Since oh, about 1999 I've had the rough outline of an
Into the Wild screenplay on my Ibook. I read the book at least 5 times during college, thought about it, dreamt about it, and listened to the Harrod & Funk Song about it. The first time I heard the story was at a Harrod and Funk concert. The two singers told it slowly, each finishing each other's sentences and then sang the song they had written about Chris. I think it was one of the first works of art to come out of his misadventure. At the time those two folksingers were singing on the streets of Boston and I imagined them telling the story in the subways to busy passers-by. It would have made a great movie beginning.
Most people are familiar with the story by now: Chris McCandless burns up his $24,000 trust fund, abandons his yellow Datsun in a national park, and spends 2 1/2 years traipsing the continent under the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp.
And plenty of people in my generation have had the same dream: to leave it all behind (except for your Tolstoy and your Thoreau and your
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and hit the highway. That was my dream anyway. I have the journal entries to prove it. I spent my college summers working on beaches and in forests, living on the sand and on the trail, wondering if I had it "in me" to really be like Christ McCandless and live out on my own like he did.
In the autumn of my junior year at Wheaton I found out. It was fall break and I wanted to really go on a trip, do something exciting on my break instead of going home this year. I wanted to come back all breathless and excited and high on my independence. I had read Bryson's
A Walk in the Woods and had dreams of the Appalachian Trail. It seemed like something Chris McCandless would have done.
But I didn't just want to hike the AT, I wanted to hike it in North Carolina. I had a friend from high school who had just moved there. We made plans for me to drive the 20 hours there, hike for 2 days, and drive 20 hours back to Wheaton, IL. This actually made sense to me at the time. Somehow I bewitched my friend Sara to go with me. Her husband still teases her about it.
Chris McCandless was into taking uneccessary risks, like not bringing a map, or only bringing enough rice for so many days and travelling for so many more, etc. We took some risks too. My 1988 Audi was a risk on wheels. We left at 5 p.m. on a Friday night. We drove through the Appalachians around 3 in the morning skirting semis and cliffs. We stopped at gas stations and popped the hood, staring into the engine in the worst hours of the night. "One in jeans, one in corduroys!" I remember a hairy Appalachian man saying as he watched us pour water into my leaking radiator from a teapot.
We arrived at a friend of a friend's of my friend around 1 p.m. the next day. Arn greeted us. His name was actually Aaron, but the accent made it Arn. "Ya'll interested in smokin some herb?" he asked. "No thanks," we said. Arn went to the stove and started cooking up some onions and tofu. Sara and I crashed on the floor in our sleeping bags with Erica, who was totally excited to see us.
A few hours later we were napped, packed, and ready to hit the trail. We were going to follow Erica's little white porsch. Another friend of one of her friends had given her a map to some great trail in this fabulous gorge somewhere. Three hours later we stopped at a general store for more gas. "We're really close, you guys!" said Erica. Two hours later found us driving through a backwoods neighborhood with Unabomber shacks lining the shock-defying trail every 2 miles or so. I started remembering the article I had read in
Backpacker magazine about the two girls who had been axed to death on the Appalachian trail.
Another hour later we were at the trail head. We had two quarts of water and the sun was setting. From the map it looked like a 5 mile descent into the gorge where the river was. Best get moving. Chris McCandless would have done it.
Ten minutes into our hike the sun had sent and the foliage was so heavy we were hiking in blackness. We turned on our flashlights and persisted. But the trail was fading in the darkness, and it didn't seem worth losing it. We were next to a giant face of rock which I was fairly sure I had identified on the map so at least we knew where we were for the night. We decided to call it quits and go to sleep where we were, wake up early in the morning, and have an amazing breakfast at the bottom of the gorge.
Oh, btw, in true Chris McCandless style we hadn't brought a tent. Or tarps. We threw down our sleeping bags and crawled in them. My two friends fell asleep immediately. For me, the adventure had just begun.
I'll never know what my deal exactly was. Given, since we had gone to sleep right after sun down, it was probably only around 6 p.m., so it makes sense that I couldn't sleep. But the fear factor is what blows my mind. I had spent the entire previous summer sleeping in forests all over the upper Midwest, so this shouldn't have been unusual. I think it was the drive into the woods with all those scary houses that set me off.
But trying to sleep in those woods (for me) was like trying to sleep in Jurassic Park. It was that loud. Trees were splintering, twigs were snapping, all the indications of another presence were around us. Maybe Southern raccoons are really big, but that was the scariest night of my life. I didn't even want to wake the others to ask them if they were hearing the noises--I didn't want whatever it was to hear us. Any moment, I thought--any moment this thing is either going to eat us, or turn on the flashlight in our faces and commit a Backpacker Magazine worthy crime.
I crouched in my sleeping bag and repented of all my sins. I thought about my parents house (like the prodigal)--how everyone was safe there. I thought about my Nanny and Pawpaw's house in Kentucky and vowed that if we survived the night we were going there first thing in the morning.
The noises never stopped. But whatever it was, it never found us.
The next morning we woke up to find three young shaggy men staring at us curiously. My heart dropped again. Then I noticed their climbing ropes.
"Good morning," they said, and walked about five steps past us and began setting up their route.
I looked around and realized we were sleeping exactly in the middle of a trail. And under a 400 foot rock face. And in the way of a lot of climbers.
"We are leaving," I announced. Erica was cool about it. So was Sara. We hiked the 10 minutes out of the wild, back into our cars, and I drove to Kentucky as fast I could. My Nanny greeted us at the door. She made us chicken salad and brownies and tucked us into bed.
That definitely wasn't my last backpacking trip. But it was my last "I don't need any maps or help from anyone else into-the-wild-esque attempt." I'm glad.
I used to tell this story to my students. The myth of man's independence is a myth. None of us are really self-reliant (sorry Emerson). Chris wanted to much to embody the ideals of the Primordial Beast...but they are not true. Nothing is subjective. You have to have a map to survive. You need community to thrive. And the false pride that comes of thinking otherwise can lead only to disaster if not death in one sense or another.
P.S. I still haven't seen the Sean Penn movie yet. That's really what brought on this lil post.
Garland House is a blog by Miss Kim who has taught many, many young women what it looks like to live a truly Biblical, Christ-centered life through her example.
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