"When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament [... ] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.[11]"
Sherry Simpson, writing in the Anchorage Press, described her trip to the bus with a friend, and their reaction upon reading the comments that tourists had left lauding McCandless as an insightful, Thoreau-like figure:
"Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the "he had a death wish" camp because I don't know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the "what a dumb--" territory, tempered by brief alliances with the "he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest" partisans. Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero[13]"
It certainly is a very dividing topic. I estimate that the comments on my personal trip to the bus [1] are split 50/50 between people that admire Chris' story, and people that think he was a dumbass.
I think the argument boils whether Chris was unprepared (mentally and equipment-wise) to go into the Alaskan wilderness. If you read "Into the Wild", and the newer "Back to the Wild" book which has entries from his diary and photos from his cameras, I think it's clear Chris was very prepared mentally - he knew exactly what he was trying to do, and he knew exactly how dangerous it was. He spent months working out, climbing mountains with his heavy pack, and researching wild edible berries and game in preparation for what he wanted to do. This shows he had a clear mind going in.
So essentially, he was trying to do something dangerous, with the minimum amount of gear possible.
This is no different from the countless people that attempt to climb Everest or K2 without oxygen and perish in the attempt. Those people are not considered dumb asses. Neither are the countless thousands and thousands that perish getting out there and pushing themselves as best as they can.
A person's level of preparedness for any life adventure is clearly their own choosing. Who are we to say that someone was foolish for attempting to push the boundaries of what they thought they were capable of?
Even worse, if someone were to be the first to summit some mountain or other without oxygen, they would be hailed a hero. If they died, they'd be a dumb ass. The outcome should not have any baring on if they were "prepared enough" or not - only they can make that choice for themselves.
--
As a side note, have you even spent any time in Alaska or with Alaskans? I live up here. If you were to go more than 10 yards from a highway and didn't have a quad, rifle, chainsaw, axe, saw, three pairs of boots, sixteen gloves, spare everything, spare gasoline, 300lb wall tent & stove, sat phone and a spot satellite messenger and you so much as broke a fingernail, Alaskans would very quickly point out you're a complete dumb-ass for being so horribly unprepared. Even worse, you go by yourself.
Folks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Boukreev, who are certainly not dumb-asses, have what seems to be an arguably reasonable viewpoint on supplementary oxygen: It gives you a very false sense of security, and that false sense of security (because of oxygen or whatever) is what really kills people.
Given that over a thousand people have climbed Everest at this point, it seems to me that climbing Everest is about the most boring/pretentious thing I could imagine doing (compared to all the other interesting things you can do in this world)
You're joking. It's still an amazing feat of endurance. People still die making the attempt. And there are 7 billion people in the world. So that means that 0.0000000142857143% of the world have done the climb.
Oops, forgot to times by 100. My bad. That's 0.000014285571%.
But then we can remove over 7 billion people who have never made a basic mathematical error, as you're right - the ability to do arithmetic is a critical skill in extreme mountaineering.
This leaves us with a world population of 1. It must feel great to be the only inerrant mathematical mountaineer in the world - was that skill learned, or is it innate?
We all do things like this everyday... And these probably do more to help make the world a better/more interesting place than another person climbing Everest.
When you say "we all do things like this everyday", what precisely do you do on a daily basis that is the equivalent of climbing the highest mountain on earth?
We all do things like help teach children, or create online resources for others, or add some detail to a small corner of science or other area of human knowledge. These are all more valuable than risking your life and littering a landmark and then telling people you're the 1473rd person to climb Everest.
You have a point. In the grand scheme of life, you are right. While I do volunteer to help others, I also like to occasionally do things for myself. That is what I was asking about.
Problem is this completely ignores the native peoples who view the mountain as sacred, and the workers that attempt to either save you or remove your remains from the mountain.
Yes, what a noble way to go! Except for the poor saps that have to deal with your mess after you're gone.
> workers that attempt to either save you or remove your remains from the mountain
The Sherpas are paid to maintain the mountain for the tourists who climb there. Customers negotiate for whatever services the Sherpas are willing to provide. If you want to find injustices you'll have to look deeper than a simple choice to attempt to summit without oxygen.
If you are Edmund Hillary, then knock yourself out. Climbing Everest today isn't pushing the limits of humanity. It is no more admirable than playing Russian Roulette.
It sounds like we're implying we should all either do something off the scale epic (like Hillary, or Felix jumping from space, or Amundsen) or we should all do mundane stuff for our entire lives.
I personally think people need to get out there and have their own adventures. For person 1 an adventure might be getting outside their comfort zone and talking to a stranger they find attractive in their apartment building. For person 2 adventure might be doing a 5 mile day-hike in a National Park, where-as for person 3 an adventure might be sailing around the world.
The fact all of those have been done before doesn't diminish the scale of the adventure for the individual, nor does it give us any right to comment on whether we think it's a worthy pursuit or in fact "adventure" at all.
Everybody needs to do what's right for them, with the level of planning and preparedness that's right for them.
People die on Everest, regardless of how well they were prepared physically, mentally, or materially. Not taking oxygen is not the worst way to be unprepared, it likely only means you will give up sooner. The sooner you give up on the attempt on the peak, the more likely you are to survive it.
This. A lone human is many, many times more vulnerable than even a couple. There is a reason why we tend to stick together.
In this particular case, the article seems to be trying to exonerate McCandless because the poison that killed him was unknown at the time. But if he'd gone with someone else, or even organised someone to drop in occasionally, he'd have survived. His loner instinct made his death almost inevitable, dumbass or no.
Interesting aside: given the high price of loner genes, we still have loners. Evolution is an amazing process.
It seems you've failed to understand why Chris McCandless went to Alaska in the first place. I'll give you a clue, it wasn't because of it's bustling social scene.
What about Dick Proenneke [0], another notable 'Alaska Loner'. He spent 30 years living 'Alone in the Wilderness'. Albeit in the relative safety of a cabin he'd built and he did have semi-frequency supply drops.
Less so. Depending how informed and prepared they are.
Now people can kill themselves if they want to. Certainly only so much can be done to warn or stop them, but it also doesn't make them immune from being called dumb asses.
For example I don't see how knowing the risks and choosing to ignore them while climbing a mountain and getting killed in the process is more noble or worthy of praise than getting drunk and wanting to launch fireworks from your shirt pocket and getting killed in the process.
Why are judgmental quotes like these "obligatory?" The whole thesis of the article is that regardless of the value judgments of what McCandless did, it was not in fact arrogance that killed him, nor was it possible to correct his ignorance until a scientific discovery was made two decades after his death.
This point has been rehashed again and again and again every time McCandless is mentioned. We get it.
Aside from that, what is your point? Did you even bother to read the article, which despite mentioning this detraction, has nothing to do with it? Or were you just looking for easy upvotes?
It doesn't really invalidate them, it says that if you eat the seeds while malnourished the ODAP can kill you. It doesn't mention anything about him dying in an unforeseen accident, he went into the Alaskan bush unprepared and died of malnutrition. If he brought a map he could've walked to safety when he started to realize his plight.
>he went into the Alaskan bush unprepared and died of malnutrition. If he brought a map he could've walked to safety when he started to realize his plight.
Did you actually read the article? That's not what it says. It suggests he became paralyzed by a neurotoxin, an event which no one could have foreseen at the time. Having a map wouldn't have cured his paralysis. I'm not even convinced he was lost.
The neurotoxin killed him in his weaken state. A weakened state he found himself in because he was starving already, basically from rabbit-starvation. Because he was unprepared.
Yes, had he not eaten the seeds, he (possibly) would still be alive... but he still would have been an idiot.
Only if you stretch the term "unprepared" beyond what people understand the Park Ranger to mean.
Maybe "less than optimally prepared" for the scope of what he was trying to do, but "unprepared" is not fair. "Unprepared" basically puts him in the same category as people who die from hypothermia because they wear cotton clothes.
I don't think "sufficiently prepared that you are not operating at a significant caloric deficient for prolonged periods of time" is a high standard. He was in the same category of people who fail to dress properly. Those people have insufficient clothing, and he was unable to obtain sufficient food. This was all before the potato seeds became an issue.
No one should ever eat ODAP. It is too risky. Now the world knows (and in a very high profile way). No one should ever have to ask themselves if they are well-fed enough to eat wild potato seeds. You should never eat them.
McCandless had a map (though given that Krakauer himself perpetrated the myth, you can't really be faulted for thinking otherwise). Wikipedia, as well as the movie and a variety of primary sources make it clear that one was found among his possession. It's also possible, if not likely, that the onset of lathyrism left him no window for realizing his plight and walking out - the damage was irreversible at the time of ingestion (I'm admittedly sketchy on how fast the onset actually is - presumably it varies a lot).
Personally, I find the details completely beside the point. McCandless sacrificed everything to test his philosophical conjecture and I have nothing but respect for that. I honestly would've thought there'd be more empathy for it here.
It wasn't grass pea - the author of the article was making a comparison between the symptoms of ODAP poisoning in people who had consumed grass pea and the symptoms displayed by McCandless. The plant that he was eating was wild potato, not grass pea, and it was McCandless's death that motivated some researchers to examine the wild potato plant to see if it contained the same toxin; that toxin turned out to be present in the plant, which had not previously been known.
According to the article, McCandless was using a reference book to determine which plants were safe to eat; the book listed wild potato as non-toxic, because it was not yet understood that it contained ODAP. If it had been known, McCandless would not likely have eaten wild potato, would not have been poisoned, and would likely not have died in the way that he did.
Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero
I tend to agree with the sentiment although I appreciate the his quest.
As a side note, I can understand how someone gets into a sticky situation in the theme of adventure. A friend's little brother (in his 20s, lot so little) decided to hike the Appalachian Trail this summer. Unfortunately he found out about a month in that he was ill-prepared for the calories it takes to hike the sometimes over 20 miles-per-day and the physical toll as well. He had to quit much earlier than expected.
I think the point is that he was an independent thinker, and thus was disillusioned by all the BS in modern society. Sure he made some mistakes and he had some back luck, but he chose to find meaning in his life instead of being another sheep. Can you say the same for your own life?
he chose to live a meaningful life instead of being another sheep. Can you say the same for your own life?
Yeah, I can. Most of us can. 'Sheep' is such an over-used term that covers so much. Getting a full time job for a company doesn't make your a 'sheep', you can still leave a happy and meaningful life. People say (though I have no personal experience) that having children is the most meaningful thing you can do in your life. If you do, maybe nothing else matters?
The point is, it's ironic to me that you're deriding all the "BS in modern society". To me, the biggest load of BS in modern society is this first world preoccupation with "meaning", "purpose" and all that other junk.
The vast majority of people out there don't even have the time to stop and think about these things. None of us can judge what McCandless did with his life because none of us are him and know how he felt as he was dying. But if I was him, I would have regrets.
Certainly, living a normal life and bringing up a family is meaningful. I think the point I am making is that it wasn't meaningful for him.
Fitting in with society is good in some ways and bad in others.
Here are some concrete examples of situations when it's bad to be a sheep:
- in my home country (Northern Ireland) people tend to vote for one of the two sectarian parties. In the 2010 election only 7% of people votes for non-sectarian parties. The problem is that the sectarian parties are supporting violence, intolerance and ignorance (some directly, others indrectly). Most people (over 90% in this case) are sheep, so they simply vote whichever tribe they were brought up in, even though it is tearing apart their society.
- Recently I was chatting to the directors of a local club who had perpetrated a scam (or "loophole" as they called it) to avoid paying a few thousand dollars in sales tax. I'm pretty sure the scheme is illegal, and the treasurer just resigned because of it. The previous president also thinks it is illegal. Anyway, when I was chatting to these guys they were saying how well democracy works because 67 people voted for this scheme and only 3 voted against.
For more example have a look at the second Iraq war, healthcare in the USA (and partisanship in US politics in general), the housing boom, not to mention silicon valley with its "me too" VCs investing in a raftload of crappy startups that aren't doing anything original.
Chris unfortunately died before he had a chance to really live his life - he was still trying to figure things out and discover his purpose in life. However if he had lived I think it is quite likely he would have made some great achievements.
I don't believe sheep is overused when a huge population of people are pursuing material gains for people who don't care. The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases, and other first world problems. All trying to keep up with the Joneses. There are more meaningful pursuits.
Like Chris McCandless's one that resulted in death? Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely. I'm not qualified to judge whether depression and dietary diseases are better than death, but I think it's at least worth debating.
And few people pursue material gains for the purpose of simply having them. Like I said, for a great many people in the world, being a parent is hugely meaningful. It leads them to pursue material gains in order to provide for their children and watch them grow in comfort. That does not make them 'sheep'.
If they are then everyone is a sheep. You are an "anti-'sheep'" sheep.
I'm not saying to hold him up as an idol. I'm just saying, if you aren't happy and you are "successful" then you may have to rethink your approach. Happiness is hard and a lot of work, and I know a lot of people never figure it out. If you're trying what consumer culture is offering and you're miserable, then maybe try something else?
I would highly debate it's few. There's a reason AdBusters struck such a nerve.
> Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely.
You can still respect the attempt, consider the ideals, and identify specific mistakes (which most of his intellectually stunted detractors fail to do).
Here's a short list: Spending time with your family, building your business, learning a trade, volunteering, learning to surf, hiking, learning to cook, learning to fly a quadcopter, volunteering in a soup kitchen, learning a new language.
People consume more when they are filling a void and it consumes them exacerbating their problems.
Give me a break. The guy was most certainly not an independent thinker. Nor was he a critical thinker. Nor did he have any respect for the challenge he was taking on. He was an angst ridden teenage boy captured in an twenty something's body that never learned the difference between fantasy and reality. Most importantly, he never learned that in the real world there are consequences for stupid actions.
This. The previous comment is the reason why McCandless is such a polarizing figure. Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough.
"Adventure is just bad planning." - Roald Amundsen
The good admiral has a point, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the McCandless drama.
For that, I think I'd look to Norman Maclean's _Young Men and Fire_ where he talks about smoke jumpers:
"It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling...
"For many former Smokejumpers, then, smokejumping is not closely tied up with their [eventual] way of life, but is more something that is necessary for them to pass through and not around and, once it is unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The 'it' is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the 'business of the world,' which isn't all that special or hard but takes time. This 'it' is the something special within that demands we do something special, and 'it' could be within a lot of us."
If people here are reading this and haven't already realized some parallels between not just McCandless and smokejumpers but also entrepreneurs I'd be surprised.
Now, you can draw distinctions between McCandless and smokejumpers, too: the later train and drill and prepare, probably as well as Amundsen could be satisfied with. And their work has a practical end. But their work is still an adventure because they also operate in an area of high risk, and as a result they sometimes pay a high cost.
And they don't do this job for entirely practical reasons. They do it because they have a need for an internal narrative that settles certain things and establishes a kind of identity, they do it because they need something off the beaten track for middle class success.
McCandless was clearly looking for that. I think it's fair to ask if he'd been a little less romantic about it and a little more thoughtful whether he might have had both his survival adventure and his survival.
Then again, unless you're Batman or some other protagonist whose superpower is acute anticipation by authorial fiat, it's mitigated by the limits of the best laid plans.
Smoke jumpers are taking on a job that offers a boon to others, so I politely give them the benefit of the doubt. Thus it is an exercise in adult behavior, even if the details of their personal motives are more ambiguous.
I do recognize a degree of courage in a young man going into the wild to heal the angst and alienation plaguing his soul. Yet I bristle at the suggestion such is automatically heroic or independent thinking, and (implicitly or explicitly) the less wounded amongst us can be dismissed as "sheep", as some admirers have done in this discussion.
I am sorry, but I see no evidence that McCandless ever had a single original thought in his head. He never completed the "hero's journey" in either the literary or practical sense -- he failed to achieve enlightenment and return with his boon, to help himself and/or others. He failed. He may have had some courage to admire, but he ultimately failed when it came to the big important stuff.
McCandless was an adolescent in a man's body -- he was not proven capable of handling adult responsibilities. That is not necessarily a negative in itself -- we are where we are in life, and being honest about it and doing something about it is a fine thing. But I am not going to be patient with people lecturing genuine adults about how this adolescent has deep insights into life. Sorry, but that is just wishful thinking by people who mistake ignorance and low intellectual standards for originality.
I see what you are saying but like you said, smoke jumpers prepare. While they might jump into hazardous conditions it is not done without a risk:reward ratio well above 'adventure'.
When best laid plans fail they are forgiven because there were at least plans.
I think it's an interesting point you raise about entrepreneurs, and I think that is why I feel a connection to Chris. I certainly know that I seem to think differently from that vast majority of people. That is useful in coming up with novel ideas, but it can also make it challenging fitting into society.
I like to think of adventure as good planning combined with inherently difficult circumstances. The first treks to the poles were quite the adventure, yet they were also highly methodical and carefully planned.
> Those who prepare and go on a quest without suffering negative consequences are somehow derided for not being independent thinkers, somehow cheapened for not risking enough.
Who is "deriding them for not being independent thinkers?" Maybe others who go on quests are independent in their own way, none of the comments here are trying to say one way or the other. What the comment DOES imply though, is that there are a lot of people who don't try anything like that at all, no matter the level of preparation.
Your comment sounds like he harmed other people with his stupid actions. He was harmless to everyone but himself.
And the consequence, he paid it with his life.
The nobel part is that he actually left everything behind while most of us are drowning into urban life.
He wasnt a hero in traditional sense of 'saving, helping' other people. He is a hero who had what it takes to leave society behind while we cannot let go of smallest of things.
(in reply to emilsedgh)
Because he was trying to find meaning and purpose in his life.
What struck me most powerfully was that he did actually discover the meaning of life (or at least one aspect of it) when he says "happiness only real when shared". So it appears that he did actually figure out how to have a meaningful life, but unfortunately never actually got to put it into practice. That is the saddest part of the whole story for me.
"Humans are social creatures, so why is leaving what we need/depend upon heroic?"
He challenged that idea. Isnt that heroic? To let go of whole society. Everything and Everyone.
Please, at least agree with me that what he did was daring. So damn daring that makes him a hero to me.
Nor did he have any respect for the challenge he was taking on.
The conclusion is that he died from a specific set of circumstances that few people knew were deadly. I think that directly counters the notion that he "he had no respect for the challenge" because I believe people arrive at that conclusion backwards: he died doing it, so he must have been foolhardy.
The irony of your post is that his death is a vivid demonstration of one reason why humans engage in flock behavior: to develop social memory of what's safe to eat. Those who stayed with the flock lived meaningful lives--they got jobs they had kids, they propagated their genes. He didn't live a meaningful life--he died painfully in his 20's in the woods because he ate a lethal dose of neurotoxins.
You could still stay at the edge of the flock and follow a zillion people who've "gone back to nature" ... but the nature of post-hunter-gatherer agriculture. Stick to growing plants and raising animals we're on very solid grounds WRT short term toxicity vs. "This wild stuff doesn't seem to be deadly" and then accidentally find out the conditions and dosages in which it turns out to be.
The flock itself has value; you don't have live with someone else, but as jusben1369 points out, if he'd so much as broken his leg falling down the steps of the bus he'd have ended up just as dead. Regular contact with a neighbor would have saved him, but he had no reserves and no margin for error.
I'm just pointing out that some risk is necessary and complete risk aversion can lead to undesirable outcomes. A lot of people here probably moved far from their home base to work at a startup for example. Some were exposed to completely new cultures and lost comforts of home because of it. If they did what their family or friends did they would have stayed home and not took the risk.
People from my home state think California is an awful place. I moved here for work and couldn't imagine living anywhere else--imagine if I'd of took their word.
I made my own personal pilgrimage to The Magic Bus in summer '09 [1]. It's an extremely special place like none other I've visited.
Completely coincidentally, one of my close friends where I now live in the far North was with the girl who tragically drowned trying to cross the Tek River in summer 2010.
Also co-incidentally, just today I gave an interview for someone writing an article on the anniversary of Chris' death. She was at the Tek river a few days ago, and watched three backpackers get swept downstream, luckily without major injury.
It's amazing how this place and Chris' story have impacted so many people's lives. I'm making plans now to go back in the winter/spring, when the river will be frozen and the scenery will be spectacular.
EDIT/UPDATE: I'll add that there is no doubt in my mind Chris helped me find the courage to quit my Software Engineering job, sell all my stuff and spend 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina. No doubt it was the best decision of my life so far.
I loaded my Jeep into a shipping container and ocean freighted it. It's much cheaper (~$800) and easier (~1 week) than you might think, and well, well worth it.
I wonder if we aren't starting to miss the forest for the trees here. Perhaps this is the true, final reason. However, if he'd fallen down the steps on that bus and broken his leg he would most likely be dead. He basically put himself in a position where he had such a small margin for error that it's not all that surprising he didn't make it. I backpacked Central and South America for quite some time pre-internet and pre mobile. There were a lot of people who were removing themselves from their environments and doing some wonderful self discovery. There was also the odd, additional person, who was so completely reckless that it seemed inevitable that something bad would befall them. I've always thought of those people whenever I've bumped into stories on Chris MacCandless.
Yea I mean the entire debate shouldn't even be about whether he was stupid to do this. Because of him, we are able to say in hindsight that travelers should be weary of these kinds of things.
The author posits that it wasn't stupidity that killed McCandless for eating a plant not known to be toxic, but rather ignorance.
However the reason he (and the rest of us) were ignorant of the danger of the potato seed is that the potato seed isn't dangerous to anyone except those in a severe caloric deficit and still undergoing physical exertion.
In other words he applied knowledge gained in one situation (normal persons eating potato seed) to a situation far outside of the experiments that seemed to show no issues with potato seed.
Call it ignorance instead of stupidity if you want, but he's still just as dead (and apparently wouldn't have died had he maintained something other than a caloric deficit which must have eventually led to his death anyways).
I'll go further and state that the only reason this ignorance was dangerous to him was because he stupidly put himself in a situation where it could be. Everyone should know that the wilderness can be dangerous for countless reasons, that isn't really something you can be ignorant of. Not making an effort to eliminate ignorance before putting yourself in the path of danger is stupid.
Put it this way, scuba diving is dangerous, everybody knows that. Furthermore, I am ignorant about diving gases and equipment; that stuff simply isn't something I know much about. This ignorance is not dangerous to me, because I have no intention of diving. If I did intend on diving, I would have to be stupid to not rectify my ignorance first.
I'm not sure you read the article. He did make an effort to reduce his ignorance. He was knowledgable on what was and was not edible. He had the same knowledge that everyone else had, prior to the investigation of his death. It is only after investigating his death that we know that eating those seeds, while in extreme caloric deficit, is dangerous.
The point is that being in a situation where eating those seeds could be dangerous in the first place was the result of stupidity.
"After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead."
Stupidly, he remained ignorant. That ignorance resulted in a weakened state, which allowed the seeds to be dangerous.
He "remained" just as ignorant as the rest of us. You're still implying that if he had done more research, he could have found out that those seeds, in his condition, could kill him. He could not have.
Yes, he took a risk. But I don't think it's a significantly different risk from other risky activities young men in their early 20s do, ranging from unusual sports to the military.
He was starving even without the seeds (it was only because he was starving already that the seeds did him in) because he did not actually know how to survive in the wild. Neither do I, but I am smart enough to know that and not attempt living in the wild.
What the article didn't touch on, is that the problem he faced was crossing out of the river, after the river rose - he couldn't simply ford across it, as he had done getting there.
"Oh well", he said, "I'll just hang back here". His original plan was to travel through Alaska - which is a weird thing to want to do, by foot, in anything but the wintertime - Alaska turns into a giant swamp. It's one of the reasons why locals thought McCandles a little dim.
What could have saved him, was this: there was an old cable basket system a little ways up river that he could have used to cross. He never knew about it. It seems he didn't even wander that way, to stumble upon it.
"A basket-pulley system built and left by the U.S. Geological survey high above the River, the basket has been chained to a pole on McCandless’ side by locals to stop people from hunting in the area. Had McCandless found the basket and broken the chain, he would’ve been able to cross even with the river at its higest point. " (Into The Wild)
If he didn't eat the wild potato seeds, he would have survived the 18 days until help came. He would have survived on squirrels and porcupines. The wild potato seeds poisoned him. He died from complications of paralysis. No one should eat wild potato seeds, ever, just to be sure they don't become permanently paralyzed. Young men are the highest risk group. This is new information. No one knew this before. I don't know how to help you understand the article better. You got it very wrong.
Well, you really don't know that he would have survived. He put himself in a precarious position and as others have said, he could have succumbed to any number of other dangers.
He would have survived. As other people have said he could have survived any number of ways (eating squirrels, porcupines) all while enjoying any number of comforts (sitting by the fire, sleeping, reading). You don't really know that he would not have survived.
How can you condemn his post for being so certain while expressing the same (opposite) certainty yourself? You sound a bit ridiculous, obviously no one can be certain of what would have happened had he not eaten the potato seeds. In any case, the article says:
"After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down."
Meaning the only reason he started eating the potato seeds in the first place was because his other sources of nutrition weren't cutting it. So if he hadn't eaten them, he would have at least needed to find another source of calories.
I'm sure that if he did not eat wild potato seeds he would not have died of complications from paralysis. I'm absolutely certain. I know it. I can think of nothing else in his environment that would have poisoned him and made him permanently paralyzed and unable to move or hunt. The other source of calories that he needed was on its way and would have arrived 18 days later. He would have been fine subsisting until then.
" Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the “false being within,” someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Why the author did that should be obvious. He wanted to write a story that would sell."
Well, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that selling books wasn't why Krakauer was compelled to tell that story.
Reading Krakauer's accounts of his own life, in both Into The Wild and in Eiger Dreams, it's pretty clear he felt the same urge to challenge himself with the wilderness that McCandless did, and that the books are Krakauer's attempts to understand that drive.
Those books are mainly journeys of self-understanding that happen to be available for other people to read.
Ordinary cooking and pressure cooking of pre-soaked seeds
were found to be most effective in reducing the levels of
all the natural toxicants examined...
These findings and the high water solubility suggest that
a simple and effective means of detoxifying Lathyrus by
removing this neurotoxic amino acid may be practicable.
McCandless wrote "POT SEED" and the author inferred that he meant potato seed? Is that a given...?
Also, doesn't this author seem a bit sloppy? First, he asserts in an 8400-word article that McCandless died from sweet pea seeds, which he shrugs off because he was on a tight deadline. Then he says he made a "rash" decision to suggest in his book that the wild-potato seeds contain swainsonine?
It is a given. McCandless meant to write potato seed. Krakauer wasn't sloppy. He was right. He knew that wild potato seeds killed McCandless. He just didn't know how. Krakauer pursued the analysis himself to determine what toxin was present in the seeds. That's not good enough? Man, everyone's a critic.
For everyone who liked 'Into the Wild' I suggest the documentary 'Once I Was a Champion' that tells the story of Evan Tanner, a mma fighter who died in a pilgrimage in the Californian Desert. Evan, an avid travelller just like Chris, was also a person who had trouble finding his place in this world and suffered from depression and a deep sense of alienation.
I'm disappointed by the hypocrisy of most of these negative HN comments.
How can you be so quick to rubbish what McCandless achieved, calling him stupid and unprepared, then go straight back to reading the next "Why I sold my home to Bootstrap my dating App" blog post to grace the front page or "How I finally achieved my dream" and then be full of praise and admiration.
Don't you see, McCandless was a young guy with a dream and a philosophy and actually had the balls to go and try it for himself. He's become a bit of a cult icon because he showed exactly the same disregard for the rules and society norms that make Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson such heroes.
To everyone commenting along these lines, I look forward to not-reading your next blog post; "How I could have done x, if only I'd tried"
Call me a cynic, but this is about the guy who went to live into the wilderness underprepared and full of noble ideas and died, either from poisoning or from hunger.
Now he has his own wikipedia page and inspires people.
I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded?
I mean, wouldn't one rather admire someone who tried a similar thing, but was prepared and succeeded?
Do you have any examples? Ted Kaczynski doesn't count.
I have one: Sooyong Park.
You know why he's not widely admired? Because people don't know much about him because no one's been able popularize a good narrative about him. Some it it is just marketing, and the extent to which he succeeded or not is a minor detail.
Also, what Park did was dangerous, too, filming tigers in the Siberian wilderness. He easily could have died accidentally in similar fashion to McCandless. He was prepared be he still could have been killed many times.
My one issue with this is that he was, by all accounts, alarmingly thin before the seeds did him in, and winter hadn't even arrived yet. It's hard to imagine him surviving the winter, seeds or not. So while the seeds obviously shortened his life, I doubt it was by a very large factor.
He never planned to stay the winter. He was just going to wait another month or two until the river level dropped, then he could just hike out the same way he hiked in.
It's interesting to note that Jon Krakauer also wrote Three Cups of Deceit, when Three Cups of Tea was required summer reading for me in high school. Funny how opinions about people change--though in this case it's sad instead of angering.
Hmm, I wonder what other types of otherwise harmless food stuffs can become detrimental given the correct physiological conditions of the consumer? How do we even go about humanely testing that sort of thing?
It was interesting to learn that people still eat the grass pea, which was the plant containing ODAP used in the concentration camp.
Apparently what causes most deaths by ODAP poisoning is that it survives droughts better than most crops making starving people eat it. The very group most susceptible to the poisoning.
Never knew he was injured at the end as well, that may have put him into a catabolic state. But he was ahead of his time.. "rewilding" is a hip thing to do now.
holy hell.. "How Chris McCandless Died" is such a bad title considering at the very end it says - "there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds". So he /may/ have died that way.
Jon Krakauer just really wants to believe that McCandless could have survived if he hadn't been a dumbass.
Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote:
"When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn't even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament [... ] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.[11]"
Sherry Simpson, writing in the Anchorage Press, described her trip to the bus with a friend, and their reaction upon reading the comments that tourists had left lauding McCandless as an insightful, Thoreau-like figure:
"Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the "he had a death wish" camp because I don't know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the "what a dumb--" territory, tempered by brief alliances with the "he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest" partisans. Mostly I'm puzzled by the way he's emerged as a hero[13]"