Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (review)

Essay Reviews 163 that it has gone the inexorable way o f other persecuted predators causes him to mourn the grizzly and the “shrinking wild habitat of the soul” that attends its loss. Reading Petersen and Bass on the trail o f the “ghost” or “lost” bears, I am reminded of Peter M atthiessen’s quest for the elusive cat in The Snow Leopard, or David Quammen’s search for the Tasmanian Tiger in The Song o f the D odo, or even o f Robert M ichael P yle’s trek seeking surviving hominid apes in Where Bigfoot Walks. Perhaps the terrifying stories o f wild animals that have long haunt­ ed our collective imagination have taken a turn; perhaps what is most horrible to us now is not to be confronted by the beast, but rather to be confronted by its absence. So, does the grizzly survive in Colorado? Petersen and Bass believe it does. State w ildlife authorities believe otherwise. Ultimately, the existence o f the Colorado grizzly remains a matter o f faith. And faith, as the prophets knew, is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence o f things not seen. MICHAEL BRANCH U niversity o f Nevada, Reno Into the Wild. B y Jon Krakauer. (N ew York: Villard, 1996. 224 pages, $22.00.) In Into the Wild Jon Krakauer narrates the story o f Chris M cCandless, a twenty-four-year-old from the suburbs of Washington, D. C. who walked into the Alaskan wilderness with a small caliber rifle and a ten-pound bag o f rice and w hose malnourished corpse was found four months later. The first mystery was in identifying the body— a task made difficult by M cCandless’s deliberate renun­ ciation o f the trappings of industrialized suburban America. We all know people who to som e degree choose the wilderness and make material sacrifices to do so; but not many o f those give away $24,000 to charity, abandon their cars, and bum all the cash in their wallets. These details sound crazed out o f context, but in Krakauer’s view they are the acts o f a high-minded idealist. The larger mystery, and addressing this is Krakauer’s real purpose here, is: why did M cCandless undertake this strange solitary wilderness adventure that ended in his death? Into the Wild belongs to that very small handful o f books to receive full-page reviews in both the N ew York Times B ook Review and the Am erican Alpine Journal. What elicits such a range o f interest? Is the story itself so compelling, the writing so polished? Or have wilderness-related tales finally impressed them­ selves into the nation’s consciousness? In this case, all o f the above are true. 164 Western American Literature The structure o f Krakauer’s tale is not only both thoughtful and thorough, but com pelling as w ell. We begin with the last person to see M cCandless alive and m ove to the discovery o f his body. From there Krakauer has reconstructed the previous two years o f M cCandless’s western odyssey, a journey that included a four-hundred-mile canoe trip down the Colorado River from Bullhead City to the G ulf o f M exico. M cCandless lived in and traveled through eight western states as w ell as M exico and British Columbia before his journey ended. Krakauer puts M cCandless into historical perspective with other western pioneers o f disappearance and misjudgment (many o f whom were mentally ill), and devotes a full chapter to the precedent set by Everett Reuss, another talented idealistic youth who disappeared, possibly by design, into the desert outside of Escalante, Utah, in 1934. From there the narrative moves back into M cCandless’s fam ily history, on to Krakauer’s own youthful exploits on D evil’s Thumb on the Stikine Ice Cap in Alaska, and finally Krakauer’s literal retracing o f his subject’s last adventure— a journey to the outback and the abandoned school bus where M cCandless died. M cCandless’s critics, and there were...