What’s in it for me? An unflinching meditation on youth, trauma, and the thrill of adventure.
One morning in late April 1992, Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan backcountry, armed with a rifle, a pair of too-large rubber boots, and a field guide to edible plants. It was the latest chapter in his two-year odyssey roaming the American West in pursuit of adventure, self-discovery, and a higher truth than what he’d known in his genteel suburban upbringing.
Four months later, his body was discovered by moose hunters in an abandoned bus. He’d starved to death 19 days prior.
Alaskans have largely dismissed McCandless as a foolhardy dreamer with a death wish. But the bus where he died became a pilgrimage site for his admirers – people from all over the world who know what it means to yearn for something more. In life, too, McCandless touched many of the people he came across. In these blinks, we’ll meet some of those people and examine what it means to be lost – and found.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
how one traumatic discovery set McCandless on his fateful course;
that McCandless’s easy charm and open heart won him friends wherever he went; and
how McCandless’s death was the unintended result of a fatal error.
Chris seemed calm on the surface, but underneath he was roiling.
Christopher McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, DC. His father, Walt, was a prominent aerospace engineer. He’d moved his family from California to take a job at NASA, earning enough to set up a trust fund for Chris and his sister.
Chris had always had itchy feet. At age two, he snuck out of his parents’ house in the dead of night, crept down the street, and broke into a neighbor’s house to steal candy. After his son’s remains were discovered, Walt summed up his son’s adventurousness: “Chris was fearless even when he was little. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge.”
Chris would have hated to admit it, but he and his father were very much alike – willful, intense, and stubborn. Their inevitable clash – and one key discovery about his family’s past – is what set Chris on his fateful course.
The key message here is: Chris seemed calm on the surface, but underneath he was roiling.
In high school and college, Chris appeared to acquiesce to Walt’s strict control. But, inwardly, he brooded, plotting his escape – even as he made plans to attend college in Atlanta.
The summer after graduating high school, he drove off in his secondhand yellow Datsun. It was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. But while visiting his parents’ old neighborhood in southern California, he made a shocking discovery. Apparently, his father had lived a double life for years, father to two families and husband to two wives. Worst of all, two years after Chris’s birth, Walt had fathered another son. But his mother wasn’t Chris’s mother. She was the other woman – Walt’s first wife. The discovery shook Chris to the core.
His parents had made their peace. But Chris couldn’t let it go. Over the next few years, he became reclusive, turning away from his family. By his final year in college, he was living in an austere, cell-like room with little more than a mattress on the floor.
He told his parents he would be staying on in Atlanta after graduation. But after not hearing from him for a few months, they drove down for a visit. When they arrived, they were greeted with a “for rent” sign outside his apartment.
Five weeks earlier, Chris had donated his trust fund to charity and once again lit out west in his yellow Datsun. His plan? To cut himself off from bourgeois privilege and live an unfiltered life of raw existence out on the road. He gave himself a new identity to symbolize his transformation: Alexander Supertramp.
In Jan Burres, McCandless found his first friend on the road – as well as a surrogate mother.
It was August 1990 when Jan Burres and her partner, Bob – two middle-aged drifters in an old van – pulled to the side of the road near the Oregon-California border. Looking into the trees, Jan saw what she describes as a pitiful-looking kid gathering wild berries in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. “Said his name was Alex,” Jan recalls. “He was big time hungry. But real happy.”
Estranged from her own son, who was about McCandless’s age, Jan took an immediate liking to him. He joined the couple at their beach camp for about a week. When he moved on, heading north, Jan thought that was the last they’d hear from him. But McCandless stayed in touch, sending them a postcard every month.
The key message here is: In Jan Burres, McCandless found his first friend on the road – as well as a surrogate mother.
From there, he hitched north to the Dakotas (he’d abandoned his car months earlier). When the weather turned, he hitched back south. Over New Year’s he was in a kayak in the Gulf of California, surviving for 36 days on five pounds of rice and whatever he could pull from the sea.
His journals and correspondence are spotty from then until the next autumn, when he got a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s in the strip-mall sprawl of Bullhead City, Arizona.
When he sent Jan a card from Bullhead City with a return address, she wrote back right away. Jan and Bob were staying just over the California border – at the Slabs, an abandoned Navy base that draws thousands of drifters and misfits every winter. McCandless, in need of some sympathetic companionship, quit his job at McDonald’s and set a course for the Slabs.
He was a charmer, according to Jan. He helped her sell second-hand books at the Slabs’ huge swap meet, hilariously cavorting with Jan’s puppies all the while. He found a portable electric organ and played it all day, drawing crowds with a surprisingly good singing voice. He gabbed to anyone who would listen about his big plans to live off the land in Alaska.
Jan begged him to call his parents, knowing the pain of a mother who’s lost touch with her son. “He’s out there somewhere,” Jan said of her son. “I’d want someone to look after him like I tried to look after Alex.”
In their short time together, McCandless awakened Jan’s dormant mothering instincts. As we’ll see next, Jan wasn’t the only stranger who came to regard McCandless as family.
McCandless’s unlikely friendship with Ron Franz had an outsized impact on the old man’s life.
One Thursday in January 1991, 80-year-old Ronald Franz came across McCandless hitching a ride back out to his desert camp from Salton City, California. Ron drove McCandless into the badlands, dropping him off past a hippie camp by some natural hot springs. Heading back into town, though, Ron couldn’t stop thinking about the kid who called himself Alex.
“I thought he was too nice a kid to be living by that hot springs with those nudists and drunks and dope smokers,” Ron recalled. He headed back out a few days later to try and convince McCandless to go straight.
But Ron couldn’t change McCandless. Instead, McCandless made an indelible impression on the old man, who ultimately put his possessions in storage and started living in McCandless’s old desert camp.
The key message here is: McCandless’s unlikely friendship with Ron Franz had an outsized impact on the old man’s life.
Ron was a military man. He’d spent most of his life stationed in East Asia. He was also familiar with loss. On New Year’s Eve 1957, his wife and only son were killed by a drunk driver. After their deaths, he sought comfort in alcohol. By the time he met McCandless, he’d long since put down the bottle, but the pain of those losses remained.
After he showed up at McCandless’s camp, the two started spending a lot of time together. Ron taught McCandless how to work leather, and McCandless made an intricate belt depicting the story of his adventure. Ron grew attached to the boy. When McCandless announced he would soon be leaving for San Diego, Ron insisted on driving him there.
A few weeks later, Ron’s phone rang. It was McCandless, asking Ron to pick him up. Hearing his voice “was like sunshine after a month of rain,” Ron said.
The two spent a few days together before Ron, again insisting, drove McCandless to Colorado. Before they parted, Ron asked if McCandless would agree to be his grandson. McCandless gently declined. The baggage of this familial intimacy was too much weight for the boy to carry.
We can only speculate as to why Ron, by then 81 years old, gave up his worldly possessions and set up camp in the badlands as his young friend had done. He was still there when author Jon Krakauer went looking for him a year and a half later. Ron had learned of McCandless’s death six months prior.
The grief was still fresh. When Krakauer showed him photographs of the bus where McCandless died, the old man’s eyes misted over. He turned abruptly and walked away to collect himself.
McCandless made his last home in rural South Dakota, with Wayne Westerberg and his family.
In September 1990, Wayne Westerberg pulled over for a gangly hitchhiker who said his name was Alex McCandless. The young man had an easy charm – and he left an impression on Wayne.
A few weeks later, McCandless showed up at Wayne’s place in Carthage, South Dakota, and Wayne gave him a job at the grain elevator he owned.
It was difficult physical labor. McCandless’s tasks included mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the silo. But McCandless wasn’t like most hitchhikers Wayne had hired over the years. He was the hardest worker Wayne had ever seen.
The key message here is: McCandless made his last home in rural South Dakota, with Wayne Westerberg and his family.
It wasn’t just McCandless’s work ethic that Wayne respected. The two had fun together as well, draining White Russians at the only bar in Carthage. They even went dancing at a honky-tonk in a neighboring town. One night, McCandless sat down at a piano and wowed everyone with that hidden talent of his – his voice. “We were all blown away by it,” said Gail, Wayne’s girlfriend.
Gail and McCandless quickly became close. McCandless would talk to her a lot about his family – “like he was baring his soul,” she said. “You could see something was gnawing at him.”
McCandless also left a big impression on Wayne’s mother, the one time he was invited to her house for dinner. “We talked for hours,” Mary Westerberg said. “There was something fascinating about him. . . . Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs.”
Wayne tried to convince McCandless to stay in Carthage. It wasn’t too often a good worker came through town – and plus, Wayne had become fond of the boy. But McCandless had his heart set on Alaska. He wouldn’t stop talking about what he called his Alaskan odyssey.
The morning he left, everybody gathered at the grain elevator to see him off. A few weeks later, Wayne received a postcard from Fairbanks, Alaska. McCandless’s note ended like this: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.”
McCandless lived happily in the wild for a few months. But he miscalculated his exit strategy.
When he started up the Stampede Trail, in the northern shadow of Denali, McCandless was giddy with excitement. At last he would fulfill his fantasy of being alone in the wild. He practically bounded into the backcountry, said Jim Gallien, who had given McCandless a lift to the trailhead – and was the last person to see him alive. Gallien, a native Alaskan, was disturbed by how little gear McCandless had for a long-term stay in the backcountry, and insisted the boy take his waterproof boots and two sandwiches.
McCandless saw gear as an encumbrance, a barrier between him and the wild. And truth be told, he didn’t really need it. For four months, he lived happily, subsisting on foraged plants and small game. Ultimately, it wasn’t a lack of gear that killed him, but two errors.
The key message here is: McCandless lived happily in the wild for a few months. But he miscalculated his exit strategy.
His second day out, he crossed the Teklanika River. In Alaska, the winter snowpack begins to melt in the spring, swelling gentle brooks into raging torrents. But it was April, and spring was still months off. When McCandless came upon it, the Teklanika was tame and shallow – easy to cross.
A few days later was “MAGIC BUS DAY,” as McCandless wrote in his journal – he’d discovered an abandoned 1940s Fairbanks city bus kitted out with a bunk, a barrel stove, and supplies left by visiting hikers and hunters. He made the bus his home base, striking out each day to gather berries and shoot squirrels or other small animals.
It was hard going. That part of Alaska turns boggy in the summer, making it very difficult to cover the ground necessary to find unharvested plants. He lost weight, burning more calories than he took in. But his journal shows that he was happy to be there.
Still, one day he decided to go back to the world. On July 3, he packed up his things and began hiking toward Fairbanks.
But when he reached the Teklanika River, it had swollen ten times in volume with snowmelt. That night, he wrote in his journal: “DISASTER . . . RAINED IN. RIVER LOOKED IMPOSSIBLE. LONELY, SCARED.”
Had he walked a mile upstream, he would have found a place where the current wasn’t as strong. Had he walked downstream, he would have found a steel cable used by hydrologists to cross the swollen river.
But he didn’t do either of those things. Instead, he decided to go back to the bus and wait for the water levels to drop.
In late July, McCandless made a mistake that ultimately killed him.
Over the years, dozens of people have walked off into the wilds of the Last Frontier, never to return. The rugged beauty of the Alaskan landscape may inspire romantic fantasies of communing with nature – but, in reality, it’s a hardscrabble existence that even the toughest Alaskans sometimes don’t survive. Hundreds of people, even Alaskan natives, have starved to death in the backcountry over the years.
McCandless had been living pretty well in the backcountry for months. That, in itself, shows he was resourceful, hardy, and tougher than most.
But why didn’t he try harder to get back to civilization once he was ready? Why did he go back to the bus and starve to death?
The key message here is: In late July, McCandless made a mistake that ultimately killed him.
The short answer is that, by the time he realized he was in mortal peril, he was too weak to hike out.
In May and June, McCandless had gathered and eaten plenty of wild potato plants, having identified them as edible in his field guide. During the summer months, these plants produce seeds. As author Jon Krakauer discovered after extensive research, these seeds contain an amino acid that brings about paralysis and eventually death. At particular risk are malnourished men between the ages of 15 and 25. This amino acid, known as ODAP, prevents the body from turning what it eats into a source of energy.
Slowly, McCandless became aware of what was happening to him. On July 30, he wrote in his journal that he was extremely weak. He identified the potato seeds as the culprit. On August 5, his hundredth day in the wild, he rejoiced in his journal. “BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE,” he wrote. “DEATH LOOMS AS A SERIOUS THREAT.”
As the body begins to consume itself, the victim of starvation suffers muscle pain, sensitivity to cold, hallucinations, and extreme exhaustion. But near the end, the pain disappears and is replaced by euphoria and mental clarity.
Close to his death, sometime between August 13 and 18, McCandless wrote: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!” Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn him and slowly passed away.
McCandless made careless mistakes. But his death was an accident, not a suicide.
Having spent years getting to know McCandless through his letters, photographs, and the lasting impressions he left on the people he met on the road, author Jon Krakauer has reached some conclusions on McCandless’s untimely death.
First, he believes that McCandless was not a foolhardy kid with a death wish, as many Alaskans derisively describe him. He wasn’t suicidal; he had grit and tenacity, and he came very close to surviving his foray into the wild.
He also believes that McCandless’s quest to find truth in the wild – truth about himself and about the world – is a natural, normal impulse. McCandless’s extreme intensity meant that he pushed risk-taking to its logical conclusion. Krakauer has found innumerable examples of similar young men taking grievous risks – including himself.
The key message is: McCandless made careless mistakes. But his death was an accident, not a suicide.
Since time immemorial, young men have been risking their lives in pursuit of meaning, or to feel more alive. And it’s not just the young who are attracted by risky endeavors. The conservationist John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, nearly fell to his death climbing a mountain – and he was well past the first blush of youth at age 36.
Jon Krakauer himself was a rash, self-absorbed young man with an ax to grind against his father. Like McCandless, Krakauer was obsessed with the great outdoors. He climbed mountains to experience life at a higher pitch. Danger was part of the thrill.
In 1977, at age 23, Krakauer got it into his head to climb a mountain in Alaska called Devils Thumb – alone. The idea became a singular obsession. He set off, hitching a ride on a commercial salmon boat from Gig Harbor, Washington. Finally underway, he felt at peace, like he was aligned with an imperative that was beyond his control or even comprehension.
He eventually managed to summit the Thumb, after taking incredible risks traversing – and then vertically ascending – an ice cap riddled with miles-deep crevasses. But he didn’t notice the danger at the time. He’d wanted to climb the Thumb for so long, so badly, that a minor thing like the weather or a crevasse didn’t seem capable of stopping him. Death was an abstract concept.
This is hubris, and naivete. But flirting with death – the game that Krakauer and so many others won, but Christopher McCandless lost – is not the same as a death wish.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Christopher McCandless died much as he lived – with full intensity, having given his utmost effort to the project of living. His story is one of self-discovery and wild passion. His legacy lives on in the people he met on the road, and in the millions of people his story has touched since then.
Got feedback?
We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with Into the Wild as the subject line and share your thoughts!
What to read next: Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts
Christopher Johnson McCandless's story can be described as many things: a search for himself or a search for meaning, a tale of traveling, wandering, or even vagabonding. What makes the art of long-term travel so fascinating? More practically, what makes it possible?
Vagabonding explains how veteran travel writer Rolf Potts approaches an extended trip – with tips ranging from how to budget your money and pack, to what philosophy to read on the road (spoiler: it’s the Upanishads). Learn all about the dangers and beauties of vagabonding in these blinks.