Travelers' Tales Alaska (38 page)

And yet there we were, we crude Alaskans, scoffing and making jokes in Fairbanks 142, shaking our heads and posing with cans of Spam. We want it both ways. We want to impress others and ourselves with scary tales of death defied at every turn, to point out that Alaska is so unforgiving that a person could die just a few miles
from help, and still we scorn those drawn to that mystique, those poor, foolish slobs who manage to die out of ignorance or stupidity or even bad luck. Perhaps that's because we know that one day—just like that, really—we could so easily become one of those poor, foolish slobs ourselves.

Occasionally I paused while flipping through the notebooks and looked out a busted window to watch how the mid-afternoon sun glazed the snow. We needed to return before dark, so I started skimming the entries, my eyes catching only certain words: Peace. Solitude. Meaning.

It was hard work, resisting the longing that rose from the scribbled words. I spent some moments puzzling over this comment written by a man from Ontario: “[Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time.”

This may be our oldest, truest survival skill: the ability to tell and to learn from each other's stories, whether from Aesop's fables, quest narratives, Greek mythology, the Book of Genesis, office gossip, the wisdom of elders, or made-for-TV movies. In some ways, Alaska is nothing but stories. We have constructed many of our ideas about this place, and about ourselves, from creation stories, gold rush stories, hunting and fishing stories, pioneer stories, family stories, clan stories. Even the animals told tales in the old Story Time, which is long behind us now.

Pay attention to what people say in bars and across dinner tables and around campfires, and often they are really telling survival stories of some sort or another: how I crossed the river, how I lost the trail, how I got my moose, how I fixed my boat, how I left home for the north, how I beat the storm, how I made it through another cold and lonely winter, how I
became a true Alaskan. What all these stories mean, though—that's up to you, the listener.

We can't know exactly why Christopher McCandless died. What matters now is what people want to believe about his death. Krakauer hypothesized that toxic seeds of the wild potato plant weakened him, and early test results seemed to support that. But chemists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks further studied wild potato seeds, as well as seeds from the similar-looking wild sweetpea, and their work seemed to eliminate the poisoning theory.

“I would be willing to bet money that neither species had toxic metabolites that would account for the fate of McCandless,” chemist Tom Clausen told me in an email. His conclusions appeared in the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
but never received wide coverage. Clausen added, “I believe McCandless died not from toxic foods but from foolishness. I hate to be so blunt about the dead but he clearly went ‘into the wild' unprepared.”

But the idea that McCandless was poisoned accidentally has become critical to his legend, because it means he wasn't stupid, wasn't seeking death. When I mentioned the research to the bus driver, he gave me an obstinate look and said, “The question is still open.” He could not surrender the “right” story.

The one thing we can say about McCandless is that his biggest mistake may have been his failure to listen to the right stories. He ignored advice about the scarcity of game, the practicalities of bear protection, the importance of maps, the truths of the land. He was too intent on creating the story of himself.

And yet, that story has such power, such meaning for so many people, that they feel drawn—called personally—to travel across the globe and hike the trail all that way to the bus
to look for Christopher McCandless or Alexander Super-tramp or themselves. They endure mosquitoes and rain and tough walking and bad river crossings and the possibility of bears. The burden the pilgrims carry to the bus is so heavy, laden with their frailties and hopes and desires, with their lives that don't quite satisfy. And when they arrive, they sit in that cold bus and think, and sometimes they cry from loss and longing and relief.

Well, so many of them are young, and they're lost, somehow, just as he was.

As he was dying, Christopher McCandless took a picture of himself propped against the bus. He held up a good-bye note, a smile on his gaunt face, and from this photograph Krakauer concluded that “Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.” But only Christopher McCandless could have known what truth was in his heart, there at the end. All we can say is that whoever he was, he's not that person anymore. Jon Krakauer made a story about him, by way of telling his own, and every pilgrim since his death has shaped him into something different as well. I'm doing it right now, too.

For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did—most of us came here in search of something, didn't we? Haven't we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can't afford to take his story seriously because it doesn't say much a careful person doesn't already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there—but it won't mean much unless you come back.

This is what bothers me—that Christopher McCandless failed so badly, so harshly, and yet so
famously
that his death has come to symbolize something admirable, that his unwillingness
to see Alaska for what it really is has somehow become the story so many people associate with this place, a story so hollow you can almost hear the wind blowing through it. His death was not a brilliant fuck-up. It was not even a terribly original fuck-up. It was just one of the more recent and pointless fuck-ups.

At 3
P.M.
, after we'd read through the notebooks, taken our silly and disrespectful photographs and eaten our lunches, we climbed back on our snowmachines and left. We rode against the wind as the light softened and dimmed all around. It grew colder, but it was still a good day to be outside, with spring on its way. I could feel fond about winter, now that it was dwindling. What I really wanted was to keep going beyond the bus, across the Sushana River and maybe down into the park.

As we followed our tracks home, I kept thinking about poor Christopher McCandless, entombed by the tributes of his pilgrims, forever wandering between the world he wanted and the world that exists, still trapped by other people's desires to make him something he is not—which is why he came out here in the first place.

Too late he learned that the hard part isn't walking toward the wilderness to discover the meaning of life. The hard part is returning from the consolations of nature and finding meaning anyway, a meaning lodged within the faithfulness of our ordinary lives, in the plain and painful beauty of our ordinary days.

Some day, I told myself, I might return. I'd do what few people do anymore, which is to pass by that junky old bus with only a sidelong glance and see what else is out there.

When she was a girl growing up in Juneau, Sherry Simpson's secret
ambition was to walk the entire rim of Alaska's coast. Later she thought she could settle for trekking the border between Canada and Alaska, from the southern end all the way to the tippy-top. As it turns out, the older she gets, the happier she is simply exploring the North one mile and one page at a time. She is the author of
The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories,
and her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including
Sierra, Backpacker, Alaska, Creative Nonfiction, American Nature Writing 1995
and
1997, Under Northern Lights,
and
Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women.
She currently teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts. This story was originally published in
The Anchorage Press.

NANCY LORD

A long-time resident recalls a place of perfect paradise.

A
RRIGETCH
,
WE KNEW BEFORE WE ARRIVED, MEANT
“fingers of the hand extended” in the language of the Nunamiut Eskimos, the caribou hunters who once broadly inhabited the land. The Arrigetch peaks in Alaska's central Brooks Range were anomalous gray granite upthrusts, mountaineers' hard-rock dreams, as dramatic a landscape as can be found anywhere on earth.

Today, their photographs grace one nature calendar after another, and a national park—Gates of the Arctic—surrounds them, the sparkliest jewel cluster in a many-jeweled crown. But in 1971, the Arrigetch were still off the maps of most Americans, still part of that great wild North that, even on real, topographic maps, existed only at the 1:250,000 scale. An inch spanned four miles, and still there were broad blank spaces marked only with contour lines and the earth colors of vegetation and rock. The blue threads of unnamed creeks wound through unnamed valleys under unnamed mountains, and there was nothing like a road or airstrip or even a trail in
sight. The Brooks and the Arrigetch were epic countries then, places of outermost dream.

A June day, that ancient year. The sky is blue. The air is warm. For the moment, there's enough breeze to keep most of the mosquitoes grounded in the tightly woven tundra. Snow patches still fill hollows and streak the north-facing slopes, but they're melting as I watch, tinkling as their skeletal crystals collapse against rock. Green spears and tiny, pastel alpine flowers rush to fill in behind the retreating snow. It's all like some heavenly garden as I work my way along the pathways of licheny rock slabs and nappy ground, down from the benchland where our tents flutter their bright primary colors, to the valley floor and the creek that creases its bottom. Rivulets of water run everywhere, down the faces of rocks, into cascading waterfalls, spilling from one basin into the next. Small birds flit, and bees buzz. One solitary caribou lifts its alert head and springs away on clicking hooves. The air is so incredibly clear, like looking through ice water—almost a magnification. Those silvery granite peaks rise all around, as though just yesterday some god or giant pushed them through the crust. Rumblings of rockfall attest to the work-in-progress nature of this nature; freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, and gravity exerting its pull. Talus stacks up deeply, precariously, at the mountains' feet.