The last photograph of Chris McCandless/Facebook

The blank lines tell a story

How is it that in all these years nobody ever noticed that Chris McCandless, the young man who died a tragic early death in the wilderness near Denali National Park and yet still rivals Sarah Palin for the title of the most famous person in modern Alaska history, left the fingerprints of a debilitating mental illness in the few words he put down on paper during his short stay in Alaska?

In one of his first acts, he wrote a testimony to the manic side of bipolar disorder, and in what has come to be called his diary, though it is more a log book, what is missing tells a tale of the depression side of this illness.

But everyone overlooked all of this after John Krakauer authored a book in which McCandless was used as a foil for delving into Krakauer’s fascination with dangerous games that make you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt if they don’t kill you.

Somehow Krakauer’s planned starring role in “Into the Wild” was lost by readers; McCandless – aka Alexander Supertramp – was embraced as a mythological, modern-day Thoreau killed by a Shakespearean accident of poison seeds concocted by Krakauer; and Krakauer, being a smart guy, embraced the misinterpretation in the recognition he could get far more mileage and money out of the myth than out of any reality.

Today the book is “taught” in some of the nation’s schools as a story “inspired by a desire for a life of simplicity and a rejection of societal norms” that “raise questions about the pursuit of personal freedom, the consequences of idealism, and the complexities of human nature.”

What the book is really about is the danger of mental illness.

Right here, I admit to being among those who overlooked McCandless’s message for decades. I did think for a time he might have been suffering from schizophrenia, a far more debilitating mental illness than what used to be called “manic depressive illness” or “manic depression.”

McCandless, however, survived for too long in the wilderness to have been a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics have much shorter life spans than the rest of us for a reason.  They are regularly haunted by hallucinations and delusions, and it’s hard to shoot well when hallucinating.

McCandless did a lot of shooting. His “diary” is primarily a log book of the animals he shot or beat to death – rabbit, ptarmigan, porcupine, duck, “grey bird,” goose, “ash bird,” moose, etc. – to acquire the necessary food to survive.

McCandless could have shot the half-dozen porkies he put on his kill list, but he was an intelligent young man, and you’d have to be a fool to waste ammunition on a dinner you can kill with a club or a rock.

All indications are that McCandless developed a taste for porky, too. The only thing handwritten in letters approaching the size of “Moose!”  in log is “A Third Porcupine!”

But let’s get back to the problem plaguing him.

Bipolar disorder

A friend who left Alaska decades ago to return to university and become a psychologist once suggested McCandless suffered from bipolar disorder, one of the country’s most common mental health diseases. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that almost one in 20 Americans will suffer from this illness at some time in their lives.

Bipolar disorder fits nicely with the strange behaviors of McCandless that “Into the Wild” describes prior to McCandless’s arrival in Alaska, if anything in the book can be believed. Krakauer played so loose with the facts in the 49th state that everything else in the book has to be suspect.

But McCandless’s vacillations between a thoughtful, intelligent and hard-working young man and a guy who can’t get his life together enough to bathe when he stinks would fit with a disease of which a  help page for those dealing with the disorder warns: “Bipolar Depression: When You’re Too Tired to Shower.”

At the time the suggestion was first offered that McCandless was bipolar, I was so done with the McCandless madness that I ignored it. By then, the old, abandoned bus in which his body was found had become a shrine, and McCandless worshippers were dying trying to get to the dirty and deserted relic.

It wasn’t until recently when an Alaska visitor posed some questions about the dead, young man that I decided to take another look at his log book, re-reference the longest missive McCandless wrote while in Alaska, and give it all some serious thought.

“Two Years He  Walks The Earth. No Phone, No Pool, No Pets, No Cigarettes. Ultimate Freedom. An Extremist,” McCandless scribbled on a sheet of plywood at the bus early in his Alaska adventure. He signed the scribble with his pseudonym “Alexander Supertramp” and dated it to May 1992.

“An Aesthetic Voyager Whose Home Is The Road. Escaped From Atlanta, Thou Shalt Not Return, ‘Cause ‘The West Is The Best. And Now After Two Rambling Years Comes The Final And Greatest Adventure,” McCandless recorded on a piece of plywood in the bus, signed with his Alexander Supertramp pseudonym and dated to May 1992. “The Climactic Battle To Kill The False Being Within And Victoriously Conclude The Spiritual Revolution! Ten Days & Nights Of Freight Trains And Hitchhiking Bring Him To The Great White North. No Longer To Be Poisoned By Civilization He Flees And Walks Alone Upon The Land To Become Lost In The Wild.”

This is the kind of manifesto that might be written by someone pumped up on speed, but in this case, the manic state of what is now called bipolar disease would fit nicely. McCandless was fired up and ready for adventure. He had made it from South Dakota to Fairbanks to shop for supplies for his adventure and on to the bus in a quick 10 days by hitchhiking and then hiking on foot.

In his excitement at arriving at the bus, he had jotted down the 103 words above, creating by far the longest message he would record during his fatal summer in Alaska. His next longest message appeared on his 100th day in-country when the 29 words in his log said he was in “Weakest Condition of Life. Death Looms As Serious Threat. Too Weak To Walk Out. Have Literally Become Trapped In the Wild – No Game.”

The logbook offers little detail on McCandless’s journey. It doesn’t say when he arrived in Fairbanks or where or when he bought the .22-caliber rifle and the ammunition for it that would help feed him in the days ahead.

He was no fool, though. In a land where edible plants are relatively few, with fruits and nuts nowhere to be found, killing animals is the best way to survive, and it would appear McCandless started killing them early.

His log starts with the number one, presumably Day One, and the words “Exit Fairbanks. Sitting Gallzean. Rabbit Day.”

Gallzen has to be a reference to electrician Jim Gallien, who picked McCandless up hitchhiking along the George Parks Highway and delivered him to the start of the Stampede Road near Healy on April 28.

Since McCandless didn’t shoot a rabbit while with Gallien, the log book would indicate the shooting happened the same day somewhere along the road. Day Two in the log – assuming the numbers one through 113 each comprise one day for McCandless – recorded “Fall Through Ice Day,” which probably happened at a beaver pond along the old road or at the unbridged Teklanika River about 18 miles from the highway, which would indicate McCandless was making pretty good time on his way to the abandoned bus he’d adopt as his home.

He’d be living in the bus when his manic phase ended and his depressive phase began with his desire to be figuratively “lost in the wild” transformed into the belief he was “trapped in the wild.”

There is no reason to believe he set out to truly get lost, or that he planned to end up trapped and dead.

A planned adventure

McCandless knew where he was. The photos he left behind tell this part of his story better than the few words he recorded. Those photos show McCandless actively and widely exploring the mountains and wilderness around and along the old and abandoned Stampede Road in his early days in-country.

To believe he was lost, you’d have to believe he was some sort of idiot who didn’t know where he was to begin with and hadn’t learned anything from his explorations. McCandless was no idiot. That he graduated from Emory University in 1990 with bachelor’s degrees in both history and anthropology is an established fact.

That doesn’t necessarily make him a genius, but it raises him above the idiot level.

It is equally obvious that he knew where he was when he asked Gallien to drop him off at the Parks Highway intersection with the Stampede Road just north of Healy. It would be hard to believe this was some sort of accident, given the many other obvious places in the 56 miles between Nenana and Healy where it would have been just as easy to randomly wander off the highway into the wild.

This is further reinforced by Day Four in the log which says “Magic Bus Day.” If McCandless went through the ice on Day Two and wasted some time starting a fire and drying out his gear as most would do, he’d be making good time to make it to the bus in three days, another indication that he knew where he was going.

The log also indicates that he didn’t stay there long, but promptly set out to explore the surrounding country. Day Eight says “Exit Bus.” In the 23 days that followed, he recorded going hungry, getting snowed in, suffering “misery,” (a common experience in the still chilly Alaska Interior in May), “cooking day” after he killed a bounty of squirrels and a porcupine, “Climb Mountain!”, “Sight Bus,” and finally at Day 31 “Move Bus.”

All of this would indicate McCandless spent a lot of time exploring the country around the bus, an activity the photos found in his camera support. A man can cover plenty of ground in 23 days.

McCandless wasn’t getting fat living off the land at this time, but he was eating a fair number of squirrels, birds, berries, ptarmigan and a duck.

Over the course of the days that followed his return to the bus, he also managed to kill small game for food on every day. On Day 36, he wrote “Porcupine Ptarmigan 4 Squirrel Grey Bird”; followed by “Another Porcupine 4 Squirrel 2 Greybird Ashbird” at 37, and finally that reference to “A Third Porcupine! Squirrel. Grey Bird” at 38.

Even better times were yet to come, “Goose!” at 39 and then “Moose!” at 43.

The second longest notations in McCandless’s log book followed the moose kill. He devoted 20 words to the difficulty of butchering the animal with flies and mosquitoes swarming. Another 46 words were used over the next three days as McCandless described the difficulty of trying to process an animal that weighs hundreds of pounds.

It was also during this time that the tone in McCandless’s log began to change.

On Day 48, he wrote “Maggots Already! Smoking Appears Ineffective. Don’t Know. Look Like Disaster. I Now Wish I Had Never Shot The Moose. One Of The Greatest Tradegies Of My Life.”

By Day 49, he was sliding into depression as his excitement at killing the moose faded into the observation “Must Revamp My Soul and Regain Deliberate Consciousness. Trying To Salvage What Can Of Moose, But Henceforth Will Learn To Accept My Errors. However Great They May Be.”

The next day McCandless reported he was giving up the effort to preserve the rest of the moose’s meat and would return to the “berry fields” for food. What came after this is most telling.

There are seven days (Day 51 through Day 57) followed by nothing but hand-drawn lines indicating McCandless had nothing to write or couldn’t bring himself to write on those days.

There are no blank lines in the log before Day 51. Up until then, McCandless had shown the discipline to write down at least a word per day. But other days with blank lines would follow after Day 57.

The obvious and hard-to-avoid conclusion is that those first blank lines mark McCandless sliding into a depression so serious he couldn’t even make the simplest record of the day.

There is a trendy term for this sort of behavior now: “bed rotting.”  Some have embraced it as a chance to reject “the productivity culture,” but psychiatrists warn it can mask debilitating depression and make less serious depression worse.

McCandless broke out of it to eventually to take pen in hand and note the harvest of a “Long Bill Bird,” and “Wild Potatoes” on one day and “Good Wind” and “Finnish (sic) Walden” on two other days. These notations are, however, followed by two more days with blank lines drawn in.

Then comes a reference to “Kreutzer Sonata,” a novella by Tolstoy, which coupled with the comment on Walden would appear to indicate McCandless was spending his days in the bus reading.

There is nothing wrong with reading unless your life depends on hunting, and if that is the case you best be hunting. McCandless’s log, which recorded him killing game or processing it almost every other day or more often from Day 12 through Day 45, now went 14 days with only the reference to food being the “Long Bill Bird” and finding some “Wild Potatoes.”

It is possible he was still eating some of the moose meat at this time, however, given that at Day 65 he wrote “End Moose” followed by “Family Happiness” at Day 66, and  “Depart Bus” at Day 67.

These three notations can easily be read to mean that McCandless planned to exit the wild.  Krakauer theorized that at this point McCandless started back along the road to Healy, which is the most likely scenario given what follows in the log.

A manufactured barrier

In the highly speculative book he pitched as “nonfiction,” Krakauer’s version of what happened next is that McCandless found the Teklanika River running high and impassible and decided to return to the comfort of the bus to await rescue.

Such a decision, however, is not rational. If the numbers in McCandless’s log are days, they would reflect he had spent 67 days along the Stampede Road or in the bus without seeing another human.

Given this lack of contact, a rational man isn’t going to decide to go back to the bus and wait for someone to rescue him because there is no reason to believe anyone will show up. And someone in the manic stage of bipolar disorder isn’t going to make this decision either because he or she has lots of energy to devote to finding a way out either at a different crossing point along the river or by hiking to the Denali Park Road to the south.

Krakauer dismissed the idea of a river crossing by claiming McCandless told Gallien he was afraid of the water, something Gallien has said didn’t happen. And Krakauer dismissed the idea of hiking to the park road, a road of which McCandless was clearly aware, as too much of a navigational problem.

Krakauer’s book doesn’t mention the map that was among the possessions Alaska State Troopers returned to McCandless’s family after his body was found. It was a simple state road map, but it would have been enough to guide a hiker by this point as experienced as McCandless to the park road.

Interestingly, Krakauer danced around this issue by writing that McCandless had no  “topographic map,” and later adding that McCandless “lacked a good map.” But he didn’t need a good map.

The map he had showed the Denali Park Road just over the hills to the south of him paralleling the Stampede Road. There was no big navigational challenge in getting there: Hike to the top of the ridgeline, and then hike down to the road.

It was a can’t-miss proposition. The park road parallels the ridgeline for 23 miles from the Teklinka River in the east to the Toklat River in the west. The terrain puts a man in a box defined by the rivers and roads with the ridge providing an obvious reference point.

Stay in the box. Hike up until you can’t hike up anymore. Then hike down until you hit the park road. For someone whose photos show him hiking widely in-country, this shouldn’t have been a problem.

But McCandless didn’t try to escape the wilderness at this point. Instead he wrote this in the log: “Disaster … Rained in. River looks impossible. Lonely, scared.”

Nowhere earlier in McCandless’s log are written the words lonely or scared. Other difficult times are described as “fell through ice day,” “snowed in,” and “misery.” These are terms that pretty much describe life at times for anyone adventuring in the Alaska wilderness.

Falling through the ice kills Alaskans every year, but it didn’t seem to phase McCandless. Neither did the “misery” appear to discourage him. Twelve days after that episode – if the numbers in his sketchy log book are presumed to be a count of his days in the wild – he wrote, “Climb Mountain!”

There are a number of these exclamation marks in the logbook. Most appear when McCandless is elated about something. The largest appears after the word “Moose!” which is also written in the by far largest letters of all the handwritten notations in the logbook.

The logbook jottings that follow make it clear this was written to celebrate McCandless’s having been able to poach a moose with his minimalist .22-caliber rifle in the summer of ’92. But he was by then riding the end of his manic phase.

By the time he got to the Teklanika, he was starting into the days of depression.

After his day at the river described as rained in and scared, he draws another of the blank lines of hopelessness to mark Day 70 before the next day recording the kills of “Squirrel” and “Gold Bird” before his “Return Bus” on the third day.

From then on, there are no indications he ever ventured far from the bus. He read books. He went out to pick berries and shoot birds or squirrels. He noted the weather when it rained. He recorded dreams or hallucinations. He drew more blank lines.

Finally he celebrated a double underlined “DAY 100!” as if it was a crowning achievement.

And despite having recorded killed “2 Squirrel” on Day 99, he at Day 100 wrote “MADE IT! But In The Weakest Condition of life DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD – NO GAME.”

Could he have forgotten he killed game the day before?

Three blank lines followed Day 100 at Days 101, 102 and 103, then came “MISSED BEAR!” at Day 104, apparently indicating McCandless tried to kill another a bear with his .22. At Day 105, there is “5 Squirrel. Caribou*”

The asterisks, which appear regularly in the logbook after notations as to various animals, could be read as a record of someone with a limited supply of ammunition keeping track of their misses when shooting.

Whatever the case, McCandless recorded a ptarmigan at Day 106 and “Beautiful Blueberries” at Day 107 before a string of five numbers followed only by blank lines and the number 113 followed by nothing at all.

This would appear to be the day he died or became so weak and bedridden from lack of food that he couldn’t write.

Sometime before this he took his last photo. It was a selfie showing an emaciated man holding a note that says “I have had a happy life and thank the lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!”

It is hard to read this as anything other than a suicide note from a man who was never known to be religious but appears to have found god in the end. Depression and suicide are associated, and it is quite common for suicidal people to fantasize about suicide, according to psychologists.

It is quite possible, if not probable, that McCandless had resigned himself to his own death when he left the river and returned to the bus and was in the end happy about the decision. There are certainly no indications he did anything after leaving the river to save himself.

Twenty-eight days passed between the time he walked from the river back to the bus and finally wrote “In Weakest Condition Of Life. Death Looms As Serious Threat. Too Weak To Walk Out.”  These are 28 days when he could have walked out to the park road or at least tried to do so.

Instead, the log indicates he spent his time reading Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,”  “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Tolstoy, “The Terminal Man” by Michael Crichton, and “O Jerusalem” by  Lary Collins and Domonique Lapierre.

This is not how a man who knows he is trouble and needs to save himself behaves. But it is likely McCandless had no choice. He might have been so depressed so to find it hard to get out of bed to go kill game for food let alone set off on a hike.

McCandless did at some point during this time post a note in the bus indicating he did not want to die, which does conflict with the note in his photo claiming he was happy.

“Attention Possible Visitors,” it read. “S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE. THIS IS NO JOKE. (“JOKE” with double underlines) IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU. CHRIS MCCANDLESS.”

It was dated “August ?” How many days before or after this McCandless took the photo of himself holding the note saying he had a happy life is unknown.

If the numbers in his log are days and they start accurately on April 28, the day Gallien said he dropped McCandless off at the Stampede Road, McCandless would have been in the wild for 92 days by the start of August and eight days short of declaring himself too weak to save himself.

Why, at the very least, he didn’t hike back to the banks of the Teklanika before this and set up camp there in the hope someone would venture down the more traveled stretch of the Stampede Trail that ends at the east bank of the river is something no one will ever know.

Much the same can be said of the question as to why he didn’t start a big, smokey fire to attract attention in a land where people live in fear of wildfires.

The answer is most likely that he couldn’t, that he was by the end so debilitated by his depression and his hunger that he couldn’t think straight. And now he lives on as a myth.

The late President John F. Kennedy once observed that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

And in the case of Chris McCandless, nothing is more persistent, unrealistic and yet persuasive to some than the idea that he ventured into the Alaska wilderness in a quest to find the meaning of life.

The problem is that the meaning of life isn’t hiding in the wilderness. The reality is that there is no meaning other than that which we create. The meaning dwells not in any place but inside us all, and we get to invent whatever definition we want.

It is sad that no one ever got the 24-year-old McCandless the mental health help he needed, but if he wasn’t simply rationalizing and truly believed what he wrote at the end – “I have had a happy life and thank the lord” – it is less sad.

Too many live long, unhappy lives before they die.