The Tripod

"Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause 'the west is the best.' And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. 10 days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."

--- Alexander Supertramp

(May 1992)

Sean Penn's Into The Wild is the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, who, after graduating from Emory in the spring of 1990, severed ties with his family, donated $25,000 in savings to charity, and took off in his yellow Datsun on an odyssey across the country. Chris would soon abandon his car, burn his remaining cash, leave behind most of his possessions and become Alexander Supertramp.

Embracing this newly created identity, Chris lived for the next two years on the outskirts of society, the rough edges most of us only read about or imagine exist.

He moved about North America, through storied forests of the Pacific Northwest to the grain fields of South Dakota; from the desert, the canyons, the red rocks of Arizona and the rest of the South, to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, and to the transcendent and pure land of Alaska.

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth," wrote Henry David Thoreau. And indeed, that is what Chris was looking for: Truth in a world with which he was fed up and skeptical of. In April 1992, Chris walked into the Alaskan wilderness. His parents had not heard from him in two years and would not know where he was until four months later when his body, wrapped tightly in the blue sleeping bag his mother had made for him, was found by six hunters.

Penn's movie is based on the book by Jon Krakauer, which, in turn, was an extension of his article in Outside magazine from January 1993. The film begins with Chris (played with great brilliance by Emile Hirsch) being dropped off by Jim Gallien (played by the real Jim Gallien) --- one of many people to offer a ride or hot meal and the last person Chris ever saw --- at the Stampede Trail, on the edge of Denali National Park, and to the North of Mt. McKinley. This is where Chris began his journey into the depths of solitude and starvation, his final Alaskan Adventure. He wanted to live off the land, believing happiness comes not from human relationship but from a connection to the world around us, with nature and the basic human constitution.

Penn, who clearly now counts McCandless as a personal hero, made a great effort to portray this worldly, if not inexperienced, vision. Indeed, while the movie follows with great precision the relationships Chris formed along the way --- and which he would then quickly dissolve --- it is wholly about the world around us, a completely visual movie with long shots of the surrounding landscape, full of beauty, sorrow, and truth. Penn was admirably helped in this endeavor by the gifted director of photography, Eric Gautier, who also worked on The Motorcycle Diaries, another movie about the depths of self-discovery through ambling journeys. This is a wonderful expression of McCandless's wanderlust, yet Penn, on occasion, overplays his hand with frenetic movements and too much Eddie Vedder on the soundtrack. As Krakauer wrote, Chris believed "in the reliability of your hands and feet and head," in an "overpowering clarity of purpose." He desired simplicity in the drive for your dreams, that if you want something you just reach out and touch it, take and embrace it. Indeed, he would have preferred silence and a moment of spiritual enlightenment.

Chris wrote to his friend Ronald Franz, "God has placed [joy] 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." Certainly, Chris desired an alternative life of asceticism and moral absolutism based on the later writings of Tolstoy, as both Penn and Krakauer make clear. Yet his bravado and arrogance precede him: He was undeniably cruel to his family and those people whose lives he touched; he never learned that Tolstoy, who he practically worshiped, divorced from a life of pleasures only after having lived such a life. Indeed, he had not lived enough for such a renunciation of society to be truly meaningful. Moreover, Penn pushes this conception of a chaste Chris as he often compares him with Jesus --- floating naked down a river in crucifixion form and the last, enduring shot of a euphoric face on the verge of enlightenment.

However, in the middle of all this, it is certainly normal for a young man to pursue a line of recklessness, to take risks and challenge conventional behavior. It is why so many young people drink so much and take so many drugs, why teenagers fantasize about fast cars and play extreme sports. Chris, in his normal fashion, simply went to the extreme, to be challenged in the only way he knew how. And when he died, which was most likely due to a mix of starvation and some toxic mold he may have eaten, he was thankful for the life he had been given, for the world in which he lived, and he was at peace.

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

-- Mary Oliver

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