Chris McCandless was a young explorer who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and whose life and death happen to be documented in one of the most monumental books of the past 30 years: Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild.

Now if we temporarily set aside the cultural impact that we now know Into the Wild has had, it might seem surprising that a story like this would gain so much traction. After all, as sad as Chris's fate may have been, how many other thousands of cases have there been of young travellers falling victim to the unforgiving depths of the wild? What makes Chris so unique? It's a fair question to ask, but even just mindlessly scrolling through Into the Wild's first few pages will make it clear enough why Chris's story is just… different. Maybe it has to do with how gripping Krakauer's prose is or his sheer tenacity as a researcher that makes you feel like Chris was someone you actually knew. But I think more than anything, Into the Wild's resonance in our collective minds has had to do with how the book has a way of revealing a kind of universal tension that afflicts anyone trying to get by in the modern world — a tension that might be best captured in a brief retelling of how I myself first became exposed to Into the Wild.

Before I even heard of the book, my introduction to Into the Wild was when my high school ethics teacher decided to show the class the Sean Penn-directed movie remake of it. Skeptical of anything school-related at the time, I remember preparing myself for another preachy snooze-fest, only to find myself knocked over the head with emotions from the start. Watching the story unfold, I felt deeply connected to Chris's character and noticed that I had rarely — if ever — been so moved by anything I had seen before.

Asked about our first impressions after the movie was over and assuming that everyone else in the class had to have been as dramatically inspired by it as I was, you can imagine how shocking it was to observe the guy sitting next to me respond to the teacher by blurting out: "The guy's just a jerk! Why on earth would anyone sympathize with him?" Um… Did we just watch the same movie? I asked myself as I began to question my own sanity. How could two people exposed to the exact same story react in such fundamentally different ways? What was I missing? Not long after I decided to dedicate myself to knowing everything I possibly could about Chris, however, it became clear to me that the polarizing response to him that I had witnessed in my classroom was no fluke. In fact, more than anything, it was a microcosm of how the world received him.

The Story Itself

At least on the surface, nothing about Chris's early life foreshadowed the idiosyncratic events that would take place in his adulthood. Having been raised in a suburban neighbourhood in Virginia, Chris's parents, Billie and Walt McCandless, found success through establishing a consulting business after Walt had made a name for himself as a brilliant aerospace engineer.

Chris's infatuation with nature began when the McCandless family would go on tranquil camping trips in the Shenandoah National Park. It was on these trips that Chris developed an abnormally intense curiosity about the intricacies of the universe and he channelled this same intensity into every facet of his life, from his relationships to his aspirations as a track star in high school.

An avid reader, Chris was drawn to writers like Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau who all had a special way of juxtaposing the beautiful spontaneity of nature with the ugly clumsiness of city life in their books. By the time Chris was off to college at Emory University, he became increasingly hellbent on not only advocating for the kind of naturalistic life his favourite authors embraced but also emulating it in practice. Upon graduating, Chris had a final meal with his sister and parents at a local restaurant before he abruptly fell off the grid and was never to be seen by them again.

For the next two years, Chris — who by now had changed his name to Alexander Supertramp — wandered around America with barely any money and no plans for the future. The twenty thousand dollars he had saved throughout college was immediately donated to charity and after his car stopped working while he was driving through the Mojave desert, he decidedly abandoned it their and proceeded the rest of his journey on foot after burning the little cash he had left on him. For the next while "Alex" mostly got around hitchhiking and immersed himself in communities of outcasts and eccentrics, finding work as a grain elevator operator in South Dakota and even working for a short period of time at a McDonalds.

At the end of his travels, Chris decided to relocate to Alaska where he planned to live off of the land in an obscure area for the next while with not much more than a shoddy map he found at a gas station, a little bit of food and a small rifle. For the next few months Chris remained in solitude there and lived in a now-iconic abandoned bus that he found.

Attempting to get back to civilization, Chris noticed that a river that was relatively calm and easy to cross when he first arrived at his site was now impossible to pass because of its wild currents. Forced to go back, Chris eventually unintentionally poisons himself with something he eats which causes him to starve to death. Two weeks later some hunters stumble upon his dead body.

The Case Against Chris

What was it about Chris that made so many people — including my disgruntled high school classmate — so critical of him? The case against Chris usually starts off with pointing out that the danger that he faced was essentially all brought upon by himself. After all, it's not like someone put a gun to his head and told him he had to throw away all of his money and live in obscurity. And couldn't he have been a little more conscientious of how dangerous it would be to plunge himself into the wild alone with such little preparation? How reckless can you possibly be? And what about his parents? They provide him with so much and put him in such a great opportunity to succeed and he repays them by needlessly blowing them off to worry sick about him so he can go in harm's way to "discover himself"? Is that inspirational or just dumb? So then why, Chris's critics will conclude, should we praise someone who had the audacity to be so selfishly delusional?

The Case For Chris

For someone like me who was completely oblivious to any of the concerns outlined above, Chris resembled something very different than what he did to his fiercest critics. I didn't see some unappreciative maniac throwing away opportunities and unnecessarily putting himself in harm's way, but someone who was genuinely fed up with the insincerity and insanity of modern life and was determined to do everything in his power to escape its oppressive grips; someone who wasn't careless or thoughtless to get away but was suffering so much that he had no choice but to sacrifice everything he had and leave it all behind to fulfil a greater purpose. He might have ultimately failed to make it out of the wild alive, but how many people would be brave enough to abandon every physical comfort available to them to rediscover a primal connection to nature that we all regularly feel so alienated from?

And if boldly going after what everyone else in the world is either too afraid to do or too ignorant to value isn't heroic, then what is?

Making Sense of Both Sides

As is the case with most people when it really comes down to it, Chris was not necessarily the hero that I initially took him to be or the reckless fool that his critics painted him as, but was probably somewhere in the middle. Part of this has to do with details of Chris's life that Into the Wild glosses over. As was revealed in Chris's sister Carine's 2014 book The Wild Truth, for example, the McCandless household was severely dysfunctional, leaving Chris and his sister beaten down by years of abuse and trauma. The notion, then, that Chris selfishly cut off his loving parents is ultimately a myth. (Krakauer was aware of this abuse and even made subtle references to it in Into the Wild, but Carine didn't feel comfortable with him explicitly including the details in the book at the time.)

Still, we might say that even if Chris was justified in needing an escape, he surely went about it in a misguided way. In one of the more interesting wrinkles of Into the Wild, Krakauer reveals that partly what made him so determined to write the book was that he saw a lot of Chris in himself when he was the same age. An exceptional mountain climber, Krakauer recalls how as a hopeless young man himself he decided to go on a solo mission to climb one of the most imposing mountains in the world, the Devils Thumb:

From the age of seventeen until my late twenties … I devoted most of my waking hours to fantasizing about, and then undertaking, ascents of remote mountains in Alaska and Canada… By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick post-adolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything — the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds — to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real. In 1977, while brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs, I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devils Thumb.

Almost as if Jon's spirit was reincarnated into Chris's body, whenever I read this passage I get the impression that the connection between the two men is rooted in how they shared the same underlying motivation to go off on their respective journeys: that in conquering their obstacles out in the world, they believed that they could silence the excruciating turbulence within themselves.

When framed this way, does Chris's journey seem so outlandish anymore? How many of us don't seek happiness in climbing that metaphorical mountain or bearing the chaotic wilderness of our day-to-day lives to stay afloat? How often do we all get caught up in the fallacy that fulfilling some distant dream like landing the perfect job or becoming famous will make all of our problems disappear? Of course what Chris did might be startling and tangibly risky compared to our own ambitions, but could the polarizing response he's garnered have to do with how there's something about his story that we all see so vividly within ourselves?

Something I think about from time to time is how Chris would have felt if he made it out of Alaska alive: would he have found the peace of mind he was looking for? Would he have been enlightened by his hardship or would he eventually look back at those days as a period of naivety and childish idealism on his part? At least when Jon made it down the Devils Thumb alive, he recalls momentarily feeling like he accomplished something profound, only to be taken aback by how much the world felt the exact same way as it did before once the initial excitement wore off. It makes you wonder if Chris would have been equally disappointed if he made it back to civilization himself and if all of us for that matter are grasping at straws when we imagine our future more-successful selves.

But even if Chris's journey into the wilderness wasn't what he hoped it would be, one thing that sticks out to me whenever I reread Into the Wild or return to the film is how deep the relationships he made along the way were and the irony that the connection to nature he was so fixated on discovering in Alaska was already taking place with every new person he met on his way there — something that Chris seemed to eventually understand when he wrote in one of his last journal entries:

HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED

There's something poetically sad about imagining someone realizing the importance of other people as he's withering away alone that makes me wonder if Chris spent his last days regretting everything he had put himself through. Then again, sometimes you have to get away to appreciate what's been in front of you the whole time.