Into the Wild

I just saw the movie Into the Wild the other night, and it got me to thinking about my own experiences when I was the age of Christopher McCandless, the movie's protagonist. Like McCandless, I was somewhat obsessed with reading and with traveling, though I didn't rough it in the same way that he did. And like McCandless, I had a somewhat romanticized notion of what the natural world, or the world away from civilized society, had to offer. My view of nature, though, was a view informed more by literature and art than by direct contact with the wild; you might even say that my view was otherworldly and abstract--a view I now find not only wrong but sinister in its implications--a view that rationalizes narcissism and passivity.

But in spite of his direct experience living off the land and a more informed view of the natural world, McCandless wasn't any better prepared for his journey than I was at his age, and he paid a higher price for his mistakes. Whatever survival experience he had, it wasn't enough to prepare him for life in the Alaskan wilderness. He walked into the forest the same way I walked into the Urban Jungle in my early twenties: naive and ill-equipped. Nevertheless, I don't believe his effort was wasted. I don't want to bury McCandless, I want to praise him. I'm not ashamed of what I did in my twenties, and I firmly disagree with McCandless' critics who claim that what he did was driven by selfishness more than bravery and that he shouldn't be emulated. I think even his stupidity should be emulated.

Like a lot of young people, McCandless wanted to find a way of life richer and more honest than the life his parents and elders had left him, which is something I can relate to. In that sense, McCandless and I took similar journeys--he into the wilderness and I into the heart of the city, but both of us delving, essentially, into the private areas of our individual psyches--into a place almost beyond the reach of human culture--to find it uninhabitable.

Unlike most people, I didn't deal with my loneliness by doing the sensible thing--by seeking companionship and simply being less alone. Instead, I tried to become happy in my loneliness. So I wandered from state to state, working temp jobs to make ends meet, and I read. And I read and I read and I read. And I walked. God knows how many miles of walking I did around Lake Washington in Seattle, through the most hidden and dangerous streets I could find in San Francisco and Oakland, through the ugly suburbs of Virginia, in the canyons of Utah and Colorado, and in and around city parks and abandoned or closed buildings wherever I found them. I also, like McCandless, tried to metaphorically kill myself. I tried to kill off the person I'd been conditioned into being by, among other things, severing most of my previous relationships. I didn't have much contact with my family at that time, and, when I did, I found it numbing. On one trip back home, adolescent drama queen that I was, I told my mother that I didn't want her calling me anymore because of her views on the death penalty. I also broke off relations with all of my Utah friends, telling them, again in adolescent drama queen fashion, that I was going away to find God.

Well, I never found God. He wasn't where I expected him to be--in the unopened closets of my mind. And I didn't find myself, either. In that sense, my journey was a failure. But I did find something, and the movie reminded me of what it was. I found the same thing McCandless found--the knowledge that "happiness isn't real unless it's shared". I learned the lie of self-reliance. And I learned something else, too: that whether you die alone in the wilderness or surrounded by family and friends in the heart of a people-filled metropolis, you die alone. Neither living alone in the wild or living in civilized society gives us the companionship and sense of responsibility that our species requires to be healthy. We need to honor our dependency on the ENTIRE natural world, which includes the human world. Put another way, we have to cooperate. We need what McCandless found: an awareness of our interdependency on the wilderness, an awareness that we can't live by destroying the landbase that makes our lives possible. We have to realize, and rediscover, the wild animals that we are. But at the same time, we have to realize that we're a certain kind of animal, an intensely social animal, dependent on community building for survival. We can't live independent of community, of human community, nor can we live without an awareness of the wilderness that we're apart of. We can't find happiness by denying certain parts of who we are. To do that, we have to live in our imaginations, the only place where our spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional selves are united.

In a nutshell, my journey taught me that you couldn't escape the world nor could you let the world imprison you. You had to recreate it. I now understand that the real battle is stopping the machine, not escaping it, but, before you can take steps to stop the machine, you have to get some distance from it, or, at the very least, stop identifying with it. You have to set your imagination free. And that's what I was able to do during my years of wandering and, ultimately, what I think McCandless did. That's why I think McCandless' journey should be emulated. Because wisdom doesn't come easily or without risk. No one is born with an understanding that the world they're inheriting is one based on the suppression and oppression of self awareness and development. No one is born with the understanding that the civilized institutions of work, marriage, and education can't fulfill our human needs for self-expansion and happiness. And no one is aware of his or her possibilities until they attempt, at the risk of death, to discover them.

By exploring the depths of his imagination, McCandless learned that he couldn't find happiness in civilization's expectations, but he couldn't find happiness alone, either. Unfortunately, he died before he could put that knowledge into practice. But at least he inspired a good story, a story that needs to be honored and which both inspires and delineates the range of human experience, a story that enrichens and awakens our imaginations, a story that, if honored and understood, makes repeating McCandless' mistakes unnecessary. The story alone justifies the journey. At the same time, you can't learn everything from a story. McCandless' story can inspire and teach us, but it can't take the place of our own journeys.

Going into the wild means more than just trekking off into the wilderness to hone up on your survival skills (a delusion, it seems, of many native Alaskans who criticize McCandless and others like him). More than anything, it's a journey into the imagination. William Blake once wrote that "The imagination is not a State: it is Human existence itself." Aside from the literal wilderness of Alaska, McCandless also journeyed into all that the wilderness represents to the human imagination: untamed, and unbounded, and unfiltered "real" experience--into existence itself. In that quest, I think his journey was a success--a success that needs to be emulated.

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Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations.
Cavett Roberts

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw

We live as we dream--alone.
Robert Conrad