INTO THE WILD

to the road.

McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law, savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way. Allowing his life to be shaped by circumstance, he hitched to Lake Tahoe, hiked into the Sierra Nevada, and spent a week walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail before exiting the mountains and returning to the pavement.

At the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself Crazy Ernie and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California; photographs of the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded by goats and chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, old appliances, and mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven days with six other vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had no intention of ever paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutter in the yard, pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot. Then he resumed a life of constant motion, riding his thumb north and west through Red Bluff, Weaverville, and Willow Creek.

At Arcata, California, in the dripping redwood forests of the Pacific shore, McCandless turned right on U.S. Highway 101 and headed up the coast. Sixty miles south of the Oregon line, near the town of Orick, a pair of drifters in an old van pulled over to consult their map when they noticed a boy crouching in the bushes off the side of the road. “He was wearing long shorts and this really stupid hat,” says Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old rubber tramp who was traveling around the West selling knick-knacks at flea markets and swap meets with her boyfriend, Bob. “He had a book about plants with him, and he was using it to pick berries, collecting them in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. He looked pretty pitiful, so I yelled, ‘Hey, you want a ride somewhere?’ I thought maybe we could give him a meal or something.

“We got to talking. He was a nice kid. Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it. Said he was tramping around the country, having a big old adventure. He told us about abandoning his car, about burning all his money. I said, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Claimed he didn’t need money. I have a son about the same age Alex was, and we’ve been estranged for a few years now. So I said to Bob, ‘Man, we got to take this kid with us. You need to school him about some things.’ Alex took a ride from us up to Orick Beach, where we were staying, and camped with us for a week. He was a really good kid. We

thought the world of him. When he left, we never expected to hear from him again, but he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years Alex sent us a postcard every month or two.”

From Orick, McCandless continued north up the coast. He passed through Pistol River, Coos Bay, Seal Rock, Manzanita, As-toria; Hoquiam, Humptulips, Queets; Forks, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Seattle. “He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

On August 10, shortly before meeting Jan Burres and Bob, McCandless had been ticketed for hitchhiking near Willow Creek, in the gold-mining country east of Eureka. In an uncharacteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents’ Annandale address when the arresting officer demanded to know his permanent place of residence. The unpaid ticket appeared in Walt and Bil-lie’s mailbox at the end of August.

Walt and Billie, terribly concerned over Chris’s vanishing act, had by that time already contacted the Annandale police, who had been of no help. When the ticket arrived from California, they became frantic. One of their neighbors was the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approached this man, an army general, for advice. The general put him in touch with a private investigator named Peter Kalitka, who’d done contract work for both the DIA and the CIA. He was the best, the general assured Walt; if Chris was out there, Kalitka would find him.

Using the Willow Creek ticket as a starting point, Kalitka launched an extremely thorough search, chasing down leads that led as far afield as Europe and South Africa. His efforts, however, turned up nothing-until December, when he learned from an inspection of tax records that Chris had given away his college fund to OXFAM.

“That really scared us,” says Walt. “By that point we had absolutely no idea what Chris could be up to. The hitchhiking ticket just didn’t make any sense. He loved that Datsun so much

it was mind-boggling to me that he would ever abandon it and travel on foot. Although, in retrospect, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.”

As Kalitka was trying to pick up Chris’s scent in California, McCandless was already far away, hitching east across the Cascade Range, across the sagebrush uplands and lava beds of the Columbia River basin, across the Idaho panhandle, into Montana. There, outside Cut Bank, he crossed paths with Wayne Westerberg and by the end of September was working for him in Carthage. When Westerberg was jailed and the work came to a halt, and with winter coming on, McCandless headed for warmer climes.

On October 28, he caught a ride with a long-haul trucker into Needles, California. “Overjoyed upon reaching the Colorado River,” McCandless wrote in his journal. Then he left the highway and started walking south through the desert, following the river-bank. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock, Arizona, a dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway intersects the California border. While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminum canoe for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south, across the border with Mexico.

This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the gulf, has little in common with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the Grand Canyon, some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Emasculated by dams and diversion canals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to reservoir through some of the hottest, starkest country on the continent. McCandless was stirred by the austerity of this landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

From Topock, McCandless paddled south down Lake Havasu under a bleached dome of sky, huge and empty. He made a brief excursion up the Bill Williams River, a tributary of the Colorado,

then continued downstream through the Colorado River Indian Reservation, the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage. Leaving the river for a day to track a herd of wild horses, he came across a sign warning that he was trespassing on the U.S. Army’s highly restricted Yuma Proving Ground. McCandless was deterred not in the least.

At the end of November, he paddled through Yuma, where he stopped long enough to replenish his provisions and send a postcard to Westerberg in care of Glory House, the Sioux Falls work-release facility where Westerberg was doing time. “Hey Wayne!” the card reads,

How’s it going? I hope that your situation has improved since the time we last spoke. I’ve been tramping around Arizona for about a month now. This is a good state! There is all kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful. But apart from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank you once again for all your hospitality. It’s rare to find a man as generous and good natured as you are. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when 1 was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal. I couldn’t make it now without money, however, as there is very little fruiting agriculture down here at this time.

Please thank Kevin again for all the clothes he gave me, I would have froze to death without them. I hope he got that book to you. Wayne, you really should read War and Peace. I meant it when I said you had one of the highest characters of any man I’d met. That is a very powerful and highly symbolic book. It has things in it that I think you will understand. Things that escape most people. As for me, I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One day I’ll get back to you Wayne and repay some of your kindness. A case of Jack Daniels maybe? Til then III always think of you as a friend. god bless You, alexander