and a breathtaking sweep of taiga fills the Plexiglas windscreen. In the distance I can pick out the Stampede Trail, cutting a faint, crooked stripe from east to west across the landscape.
Billie McCandless is in the front passenger seat; Walt and I occupy the back. Ten hard months have passed since Sam McCandless appeared at their Chesapeake Beach doorstep to tell them Chris was dead. It is time, they have decided, to visit the place where their son met his end, to see it with their own eyes.
Walt has spent the past ten days in Fairbanks, doing contract work for NASA, developing an airborne radar system for search-and-rescue missions that will enable searchers to find the wreckage of a downed plane amid thousands of acres of densely forested country. For several days now he’s been distracted, irritable, edgy. Billie, who arrived in Alaska two days ago, confided to me that the prospect of visiting the bus has been difficult for him to come to terms with. Surprisingly, she says she feels calm and centered and has been looking forward to this trip for some time.
Taking a helicopter was a last-minute change of plans. Billie wanted badly to travel overland, to follow the Stampede Trail as Chris had done. Toward that end she’d contacted Butch Killian, the Healy coal miner who’d been present when Chris’s body was discovered, and he agreed to drive Walt and Billie into the bus on his all-terrain vehicle. But yesterday Killian called their hotel to say that the Teklanika River was still running high-too high, he worried, to cross safely, even with his amphibious, eight-wheeled Argo. Thus the helicopter.
Two thousand feet beneath the aircraft’s skids a mottled green tweed of muskeg and spruce forest now blankets the rolling country. The Teklanika appears as a long brown ribbon thrown carelessly across the land. An unnaturally bright object comes into view near the confluence of two smaller streams: Fairbanks bus 142. It has taken us fifteen minutes to cover the distance it took Chris four days to walk.
The helicopter settles noisily onto the ground, the pilot kills the engine, and we hop down onto sandy earth. A moment later the machine lifts off in a hurricane of prop wash, leaving us surrounded by a monumental silence. As Walt and Billie stand ten yards from the bus, staring at the anomalous vehicle without speaking, a trio of jays prattles from a nearby aspen tree.
“It’s smaller,” Billie finally says, “than I thought it would be. I mean the bus.” And then, turning to take in the surroundings: “What a pretty place. I can’t believe how much this reminds me of where I grew up. Oh, Walt, it looks just like the Upper Peninsula! Chris must have loved being here.”
“I have a lot of reasons for disliking Alaska, OK?” Walt answers, scowling. “But I admit it-the place has a certain beauty. I can see what appealed to Chris.”
For the next thirty minutes Walt and Billie walk quietly around the decrepit vehicle, amble down to the Sushana River, visit the nearby woods.
Billie is the first to enter the bus. Walt returns from the stream to find her sitting on the mattress where Chris died, taking in the vehicle’s shabby interior. For a long time she gazes silently at her son’s boots under the stove, his handwriting on the walls, his toothbrush. But today there are no tears. Picking through the clutter on the table, she bends to examine a spoon with a distinctive floral pattern on the handle. “Walt, look at this,” she says. “This is the silverware we had in the Annandale house.”
At the front of the bus, Billie picks up a pair of Chris’s patched, ragged jeans and, closing her eyes, presses them to her face. “Smell,” she urges her husband with a painful smile. “They still smell like Chris.” After a long beat she declares, to herself more than to anyone else, “He must have been very brave and very strong, at the end, not to do himself in.”
Billie and Walt wander in and out of the bus for the next two hours. Walt installs a memorial just inside the door, a simple brass plaque inscribed with a few words. Beneath it Billie arranges a bouquet of fireweed, monkshood, yarrow, and spruce boughs. Under the bed at the rear of the bus, she leaves a suitcase stocked with a first-aid kit, canned food, other survival supplies, a note urging whoever happens to read it to “call your parents as soon as possible.” The suitcase also holds a Bible that belonged to Chris when he was a child, even though, she allows, “I haven’t prayed since we lost him.”
Walt, in a reflective mood, has had little to say, but he appears more at ease than he has in many days. “I didn’t know how I was going to react to this,” he admits, gesturing toward the bus. “But now I’m glad we came.” This brief visit, he says, has given him a slightly better understanding of why his boy came into this country. There is much about Chris that still baffles him and always will, but now he is a little less baffled. And for that small solace he is grateful.
“It’s comforting to know Chris was here,” Billie explains, “to know for certain that he spent time beside this river, that he stood on this patch of ground. So many places we’ve visited in the past three years-we’d wonder if possibly Chris had been there. It was terrible not knowing-not knowing anything at all.
“Many people have told me that they admire Chris for what he was trying to do. If he’d lived, I would agree with them. But he didn’t, and there’s no way to bring him back. You can’t fix it. Most things you can fix, but not that. I don’t know that you ever get over this kind of loss. The fact that Chris is gone is a sharp hurt I feel every single day. It’s really hard. Some days are better than others, but it’s going to be hard every day for the rest of my life.”
Abruptly, the quiet is shattered by the percussive racket of the helicopter, which spirals down from the clouds and lands in a patch of fireweed. We climb inside; the chopper shoulders into the sky and then hovers for a moment before banking steeply to the southeast. For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it’s gone.
acknowledgments
Writing this book would have been impossible without considerable assistance from the McCandless family. I am deeply indebted to Walt McCandless, Billie McCandless, Carine McCandless, Sam McCandless, and Shelly McCandless Garcia. They gave me full access to Chris’s papers, letters, and photographs and talked with me at great length. No family member made any attempt to exert control over the book’s content or direction, despite knowing that some material would be extremely painful to see in print. At the family’s request, twenty percent of the royalties generated by sales of
I am grateful to Doug Stumpf, who acquired the manuscript for Villard Books/Random House, and to David Rosenthal and Ruth Fecych, who edited the book with skill and care following Doug’s premature departure. Thanks, also, to Annik LaFarge, Adam Rothberg, Dan Rembert, Dennis Ambrose, Laura Taylor, Diana Frost, Deborah Foley, and Abigail Winograd at Villard/ Random House for their assistance.
This book began as an article in
Special gratitude is owed to Linda Mariam Moore, Roman Dial, David Roberts, Sharon Roberts, Matt Hale, and Ed Ward for providing invaluable advice and criticism; to Margaret David-son for creating the splendid maps; and to John Ware, my agent nonpareil.
Important contributions were also made by Dennis Burnett, Chris Fish, Eric Hathaway, Gordy Cucullu, Andy Horowitz, Kris Maxie Gillmer, Wayne Westerberg, Mary Westerberg, Gail Borah, Rod Wolf, Jan Burres, Ronald Franz, Gaylord Stuckey, Jim Gal-lien, Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, Ferdie Swanson, Butch Kil-lian, Paul Atkinson, Steve Carwile, Ken Kehrer, Bob Burroughs, Berle Mercer, Will Forsberg, Nick Jans, Mark Stoppel, Dan Solie, Andrew Liske, Peggy Dial, James Brady, Cliff Hudson, the late Mugs Stump, Kate Bull, Roger Ellis, Ken Sleight, Bud Walsh, Lori Zarza, George Dreeszen, Sharon Dreeszen, Eddie Dickson, Priscilla Russell, Arthur Kruckeberg, Paul Reichart, Doug Ewing, Sarah Gage, Mike Ralphs, Richard Keeler, Nancy J. Turner, Glen Wagner, Tom Clausen, John Bryant, Edward Treadwell, Lew Krakauer, Carol Krakauer, Karin Krakauer, Wendy Krakauer, Sarah Krakauer, Andrew Krakauer, Ruth Selig, and Peggy Langrall.
I benefited from the published work of journalists Johnny Dodd, Kris Capps, Steve Young, W. L. Rusho, Chip Brown, Glenn Randall, Jonathan Waterman, Debra McKinney, T. A. Badger, and Adam Biegel.
For providing inspiration, hospitality, friendship, and sage counsel, I am grateful to Kai Sandburn, Randy Babich, Jim Freeman, Steve Rottler, Fred Beckey, Maynard Miller, Jim Doherty, David Quammen, Tim Cahill,
