that seems absolutely right on this is a story that a lot of people know at least the broad outlines of and you do too right you you have some understanding of the story what what's your understanding of it. Okay so mine this was something that I first heard about as a teenager because I was a crunchy little teenager with crunchy little friends and we loved fantasizing about you know like living in a tree to keep it from getting chopped down and stuff like that which honestly I still think I should be doing but Into the Wild was a book that I believe came out in the 90s by

John Krakauer who is a writer who who I really like and think is good and also consistently sells well in airports and that's not a backhanded compliment it's just true. He has he has like nailed it like he's he's a brilliant outdoors person he sells airport books like it tremendous respect for the guy. Yeah like you and I have talked many times about how kind of all we want is to have books that sell well in airports. I've always thought as a writer particularly when I was starting out as a writer that my goal was to write things that people would read by choice that always seemed like an actually pretty high bar to me like if people have free time and they're choosing to spend that time with your words that to me is just the greatest honor

and I feel like airplanes are they're sort of like in the middle there where it's not quite free time but like you're trying to get your head out of the space. Right it's like I think there's a certain like airport books to me are books that are able to really transport you in some way or just really hold your attention. Yeah. I always like to read Stephen King on a plane so yes Sean Crackauer he wrote Into the Wild very successful book made into a movie when you and I Blair were in high school which is a beautiful movie like beautifully shot it kind of in the same way I think that Grizzly Man does kind of shows you like it's it's really great to live a doomed life and so then like I used to teach writing classes at Portland State and the thing I found the hardest

was the thing and anyone who's taught most age groups will know this where you're trying to start a conversation desperately and you're pitching all these like conversations starting questions and everyone is just looking back at you like the background ang chovies and Spongebob and what I realized was that Into the Wild was a great text to discuss because the the normal kind of very thick ice was broken because everyone has a strong feeling about Chris McCandless. I remember initially feeling like this is so dumb this is like the folly of teenage boys I hate it why are we valorizing this these are my 17 year old thoughts then coming around to the part of me that was like but I want to go off the grid and kayak to Mexicali and whatever and then finally

arriving I think at this place where I am currently of like I think here was someone who lived by conviction and was more kind of extreme in like living up to his beliefs than most of us ever will be and there's like a profound charisma to that and also that he was young and and also that were obsessed with the question of how much it was his own fault that he died which I think is kind of a fascinating thing to be fixated on and I know that we're going to talk about how that conversation has changed over the years because I feel like science is discovering new things about Chris McCandless every day. Well the the story has changed from when it first came out from when you and I first encountered it it's changed a couple times and those changes are subtle

but they they do affect people's understanding of it so I'm gonna start the story at the beginning and do a somewhat broad overview because I know a lot of people are going to be familiar with it or familiar with parts of it from the book or the movie before we get into the story think about what your impression of Chris McCandless is what if if you have a strong feeling about him try to identify that now and see if it's the same at the end and maybe it will be but I'd be curious to hear about it. Yeah I as would I and also I I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the story but a ton aren't and despite there being a very good book and slightly less good movie about it we don't have the Blair version I think that that's necessary personally. Okay well well I'll jump

in and I'll start with Chris's parents his mother her name is Billy she was a dance student from Iron Mountain, Michigan where I think we've been together and she thought dance was gonna get her out of her small town she applied to be a stewardess but she wasn't tall enough and she finally landed a secretary job at Hughes aircraft where her boss was Walt McCandless who was married to a woman named Marsha who had three kids and another kid on the way now immediately they began an affair Walt told Billy that he was leaving his wife Marsha which is sort of the classic story that mental mistresses he did not leave Marsha in fact Marsha was trying to leave him and he was getting physically violent with her there was a point he even fractured a vertebra in her back

deep violence when Billy got pregnant Walt ended up having two families at the same time he split his time between both women and they both knew about each other and according to Marsha Walt was proud of having quote produced so many offspring oh god and his sister Kareen was born three years later in 1971 Chris was born in February 1968 and throughout their childhood their parents were violent and the kids were forced to witness this when it was over Billy would say basically this is because of Chris I got trapped with him because Chris was born Chris grew up feeling horrific about that as if he had ruined his mother's life I'm such a broken record about this but I feel like it's it's just worth pointing out

that this is the period when you know in this period lasted for a long time and never really ended when pundits on both sides are like you know the divorce rate is sky high in this country it's really terrible it's a moral conundrum and it's like what you know like this this rationale of like save the marriage protect the child save the marriage protect the child right that like marriages remaining intact are like obviously necessary to the health and safety of everyone involved and you just look at it and you're like isn't it obvious that like so many like the divorce rate was really much lower than it should have been it so the other thing about all this violence is that it did not really appear in the book into the wild right these are things that Chris's sister

kareen has talked about later she wrote her own book called the wild truth that came out in 2014 which is where these details are coming from for me so the first decades of conversation about Chris McCandless do not take the full story into account yeah so this family would always keep up appearances you know walt was wealthy he worked for nasa at one point he would get home in his Cadillac and the kids would hide he made uh you know finally marsha did leave him and he was with billy more full-time and he would make her wear a short skirt and three inch heels and perfect makeup whenever he got home from work colleagues would come over and they would just show off being the perfect family and they would go to church and show off being the perfect family and kareen has

said that some of the only times they were happy were when they went camping all together because they were away from all the stress they were away from the pressure they were distracted they had something to focus on so even as a little kid nature was the place where chris escaped then when they when they were a little bit older they were walking home from church he and his sister would always take a detour through the woods and he loved it he would spend forever just looking at bugs plants everything it just the woods were always a place of peace for him they were always a refuge where he could get away from violence i guess i want to call back to something that you've talked about before i think when we did the dial off past episode about you know how like i have

made the point to you in the past that stories of being like lost in the woods you know stuck in an avalanche whatever are particularly scary to me because there's no human element right there's no one you can fantasize that you can like talk out of kidnapping you which is the kind of thing that i waste my time on and your point in return which i think is has been very persuasive to me and a lot of other people who heard that episode is that like the lack of intent is what makes it comforting right and that's what this is making me think of is that like the feeling of being like in the woods is the feeling of there being no dads it's indifferent you're like inside of a being that's so giant that you're this tiny microbe inside of and that and i think like the thing

that happens with parents and kind of parental abuse situations potentially is that parents kind of look at you and see the part of themselves that they want to destroy right and like the forest doesn't want to destroy you for personal reasons it just you know won't intervene if you fall in a ravine or something i didn't mean to rhyme that just everything you say is poetry it starts off as a prose poem and then it takes a hard turn into limerick please please do a podcast of limerick at some point but i mean yeah this is just this is information that darkens and sort of contrasts the colors of the picture so much and also i understand that this didn't come out initially because there's

you know many reasons why books don't or can't talk about abuse but i feel like this is the kind of thing that if you grow up in this family like it might just take a while and like some amount of aging and learning to be like oh that wasn't a very abusive household i grew up you know it was a conscious decision uh that was meant to be protective yeah but you know chris gets older i can't speak for him and say his biggest goal but a very clear goal he has a huge thing he's trying to do is always escape from his house he discovers running you know he tells the sister everything in my head gets organized when i run he tells his friend on the track team eric hathaway he tells us to think about all the evil in the world all the hatred and imagine

ourselves running against the forces of darkness the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best so this kid is intense he has a very strong reputation for his intensity he gets angry at himself he's hard on himself about things he holds himself to a very high standard you know we know that he had a high school girlfriend named julie and he loved her he told her he loved her he was reading jack london and a lot of literature at the time and he told julie he wanted to go to alaska with her but she broke up with him because it was a little too intense for her maybe it she didn't want to be as serious as he was and and that that was very hard for him finally he graduates high school he's old enough to escape and he just leaves

he spends the summer after high school driving around the southwest he doesn't come back until two days before he's supposed to start college he's lost a ton of weight he's very very thin he has long hair he has a long beard and he walks into his dorm room at emory with a machete and a rifle can you can you imagine being that roommate he just walked out of the jungle with a rare orchid specimen in his neck exactly and then he cleans up for college he gets good grades you know he cuts his hair a family friend had given him a college fund in part because she saw the abuse and sort of wanted to give the kids a way out and he managed this fund himself very well he didn't use a lot of it he lived what people called a monkish life very simple he didn't have a phone

and he seemed to thrive he majored in history and anthropology he edited the student paper this surprised me maybe i'll will surprise you he co-founded the young republicans club in college i didn't remember that but or didn't know that but i didn't i knew that he had written something that was like sort of supportive to some extent of a reagan policy or was kind of pro-reagan in some way and like but also college is a time to have terrible ideas and republicanism is one of them his values like everything we know about his values is he cared tremendously about apartheid in south africa um he he talked to his friends about wanting to smuggle weapons into south africa to help you know overthrow apartheid which he i don't i don't think that panned out but he he

cared very much about justice right he seems to be doing well in college because he's to a certain degree he has escaped and he he's worried about his sister who's younger than him he wrote her a letter that said um the events that we suffered are so outlandish in their proportion that it is useless to try to explain them to anybody because they will never believe you they will think you are some kind of freak some kind of outrageous liar and exaggerator they will think that you simply couldn't handle the normal conflicts which all teenagers and their parents go through yeah you know was an astute observation on his part because sure enough as more of the story came out people people did say that about him yeah god and he he graduates in 1990

his transcript comes out in june he hasn't mailed to his parents after that they don't hear from him for a while when they still haven't heard from him by august and remember he doesn't have a phone they drive out to visit him and they see a for rent sign on his apartment and then they get home again and they find all the letters that they've mailed him over the summer have been returned because chris had the post office hold them so that his parents would take quite a while to realize he was missing he has made himself disappear and like good work i know i know he did it he did it he he got away you know from this point on his parents don't know anything about what he's up to you know he has he has vanished chris mcandless has vanished

he gives himself a new name alexander super tramp i love i always forget and love remembering that he re christened himself alexander super tramp it's so great i love the idea of being a super tramp this makes me happy i also i know we're gonna get to this but let me just point out that like the ending of shan pens into the wild shan pen a man who knows nothing of domestic abuse ends with like chris in a vision like hugging his nice old dad william hurt and crying you know and it's like anyway not just not to spoil the story but yeah i don't i um i have some notes but he he is not hugging his parents and smiling right now he has gone west alexander super tramp has gone west and he has a bunch of adventures he goes to lake mead he drives off the road down a

riverbed to camp he like burns his money makes a little pile of it then he gets caught in a flash flood he abandons his car he hitchhikes he goes to lake tahoe seara nevadas he hikes part of the pct the pacific crest trail famously he paddles a canoe 400 miles down the colorado river to the gulf of mexico he slips over the border gets stuck in like a swamp gets saved by some duck hunting guides you know he this this man is living well this is going on his parents walton billy hire a private detective to find him the detective finds out that chris has donated all the remainder of his college fund around 24 000 to oxfam clearly this is when the family knows without a doubt he didn't want to be found and the detective keeps trying to track him but

because chris is always moving he can never quite catch up wow he goes to las vegas he goes to arizona he works at a mcdonald's where he even sets up a bank account at that point under the name chris mcambles um he's working different places when he gets into town he'll bury his money and then he digs it up again when he leaves just like someone in the bible would do he buries his camera that doesn't go so well he works at a grain elevator in north dakota for a guy named wane westerberg and here's how westerberg described him he was the hardest worker i'd ever seen didn't matter what it was he would do it hard physical labor mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole if he started a job he'd finish it it was almost like

a moral thing for him he read a lot used a lot of big words sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world to figure out why people were bad to each other so often i tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff but alex got stuck on things he always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing hmm i love that well he's traveling um while he's staying in these different places chris is making really deep connections with people there are people who came to to love him during this time to love him like family and you know who wanted him to stay with them he never did he would always move on he would sort of touch people's lives and move on um and then he'd send them postcards and he'd stay in touch

and the one thing he always talked about during this big journey is going to alaska that was his ultimate goal so well he's doing all these things working places traveling getting stuck in the Gulf of Mexico all these things he's thinking about alaska he's getting in shape he's researching and asking people about living off the land and finally the time has come for him to go north after two years of travel and can you talk about i feel like you understand better than a lot of people and have certainly thought a lot more about it sort of alaska as as the license plates say the last frontier and what that means sort of in people's ideas of it and their ideas of what role it's going to play in their life and you know becoming the person that they want to be well alaska is

a symbol yeah and a lot of places are symbols but in alaska you really see it it represents different things for different people it represents freedom it represents lawlessness it represents anonymity you know starting over it represents sort of the closest you can get to true wilderness i'm not saying uh these things are accurate or not but this is you know what it means in the popular imagination you know there's a huge phenomenon of people going north young people going north to sort of confront these things and and learn something about themselves along the way chris absolutely saw alaska as a symbol i mean he was reading the call of the wild you know which i can say as a musher is just a highly highly inaccurate book if you have one takeaway please

let it be that and the call of the wild is like it's about a domesticated dog right who's he's a fancy you know a dog who went to private college and and now he's in alaska finding himself you could say it like contributes so much to the alpha myth of you know dogs establishing authority over each other through violence yeah and in particular like sled dogs doing that which just you know i could go on a whole thing that's not actually how they work together you know that's not how you become a lead dog by like killing the other dogs like this is not this is not a thing anyway business types like to fantasize that that's how it works in nature so they can you know backstab everyone and have no real relationships and drop dead of a heart attack at 50 it's exactly

it's a human fantasy yeah projected onto dogs that then like makes people think it has scientific legitimacy but you know what we'll give chris a pass yeah you know the the most important thing it's doing is giving him a way out yeah a terrible situation and and the way out is north it is a clean slate for him so in april 1992 he leaves south dakota he catches a ride in a truck hauling sunflower seeds and hitchhikes his way to alaska now this drive from the lower 48 to alaska falls a route called the alaska highway that goes north through the uconn and then turns west it is a hard place to hitchhike it is hard for him it is hard for anyone sarah you and i have made that drive together how would you describe it it's very dramatic you're it's a very vulnerable

feeling i think you just feel like you're sort of exposed to the sight of god you're driving through massive spaces yeah there's very few you know resources like to give you an example of this place where he's hitchhiking and this was obviously in 1992 so i'm talking about 30 years later my husband and i make this drive a couple times a year because uh we're dogsletters so we go up to alaska that's where a lot of dogsletting happens then we come home to wisconsin we go back again blah blah blah we've picked up hitchhikers on this route we have hitchhiked on this route when the truck breaks down you know it's like sometimes like a days drive between hotels and one day we like get to this hotel that we play at like we haven't seen anyone in so many hours not a gas

station nothing if your car breaks down like you are just gonna be stuck there for quite a while we get to this hotel we go in we're like we need a room we've stayed there before and you know there's nothing else for hours in every direction and uh there's some people at the hotel it's cold in the hotel is what we notice the people are like sure yeah you can you can have a room you can pay in the morning and uh they like tell us which room to go to it's it's unlocked there's no no lock in the door there's no key or whatever and it's really cold in the hotel room it's very cold i mean it's practically as cold as outside their heating must be broken or something but we just get our sleeping bags and we sleep on top of the bed and like the plumbing isn't

working but like this is all sort of predictable like just things break a lot up there um and in the morning we come down and we're hoping there's some sort of breakfast and we're sort of cold because it's below freezing in our room and the same people are like sitting around in the common area of the hotel and uh they're like yeah so here's this notebook um just write your credit card number in the notebook uh in order to pay and we open the notebook and it's just like a bunch of people have written their credit card numbers in the notebook and we're like you know what we're gonna give you cash so we give them cash we keep driving we don't think about it anymore a year later we make that same drive we plan to stay at that same hotel we get into the hotel it's warm all

the lights are on it's a totally different vibe and we're like what happened last year like you know you got you know you're refurbished or something and the owners are like oh no we were closed last year this hotel has been dead for 30 years and we're like no we like one year ago this week we stayed here and we paid and we stayed in a room and your heat was broken and it turns out the hotel had been closed down there were just squatters in the living room like you know taking people's credit cards and sending them to random rooms because they knew they wouldn't be caught yeah and which is like expert level right because like you know and amateur like me would just sort of like huddle up and be like well this is mine now but no you got to make a profit

you know resourcefulness so like this is what the alaska highway is like i don't think probably never got caught like this oh yeah it's flawless like that there's hardly anyone on it and everyone is a character so i'm honestly happy for chris that he he got to have so much life and that's seems like part of it for sure and he he eventually makes it up he makes it up to fair banks now when he makes it to fair banks he spends a couple days there he's mainly at the university he's looking at books he buys a field guide to plants and he buys a used gun a 22 caliber rifle in a parking lot for like 125 dollars then he hitchhikes out of town he gets picked up by a guy named jim galleen and chris tells jim he's from south dakota and that his plan is to live off the

land for a while he has a backpack that's not very big like 25 pounds like a daypack and like a significant portion of the weight is books so like what i carry in a tote basically most of the time yeah it's like your tote bag he has a rifle this rifle is not very big yeah 22 caliber like it's this is not a big gun he also has really shitty hiking boots he has no snowshoes he has no compass the driver jim who picked him up is worried about the dude he's very nice he actually offers to drive chris to anchorage and buy him adequate equipment which chris staunchly refuses but he does agree to take a pair of old extra tuffs which are if you don't know extra tuffs they're like the classic alaskan boot they're like you know neoprene i think rubber like rain boots but they're very

tough you know so at least he has something waterproof for his feet chris gets dropped off near something called the stampede trail and he walks into the wild on his second day he reaches the teclanica river which has ice all along its banks i had trouble figuring out how to pronounce this river just so you know i ended up calling multiple alaskans and they said teclanica so so we're going with that even though um the internet sometimes says otherwise you know what the internet says a lot of things is what i've noticed about it that's we're going with the alaskans yeah so the teclanica river probably thigh deep mm god you know it's not easy if if you have forwarded a thigh deep fast moving river like that's treacherous but chris gets through it he forwards the river and he

keeps going yeah and also i mean if it's april i assume that water is pretty frigid oh yeah everything is frigid this was it was snow like the other day eventually chris finds a bus in the wilderness now the bus it's there because it's a remnant of an old construction project from the 1960s that was abandoned and it got left behind as a shelter cabin and a shelter cabin is basically a very simple cabin in the wilderness where anyone can stay it's unlocked if they need a place to sleep if they need a shelter that'll save their lives in a storm you know i've stayed in a bunch of these in the wilderness they're not usually buses but like they vary dramatically from super dilapidated shacks to like super cozy log cabins

sometimes they go months or longer without anyone stopping by and sometimes a bunch of people will be there on the same day and there's kind of an etiquette like you want to leave kindling for the next person if you use all the firewood you don't want to leave it empty you want to bring in more kindling or if you have extra food in a can or something you might leave it there so i hope for chris that there was like some stuff in the cabin but it is a shelter so he writes this inside the bus capital letters two years he walks the earth no phone no pool no pets no cigarettes ultimate freedom an extremist an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road escaped from atlanta thou shalt not return because the west is the best and now after

two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure the climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution 10 days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north no longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild alexander super tramp may 1992 i have so many thoughts he's grandiose oh yeah i love that this is a combination of him describing himself as a christ figure not as like a prophet but kind of in his own life and also using the lyrics to king of the road classic song and also the door's lyrics because like the wait there's the door's lyrics well kind of because the west is the best like i think that was an old car ad

from the 50s and 60s and then like it turns up and i think the end by the door is one of the like rambly talk singing sort of jim morrison american poet songs i fucking love the doors and like the way i feel about this is like i think based on the fact that part of me was and still is an intense teenage boy you know and i have done the thing of being like i'm free i'm i'm getting away from codependency by living on the road and and being a tumbleweed blowing in the wind like jack dawson i feel like when you have come to alaska with us you were doing your christ macandless i was exactly so it's like how hard can i be on the guy right what's the point of that i remember in the past being really struck by i haven't thought of it in a long time but this

idea of him killing the false being within and really that resonating with me and i you know my read of it and who knows what he meant specifically but my sense of it is just that like any kind of trauma you know familial trauma difficulty in your relationships as you're growing up i think that that can leave you feeling like you don't know who you are i also understand very deeply the appeal of believing that you can sort of find your true self only through adventuring when in fact i think that adventures arguably work better as an adjunct to therapy for some of us there's a balance there's a balance you need an adventure in one hand and i don't know other stuff in another i don't know what but i'm really i'm fully speaking to

my younger self here is i think all of us do about christ macandless but i feel like i so rightly or wrongly see myself and the idea of like i will fix myself through this journey that i'm taking and through kind of experiencing the world and i will find myself out there and i will be freed from you know the pain of of these you know these ties that have been with me throughout my life and really that that is part of it and that draw is real and i think that you know the need for experience and to challenge yourself and push yourself is so important but also that i don't know you can also do really important work on yourself by living in great physical comfort and by having routines and going to casco you can do both and blaire as you know when you

have adventures you do have to go to casco a lot yeah yeah casco is really good for adventures actually it's so true but yes we're we're we're rooting for the guy we have his journals from his time in the wilderness they're not necessarily long but uh you know we know that he misses some ducks he kills a grouse and he eats it he kills a squirrel and he eats it he is sort of getting better at hunting with his 22 has he hunted before this or is he just in classic chris fashion like i'll figure it out i'm not sure i know he's been training for this trip north so i yeah i imagine he's been training yeah i feel like he's probably shot at least a lot of coke cans if he's able to to even get a grouse at all that would be my my hunch so he's getting better at hunting small game

and his original plan was to travel through the bush so he leaves the bus this is not effective because actually the best time to travel in alaska through the wilderness is in winter like over snow being pulled by dogs arguably yes arguably being pulled by dogs um and now is the ground is thawing it's just turning into like yeah muck like it's saturated it's wet it's hard to move there's mosquitoes he only makes it 15 miles and then he goes back to the bus and stays and he's he stays there he explores the area he's getting better at hunting i think it's impressive that he could find it again honestly like i and i feel like the way people talk about chris mccanless reminds me of the way we feel when we watch figure skating

where suddenly everyone in america becomes like very critical of someone doing something they could never do in their whole life like ah stepped out of that triple toe loop um but like i feel like we're the kind of narrative to this point there has been a strong faction of like he didn't know what he was doing and he should have known more about what he was doing and it's like you know he did he knew at least more than the average person i think about how to accomplish this like i would i am positive i would not get that far no i'm also positive you wouldn't i don't think i would yeah this is difficult very few people have done what he has done at up to this point you know more than a month has gone by that's an incredibly long time to live off the land with

his few things as he brought particularly if he didn't grow up doing it so it's this is very accomplished you know famously he kills a moose and he's very excited he spends six days trying to preserve it he should probably have dried it cut it into strips and dried it he tries to smoke it it's a disaster the meat spoils it's full of maggots he wrote uh maggots already smoking up here is ineffective don't know it looks like disaster i now wish i had never shot the moose one of the biggest tragedies of my life it's a colossal waste yeah but apart from the moose his journey and his experiment have gone relatively well and after two months of doing this incredibly hard thing he decides his journey is complete on july 3rd he leaves the bus to hike back up to the

road however when he reaches the river that he crossed the water is much much higher than it was it's raging it was probably thigh deep before which remember was already not not treacherous but the volume has now increased 10 times over from snow melts it's not crossable you would die it turns into rapids chris is afraid of water but even if he weren't uh this is not a crossable river it says everything about him i think that he's like self admitted admittedly afraid of water and yet also canoed for 400 miles like that that that's you know yeah and that this is like a type of person that we are all you know hopefully know at least one person who's like this who like runs directly as fast as possible into the thing that they most fear yeah absolutely he does he

does not know that if he had gone up river he probably would have found a place he could cross this is probably an example of inexperience because i think most people who have spent a lot of time in the back country would would think to follow the river up and downstream to look for a crossable place he does not do that and instead he turns around and he goes back to the bus presumably hoping that if he waits the water level will go down and he writes in his journal lonely scared so now he is not really here by choice anymore something has shifted on july 30th he writes in his journal extremely weak faults of pot pot dot seed short for potato much trouble just to stand up starving great jeopardy this is the first sign that something

is really going wrong there's a note on the door that he leaves sos i need your help i am injured near death and too weak to hike out of here i am all alone this is no joke in the name of god please remain to save me i am out collecting berries close by and she'll return this evening thank you christmas canvass august question mark and i think it's interesting that he returns to christmas canvass at this point i i've always been struck by the fact that he wrote shall return later this evening you know that it's like it's such a polite way to send an sos yeah it is and what do you think about him him signing his name is chris again i don't know what to make of it but i think i think it means something i feel like that's kind of the fairest attempt you can

make at history is to say i think it means something i don't know what we don't well but like but we don't have the ability to know right and i feel like it's the drawing of you know trying to draw more of a conclusion than you have the ability to get to and specifically the idea that like you can't tell a story unless you can say like why did he do that and i i think that's not true i think that we can allow people both in our lives and kind of in the stories that we tell and and here deserve to have areas of themselves that we accept that we don't understand i guess what i hope it means is that we know he went out there and he changed his name because there was something broken in christmas canvass my hope is that this journey healed that broken thing

that he he set out to fix and to to learn about and he was able to return to christ macandless yeah uh the last words he wrote in his journal were on august 12th he wrote beautiful blueberries and he also wrote notes uh elsewhere he wrote i have had a happy life and thank the lord goodbye and may god bless all and he wrote happiness only real when shared when did you first encounter these words and how did you feel about them then it might have been required reading in high school in figures like this i i was thinking a little bit about an frank when i was reading about chris in the sense that they are they're very very different situations obviously very different narratives that were left behind very different intentions but i feel like they've

both had sort of an iconic line emerge that is treated as wisdom because they died and as like their concluding thought like they're concluding thesis statement of their whole life in a way yes it's it's treated as their thesis statement of a life that ended too soon so for chris it's happiness only real when shared uh for an frank it's i still believe in spite of it all that people are truly good at heart or something similar to that this is like the make sarah cry episode she wrote that before she was murdered like i don't know um if she would still write that at the time she died but she wrote it at one point and it i actually think it's weird that that sort of has emerged as her story because i think it is weird it's like is that the concluding

thesis of the holocaust that people are good at heart like i i feel like that sentence emerged as the moral of the and frank story in order to uh make gentiles reading and frank feel better about themselves uh but i i digress i feel like i've spent a lot of time thinking about diaries as a literary form and as a form of history and that's something that's always fascinated me because like i was someone who spent a lot of time in grad school writing about pamela which is a very boring book but it's a diary book and just that like diaries are sort of something that we like to imagine is just sort of the unmediated truth telling of a human soul but in fact like i think we arrive at truth by thinking a lot by kind of processing through

writing and by using writing as a way to sort of refine and explore and put words to how we feel not to just transcribe what's ambiently happening inside of us it's interesting to think about chris's diary because it was not necessarily created as a literary work it seems like these are just notes he left for himself and that means there's a lot of open space to project things on too yeah and boy have we early september moose season opens so multiple hunters actually arrive at the bus on the same day even though nobody has been there all summer a couple from anchorage finds the note on the door and they are too upset to go inside reasonable but another guy shows up and he goes inside he finds chris's body um he's in his sleeping bag uh an investigation finds

there's no signs of significant internal injuries there's no broken bones but he has basically no fat left and his remains weighed 67 pounds oh god what what is his height i am not sure but some people have speculated that he did the things he did because he was short i don't think that's why i'm gonna google it right now he was he was five six which isn't that short now state troopers uh didn't immediately know who chris was when they found his body so story started appearing in the news about uh a mystery hiker who had died in the wilderness it was in the new york times it was in the the more local news the anchorage daily news and jim galleen who was the guy who had picked up chris on his trip out of fairbanks saw the news called the troopers

and said i think i picked that guy up and he helped them find more information about him kareen chris's sister flew out to fairbanks to identify the remains and she's talked about on the flight home how she felt like compelled to eat every single thing that was in front of her because she couldn't stand the thought that he had starved to death she wrote i wanted to fly across the country and discover that it was a colossal mistake or perhaps that chris had succeeded in pulling off a brilliant scheme to finally separate himself once and for all from the oppression of our parents just like he said he would there would be a note for me explaining his ingenious plan and how to get in touch with him and that would have been a character for him you see it

you see how that would make sense shortly after the new york times piece comes out outside magazine calls john crack hour who just incredible writer incredible journalist incredible outdoors person he gets assigned this story for outside and john crack hour reaches out to walton billy chris's parents they want to learn everything they can about what chris has been up to where he's been and they give john access to all the documents and photos that were part of chris's belongings the story comes out in january 1993 it's a very long feature called death of an innocent and it gets more male than any other story in the magazine's history it is hugely controversial a lot of the letter writers are pissed off they think that john crack hour is glorifying someone who was knowingly stupid went

into wilderness without preparation someone wrote macandless had already gone over the edge and just happened to hit bottom in alaska a writer in the village of ambler named nick jans wrote macandless is hardly unique there's quite a few of these guys hanging around the state so much alike they're almost a collective cliche the only difference is macandless ended up dead with the story of his dumb assedness splashed across the media people are really angry and some people have a totally different response and are sort of in awe of this guy and like this is what's so fascinating to me about it all is that like in america you can harm someone and people will debate whether it's a problem but you can harm yourself and and people will be so mad at you

right right if he'd been a murderer there he would have been glorified and had a lot of podcasts about him he he is getting podcasts about him obviously but one of the reasons people are upset is or one of the reasons they say they're upset is that the hunters who found chris's body had declared that the moose he'd hunted was actually caribou they so people heard that it was in the story they were like oh my god this guy knows nothing what was he doing out there john cracker develops the story further he's turning it into a book he dives into even more research he learns the hunters were wrong the caribou was a moose these are moose hunters they were wrong chris was right so this redeems chris a little bit john also connects with kareen

chris's sister and she shares chris's letters with him and tells him all about their childhood but she asks that he not include these details in the book she doesn't want him to write about the horrific abuse that they endured as children because she's still hoping to repair her relationship with her parents that is like the saddest and most believable thing i've ever heard you know she's hopeful and in fact when the book comes out it calls kareen's relationship with her parents quote extremely good and she's hoping it can be yeah and like now that we know the context it is like kind of telling that john crackauer a very articulate guy resorted to extremely uh good moving on well crackauer he's talked about this wanting to uh have the suggestion

of abuse in the book without making it explicit and when i read it now i thought i thought the suggestion was it was on the faint side i wouldn't have picked up on it this sort of holds true for a lot of its readers they don't pick up on these undercurrents of abuse um and when the book becomes a bestseller people get mad at chris for abandoning his parents a common common theme and the response is i feel sorry for his parents i don't feel sorry for him he was selfish which is a really interesting part of this whole national conversation which i feel like we're really in the thick of in an exciting way of you know legitimizing the reality and the many faces of abuse and and familial abuse and just you know your parents not deserving the relationship that they

perhaps want to have with you um or that society is telling you that you are duty bound to have with them ryan ken talked about this a lot in uh you are a good episode we did recently about moonlight but it this feels like such a part of it is the idea that like the worst thing you can do is reject your parents love and and that there's some and even this idea i feel like implicit in it that there's something unnatural about it right like do you do you get that oh it breaks a commandment yeah i think one of the sort of ways we talk about the american family whether we know it or not is that a family the way we've tended to envision it as a hierarchy with the parents above the children and the patriarch at the top of everything and that you know society as we have built it in america

is run on the idea that we'll have kind of an overarching patriarchy in place that is represented individually in the family and i kind of suspect that this idea of like too many divorces too many single moms is based partly on the idea that like we we can't have all these women and children going rogue without men to tell them what to do because like part of the argument that we always frame it as is like they don't have as many resources as households with with two parents or with a present father and it's like yeah it's too bad that you're the government and can't help them with that if only someone has the power but yeah i mean that feels that feels very in character with america to for people to be to be very upset about that yeah absolutely and even

chris's parents seem to really embrace this narrative they would wouldn't they you know that they were wronged that he was selfish and that they were wronged kareen later wrote that by asking john not to include the details of the abuse in into the wild quote i had allowed the opportunity for my parents to use john's book as their new bible if it wasn't in there it didn't happen wow right and then you have this like outside figure legitimizing the narrative that you want to tell yourself and everybody else and like and and again like i feel like it makes total sense to me that you would keep those details out and i don't know it feels like it's like a human right to have a relationship with your parents you know it's like it makes sense to expect that

and i want to try and get that however you can but that's so awful yeah now a lot of the discussion the continuing discussion the reason that the story has remained relevant is because there has been so much debate about why and how chris died and that debate has changed over time we've had uh changes in our understanding of the science mostly because of john krakauer's research now ongoing research originally there was a theory that chris died because he confused the wild potato with the wild sweet pea which looks similar in his poisonous remember uh he wrote in his journal extremely weak fault of wild potato seeds this is this is our clue and this plant mix up is the explanation that's shown in the 2007 movie that comes out about chris uh which

by the way does include more details about the abuse now john krakauer had a very strong hunch that chris had not mixed up the plants that when he'd written fault of wild potato seeds in his journal he knew what he was talking about the problem was the wild potato seeds it wasn't that he had been ignorant and mixed up the plants and john had a theory that there was a toxic alkaloid in the seeds and after the first edition of the book came out in 1996 a university of alaska chemical analysis of the wild potato seeds john gathered them you know the same ones he'd been eating boy that's that's some good writing it is it's incredible research i mean and you know just to say all these details about where chris went and the people he met and the people he talked to

these were all tracked down by john krakauer it is his research it is his work that brings us this story yeah and i guess there's a quick sidebar too i mean john krakauer also the author it's into thin air right he has two in two books yeah and that is an amazing book that is also the result of a magazine being able to be like yeah we're sending you up to climb Mount Everest it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars go write a story and uh that was a magazine assignment but you know but like this is the result of like there being institutional support for journalism you know like we know so many of the things we know about each other that help us understand what it means to be human because somebody you know was able to put an

immense amount of time an immense amount of muscle into figuring all this out yeah i outside is one of the magazines that continues to do very good journalism yeah even as you know everyone's budgets are getting so so tight but i i don't know if they're sending people up Everest at the moment yeah i mean that you know that should be the goal certainly so after the first edition of the book came out the chemical analysis revealed that the wild potato seeds were completely safe totally safe that they were not the problem john did not let this go he developed a new theory this theory was included in the 2007 edition of into the wild that there was a toxic mold growing on the seeds that the problem wasn't the seeds themselves but

that they'd been stored in a bag it was maybe a little damp and there was a mold that had grown on them that was toxic toxic this theory also kind of gets debunked it's not there there isn't really a lot of evidence to support it's a nice try it's a good try in 2013 a writer named ronald hamilton wrote an essay with a whole new theory ronald hamilton had read about an experiment at a nazi concentration camp where jewish prisoners were fed bread made from the seeds of the grass pea which is toxic they had developed a condition called latherism which is leads to weakness and eventually paralysis because they were consuming a substance called odap odap which was in this grass pea it causes this condition latherism but it is known to be worse for men between the ages

of 15 and 25 who have been eating a very limited diet well being very physically active this is sounding like christ mcandless john crackauer learns of this theory he sends the wild potato seeds to a lab to have them evaluated for odap the lab found odap they found 0.394 percent odap by weight which is enough to be toxic so crackauer wrote this up for the new yorker big breakthrough he receives criticism for not having the research peer reviewed so he pursues further analysis and he's paying for this himself like this is not this is not cheap research this is why you get your books to sell in airports so you can then remain completely obsessed with the topic of one of them and keep like doing science about it i think you know but it wasn't about the science

it's because the discussion of why he died had become a proxy for whether he deserved it or not yeah if he had been poisoned by the wild potato seed as he wrote in his journal which is a plant that his book said was safe then it would be not his fault and if he had mixed up plants then he would somehow have had it coming right i mean i just i feel so strongly that that's like our little like terrified you know small creature in the night brain trying to rationalize how like i would never i would never die in the wilderness and it's like all yes we would well we're all gonna die either in the wilderness or in civilization so it's no one's immune i know it's like don't you want to die somewhere scenic

yeah at the heart of this i feel like there's really a response of like oh what an idiot to go around dying i would never die that's just dumb and it's like oh i have news nobody's like oh someone got hit by a car what it clearly they had it coming for crossing the street well in l.a. they say that this research indicates in fact odap is not in the seeds instead there's a substance with the same molecular mass something structurally similar to odap uh-huh what is this it's still very mysterious crack hour goes back to the scientific literature he finds a study from 1960 about a toxic amino acid called el canavanine that would match this criteria of being structurally similar the seeds were evaluated for el canavanine it was confirmed that they contained 1.2

percent el canavanine by weight which would absolutely have led to serious symptoms including progressive weakness this conclusion was published with a group of scientists in october 2014 in the journal wilderness and environmental medicine it is peer reviewed crack hour wrote in the afterward to a recent edition had mccandless's guidebook to edible plants warned that each alpinum seeds contained a highly toxic secondary plant constituent as el canavanine is described in the scientific literature he probably would have walked out of the wild in late august with no more difficulty than when he walked into it in april and would still be alive today if that were the case chris mccandless would now be 46 years old and that was written in 2015 he'd now be 52

and so and so the premise here is that he was weakened and therefore that that if he had if he'd found it easier to like forage and hunt for himself during that time then he would have like maintained you know his strength and would have been able to to leave i think by weekend when we're talking about weakened by poison we're not talking about like oh he's tired we're talking about his muscles are not working like he cannot right like people cannot walk they crawl or they drag themselves along like this is yeah very significant weakness it's not it's not like oh your muscles are sore i had a moment just earlier today uh because i'm in california where it delights me that there's nasturtium in winter and i like grabbed a nasturtium leaf as i walked by and ate

it because nasturtium leaves are delicious and then i was like wait a minute i was like suddenly possessed by doubt about this thing this plant that i look at like most days of my life and recognize like the back of my hand i was like was that what if it's some what if it's a varietal that makes you drop dead but i appear to be fine and just like i don't know i think like plant identification is i feel like something that like if you don't know anything about it you can imagine that it's easy but it as far as i can tell it is like devilishly complicated the people i know who have the most humility about plant identification are the experts right there are still articles coming out with new information about him with some frequency

journalists including eva holland who's amazing matt power have covered the phenomenon of people making pilgrimages to the bus eva holland wrote an outside that in one summer alone a dozen people not just went out there but needed rescue got into trouble out there these pilgrims to chris's bus and finally in the summer of 2020 the bus was removed from the wilderness to become part of an exhibit at the museum of the north in fairbanks i mean there's many interesting things but even as the story has evolved over the decades it still evokes these same strong reactions i mean people compare chris to thorough compare him to jesus if you look up chris mcambless on tiktok there's just hugely popular tiktoks of people being like someday i'm just gonna pull a and then a

picture of chris mcambless comes up like people uh fantasizing about and then you know teenagers teenagers 15 years ago we're fantasizing about being like chris mcambless teenagers now are fantasizing about it and then there's people who are very vocal about hating chris and these people are mostly alaskans i think it's interesting that two people who have written very negatively about him are alaskan park ranger peter christian and alaskan journalist craig midred who calls chris a suicidal narcissist bomb thief and poacher wow both of these people are men who live in alaska as adults but are not from there originally this sort of matches with my experience in alaska um you know when i've been up there i've spent quite a bit of time there but i'm certainly not alaskan

i am often told i don't belong or i can't handle the bush uh or i'm not tough enough or all sorts of things and the people who tell me that are only ever people who have been in alaska slightly longer than i have people who are born in alaska never ever ever say those things to me they're just like you're welcome let me know if you need to borrow meat saw have some coffee yeah exactly so i think there's something here with chris too that you know the things we hate often reflect our own insecurities and the people who hate chris the most are people who are trying to prove they're not like him yeah it's like oh i hate gentrifiers um but but i i understand i understand the alaskan frustration with chris also because i think it's it's terrible to have something real and challenging

and big in your life in this case alaska and alaskan wilderness and see other people flattening it into a symbol totally and chris did see alaska as a symbol like he loved call of the wild he had an idea of alaska and what alaska would do for him and that was a flattened idea of what alaska is because he hadn't had a chance to learn about it in depth yet yeah and that's really frustrating if you're alaskan to have people just constantly treating your home as a symbol and and have this guy be glorified for it but i would argue that the people who hate chris for this reason are turning him into a symbol and they're just seeing him as representative of everyone who's ever underestimated the wilderness ever gone into it unprepared um they're flattening him just as much as he was

flattening their home totally right and it seems like at least a sizable contingent of the people who feel that way about him are also seeing alaska as a symbol and it feels like maybe there's even an element of like see alaska likes me and it's like she does not like you i mean and then there's the practical the practical uh concern which is that alaskans are really tired of having to rescue these people i mean fair i would be also i don't like it when i have to pick up a package from somewhere i just find so interesting the fact that he's so divisive you know that there are people who who whose goat he just gets in a way that like you know murderers and genociders and and rapists don't get you know that they're what is it i mean he's

like he's like the classic campfire conversation in the sense that just like you with your students if the conversation lags you say chris mcambless and everyone will talk for a long time but none of it's really about him people who hate him it's not really about him it's about hating you know something they don't like in themselves or hating the responsibility they feel they end up being forced to take for people who underestimate wilderness i think that people loving chris you know it is about him but it's also about ourselves it's about our ideas of wilderness our ideas of alaska our ideas about whether it's possible to start over and leave deep problems and struggles behind is there still a place in this world where we can be new again

i i think like one of the things that really bothers me about is that it it feels to me like i don't know i'm old enough to say like he's he's not a role model but who is he's someone who many of us have emulated in one way or another you know in our lives or wanted to emulate and that he's like he i think maybe he's compelling because he's just an example of like a human soul struggling very earnestly with the baggage that it has been given in this lifetime however you relate to it i feel like we have some basic human understanding that our life's work here is to try and learn how to love and to love ourselves and to give and accept love and i feel like this to me is so clearly a story of someone trying to do that and dying tragically in the process and

like i feel like it's sad that he died and i wish that he hadn't and i do wish that he had been and you know brought more quest bars or whatever but like i whatever that's not the point there are ways to start your life over it's possible there are ways to end your life as you know it that don't involve dying that don't involve yeah accidentally poisoning yourself with potato seeds but still can give you a life that looks very very different from how it does now and far more beautiful and that was our episode thank you so much for joining us for the chris mccannellis story thank you so much to blair braverman for co-hosting if you want to get more of her work you can

listen to her other episodes with us or you can read her book small game thank you to caroline kendrick for producing and editing this episode if you want to come see one of our live shows there's a link to information for you in the show notes thank you so much for being here thank you for being out here in the world we'll see you next time