sitting in on piano, worked the regional lounge circuit, covering dance numbers and old standards in smoky honky- tonks up and down the Front Range. An inspired musician with considerable natural talent, Walt still plays professionally from time to time.
In 1957, the Soviets launched
He bought a little bungalow in Torrance, worked hard, moved quickly up the ladder. Sam was born in 1959, and four other children-Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, and Shannon-followed in quick succession. Walt was appointed test director and section head for the
By 1965, however, his marriage was in trouble. He and his wife, Marcia, separated. Walt started dating a secretary at Hughes named Wilhelmina Johnson-everyone called her Bil-lie-who was twenty-two years old and had dark, striking eyes. They fell in love and moved in together. Billie got pregnant. Very petite to begin with, in nine months she gained only eight pounds and never even wore maternity clothes. On February 12, 1968, Billie gave birth to a son. He was underweight, but healthy and animated. Walt bought Billie a Gianini guitar, on which she strummed lullabies to soothe the fussy newborn. Twenty-two years later, rangers from the National Park Service would find that same guitar on the backseat of a yellow Datsun abandoned near the shore of Lake Mead.
It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor’s candy drawer.
In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Billie remembers, “because it meant he had to do extra schoolwork. So he spent a week trying to get himself out of the program. This little boy attempted to convince the teacher, the principal-anybody who would listen-that the test results were in error, that he really didn’t belong there. We learned about it at the first PTA meeting. His teacher pulled us aside and told us that ‘Chris marches to a different drummer.’ She just shook her head.”
“Even when we were little,” says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, “he was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial- he always had friends, and everybody liked him-but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely.”
When Chris was six, Walt was offered a position at NASA, prompting a move to the nation’s capital. They bought a split-level house on Willet Drive in suburban Annandale. It had green shutters, a bay window, a nice yard. Four years after arriving in Virginia, Walt quit working for NASA to start a consulting firm- User Systems, Incorporated-which he and Billie ran out of their home.
Money was tight. In addition to the financial strain of exchanging a steady paycheck for the vagaries of self- employment, Walt’s separation from his first wife left him with two families to support. To make a go of it, says Carine, “Mom and Dad put in incredibly long hours. When Chris and I woke up in the morning to go to school, they’d be in the office working. When we came home in the afternoon, they’d be in the office working. When we went to bed at night, they’d be in the office working. They ran a real good business together and eventually started making bunches of money, but they worked all the time.”
It was a stressful existence. Both Walt and Billie are tightly wound, emotional, loath to give ground. Now and then the tension erupted in verbal sparring. In moments of anger, one or the other often threatened divorce. The rancor was more smoke than fire, says Carine, but “I think it was one of the reasons Chris and I were so close. We learned to count on each other when Mom and Dad weren’t getting along.”
But there were good times, too. On weekends and when school was out, the family took to the road: They drove to Virginia Beach and the Carolina shore, to Colorado to visit Walt’s kids from his first marriage, to the Great Lakes, to the Blue Ridge Mountains. “We camped out of the back of the truck, the Chevy Suburban,” Walt explains. “Later we bought an Airstream trailer and traveled with that. Chris loved those trips, the longer the better. There was always a little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it.”
In the course of their travels, the family visited Iron Mountain, Michigan, a small mining town in the forests of the Upper Peninsula that was Billies childhood home. She was one of six kids. Loren Johnson, Billies father, ostensibly worked as a truck driver, “but he never held any job for long,” she says.
“Billies dad didn’t quite fit into society,” Walt explains. “In many ways he and Chris were a lot alike.”
Loren Johnson was proud and stubborn and dreamy, a woodsman, a self-taught musician, a writer of poetry. Around Iron Mountain his rapport with the creatures of the forest was legendary. “He was always raising wildlife,” says Billie. “He’d find some animal in a trap, take it home, amputate the injured limb, heal it, and then let it go again. Once my dad hit a mother deer with his truck, making an orphan of its fawn. He was crushed. But he brought the baby deer home and raised it inside the house, behind the woodstove, just like it was one of his kids.”
To support his family, Loren tried a series of entrepreneurial ventures, none of them very successful. He raised chickens for a while, then mink and chinchillas. He opened a stable and sold horse rides to tourists. Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting-despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. “My dad cried every time he shot a deer,” Billie says, “but we had to eat, so he did it.”
He also worked as a hunting guide, which pained him even more. “Men from the city would drive up in their big Cadillacs, and my dad would take them out to his hunting camp for a week to get a trophy. He would guarantee them a buck before they left, but most of them were such lousy shots and drank so much that they couldn’t hit anything, so he’d usually have to shoot the deer for them. God, he hated that.”
Loren, not surprisingly, was charmed by Chris. And Chris adored his grandfather. The old man’s backwoods savvy, his affinity for the wilderness, left a deep impression on the boy.
When Chris was eight, Walt took him on his first overnight backpacking trip, a three-day hike in the Shenandoah to climb Old Rag. They made the summit, and Chris carried his own pack the whole way. Hiking up the mountain became a father-son tradition; they climbed Old Rag almost every year thereafter.
When Chris was a little older, Walt took Billie and his children from both marriages to climb Longs Peak in Colorado-at 14,256 feet, the highest summit in Rocky Mountain National Park. Walt, Chris, and Walt’s youngest son from his first marriage reached the 13,000-foot elevation. There, at a prominent notch called the Keyhole, Walt decided to turn around. He was tired and feeling the altitude. The route above looked slabby, exposed, dangerous. “I’d had it, OK,” Walt explains, “but Chris wanted to keep going to the top. I told him no way. He was only twelve then, so all he could do was complain. If he’d been fourteen or fifteen, he would have simply gone on without me.”
Walt grows quiet, staring absently into the distance. “Chris was fearless even when he was little,” he says after a long pause. “He didn’t think the odds applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge.”
Chris was a high achiever in almost everything that caught his fancy. Academically he brought home As with little effort. Only once did he receive a grade lower than B: an F, in high school physics. When he saw the report card, Walt made an appointment with the physics teacher to see what the problem was. “He was a retired air force colonel,” Walt remembers, “an old guy, traditional, pretty rigid. He’d explained at the beginning of the semester that because he had something like two hundred students, lab reports had to be written in a particular format to make grading them a manageable proposition. Chris thought it was a stupid rule and decided to ignore it. He did his lab reports, but not in the correct format, so the teacher gave him an F. After talking with the guy, I came home and told Chris he got the grade he deserved.”
Both Chris and Carine shared Walt’s musical aptitude. Chris took up the guitar, piano, French horn. “It was strange to see in a kid his age,” says Walt, “but he loved Tony Bennett. He’d sing numbers like ‘Tender Is the Night’ while I accompanied him on piano. He was good.” Indeed, in a goofy video Chris made in college, he can be
