(read the full article here)
Jon Krakauer's haunting account of the meteoric passage of Chris McCandless, the vagabond loner who cut all ties with family and society, plunged into a remote outback, and unwittingly slipped into his own death trap, was headed for the best-seller list. And if Sean Penn had had his way back in 1996, Into the Wild was also headed for the silver screen. Instead, an ill-timed dream that visited McCandless's mother just hours before Penn was to fly to the East Coast to close the deal brought an end to the project.
Not every reader of Krakauer's book finds its protagonist as sympathetic as Penn did. In Alaska, especially, the take could be summed up in the chauvinistic formula: One more clueless hippie from the lower 48 screws up in the wilderness and buys the farm. Why glorify him?
But Penn, who as a budding star in Hollywood had his own much publicized troubles, was quick to identify with the alienated youth.
In the film, McCandless is played by 22-year-old Emile Hirsch, known mainly as a teenage heartthrob in The Girl Next Door and as a pioneering skateboarder in Lords of Dogtown. By turns gallantly romantic and awkwardly shy, jubilant and full of rage, hungry for experience yet saddled with something like a death wish, Hirsch's McCandless is calculated to make the viewer care deeply about this mixed-up young man.
Many of McCandless's Alaska critics point out that if the kid had had a map, he probably wouldn't have died. The USGS quadrangle of the wilderness into which he ventured clearly indicates a gauging station with a cable across the Teklanika River, only a mile (two kilometers) downstream from the spot where McCandless, as he tried to hike out, was turned back by the swollen river. The map also locates three cabins in which he might have found emergency rations and supplies. As I read the manuscript of Into the Wild, I voiced the same stricture.
Jon, however, had a compelling rejoinder. McCandless's deliberate choice not to take a map, like his choice to carry only a ten-pound (five-kilogram) bag of rice into the wilderness, was, Jon argued, the very kind of upping the ante that we admired in other adventurers. Many landmarks in the history of exploration have come about when bold innovators chose not to use all the means their predecessors had counted on. McCandless's deliberate self-limitation, in this view, was like Reinhold Messner climbing Everest without bottled oxygen, or Børge Ousland skiing across Antarctica without airdropped supplies or prelaid depots.
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Visit The Bus
Into the Wild to visit the Bus?
Since the release of Sean Penn's movie "Into the Wild," there have been many more inquiries about the infamous bus on the Stampede Trail.
Please use caution if you are planning to travel to the the bus and dress appropriately. Some of the windows in the bus are broken and there is no way to use the bus to stay warm. Remember, you will be in a backcountry situation.
If you do not know what kind of gear you need or have this equipment to travel safely into the Bush, then you probably have no business trying to do so.
For example:
If you had decided to carry 10 pounds of food with you, a 10 pound bag of rice is probably the wrong choice.
The Alaska bush IS NOT the Cascades or Rockies.
Death is always a possibility.
There are no provisions or supplies at the bus.
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