I mean, he, you know, Hamilton deserves the credit for this. And it was a place no one had thought to look before or no one I knew about, and it was brilliant. And by chance, I came across this essay by Ronald Hamilton.ĬORNISH: And this gentleman named Ron Hamilton helps you get to the bottom of things, right, from an unlikely place, right? He looks to World War II and concentration camp victims. I mean, how do I reconcile what the chemist said with what McCandless' journal said? So I just kept combing the scientific literature. He said, you know, I tore this plant apart. And the chemist - they came back and the chemist said, no, these plants aren't poisonous. So I sent these seeds - I collected some seeds when I visited the bus and sent these seeds to an esteemed biochemist in Fairbanks and had them tested. Well, this led me to conclude, as it would almost anybody, that the seeds had somehow laid him low, maybe killed him outright.
And then a little over three weeks later, on August 18, he crawled in the back of the bus and died. After that, there's other signs in his journal that, you know, he was in big trouble. You know, before this entry, there's nothing to suggest he was in trouble. Until the end of July, there's this ominous journal entry, July 30th. So he decided just to keep living at the bus, foraging food, killing small game. So that's where he lived for most of these three and a half months. And he stumbled upon it by chance, and it had this wood stove in it and a bed in the back and it was - it's in a pretty place, and he thought it was a great place to make it his base camp. It had been used for many years by hunters and trappers out at the stampede trails it's called, like a day's journey from the road. So he.ĬORNISH: And this is a bus that was a makeshift shelter that was just out there already. So things were going pretty well in July when he - early July when he returned to the bus after trying and failing to cross the river because it was so hot. So - and his photographs show what he was eating. So - and he also took a lot of photographs that were recovered with his body, several rolls of film. He recorded the weather on pieces of birch bark. But he recorded all the food that he killed. KRAKAUER: Well, the journal is very brief and cryptic, so you have to interpret it. And what did it tell you about how he lived and how he died? Jon, welcome to the program.ĬORNISH: So a lot of what people know about Christopher McCandless came from his journal, right? He actually kept writing about his experience. Krakauer joins us now from Boulder, Colorado. Jon Krakauer had a theory: Unintentional poisoning.
It's called "Into the Wild." But one core mystery remained: Was McCandless' journey a slow-motion suicide mission, the results of recklessness or ignorance about the realities of living in the wild? Or was his death an accident? The story of Christopher McCandless and his short, fatal experiment with simple living was exhaustively explored in a 1996 book by Jon Krakauer. Four months later, emaciated and helpless, he died. I'm Audie Cornish.īack in 1992, a young man headed into the Alaskan wilderness seeking a new way of life, perhaps an escape from the modern world. However, despite this betrayal, Walt’s other wife and children always included Carine and Christopher in family affairs and loved more kindly than their actual parents did.From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. When Billie found out about how Walt did not intend on leaving his pregnant wife, he mustered up the horrendous lie that he would not because she had cancer, which was not true in the slightest. Knowing of Walt’s other family, Billie still continued the relationship and in fact bore his children (Carine and Chris), at the same time Walt’s other wife was pregnant. It was briefly mentioned in Into the Wild that their father, Walt McCandless, had another family but Carine goes in depth about how their mother, Billie knew about Walt’s wife and frequently rubbed it in her face that he was cheating on her. She reveals the ugly truth that their parents constantly fought and were more than often physically and emotionally abusive towards each other and their children. McCandless’ sister, Carine, is the only one that he feels comfortable to be with. McCandless is very upset and struggles with his current society especially his family. He also displays youthful impulsiveness, a risk-taking mentality, and withering judgments of those, like his father, who are materialistic and do not think as he does. As he is dying, he journals with mature wisdom, generosity, and acceptance.
Chris’s personality is a mix of heady, enthusiastic optimism and a full embrace of “sucking the marrow” out of life. He tends to feel he knows he is right and has no problem lecturing much older people on how they should be living their lives.