In case you aren't entirely familiar with Alexander Supertramp, I'll summarise: It was the self-assigned alter ego of one Chirstopher McCandless, a young American college graduate who, confunded by a material good-orientated, greed-hungry capitalist society, hiked into the Alaskan "wilderness", sporting little more than a semi-automatic rifle, a sack of rice and more than a few youthful ideals.
Needless to say, McCandless died.
His was made a famous life, and death, following the release of a biography by Jon Krakauer, and later a film. Both these texts, though (jeez, I am horrified by my adopting of NZQA's bullshit phrasing) painted the portrait of a disaffected, bright, humanitiarian, Thoreau-like young man, whereas a source not bound the constraints by a novelist's poetic license like Wikipedia represents an entirely different school of thought, as it appears. Reality.
And what a harsh once McCandless must face up to. His apparent total lack of preparation and general ineptitude where a hostile place like Alaska was concerned, compounded by his romanticisation in Into the Wild provoking many Alaskan natives to lash out. I have picked the best of them and pasted it below, from Sherry Simpson:
"Astounded by page after page of such writings, we counted the number of people identified in the notebooks. More than 200 had trekked to the bus since McCandless’s death, and that didn’t account for those who passed by without comment. Think of that: More than 200 people, many as inexperienced as McCandless, had hiked or bicycled along the Stampede Trail to the bus — and every one of them had somehow managed to return safely... Among my friends and acquaintances, the story of Christopher McCandless makes great after-dinner conversation. Much of the time I agree with the "he had a death wish" camp because I don’t know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the "what a dumbshit" territory, tempered by brief alliances with the "he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest" partisans. Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.... 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."
I want to make a neat, contradictory summarising statement, but so succinct yet so very very accurate is this criticism that I struggle to fault her logic. Yes, McCandless was a dumbass, and people more knowledgeable on the topic could doubtless spend all day taking to pieces his poor decisions, leading him from one bad situation to the next. I want to say, "yet cruelly analyse his ideology and actions though she may, Simpson must admit that McCandless has achieved something..." But what? We knew what no food and no map already led to.
We just didn't know anyone would do it.
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