An Experiment in Scotch

Dark spruce for­est frowned on either side of the frozen water­way. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white cov­er­ing of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and omi­nous, in the fad­ing light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a des­o­la­tion, life­less, with­out move­ment, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sad­ness. There was a hint in it of laugh­ter, but of a laugh­ter more ter­ri­ble than any sadness–a laugh­ter that was mirth­less as the smile of the Sphinx, a laugh­ter cold as the frost and par­tak­ing of the grim­ness of infal­li­bil­ity. It was the mas­ter­ful and incom­mu­ni­ca­ble wis­dom of eter­nity laugh­ing at the futil­ity of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the sav­age, frozen-hearted North­land Wild.

So begins White Fang, Jack London’s fine novel about the tam­ing of a wolf-dog against back­drop of the Yukon ter­ri­tory of Canada, a novel of man’s strug­gle against the Great North. The com­mon theme in much of London’s writ­ing was the harsh unfor­giv­ing wilder­ness of the North­west and man’s attempts, often futile, at tam­ing it. For as long as some­thing untamed has existed, man has wanted to explore it both as a plat­form for pos­si­ble riches and as a vehi­cle of explo­ration into the self. The lure of the wilder­ness is pow­er­ful. Jacques Barzun in his epic his­tor­i­cal work From Dawn to Deca­dence speaks of Prim­i­tivism and Eman­ci­pa­tion as over­ar­ch­ing themes of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, ideas that appear con­tin­u­ally with force through­out the last 500 years in West­ern cul­ture. Prim­i­tivism is the desire to return to a sim­pler age than the advanced one we cur­rently live in. Con­trary to com­mon belief, an appeal to Prim­i­tivism is cen­turies old. Eman­ci­pa­tion, the free­dom of the indi­vid­ual to explore his rights and abil­i­ties is another theme com­mon to our civ­i­liza­tion. We want to find our­selves, explore our inner child, dis­cover our inner great­ness unshack­led by the con­traints of civ­i­liza­tion and a well pay­ing job. Eman­ci­pa­tion and Prim­i­tivism often go hand in hand in lit­er­a­ture, the arts and the dreams of peo­ple sit­ting at desks star­ing at com­put­ers the world over. The idea of drop­ping every­thing and liv­ing life to its fullest is decep­tively alluring.

This idea is cen­tral to Chris McCan­d­less and the film Into The Wild. McCan­d­less was (if you haven’t seen the film and hate spoil­ers, now would be the time to for­get the tense of the last verb and go watch the film. I’ll still be here when you get back.) a young man who upon grad­u­a­tion from Emory Uni­ver­sity in 1990 gave away his entire sav­ings and set out on a cross coun­try trip that would cul­mi­nate with a trip into the Alaskan wilder­ness two years later. McCan­d­less’ story is expertly told by Sean Penn in the film. The view­point is entirely sym­pa­thetic to McCan­d­less’ desire to drop out of the advanced soci­ety he seems to hate and glow­ingly details this return to Prim­i­tivism as a way of find­ing one’s self.

Most of us have dreamed of throw­ing cau­tion to the wind in an under­tak­ing mod­est soci­ety would find uncom­fort­able at best and insane at worst. Hik­ing the Appalachian Trail, swim­ming the Eng­lish Chan­nel, mail­ing the keys to the house back to the bank and dri­ving down to Mex­ico to see if we can find Andy Dufresne sand­ing a boat on some windswept sparkling white beach. The desire to give up every­thing and hit the reboot but­ton is ingrained in our col­lec­tive psy­che, almost instinc­tual (or maybe that’s just Microsoft’s world wide dom­i­nance since that’s the only way to cure a Win­dows PC some­times). We find the thought of start­ing over strangely com­pelling. Of course the rea­son for that is it’s eas­ier to start over than it is to fix some­thing bro­ken. This idea that if we could just start over, we wouldn’t make the same mis­takes and things would be dif­fer­ent is strong. None of us like to admit fail­ure. Detach­ment from those fail­ures, whether our own or oth­ers, is a strong impulse.

McCan­d­less’ story is this desire for detach­ment from the prob­lems of the past writ large. This is not the story of some­one who decided to climb Ever­est or hike the Appalachian Trail. This is the story of a young man who felt betrayed by his par­ents and their treat­ment of him, not unjus­ti­fi­ably so. That betrayal man­i­fested itself as total detach­ment from the soci­ety he saw as cor­rupt and waste­ful. He took the easy road, sev­ered all human ties with his par­ents and became a nomad. Early in the story, McCan­d­less believes that hap­pi­ness can be achieved with­out per­ma­nent human rela­tion­ships. His love of nature and the world is highly Roman­ti­cized. He uses his belief that peo­ple are nat­u­rally ter­ri­ble to each other as a spring­board for his detach­ment. Only later, far too late, does he real­ize that hap­pi­ness is most pow­er­ful when shared and that in fact it is Nature that is harsh and unfeel­ing. He wasn’t an adven­turer con­trary to his wikipedia page descrip­tion. He was a reck­less ide­al­ist, unpre­pared for almost every­thing he encoun­tered who was for­tu­nate in the two years run­ning up to Alaska.

His story is com­pelling on sev­eral fronts. The gen­er­al­ized idea of drop­ping out to find one­self goes back 500 years or more and has a strong lit­er­ary his­tory in Thoreau, Lon­don and oth­ers. Here we have a man who left the crea­ture com­forts of his known exis­tence and did just that. The moral themes of the story are also com­pelling. McCan­d­less is said to have a pow­er­ful moral com­pass. He never for­gives his par­ents for the lies and abuse. He refuses to sleep with an under­age girl instead choos­ing to share in some­thing she loves. He seems to touch everyone’s life for the bet­ter that he meets. Yet when it comes to his own sur­vival, he chooses to leave it largely to chance. He walks into the Alaskan wilder­ness armed with a bag of rice, a fish­ing pole he doesn’t seem to ever use, a book on edi­ble plants and a .22 cal­iber rifle. This is tan­ta­mount to sui­cide and one could argue a strongly immoral choice. This isn’t Thoreau liv­ing in a cabin in the woods. McCan­d­less is woe­fully unpre­pared for the harsh­ness of his cho­sen path. This isn’t a man drop­ping off the grid. It’s mis­guided ide­al­ism in place of adventure.

Even­tu­ally, he comes to the real­iza­tion that human rela­tion­ships are nec­es­sary for true hap­pi­ness. As in any good tragedy, this real­iza­tion comes too late. When he tries to return to civ­i­liza­tion, the river he crossed in early spring is full with snow melt. He finds his way back to the camp he had been stay­ing in and slowly starts to spi­ral into star­va­tion and mad­ness. His total lack of prepa­ra­tion leaves him unin­formed of the fact that a quar­ter of a mile from where he tried to cross the now rag­ing river is a hand cranked tram on which he could have eas­ily crossed. He returns to his camp to even­tu­ally starve to death.

Is Chris McCan­d­less a tragic hero? Aris­to­tle said that the tragic hero has to be a man “who is not emi­nently good and just, yet whose mis­for­tune is brought about not by vice or deprav­ity, but by some error or frailty.” On the sur­face, McCan­d­less’ tragic flaw is man­i­fested in his total lack of prepa­ra­tion. Even a minute amount of knowl­edge about the area he was hik­ing into would have pre­vented his death. Even a tiny bit of crit­i­cal think­ing could have told him that a bus didn’t end up in the Alaskan tun­dra on its own (he lives in an aban­doned bus for the 4 months he is there). We have a young man who seems excep­tion­ally intel­li­gent with­out the fore­sight to have a backup plan. His desire for total eman­ci­pa­tion from civ­i­liza­tion seems to divorce him of the abil­ity to be pre­pared for not just the worst cir­cum­stance but even a slight bump in the road.

The scenes in the movie are breath­tak­ing and the very real sense of adven­ture you get from McCan­d­less’ trav­els is pow­er­ful. You do come to feel a strong sense of pity for him as the story unrav­els. That pity is twofold in nature. On the sur­face, the even­tual real­iza­tion con­cern­ing hap­pi­ness and his inabil­ity to make good on that real­iza­tion evokes the pity com­mon with all tragic heros. But I found myself pity­ing him in a more sub­tle way as it relates to his appar­ent inabil­ity to form last­ing rela­tion­ships. Peo­ple are just pass­ing through his life and vice versa. The arm­chair psy­chol­o­gist could say that is a direct arti­fact of his rela­tion­ship with his father. How­ever, lots of peo­ple have crappy rela­tion­ships with their par­ents and still live nor­mal, adjusted lives. In McCan­d­less and his real­iza­tion of the tragic hero arche­type, we have this more fun­da­men­tal flaw at the heart of things. His lack of prepa­ra­tion in all things is a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of his inabil­ity to form last­ing rela­tion­ships not just with peo­ple but with sit­u­a­tions, loca­tions, careers, etc.

That is why McCan­d­less was a tragic hero, one that speaks to the rest of us in a mean­ing­ful way. Chris McCan­d­less dies in the Alaskan wilder­ness because he couldn’t ever get over the fact that his father lied to him (and was pos­si­bly vio­lent but the key theme to the story seems to be the lies). His desire for Eman­ci­pa­tion leads him to walk into the wilder­ness with­out a map, a real weapon or even ade­quate shoes all because of this mis­guided desire to rely totally on his wits and abil­i­ties. The irony is that with the excep­tion of his father (and that scary train guy), every other per­son in the story is fan­tas­ti­cally good to McCan­d­less. Yet he never real­izes this in time to change. We asso­ciate with McCan­d­less our own desire for Prim­i­tivism and Eman­ci­pa­tion from prob­lems cre­ated by peo­ple in our lives. But this is a mis­take. Far bet­ter though harder to resolve the things that cause these desires.

Into The Wild is a great movie, one that raises age old ques­tions of what it is to know one’s self. It is a story of tragedy, one beau­ti­fully told with the Prim­i­tivism of the Alaskan wilder­ness as a back­drop. You find your­self root­ing for McCan­d­less as you do with any tragic hero and his tragic flaw raises many of the same ques­tions Thoreau and Lon­don did in their writ­ing. It is a fas­ci­nat­ing mod­ern tale of the tragic hero.