One Man’s Final Frontier Is Another’s Gripping Bestseller

It’s a slide show of rugged beauty and eerie endings. In his publisher’s Manhattan office, author Jon Krakauer clicks through scenes of snowy peaks, stark deserts and self-portraits of a young man wandering through the final months of his life.

The man is Chris McCandless. After graduating from Emory University in 1990, he gave $25,000 in savings to charity, turned away from his well-to-do family in the Washington suburbs and began a Thoreauvian quest into the western wilderness. He photographed and kept a written record of his travels until two years later, when his decomposed body was discovered by moose hunters on a remote mining trail in the Alaskan taiga. He was 24.

A handwritten note, apparently posted by McCandless on a day when he had left his encampment to look for berries, said: “S. O. S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone. In the name of God, please remain to save me.”

Captivated by the initially sketchy accounts--”Hiker Stranded for Months Left Diary of His Demise,” the Associated Press first reported--Krakauer wrote about McCandless hurriedly for Outside magazine’s January 1993 issue. But Krakauer remained haunted by the story and its parallels to his own youth and the cravings that led him to natural highs and solo mountain climbs inside the Arctic Circle. The writer retraced McCandless’ odyssey and managed to track down some of the far-flung souls that his subject had encountered on the road. Krakauer, now 41, offers answers to the puzzle in “Into the Wild,” an intimate biography published by Villard Books.

It’s a gripping story of an unknown man, written by a less than famous author. However, buoyed by strong reviews and by the enthusiasm of booksellers, “Into the Wild” has cracked through a wall of titles by George Burns, Fran Drescher, Howard Stern and other familiar names and has found a place on nonfiction bestseller lists for four weeks. On Sunday, it was No. 15 on the New York Times’ national bestseller list; from an initial order of 28,000 copies, Villard now has 94,000 in print.

“McCandless is a very complicated person,” Krakauer said as he showed the slide images left by the deceased. “Here’s a guy who was comfortable spending four months by himself on one occasion and didn’t seem to need the company of others. But when he was around people, he wasn’t some kind of misfit, he wasn’t this social geek. He was gregarious, charming, people were drawn to him. But whenever anyone would try to become close, he’d pull back.”

Krakauer puts McCandless’ life in the broader context of landscape, wilderness and its grip on the American imagination. He tracks McCandless’ impassioned attachment to the books of Henry David Thoreau, Jack London and Louis L’Amour.

“Why does wilderness have a hold on us?” Krakauer said as he projected some of the panoramas taken by McCandless. “It’s part of our national mythology, this sense that you can always go west, transform your life, go into the wilderness.”

In McCandless’ case, only Alaska, the last American frontier, would do. Nevertheless, successful as McCandless had been in paddling 400 miles on the lower Colorado River to the Sea of Cortez, and in getting by on little more than the earnings from odd jobs, his elementary survival skills proved no match for the Alaska bush. As much a detective as a storyteller, Krakauer poked around McCandless’ final environs and figured out the key mistakes that led to his death.

McCandless had misjudged a stream he crossed hiking in. It became a raging river later in the year, cutting him off from returning to civilization. He bungled an attempt to preserve meat and, ignorant of the Alaskan wilderness, chose as nourishment a plant with toxic properties.

Near the end, an emaciated McCandless, smiling, waved to his camera while displaying a farewell note: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all.”

The film was found and developed by the authorities in Alaska. One measure of Krakauer’s sensitivity is that this photo (not included in the book), journals and other possessions were shared with the writer by McCandless’ family, whose own secrets help explain why the young man so coldly walked away from them forever--and ultimately broke their hearts.

According to some who read Krakauer’s first report in Outside, McCandless was “a self-absorbed narcissistic jerk,” Krakauer says. He concedes that McCandless was “very melodramatic and self-dramatizing,” as evidenced by some of his photographs and rapturous prose. “But Chris was not clinically disturbed, he was not a nut case,” Krakauer added. “In this cynical age, he was a real pilgrim.”

He added: “I really got wrapped up in the story. I wrote this book because I sort of had to.”