INTO THE WILD

“Yeah, Bobby. Wayne here. What’s up?”

“Quick-turn on your AM, and listen to Paul Harvey. He’s talking about some kid who starved to death up in Alaska. The police don’t know who he is. Sounds a whole lot like Alex.”

Westerberg found the station in time to catch the tail end of the Paul Harvey broadcast, and he was forced to agree: The few sketchy details made the anonymous hiker sound distressingly like his friend.

As soon as he got to Carthage, a dispirited Westerberg phoned the Alaska State Troopers to volunteer what he knew about McCandless. By that time, however, stories about the dead hiker, including excerpts from his diary, had been given prominent play in newspapers across the country. As a consequence the troopers were swamped with calls from people claiming to know the hiker’s identity, so they were even less receptive to Westerberg than they had been to Gallien. “The cop told me they’d had more than one hundred fifty calls from folks who thought Alex was their kid, their friend, their brother,” says Westerberg. “Well, by then I was kind of pissed at getting the runaround, so I told him, ‘Look, I’m not just another crank caller. I know who he is. He worked for me. I think I’ve even got his Social Security number around here somewhere.’”

Westerberg pawed through the files at the grain elevator until he found two W-4 forms McCandless had filled out. Across the top of the first one, dating from McCandless’s initial visit to Carthage, in 1990, he had scrawled “exempt exempt exempt exempt” and given his name as Iris Fucyu. Address: “None of your damn business.” Social Security number: “I forget.”

But on the second form, dated March 30, 1992, two weeks before he left for Alaska, he’d signed his given name: “Chris J. McCandless.” And in the blank for Social Security number he’d put down, “228-31-6704.” Westerberg phoned Alaska again. This time the troopers took him seriously.

The Social Security number turned out to be genuine and placed McCandless’s permanent residence in northern Virginia. Authorities in Alaska contacted law-enforcement agencies in that state, who in turn started combing phone directories for McCand-lesses. Walt and Billie McCandless had by then moved to the Maryland shore and no longer had a Virginia phone number, but Walt’s eldest child from his first marriage lived in Annandale and was in the book; late on the afternoon of September 17, Sam McCandless received a call from a Fairfax County homicide detective.

Sam, nine years older than Chris, had seen a short article about the hiker in The Washington Post a few days earlier, but, he allows, “It didn’t occur to me that the hiker might be Chris. Never even crossed my mind. It’s ironic because when I read the article I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a terrible tragedy. I really feel sorry for the family of this guy, whoever they are. What a sad story.’ “

Sam had been raised in California and Colorado, in his mother’s household, and hadn’t moved to Virginia until 1987, after Chris had left the state to attend college in Atlanta, so Sam didn’t know his half brother well. But when the homicide detective started asking whether the hiker sounded like anyone he knew, Sam reports, “I was pretty sure it was Chris. The fact that he’d gone to Alaska, that he’d gone off by himself-it all added up.”

At the detective’s request, Sam went to the Fairfax County Police Department, where an officer showed him a photograph of the hiker that had been faxed from Fairbanks. “It was an eight-by-ten enlargement,” Sam recalls, “a head shot. His hair was long, and he had a beard. Chris almost always had short hair and was clean-shaven. And the face in the picture was extremely gaunt. But I knew right away. There was no doubt. It was Chris. I went home, picked up Michele, my wife, and drove out to Maryland to tell Dad and Billie. I didn’t know what I was going to say. How do you tell someone that their child is dead?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHESAPEAKE BEACH

Everything had changed suddenly-the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute-life or truth or beauty-of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago passage highlighted in one of the books found with Chris McCandless’s remains. “Need for a purpose” had been written in mccandless’s hand in the margin above the passage.

Samuel Walter McCandless, Jr., fifty-six years old, is a bearded, taciturn man with longish salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Tall and solidly proportioned, he wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a professorial demeanor. Seven weeks after the body of his son turned up in

Alaska wrapped in a blue sleeping bag that Billie had sewn for Chris from a kit, Walt studies a sailboat scudding beneath the window of his waterfront townhouse. “How is it,” he wonders aloud as he gazes blankly across Chesapeake Bay, “that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?”

The McCandless home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, is tastefully decorated, spotless, devoid of clutter. Floor-to-ceiling windows take in the hazy panorama of the bay. A big Chevy Suburban and a white Cadillac are parked out front, a painstakingly restored ‘69 Corvette sits in the garage, a thirty-foot cruising catamaran is moored at the dock. Four large squares of poster board, covered with scores of photos documenting the whole brief span of Chris’s life, have occupied the dining-room table for many days now.

Moving deliberately around the display, Billie points out Chris as a toddler astride a hobby horse, Chris as a rapt eight-year-old in a yellow rain slicker on his first backpacking trip, Chris at his high school commencement. “The hardest part,” says Walt, pausing over a shot of his son clowning around on a family vacation, his voice cracking almost imperceptibly, “is simply not having him around anymore. I spent a lot of time with Chris, perhaps more than with any of my other kids. I really liked his company even though he frustrated us so often.”

Walt is wearing gray sweatpants, racquetball shoes, and a satin baseball jacket embroidered with the logo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite the casual attire, he projects an air of authority. Within the ranks of his arcane field-an advanced technology called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR-he is an eminence. SAR has been a component of high-profile space missions since 1978, when the first SAR-equipped satellite, Seasat, was placed into orbit around the earth. NASA’s project manager for that pioneering Seasat launch was Walt McCandless.

The first line of Walt’s resume reads “Clearance: Current U.S. Department of Defense Top Secret.” A little farther down the page an account of his professional experience begins: “I perform private consulting services aligned with remote sensor and satellite system design, and associated signal processing, data reduction and information extraction tasks.” Colleagues refer to him as brilliant.

Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an undercurrent of nervous energy. Even from across the room it is apparent that some very high voltage is crackling through his wires. There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came.

When Walt talks, people listen. If something or someone displeases him, his eyes narrow and his speech becomes clipped. According to members of the extended family, his moods can be dark and mercurial, although they say his famous temper has lost much of its volatility in recent years. After Chris gave everybody the slip in 1990, something changed in Walt. His son’s disappearance scared and chastened him. A softer, more tolerant side of his personality came to the fore.

Walt grew up poor in Greeley, Colorado, an agricultural town on the high, windswept plains up near the Wyoming line. His family, he declares matter-of-factly, “was from the wrong side of the tracks.” A bright child, and driven, he won an academic scholarship to Colorado State University in nearby Fort Collins. To make ends meet, he held down an assortment of part-time jobs through college, including one in a mortuary, but his steadiest paycheck came from playing with Charlie Novak, the leader of a popular jazz quartet. Novak’s band, with Walt