guhewk.cc 
I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wants me to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combining with him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my Alaskan Odyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will be leaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may have received to the return address listed below.
Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times that we spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through this Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing from me again in the future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly chang-ing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its in?credible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possi?ble, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out
there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.
Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. You will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.
TAKE CARE RON, ALEX
Please write back to:
Alex McCandless
Madison, SD 57042
Astoundingly, the eighty-one-year-old man took the brash twenty-four-year-old vagabonds advice to heart. Franz placed his furniture and most of his other possessions in a storage locker, bought a CMC Duravan, and outfitted it with bunks and camping gear. Then he moved out of his apartment and set up camp on the bajada.
Franz occupied McCandless’s old campsite, just past the hot springs. He arranged some rocks to create a parking area for the van, transplanted prickly pears and indigobushes for “landscap?ing.” And then he sat out in the desert, day after day after day, awaiting his young friend’s return.
Ronald Franz (this is not his real name; at his request I have given him a pseudonym) looks remarkably sturdy for a man in his ninth decade who has survived two heart attacks. Nearly six feet tall, with thick arms and a barrel chest, he stands erect, his shoulders unbowed. His ears are large beyond the proportions of his other features, as are his gnarled, meaty hands. When I walk into his camp in the desert and introduce myself, he is wearing old jeans and an immaculate white T-shirt, a decorative tooled-leather belt of his own creation, white socks, scuffed black loafers. His age is betrayed only by the creases across his brow and a proud, deeply pitted nose, over which a purple filigree of veins unfolds like a finely wrought tattoo. A little more than a year after McCandless’s death he regards the world through wary blue eyes.
To dispel Franz’s suspicion, I hand him an assortment of pho?tographs I’d taken on a trip to Alaska the previous summer, dur?ing which I’d retraced McCandless’s terminal journey on the Stampede Trail. The first several images in the stack are land?scapes—shots of the surrounding bush, the overgrown trail, dis?tant mountains, the Sushana River. Franz studies them in silence, occasionally nodding when I explain what they depict; he seems grateful to see them.
When he comes to the pictures of the bus in which the boy died, however, he stiffens abruptly. Several of these images show McCandless’s belongings inside the derelict vehicle; as soon as Franz realizes what he’s seeing, his eyes mist over, he thrusts the photos back at me without examining the rest, and the old man walks away to compose himself as I mumble a lame apology.
Franz no longer lives at McCandless’s campsite. A flash flood washed the makeshift road away, so he moved twenty miles out, toward the Borrego badlands, where he camps beside an isolated stand of cottonwoods. Oh-My-God Hot Springs is gone now, too, bulldozed and plugged with concrete by order of the Imperial Valley Health Commission. County officials say they eliminated the springs out of concern that bathers might become gravely ill from virulent microbes thought to flourish in the thermal pools.
“That sure could of been true,” says the clerk at the Salton City store, “but most people think they bulldozed ‘em ‘cause the springs was starting to attract too many hippies and drifters and scum like that. Good riddance, you ask me.”
For more than eight months after he said good-bye to McCandless, Franz remained at his campsite, scanning the road for the approach of a young man with a large pack, waiting pa?tiently for Alex to return. During the last week of 1992, the day after Christmas, he picked up two hitchhikers on his way back from a trip into Salton City to check his mail. “One fella was from Mississippi, I think; the other was a Native American,” Franz re?members. “On the way out to the hot springs, I started telling them about my friend Alex, and the adventure he’d set out to have in Alaska.”
Suddenly, the Indian youth interrupted: “Was his name Alex McCandless?”
“Yes, that’s right. So you’ve met him, then—”
“I hate to tell you this, mister, but your friend is dead. Froze to death up on the tundra. Just read about it in Outdoor magazine.”
In shock, Franz interrogated the hitchhiker at length. The de?tails rang true; his story added up. Something had gone horribly wrong. McCandless would never be coming back.
“When Alex left for Alaska,” Franz remembers, “I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn’t believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.
“After I dropped off the hitchhikers,” Franz continues, “I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bot?tle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn’t used to drinking, so it made me sick. Hoped it’d kill me, but it didn’t. Just made me real, real sick.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
CARTHAGE
There was some books... One was Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
It is true that many creative people fail to make mature per?sonal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early sepa?ration or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative per?son toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
ANTHONY STORR, SOLITUDE: A RETURN TO THE SELF
The big John Deere 8020 squats silently in the canted evening light, a long way from anywhere, surrounded by a half-mowed field of South Dakota milo. Wayne Westerberg’s muddy sneakers protrude from the maw of the combine, as if the machine were in the process of swallowing him whole, an overgrown metal reptile digesting its prey. “Hand me that goddamn wrench, will you?” an angry, muffled voice demands from deep within the ma?chine’s innards. “Or are you guys too busy standing around with your hands in your goddamn pockets to be of any use?” The com?bine has broken down for the third time in as many days, and Westerberg is frantically trying to replace a hard-to-reach bush?ing before nightfall.
An hour later he emerges, smeared with grease and chaff but successful. “Sorry about snapping like that,” Westerberg apolo?gizes. “We’ve been working too many eighteen-hour days. I guess I’m getting a little snarly, it being so late in the season and all, and us being shorthanded besides. We was counting on Alex being back at work by now.” Fifty days have gone by since McCandless’s body was discovered in Alaska on the Stampede Trail.
Seven months earlier, on a frosty March afternoon, McCand-less had ambled into the office at the Carthage grain elevator and announced that he was ready to go to work. “There we were, ring?ing up the morning’s tickets,” remembers Westerberg, “and in walks Alex with a big old backpack slung over his shoulder.” He told Westerberg he planned on staying until April 15, just long enough to put together a grubstake. He needed to buy a pile of new gear, he explained, because he was going to Alaska. McCand-less promised to come back to South Dakota in time to help with the autumn harvest, but he wanted to be in Fairbanks by the end of April in order to squeeze in as much time as possible up North before his return.
During those four weeks in Carthage, McCandless worked hard, doing dirty, tedious jobs that nobody else wanted to tackle: mucking out warehouses, exterminating vermin, painting, scyth?ing weeds. At one point, to reward McCandless with a task that involved slightly more skill, Westerberg attempted to teach him to operate a front-end loader. “Alex hadn’t been around machin-ery much,” Westerberg says with a shake of his head, “and it was pretty comical to watch him try to get the hang of the clutch and all those levers. He definitely wasn’t what you’d call mechanically minded.”
Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense.
Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have great difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest. “Alex wasn’t a total space cadet or anything,” says Wester?berg; “don’t get me wrong. But there was gaps in his thinking. I remember once I went over to the house, walked into the kitchen, and noticed a god-awful stink. I mean it smelled nasty in there. I opened the microwave, and the bottom of it was filled with ran?cid grease. Alex had been using it to cook chicken, and it never oc?curred to him that the grease had to drain somewhere. It wasn’t that he was too lazy to clean it up—Alex always kept things real neat and orderly—it was just that he hadn’t noticed the grease.”
Soon after McCandless returned to Carthage that spring, West?erberg introduced him to his longtime, on-again, off-again girl?friend, Gail Borah, a petite, sad-eyed woman, as slight as a heron, with delicate features and long blond hair. Thirty-five years old, divorced, a mother of two teenage children, she quickly became close to McCandless. “He was kind of shy at first,” says Borah. “He acted like it was hard for him to be around people. I just fig?ured that was because he’d spent so much time by himself.
“I had Alex over to the house for supper just about every night,” Borah continues. “He was a big eater. Never left any food on his plate. Never. He was a good cook, too. Sometimes he’d have me over to Wayne’s place and fix supper for everybody. Cooked a lot of rice. You’d think he would of got tired of it, but he never did. Said he could live for a month on nothing but twenty-five pounds of rice.
“Alex talked a lot when we got together,” Borah recalls. “Seri?ous stuff, like he was baring his soul, kind of. He said he could tell me things that he couldn’t tell the others. You could see some?thing was gnawing at him. It was pretty obvious he didn’t get along with his family, but he never said much about any of them except Carine, his little sister. He said they were pretty close. Said she was beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would turn their heads and stare.”
Westerberg, for his part, didn’t concern himself with McCand?less’s family problems. “Whatever reason he had for being pissed off, I figured it must have been a good one. Now that he’s dead, though, I don’t know anymore. If Alex was here right now, I’d be tempted to chew him out good: ‘What the hell were you thinking? Not speaking to your family for all that time, treating them like dirt!’ One of the kids that works for me, fuck, he don’t even have any goddamn parents, but you don’t hear him bitching. Whatever the deal was with Alex’s family, I guarantee you I’ve seen a lot worse. Knowing Alex, I think he must have just got stuck on something that happened between him and his dad and couldn’t leave it be.”
Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’s extrava?gantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt’s authority through high school and college to a surprising degree, but the boy raged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he perceived to be his father’s moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parents’ lifestyle, the tyranny of their conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled—and when he finally did, it was with characteristic immoderation.
Shortly before he disappeared, Chris complained to Carine that their parents’ behavior was “so irrational, so oppressive, dis?respectful and insulting that I finally passed my breaking point.” He went on:
Since they won’t ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation I’m going to let them think they are right, I’m going to let them think that I’m “coming around to see their side of things “ and that our relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my par?ents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever.
The chill Westerberg sensed between Alex and his parents stood in marked contrast to the warmth McCandless exhibited in Carthage. Outgoing and extremely personable when the spirit moved him, he charmed a lot of folks. There was mail waiting for him when he arrived back in South Dakota, correspondence from people he’d met on the road, including what Westerberg re?members as “letters from a girl who had a big crush on him, someone he’d gotten to know in some Timbuktu—some camp?ground, I think.” But McCandless never mentioned any romantic entanglements to either Westerberg or Borah.
“I don’t recollect Alex ever talking about any girlfriends,” says Westerberg. “Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have a family some day. You could tell he didn’t take relationships lightly. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would go out and pick up girls just to get laid.”
It was clear to Borah, too, that McCandless hadn’t spent much time cruising singles bars. “One night a bunch of us went out to a bar over in Madison,” says Borah, “and it was hard to get him out on the dance floor. But once he was out there, he wouldn’t sit down. We had a blast. After Alex died and all, Carine told me that as far as she knew, I was one of the only girls he ever went danc?ing with.”
In high school McCandless had enjoyed a close rapport with two or three members of the opposite sex, and Carine recalls one instance when he got drunk and tried to bring a girl up to his bed?room in the middle of the night (they made so much noise stum?bling up the stairs that Billie was awakened and sent the girl home). But there is little evidence that he was sexually active as a teenager and even less to suggest that he slept with any woman after graduating from high school. (Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that he was ever sexually intimate with a man.) It seems that McCandless was drawn to women but remained largely or entirely celibate, as chaste as a monk.
Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol?stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc?tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand?less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”
We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.
