Trying to explain McCandless’s unorthodox behavior, some people have made much of the fact that like John Waterman, he was small in stature and may have suffered from a “short man’s complex,” a fundamental insecurity that drove him to prove his manhood by means of extreme physical challenges. Others have posited that an unresolved Oedipal conflict was at the root of his fatal odyssey. Although there may be some truth in both hy?potheses, this sort of posthumous off-the-rack psychoanalysis is a dubious, highly speculative enterprise that inevitably demeans and trivializes the absent analysand. It’s not clear that much of value is learned by reducing Chris McCandless’s strange spiritual quest to a list of pat psychological disorders.
Roman and Andrew and I stare into the embers and talk about McCandless late into the night. Roman, thirty-two, inquisitive and outspoken, has a doctorate in biology from Stanford and an abiding distrust of conventional wisdom. He spent his adoles?cence in the same Washington, D.C., suburbs as McCandless and found them every bit as stifling. He first came to Alaska as a nine-year-old, to visit a trio of uncles who mined coal at Usibelli, a big strip-mine operation a few miles east of Healy, and immediately fell in love with everything about the North. Over the years that followed, he returned repeatedly to the forty-ninth state. In 1977, after graduating from high school as a sixteen-year-old at the top of his class, he moved to Fairbanks and made Alaska his perma?nent home.
These days Roman teaches at Alaska Pacific University, in An?chorage, and enjoys statewide renown for a long, brash string of backcountry escapades: He has—among other feats—traveled the entire 1,000-mile length of the Brooks Range by foot and pad?dle, skied 250 miles across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in subzero winter cold, traversed the 700-mile crest of the Alaska Range, and pioneered more than thirty first ascents of northern peaks and crags. And Roman doesn’t see a great deal of difference between his own widely respected deeds and McCandless’s ad?venture, except that McCandless had the misfortune to perish.
I bring up McCandless’s hubris and the dumb mistakes he made—the two or three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him his life. “Sure, he screwed up,” Roman answers, “but I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult. I’ve never done it. And I’d bet you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or two. Living in the interior bush for an ex?tended period, subsisting on nothing except what you hunt and gather—most people have no idea how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.
“I guess I just can’t help identifying with the guy,” Roman al?lows as he pokes the coals with a stick. “I hate to admit it, but not so many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager. And I’m sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with McCandless when they first got here, too, includ?ing many of his critics. Which is maybe why they’re so hard on him. Maybe McCandless reminds them a little too much of their former selves.”
Roman’s observation underscores how difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth. As Everett Ruess’s father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, “The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett.”
Roman, Andrew, and I stay up well past midnight, trying to make sense of McCandless’s life and death, yet his essence re?mains slippery, vague, elusive. Gradually, the conversation lags and falters. When I drift away from the fire to find a place to throw down my sleeping bag, the first faint smear of dawn is al-ready bleaching the rim of the northeastern sky. Although the mosquitoes are thick tonight and the bus would no doubt offer some refuge, I decide not to bed down inside Fairbanks 142. Nor, I note before sinking into a dreamless sleep, do the others.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE STAMPEDE TRAIL
It is nearly impossible for modem man to imagine what it is like to live by hunting. The life of a hunter is one of hard, seemingly continuous overland travel... A life of frequent concerns that the next interception may not work, that the trap or the drive will fail, or that the herds will not appear this season. Above all, the life of a hunter carries with it the threat of deprivation and death by starvation.
JOHN M. CAMPBELL, THE HUNGRY SUMMER
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explo?rations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electro?magnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea offree personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO - PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND WITH CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS;UNDERSCORING BY MCCANDLESS
After his attempt to depart the wilderness was stymied by the Teklanika’s high flow, McCandless arrived back at the bus on July 8. It’s impossible to know what was going through his mind at that point, for his journal betrays nothing. Quite possibly he was unconcerned about his escape routes having been cut off; in?deed, at the time there was little reason for him to worry: It was the height of summer, the country was a fecund riot of plant and animal life, and his food supply was adequate. He probably sur?mised that if he bided his time until August, the Teklanika would subside enough to be crossed.
Reestablished in the corroded shell of Fairbanks 142, McCand?less fell back into his routine of hunting and gathering. He read Tolstoys “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and Michael Crichtons Termi?nal Man. He noted in his journal that it rained for a week straight. Game seems to have been plentiful: In the last three weeks of July, he killed thirty-five squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs, all of which he supplemented with wild potatoes, wild rhubarb, various species of berries, and large numbers of mushrooms. But despite this apparent munifi?cence, the meat he’d been killing was very lean, and he was con?suming fewer calories than he was burning. After subsisting for three months on an exceedingly marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric deficit. He was balanced on a precarious edge. And then, in late July, he made the mistake that pulled him down.
He had just finished reading Doctor Zhivago, a book that in?cited him to scribble excited notes in the margins and underline several passages:
Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pil?grims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, clos?ing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, bet?ter than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscov?ered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.
“NATURE/PURITY,” he printed in bold characters at the top of the page.
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaning?less dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emo?tion!
McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled “refuge in nature” in black ink.
Next to “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that McCandless’s long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. It can be interpreted to mean that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from inti?macy, and become a member of the human community. But we will never know, because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read.
Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, there is an ominous entry in the journal: “EXTREMLY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Before this note there is nothing in the journal to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances. He was hungry, and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health. Then, after July 30, his physical condition suddenly went to hell. By August 19, he was dead.
There has been a great deal of conjecture about what caused such a precipitous decline. In the days following the identifica?tion of McCandless’s remains, Wayne Westerberg vaguely re?called that Chris might have purchased some seeds in South Dakota before heading north, including perhaps some potato seeds, with which he intended to plant a vegetable garden after getting established in the bush. According to one theory, McCand-less never got around to planting the garden (I saw no evidence of a garden in the vicinity of the bus) and by late July had grown hungry enough to eat the seeds, which poisoned him.
Potato seeds are in fact mildly toxic after they’ve begun to sprout. They contain solanine, a poison that occurs in plants of the nightshade family, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, head?ache, and lethargy in the short term, and adversely affects heart rate and blood pressure when ingested over an extended period. This theory has a serious flaw, however: In order for McCandless to have been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many pounds of them; and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato seeds, if he carried any at all.
But other scenarios involve potato seeds of an entirely differ?ent variety, and these scenarios are more plausible. Pages 126 and 127 of Tanaina Plantlore describe a plant that is called wild potato by the Dena’ina Indians, who harvested its carrotlike root. The plant, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum, grows in gravelly soil throughout the region.
According to Tanaina Plantlore, “The root of the wild potato is probably the most important food of the Dena’ina, other than wild fruit. They eat it in a variety of ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it especially dipped in oil or lard, in which they also preserve it.” The citation goes on to say that the best time to dig wild potatoes “is in the spring as soon as the ground thaws.... During the summer they evidently become dry and tough.”
Priscilla Russell Kari, the author of Tanaina Plantlore, explained to me that “spring was a really hard time for the Dena’ina people, particularly in the past. Often the game they depended on for food didn’t show up, or the fish didn’t start running on time. So they depended on wild potatoes as a major staple until the fish came in late spring. It has a very sweet taste. It was—and still is— something they really like to eat.”
Above ground the wild potato grows as a bushy herb, two feet tall, with stalks of delicate pink flowers reminiscent of miniature sweet-pea blossoms. Taking a cue from Kari’s book, McCandless started to dig and eat wild potato roots on June 24, apparently without ill effect. On July 14, he began consuming the pealike seed pods of the plant as well, probably because the roots were becoming too tough to eat. A photograph he took during this pe?riod shows a one-gallon Ziploc plastic bag stuffed to overflowing with such seeds. And then, on July 30, the entry in his journal reads, “EXTREMLY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED...”
One page after Tanaina Plantlore enumerates the wild potato, it describes a closely related species, wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii. Although a slightly smaller plant, wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart. There is only a single dis?tinguishing characteristic that is absolutely reliable: On the un-derside of the wild potato’s tiny green leaflets are conspicuous lateral veins; such veins are invisible on the leaflets of the wild sweet pea.
Kari’s book warns that because wild sweet pea is so difficult to distinguish from wild potato and “is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempt?ing to use the wild potato as food.” Accounts of individuals being poisoned from eating H. mackenzii are nonexistent in modern medical literature, but the aboriginal inhabitants of the North have apparently known for millennia that wild sweet pea is toxic and remain extremely careful not to confuse H. alpinum with H. mackenzii.
To find a documented poisoning attributable to wild sweet pea, I had to go all the way back to the nineteenth-century annals of Arctic exploration. I came across what I was looking for in the journals of Sir John Richardson, a famous Scottish surgeon, nat?uralist, and explorer. He’d been a member of the hapless Sir John Franklin s first two expeditions and had survived both of them; it was Richardson who executed, by gunshot, the suspected mur?derer-cannibal on the first expedition. Richardson also happened to be the botanist who first wrote a scientific description of H. mackenzii and gave the plant its botanical name. In 1848, while leading an expedition through the Canadian Arctic in search of the by then missing Franklin, Richardson made a botanical com?parison of H. alpinum and H. mackenzii. H. alpinum, he observed in his journal,
furnishes long flexible roots, which taste sweet like the liquorice, and are much eaten in the spring by the natives, but become woody and lose their juiciness and crispness as the season ad?vances. The root of the hoary, decumbent, and less elegant, but larger-flowered Hedysarum mackenzii is poisonous, and nearly killed an old Indian woman at Fort Simpson, who had mistaken it for that of the preceding species. Fortunately, it proved emetic; and her stomach having rejected all that she had swallowed, she was restored to health, though her recovery was for some time doubtful.
It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mis?take as the Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated. From all the available evidence, there seemed to be little doubt that McCandless—rash and incautious by nature—had commit?ted a careless blunder, confusing one plant for another, and died as a consequence. In the Outside article, I reported with great cer?tainty that H. mackenzii, the wild sweet pea, killed the boy. Virtu?ally every other journalist who wrote about the McCandless tragedy drew the same conclusion.
But as the months passed and I had the opportunity to ponder McCandless s death at greater length, the less plausible this con?sensus seemed. For three weeks beginning on June 24, McCand?less had dug and safely eaten dozens of wild potato roots without mistaking H. mackenzii for H. alpinum; why, on July 14, when he started gathering seeds instead of roots, would he suddenly have confused the two species?
McCandless, I came to believe with increasing conviction, scrupulously steered clear of the toxic H. mackenzii and never ate its seeds or any other part of the plant. He was indeed poisoned, but the plant that killed him wasn’t wild sweet pea. The agent of his demise was wild potato, H. alpinum, the species plainly iden?tified as nontoxic in Tanaina Plantlore.
The book advises only that the roots of the wild potato are ed?ible. Although it says nothing about the seeds of the species being edible, it also says nothing about the seeds being toxic. To be fair to McCandless, it should be pointed out that the seeds of H. alpinum have never been described as toxic in any published text: An extensive search of the medical and botanical literature yielded not a single indication that any part of H. alpinum is poi?sonous.
But the pea family (Leguminosae, to which H. alpinum be?longs) happens to be rife with species that produce alkaloids— chemical compounds that have powerful pharmacological effects on humans and animals. (Morphine, caffeine, nicotine, curare, strychnine, and mescaline are all alkaloids.) And in many alkaloid-producing species, moreover, the toxin is strictly local?ized within the plant.
“What happens with a lot of legumes,” explains John Bryant, a chemical ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, “is that the plants concentrate alkaloids in the seed coats in late summer, to discourage animals from eating their seeds. Depend?ing on the time of year, it would not be uncommon for a plant with edible roots to have poisonous seeds. If a species does pro?duce alkaloids, as fall approaches, the seeds are where the toxin is most likely to be found.”
During my visit to the Sushana River, I collected samples of H. alpinum growing within a few feet of the bus and sent seed pods from this sample to Tom Clausen, a colleague of Professor Bryant’s in the Chemistry Department at the University of Alaska. Conclusive spectrographic analysis has yet to be completed, but preliminary testing by Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, indicates that the seeds definitely contains traces of an alkaloid. There is a strong likelihood, moreover, that the alkaloid is swainsonine, a compound known to ranchers and livestock veterinarians as the toxic agent in locoweed.
There are some fifty varieties of toxic locoweeds, the bulk of which are in the genus Astragalus—a genus very closely related to Hedysarum. The most obvious symptoms of locoweed poisoning are neurological. According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, among the signs of locoweed poisoning are “depression, a slow staggering gait, rough coat, dull eyes with a staring look, emaciation, muscular incoordination, and nervousness (especially when stressed). In addition, affected animals may become solitary and hard to han?dle, and may have difficulty eating and drinking.”
With the discovery by Clausen and Treadwell that wild potato seeds may be repositories of swainsonine or some similarly toxic compound, a compelling case can be made for these seeds hav?ing caused McCandless s death. If true, it means that McCandless wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he has been made out to be. He didn’t carelessly confuse one species with another. The plant that poisoned him was not known to be toxic—indeed, he’d been safely eating its roots for weeks. In his state of hunger, McCandless simply made the mistake of ingesting its seed pods. A person with a better grasp of botanical principles would prob?ably not have eaten them, but it was an innocent error. It was, however, sufficient to do him in.
The effects of swainsonine poisoning are chronic—the alka?loid rarely kills outright. The toxin does the deed insidiously, in?directly, by inhibiting an enzyme essential to glycoprotein metabolism. It creates a massive vapor lock, as it were, in mam?malian fuel lines: The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy. If you ingest too much swainso?nine, you are bound to starve, no matter how much food you put into your stomach.
Animals will sometimes recover from swainsonine poisoning after they stop eating locoweed, but only if they are in fairly robust condition to begin with. In order for the toxic compound to be excreted in the urine, it first has to bind with available molecules of glucose or amino acid. A large store of proteins and sugars must be present to mop up the poison and wring it from the body.
“The problem,” says Professor Bryant, “is that if you’re lean and hungry to begin with, you’re obviously not going to have any glucose and protein to spare; so there’s no way to flush the toxin from your system. When a starving mammal ingests an alka?loid—even one as benign as caffeine—it’s going to get hit much harder by it than it normally would because they lack the glucose reserves necessary to excrete the stuff. The alkaloid is simply going to accumulate in the system. If McCandless ate a big slug of these seeds while he was already in a semi-starving condition, it would have been a setup for catastrophe.”
Laid low by the toxic seeds, McCandless discovered that he was suddenly far too weak to hike out and save himself. He was now too weak even to hunt effectively and thus grew weaker still, sliding closer and closer toward starvation. His life was spiraling out of control with awful speed.
There are no journal entries for July 31 or August 1. On August 2, the diary says only, “TERRIBLE WIND.” Autumn was just around the corner. The temperature was dropping, and the days were becoming noticeably shorter: Each rotation of the earth held seven fewer minutes of daylight and seven more of cold and darkness; in the span of a single week, the night grew nearly an hour longer.
“DAY 100! MADE IT!” he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving such a significant milestone, “BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD.—NO GAME.”
If McCandless had possessed a U.S. Geological Survey topo?graphic map, it would have alerted him to the existence of a Park Service cabin on the upper Sushana River, six miles due south of the bus, a distance he might have been able to cover even in his se?verely weakened state. The cabin, just inside the boundary of De-nali National Park, had been stocked with a small amount of emergency food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for the use of backcountry rangers on their winter patrols. And although they aren’t marked on the map, two miles even closer to the bus are a pair of private cabins—one owned by the well-known Healy dog mushers Will and Linda Forsberg; the other, by an employee of Denali National Park, Steve Carwile—where there should have been some food as well.
McCandless’s apparent salvation, in other words, seemed to be only a three-hour walk upriver. This sad irony was widely noted in the aftermath of his death. But even if he had known about these cabins, they wouldn’t have delivered McCandless from harm: At some point after mid-April, when the last of the cabins was vacated as the spring thaw made dog mushing and snow-ma-chine travel problematic, somebody broke into all three cabins and vandalized them extensively. The food inside was exposed to animals and the weather, ruining it.
