Sunday Night With John: Through The Wild

My wife and I snuggled up to a night in on Saturday for take out and a movie.  As we settled in we pressed play on the movie “Into The Wild.” A story about Christopher McCandless, who arrives in a remote area just north of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and sets up a campsite in an abandoned bus, which he calls The Magic Bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around him, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts wild animals with a .22 caliber rifle, reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts as he prepares himself for a new life in the wild.

Two years earlier in May 1990, McCandless graduates with high honors from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly afterwards, McCandless rejects his conventional life by destroying all of his credit cards and identification documents. He donates nearly all of his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well used but reliable Datsun B210, to experience life in the wilderness. However, McCandless does not tell his parents and Billie McCandless or his sister Carine what he is doing or where he is going, and refuses to keep in touch with them after his departure, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.

As the story unfolds on Christoper’s adventure you learn that he rejects his conventional up bringing because of an abusive father and the fact he was an illegitimate child. I admired Chris’s attempt to take an emotional and spiritual journey to figure out who he was going to be entering adulthood. Those moments after college when even the best laid plans seem written in sand can be difficult. I loved his sense of excitement they way he turned his nose up to authority.  Those are two qualities I can find very endearing and relate to a little bit.

Chris, who changes his name to Alexander Supertramp, begins to be-friend people along the way, his singular focus of living in the wild in Alaska takes control and he diatribes on the downfall of civilation and relationships. I began to see the demons Chris was running from.  He figured all of society was his father an abusive man who only saw people, homes, and materials threw the lens of a price tag. Chris in an attempt to shed those painful childhood memories escapes a place where money would matter the least. He tried to prove that there is a life without the importance of monetary value and attempted to live a life of counter culture, the opposite of what society deems as success. As I watched this journey unfold I couldn’t help to feel for Chris as he failed to miss the great people he was meeting along the way.  A hippy couple who took him in, a farmer in South Dakota who provided him with lessons on survival, and an old man who himself was struggling. Chris failed to see that he was successful without the help of his father’s money; he was thriving and living a great adventure. He kayaked from Colorado to Mexico, what a feat! What an adventure!

As the scenes with Chris in Alaska unfolded his life came full circle in the fact that he was still haunted by those painful thoughts and emotions from his past. Running to Alaska, into the wild, didn’t solve those quandaries he contemplated over and over again. They still ate at him; they still caused him pain, and drove him to hurt others. As his sister twisted in the wind at his choice, never knowing why, or where her brother was he forged ahead with a care for her. His exploits begin to feel not as a journey but a long, drawn out plan to torture his parents for torturing him.  Chris dies in the end of the movie due to eating a poisonous plant, but his thoughts were still focused on his parents, still on what he went into the wild to escape from.

I’m all for emotional and spiritual journeys. I think finding yourself and coming to peace with past experiences is as essential to life as breathing. I too left my home at a young age, 18, and traversed the Midwest trying to make sense of my father and Eric’s death, my depression, my explosive anger, and my suicidal thinking. As I crossed paths with people who would care, and love I began to allow myself to heal a little bit. Each persona and experience granted me the ability to begin to deal with my downfalls, to understand the motives of my mother, sister and brother and their interactions me.  I began to understand whether it’s in Iowa, Brazil, Egypt, or in an abandoned bus in Alaska, we cannot escape those nagging thoughts and emotions that cause us such fear and panic. The only way to conquer those tough spots isn’t always going into to the wild, but through the wild. Chris didn’t get the chance to finish that part of his journey but I hope you do.

*The description of the movie in Paragraphs 1 and 2 are from movie’s IMDB Page