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Finding books on the shelves of houses I am visiting is a pleasure, albeit a disappearing one in these days of e-books and audio books. I love to find something I’ve been meaning to read for a long time, or a book by a favourite author I’ve not yet read, or, as is the case with Into the Wild, a book I have heard of and chosen not to read in the past. But when I have a five year-old and a nine-year old to look after for several days in a row I will read anything I can get my hands on to nourish the adult section of my brain.

 

I was dubious about Into the Wild because it’s that story: the one about a young man who sets off into the wilderness with the intention of living off the land and fails to live at all. I admit to finding such adventures irritating. I have no patience with ill-prepared, risk-taking explorers who go it alone; who ignore all the common sense rules about having a means to communicate and a good map and compass; who imagine living like a hunter-gatherer is somehow a better and purer existence.

 

But the book was there and I picked it up.

 

This is how it starts:

 

‘Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaska dawn. He didn’t appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteen at most. A rifle protruded from the young man’s backpack, but he looked friendly enough: A hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing that gives motorist pause in the forty-ninth state.’

 

I’ve been to Alaska, and to Fairbanks, which is a full-size city. Krakauer gets onto the page the distances expanding into apparent infinity as soon as you get beyond settlements and how humans travelling through this raw environment depend on each other’s goodness. The vast open spaces are an ever present pressure that might support you and delight you. They might also kill you.

 

Chris McCandless was found dead in an abandoned bus to the side of a little-used trail just outside Denali National Park, Alaska. This isn’t giving away the end of the story. It’s the second chapter. It’s the Sean Penn movie of 2007, which is based on this book.

 

Krakauer starts his story at the end because the end is where the story began, with the news of this young man’s unhappy demise. Krakauer is a journalist. Chris McCandless was a news item. Krakauer published an article. But Chris’ story became so much more for Krakauer. He recognised his own younger self, driven to undertake the most dangerous challenge he thought he could achieve because that would somehow make all of life more achievable. Krakauer is a mountaineer. He’d learned to climb at a young age. He set himself the task of climbing a bleak Alaskan peak, alone. And he almost didn’t make it back. He knew Chris McCandless didn’t have a death wish, as many people had speculated. But what had driven him into the Alaskan wilderness? And why did he die out there? Krakauer felt compelled to find out.

 

Into the Wild reconstructs McCandless’ childhood through to the end of college, when he gave away all his money and set out to hitchhike across America. Bit by bit the reader is told where the young man went and what he did to survive. We meet the people who came across him and helped him. We find out about his family. We get to know him.

 

And gradually my irritation faded and I began to understand the forces that pushed this boy out of the life he was born into. I recognized other people outside the world of the successful and how they were nearer to the essence of America the land than those floating on its surface in the cities. Not that I would exchange my comfortable and safe existence for theirs.

 

That land is powerful and it will overwhelm anyone who doesn’t treat it with respect and many who do. Krakauer tells the stories of several other such wanderers. He wants to make the point that McCandless is not exceptional but alongside doing that he tells you a lot about the vast spaces of America.

 

Alaska: ‘ …as the ground thawed, his route turned into a gauntlet of boggy muskeg and impenetrable alder… winter, not summer is the preferred season for travelling overland through the bush.

 

Utah: ‘The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and brick-red sand. Vegetation is lean. Shade from the withering sun is virtually non-existent.’

 

Gulf of California, Mexico: … a maze of irrigation canals, marshland and dead-end channels…a tarantula,, plaintive sunsets, windswept dunes, the long curve of empty coastline.

 

Krakauer has reconstructed McCandless’ journeying from the boy’s own diaries and interviews with people he crossed paths with. There is an element of fictionalising to create a narrative but when the evidence is sparse he tells you it is. The peregrination is interrupted by backstory, speculation and parallel tales. The character of Chris McCandless gradually emerges and this reader’s scepticism about this book gradually retreated.

 

But I was still heartened to come across this passage:

 

‘When McCandless turned up dead he was likened to [the Victorian explorer] Franklin not simply because both men starved but also because both were perceived to have lacked a requisite humility; both were thought to have possessed insufficient respect for the land. A century after Franklin’s death, the eminent explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson pointed out that the English explorer had never taken the trouble to learn the survival skills practiced by the Indians and Eskimos­–peoples who had managed to flourish “for generations, bringing up their children and taking care of their aged” in the same harsh country that killed Franklin. (Stefansson conveniently neglected to mention that many, many Indians and Eskimos have starved in the northern latitudes as well.)’

 

My initial reactions were not that far off the mark. Trying to survive as paleolithic hunter gatherer may well result in an early paleolithic death. But I did come away from this story less judgemental of one particular young man.