Into the Wild: Memories of Alaska

Last night at 8:30 I went to see Sean Penn's new film Into the Wild by myself at the Piedmont Theater in Oakland, which is close to where I live. I had read the book by Jon Krakauer back when it first came out in paperback--I even saw Krakauer give a reading from it in Seattle where I lived at the time. The odd thing about that is that it's sort of blacked out of my memory, but I went with a buddy of mine named Brad who has reminded me we were there several times.

This story really hits home with me. McCandless was from Virginia, like me, and he was just a few years younger than me. I feel like we both had many of the same instincts about life--he just managed to take his to greater extremes than I have (so far).

Like him and at about the same time, I packed all of my stuff into a car in Virginia in 1990 and just took off west by myself. Only I told my parents I was doing it, and I called them from the road a few times, but I also told them I didn't know where I was going to end up, and I took my sweet time getting across the country, even driving all the way down to New Orleans in the process. I eventually wound up sleeping on my buddy Bill Willett's couch in the Haight in San Francisco until I could afford to rent my own bed after working a few temp jobs.

But here's the weird part--in the summer of 1992 I went up to Alaska for about 6 weeks. I spent a week in Denali National Park camped at Wonder Lake, and I went through the Canadian Yukon, and down to Juneau, and back to Homer where I slept on the Homer Spit. Eventually I worked for two weeks at a salmon plant on the Kenai Peninsula, sleeping in a tent the whole time out in the forest by the fish plant. This is the exact same period of time that Chris McCandless was in Alaska, camped out at his abandoned green and white bus, slowly starving to death. We were probably looking at the same mountains at the same moment. He died around mid-August, if I understand it right. That's almost exactly the same time I up and left the salmon plant. I hitchhiked back to the Anchorage airport in three rides and flew back down to the lower 48 in one day. Suddenly I just had to get the hell out of there. I hope Chris McCandless found what he was looking for. I greatly admire the integrity of his search.

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