CARTHAGE

/ wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

leo tolstoy, “family happiness”

passage highlighted in one of the books

found with chris mccandless’s remains

It should not be denied... that being footloose has always ex­hilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from his­tory and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.

wallace stegner, the american west as living space

Carthage, South Dakota, population 274, is a sleepy little cluster of clapboard houses, tidy yards, and weathered brick storefronts rising humbly from the immensity of the northern plains, set adrift in time. Stately rows of cottonwoods shade a grid of streets seldom disturbed by moving vehicles. There’s one grocery in town, one bank, a single gas station, a lone bar—the Cabaret, where Wayne Westerberg is sipping a cocktail and chewing on a sweet cigar, remembering the odd young man he knew as Alex.

The Cabaret’s plywood-paneled walls are hung with deer antlers, Old Milwaukee beer promos, and mawkish paintings of game birds taking flight. Tendrils of cigarette smoke rise from clumps of farmers in overalls and dusty feed caps, their tired faces as grimy as coal miners’. Speaking in short, matter-of-fact phrases, they worry aloud over the fickle weather and fields of sunflowers still too wet to cut, while above their heads Ross Perot s sneering visage flickers across a silent television screen. In eight days the nation will elect Bill Clinton president. It’s been nearly two months now since the body of Chris McCandless turned up in Alaska.

“These are what Alex used to drink,” says Westerberg with a frown, swirling the ice in his White Russian. “He used to sit right there at the end of the bar and tell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours. A lot of folks here in town got pretty attached to old Alex. Kind of a strange deal what happened to him.”

Westerberg, a hyperkinetic man with thick shoulders and a black goatee, owns a grain elevator in Carthage and another one a few miles out of town but spends every summer running a cus­tom combine crew that follows the harvest from Texas north to the Canadian border. In the fall of 1990, he was wrapping up the season in north-central Montana, cutting barley for Coors and Anheuser-Busch. On the afternoon of September 10, driving out of Cut Bank after buying some parts for a malfunctioning com­bine, he pulled over for a hitchhiker, an amiable kid who said his name was Alex McCandless.

McCandless was smallish with the hard, stringy physique of an itinerant laborer. There was something arresting about the youngster’s eyes. Dark and emotive, they suggested a trace of ex­otic blood in his heritage—Greek, maybe, or Chippewa—and conveyed a vulnerability that made Westerberg want to take the kid under his wing. He had the kind of sensitive good looks that women made a big fuss over, Westerberg imagined. His face had a strange elasticity: It would be slack and expressionless one minute, only to twist suddenly into a gaping, oversize grin that distorted his features and exposed a mouthful of horsy teeth. He was nearsighted and wore steel-rimmed glasses. He looked hungry.

Ten minutes after picking up McCandless, Westerberg stopped in the town of Ethridge to deliver a package to a friend. “He of­fered us both a beer,” says Westerberg, “and asked Alex how long it’d been since he ate. Alex allowed how it’d been a couple of days. Said he’d kind of run out of money.” Overhearing this, the friend s wife insisted on cooking Alex a big dinner, which he wolfed down, and then he fell asleep at the table.

McCandless had told Westerberg that his destination was Saco Hot Springs, 240 miles to the east on U.S. Highway 2, a place he’d heard about from some “rubber tramps” (i.e., vagabonds who owned a vehicle; as distinguished from “leather tramps,” who lacked personal transportation and were thus forced to hitchhike or walk). Westerberg had replied that he could take McCandless only ten miles down the road, at which point he would be turn­ing north toward Sunburst, where he kept a trailer near the fields he was cutting. By the time Westerberg steered over to the shoul­der to drop McCandless off, it was ten-thirty at night and raining hard. “Jeeze,” Westerberg told him, “I hate to leave you out here in the goddamn rain. You got a sleeping bag—why don’t you come on up to Sunburst, spend the night in the trailer?”

McCandless stayed with Westerberg for three days, riding out with his crew each morning as the workers piloted their lumber­ing machines across the ocean of ripe blond grain. Before McCandless and Westerberg went their separate ways, Wester­berg told the young man to look him up in Carthage if he ever needed a job.

“Was only a couple of weeks that went by before Alex showed up in town,” Westerberg remembers. He gave McCandless em­ployment at the grain elevator and rented him a cheap room in one of the two houses he owned.

“I’ve given jobs to lots of hitchhikers over the years,” says Westerberg. “Most of them weren’t much good, didn’t really want to work. It was a different story with Alex. He was the hard­est worker I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter what it was, he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of the bottom of the hole—jobs where you’d get so damn dirty you couldn’t even tell what you looked like at the end of the day. And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for himself.

“You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent,” Wester-berg reflects, draining his third drink. “He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer be­fore he could go on to the next thing.”

At one point Westerberg discovered from a tax form that McCandless’s real name was Chris, not Alex. “He never explained why he’d changed his name,” says Westerberg. “From things he said, you could tell something wasn’t right between him and his family, but I don’t like to pry into other people’s business, so I never asked about it.”

If McCandless felt estranged from his parents and siblings, he found a surrogate family in Westerberg and his employees, most of whom lived in Westerberg’s Carthage home. A few blocks from the center of town, it is a simple, two-story Victorian in the Queen Anne style, with a big cottonwood towering over the front yard. The living arrangements were loose and convivial. The four or five inhabitants took turns cooking for one another, went drinking together, and chased women together, without success.

McCandless quickly became enamored of Carthage. He liked the community’s stasis, its plebeian virtues and unassuming mien. The place was a back eddy, a pool of jetsam beyond the pull of the main current, and that suited him just fine. That fall he developed a lasting bond with both the town and Wayne Wester­berg.

Westerberg, in his mid-thirties, was brought to Carthage as a young boy by adoptive parents. A Renaissance man of the plains, he is a farmer, welder, businessman, machinist, ace mechanic, commodities speculator, licensed airplane pilot, computer pro­grammer, electronics troubleshooter, video-game repairman. Shortly before he met McCandless, however, one of his talents had got him in trouble with the law.

Westerberg had been drawn into a scheme to build and sell “black boxes,” which illegally unscramble satellite-television transmissions, allowing people to watch encrypted cable pro­gramming without paying for it. The FBI caught wind of this, set up a sting, and arrested Westerberg. Contrite, he copped a plea to a single felony count and on October 10, 1990, some two weeks after McCandless arrived in Carthage, began serving a four-month sentence in Sioux Falls. With Westerberg in stir, there was no work at the grain elevator for McCandless, so on October 23, sooner than he might have under different circumstances, the boy left town and resumed a nomadic existence.

The attachment McCandless felt for Carthage remained pow­erful, however. Before departing, he gave Westerberg a treasured 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. On the title page he in­scribed, “Transferred to Wayne Westerberg from Alexander. Oc­tober, 1990. Listen to Pierre.” (The latter is a reference to Tolstoy’s protagonist and alter ego, Pierre Bezuhov—altruistic, questing, illegitimately born.) And McCandless stayed in touch with Westerberg as he roamed the West, calling or writing Carthage every month or two. He had all his mail forwarded to Westerberg’s address and told almost everyone he met thereafter that South Dakota was his home.

In truth McCandless had been raised in the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Annandale, Virginia. His father, Walt, is an eminent aerospace engineer who designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle and other high-profile projects while in the employ of NASA and Hughes Aircraft in the 1960s and 70s. In 1978, Walt went into business for himself, launching a small but eventually prosperous consulting firm, User Systems, Incorporated. His partner in the venture was Chris’s mother, Bil-lie. There were eight children in the extended family: a younger sister, Carine, with whom Chris was extremely close, and six half-brothers and sisters from Walt’s first marriage.

In May 1990, Chris graduated from Emory University in At­lanta, where he’d been a columnist for, and editor of, the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, and had distinguished himself as a history and anthropology major with a 3.72 grade-point average. He was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined, in­sisting that titles and honors are irrelevant.

The final two years of his college education had been paid for with a forty-thousand-dollar bequest left by a friend of the fam­ily’s; more than twenty-four thousand dollars remained at the time of Chris’s graduation, money his parents thought he in­tended to use for law school. “We misread him,” his father ad­mits. What Walt, Billie, and Carine didn’t know when they flew down to Atlanta to attend Chris’s commencement—what nobody knew—was that he would shortly donate all the money in his college fund to OXFAM America, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger.

The graduation ceremony was on May 12, a Saturday. The family sat through a long-winded commencement address deliv­ered by Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, and then Billie snapped pictures of a grinning Chris traversing the stage to re­ceive his diploma.

The next day was Mother’s Day. Chris gave Billie candy, flow­ers, a sentimental card. She was surprised and extremely touched: It was the first present she had received from her son in more than two years, since he had announced to his parents that, on principle, he would no longer give or accept gifts. Indeed, Chris had only recently upbraided Walt and Billie for expressing their desire to buy him a new car as a graduation present and of­fering to pay for law school if there wasn’t enough money left in his college fund to cover it.

He already had a perfectly good car, he insisted: a beloved 1982 Datsun B210, slightly dented but mechanically sound, with 128,000 miles on the odometer. “I can’t believe they’d try and buy me a car,” he later complained in a letter to Carine,

or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was going to go.... I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, a car that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in all those thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will never trade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to—yet they ignore what I say and think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be real careful not to accept any gifts from them in the fu­ture because they will think they have bought my respect.

Chris had purchased the secondhand yellow Datsun when he was a senior in high school. In the years since, he’d been in the habit of taking it on extended solo road trips when classes weren’t in session, and during that graduation weekend he casu­ally mentioned to his parents that he intended to spend the up­coming summer on the road as well. His exact words were “I think I’m going to disappear for a while.”

Neither parent made anything of this announcement at the time, although Walt did gently admonish his son, saying “Hey, make sure you come see us before you go.” Chris smiled and sort of nodded, a response that Walt and Billie took as an affirmation that he would visit them in Annandale before the summer was out, and then they said their good-byes.

Toward the end of June, Chris, still in Atlanta, mailed his par­ents a copy of his final grade report: A in Apartheid and South African Society and History of Anthropological Thought; A minus in Contemporary African Politics and the Food Crisis in Africa. A brief note was attached:

Here is a copy of my final transcript. Gradewise things went pretty well and I ended up with a high cumulative average.

Thankyou for the pictures, the shaving gear, and the postcard from Paris. It seems that you really enjoyed your trip there. It must have been a lot of fun.

I gave Lloyd [Chris’s closest friend at Emory] his picture, and he was very grateful; he did not have a shot of his diploma getting handed to him.

Not much else happening, but it’s starting to get real hot and humid down here. Say Hi to everyone for me.

It was the last anyone in Chris’s family would ever hear from him.

During that final year in Atlanta, Chris had lived off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates, and a table. He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barracks. And he didn’t have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him.

By the beginning of August 1990, Chris’s parents had heard nothing from their son since they’d received his grades in the mail, so they decided to drive down to Atlanta for a visit. When they arrived at his apartment, it was empty and a for rent sign was taped to the window. The manager said that Chris had moved out at the end of June. Walt and Billie returned home to find that all the letters they’d sent their son that summer had been returned in a bundle. “Chris had instructed the post office to hold them until August 1, apparently so we wouldn’t know anything was up,” says Billie. “It made us very, very wor­ried.”

By then Chris was long gone. Five weeks earlier he’d loaded all his belongings into his little car and headed west without an itin­erary. The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly

new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Super-tramp, master of his own destiny.

[See Map Page 24]

CHAPTER FOUR

DETRITAL WASH

The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical.... Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands... In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land....

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pil­grims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to es­cape but to find reality.

paul shepard, man in the landscape:

A historic view of the esthetics of nature

The bear-paw poppy, Arctomecon califomica, is a wildflower found in an isolated corner of the Mojave Desert and nowhere else in the world. In late spring it briefly produces a delicate golden bloom, but for most of the year the plant huddles un­adorned and unnoticed on the parched earth. A. califomica is sufficiently rare that it has been classified as an endangered species. In October 1990, more than three months after McCan-dless left Atlanta, a National Park Service ranger named Bud Walsh was sent into the backcountry of Lake Mead National Recreation Area to tally bear-paw poppies so that the federal gov­ernment might better know just how scarce the plants were.

A. califomica grows only in gypsum soil of a sort that occurs in abundance along the south shore of Lake Mead, so that is where Walsh led his team of rangers to conduct the botanical survey. They turned off Temple Bar Road, drove two roadless miles down the bed of Detrital Wash, parked their rigs near the lakeshore, and started scrambling up the steep east bank of the wash, a slope of crumbly white gypsum. A few minutes later, as they neared the top of the bank, one of the rangers happened to glance back down into the wash while pausing to catch his breath. “Hey! Look down there!” he yelled. “What the hell is that?”

At the edge of the dry riverbed, in a thicket of saltbush not far from where they had parked, a large object was concealed be­neath a dun-colored tarpaulin. When the rangers pulled off the tarp, they found an old yellow Datsun without license plates. A note taped to the windshield read, “This piece of shit has been abandoned. Whoever can get it out of here can have it.”

The doors had been left unlocked. The floorboards were plas­tered with mud, apparently from a recent flash flood. When he looked inside, Walsh found a Gianini guitar, a saucepan contain­ing $4.93 in loose change, a football, a garbage bag full of old clothes, a fishing rod and tackle, a new electric razor, a harmon­ica, a set of jumper cables, twenty-five pounds of rice, and in the glove compartment, the keys to the vehicle’s ignition.

The rangers searched the surrounding area “for anything sus­picious,” according to Walsh, and then departed. Five days later another ranger returned to the abandoned vehicle, managed to jump-start it without difficulty and drove it out to the National Park Service maintenance yard at Temple Bar. “He drove it back at sixty miles an hour,” Walsh recalls. “Said the thing ran like a champ.” Attempting to learn who owned the car, the rangers sent out a bulletin over the Teletype to relevant law-enforcement agencies and ran a detailed search of computer records across the Southwest to see if the Datsun s VIN was associated with any crimes. Nothing turned up.

By and by the rangers traced the car’s serial number to the Hertz Corporation, the vehicle’s original owner; Hertz said they had sold it as a used rental car many years earlier and had no in­terest in reclaiming it. “Whoa! Great!” Walsh remembers think­ing. “A freebie from the road gods—a car like this will make a great undercover vehicle for drug interdiction.” And indeed it did. Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make undercover drug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national recreation area, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating out of a trailer park near Bullhead City.

“We’re still getting a lot of mileage out of that old car even now,” Walsh proudly reports two and a half years after finding the Datsun. “Put a few bucks of gas in the thing, and it will go all day. Real reliable. I kind of wondered why nobody ever showed up to reclaim it.”

The Datsun, of course, belonged to Chris McCandless. After pi­loting it west out of Atlanta, he’d arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6, riding a giddy Emersonian high. Ig­noring posted warnings that off-road driving is strictly forbid­den, McCandless steered the Datsun off the pavement where it crossed a broad, sandy wash. He drove two miles down the riverbed to the south shore of the lake. The temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The empty desert stretched into the dis­tance, shimmering in the heat. Surrounded by chollas, bur sage, and the comical scurrying of collared lizards, McCandless pitched his tent in the puny shade of a tamarisk and basked in his newfound freedom.

Detrital Wash extends for some fifty miles from Lake Mead into the mountains north of Kingman; it drains a big chunk of country. Most of the year the wash is as dry as chalk. During the summer months, however, superheated air rises from the scorched earth like bubbles from the bottom of a boiling kettle, rushing heavenward in turbulent convection currents. Frequently the updrafts create cells of muscular, anvil-headed cu­mulonimbus clouds that can rise thirty thousand feet or more above the Mojave. Two days after McCandless set up camp beside Lake Mead, an unusually robust wall of thunderheads reared up in the afternoon sky, and it began to rain, very hard, over much of the Detrital Valley.

McCandless was camped at the edge of the wash, a couple of feet higher than the main channel, so when the bore of brown water came rushing down from the high country, he had just enough time to gather his tent and belongings and save them from being swept away. There was nowhere to move the car, how­ever, as the only route of egress was now a foaming, full-blown river. As it turned out, the flash flood didn’t have enough power to carry away the vehicle or even to do any lasting damage. But it did get the engine wet, so wet that when McCandless tried to start the car soon thereafter, the engine wouldn’t catch, and in his impatience he drained the battery.

With the battery dead there was no way to get the Datsun run­ning. If he hoped to get the car back to a paved road, McCand­less had no choice but to walk out and notify the authorities of his predicament. If he went to the rangers, however, they would have some irksome questions for him: Why had he ignored posted regulations and driven down the wash in the first place? Was he aware that the vehicle’s registration had expired two years before and had not been renewed? Did he know that his drivers license had also expired, and the vehicle was uninsured as well?

Truthful responses to these queries were not likely to be well received by the rangers. McCandless could endeavor to explain that he answered to statutes of a higher order—that as a latter-day adherent of Henry David Thoreau, he took as gospel the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and thus considered it his moral responsibility to flout the laws of the state. It was im­probable, however, that deputies of the federal government would share his point of view. There would be thickets of red tape to negotiate and fines to pay. His parents would no doubt be con­tacted. But there was a way to avoid such aggravation: He could simply abandon the Datsun and resume his odyssey on foot. And that’s what he decided to do.

Instead of feeling distraught over this turn of events, moreover, McCandless was exhilarated: He saw the flash flood as an oppor­tunity to shed unnecessary baggage. He concealed the car as best he could beneath a brown tarp, stripped it of its Virginia plates, and hid them. He buried his Winchester deer-hunting rifle and a few other possessions that he might one day want to recover. Then, in a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tol­stoy proud, he arranged all his paper currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal ten­der was promptly reduced to ash and smoke.

We know all of this because McCandless documented the burning of his money and most of the events that followed in a journal-snapshot album he would later leave with Wayne West-erberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska. Although the tone of the journal—written in the third person in a stilted, self-consciousness voice—often veers toward melodrama, the avail­able evidence indicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was a credo he took seriously.

After loading his few remaining possessions into a backpack, McCandless set out on July 10 to hike around Lake Mead. This, his journal acknowledges, turned out to be a “tremendous mis­take... In extreme July temperatures becomes delirious.” Suf­fering from heat stroke, he managed to flag down some passing boaters, who gave him a lift to Callville Bay, a marina near the west end of the lake, where he stuck out his thumb and took to the road.

McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law, savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way. Allowing his life to be shaped by circumstance, he hitched to Lake Tahoe, hiked into the Sierra Nevada, and spent a week walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail before exiting the mountains and returning to the pavement.

At the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself Crazy Ernie and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California; photographs of the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded by goats and chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, old appliances, and mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven days with six other vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had no intention of ever paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutter in the yard, pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot. Then he resumed a life of constant motion, riding his thumb north and west through Red Bluff, Weaverville, and Willow Creek.

At Arcata, California, in the dripping redwood forests of the Pacific shore, McCandless turned right on U.S. Highway 101 and headed up the coast. Sixty miles south of the Oregon line, near the town of Orick, a pair of drifters in an old van pulled over to consult their map when they noticed a boy crouching in the bushes off the side of the road. “He was wearing long shorts and this really stupid hat,” says Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old rub­ber tramp who was traveling around the West selling knick-knacks at flea markets and swap meets with her boyfriend, Bob. “He had a book about plants with him, and he was using it to pick berries, collecting them in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. He looked pretty pitiful, so I yelled, ‘Hey, you want a ride some­where?’ I thought maybe we could give him a meal or something.

“We got to talking. He was a nice kid. Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d been surviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it. Said he was tramp­ing around the country, having a big old adventure. He told us about abandoning his car, about burning all his money. I said, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Claimed he didn’t need money. I have a son about the same age Alex was, and we’ve been es­tranged for a few years now. So I said to Bob, ‘Man, we got to take this kid with us. You need to school him about some things.’ Alex took a ride from us up to Orick Beach, where we were staying, and camped with us for a week. He was a really good kid. We

thought the world of him. When he left, we never expected to hear from him again, but he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years Alex sent us a postcard every month or two.”

From Orick, McCandless continued north up the coast. He passed through Pistol River, Coos Bay, Seal Rock, Manzanita, As-toria; Hoquiam, Humptulips, Queets; Forks, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Seattle. “He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

On August 10, shortly before meeting Jan Burres and Bob, McCandless had been ticketed for hitchhiking near Willow Creek, in the gold-mining country east of Eureka. In an unchar­acteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents’ Annandale address when the arresting officer demanded to know his permanent place of residence. The unpaid ticket appeared in Walt and Bil-lie’s mailbox at the end of August.

Walt and Billie, terribly concerned over Chris’s vanishing act, had by that time already contacted the Annandale police, who had been of no help. When the ticket arrived from California, they became frantic. One of their neighbors was the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approached this man, an army general, for advice. The general put him in touch with a private investigator named Peter Kalitka, who’d done con­tract work for both the DIA and the CIA. He was the best, the gen­eral assured Walt; if Chris was out there, Kalitka would find him.

Using the Willow Creek ticket as a starting point, Kalitka launched an extremely thorough search, chasing down leads that led as far afield as Europe and South Africa. His efforts, however, turned up nothing—until December, when he learned from an in­spection of tax records that Chris had given away his college fund to OXFAM.

“That really scared us,” says Walt. “By that point we had ab­solutely no idea what Chris could be up to. The hitchhiking ticket just didn’t make any sense. He loved that Datsun so much

it was mind-boggling to me that he would ever abandon it and travel on foot. Although, in retrospect, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Chris was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a dead run.”

As Kalitka was trying to pick up Chris’s scent in California, McCandless was already far away, hitching east across the Cas­cade Range, across the sagebrush uplands and lava beds of the Columbia River basin, across the Idaho panhandle, into Mon­tana. There, outside Cut Bank, he crossed paths with Wayne Westerberg and by the end of September was working for him in Carthage. When Westerberg was jailed and the work came to a halt, and with winter coming on, McCandless headed for warmer climes.

On October 28, he caught a ride with a long-haul trucker into Needles, California. “Overjoyed upon reaching the Colorado River,” McCandless wrote in his journal. Then he left the highway and started walking south through the desert, following the river-bank. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock, Arizona, a dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway inter­sects the California border. While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminum canoe for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south, across the border with Mexico.

This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the gulf, has little in common with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the Grand Canyon, some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Emasculated by dams and diversion canals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to reservoir through some of the hottest, starkest country on the continent. McCand­less was stirred by the austerity of this landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, am­plified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

From Topock, McCandless paddled south down Lake Havasu under a bleached dome of sky, huge and empty. He made a brief excursion up the Bill Williams River, a tributary of the Colorado,

then continued downstream through the Colorado River Indian Reservation, the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage. Leaving the river for a day to track a herd of wild horses, he came across a sign warning that he was tres­passing on the U.S. Army’s highly restricted Yuma Proving Ground. McCandless was deterred not in the least.

At the end of November, he paddled through Yuma, where he stopped long enough to replenish his provisions and send a post­card to Westerberg in care of Glory House, the Sioux Falls work-release facility where Westerberg was doing time. “Hey Wayne!” the card reads,

How’s it going? I hope that your situation has improved since the time we last spoke. I’ve been tramping around Arizona for about a month now. This is a good state! There is all kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful. But apart from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank you once again for all your hospitality. It’s rare to find a man as generous and good natured as you are. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when 1 was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal. I couldn’t make it now without money, however, as there is very little fruiting agriculture down here at this time.

Please thank Kevin again for all the clothes he gave me, I would have froze to death without them. I hope he got that book to you. Wayne, you really should read War and Peace. I meant it when I said you had one of the highest characters of any man I’d met. That is a very powerful and highly symbolic book. It has things in it that I think you will understand. Things that escape most people. As for me, I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One day I’ll get back to you Wayne and repay some of your kindness. A case of Jack Daniels maybe? Til then III always think of you as a friend. god bless You, alexander

On December 2, he reached the Morelos Dam and the Mexican border. Worried that he would be denied entry because he was carrying no identification, he sneaked into Mexico by paddling through the dam’s open floodgates and shooting the spillway below. “Alex looks quickly around for signs of trouble,” his jour­nal records. “But his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed or ig­nored. Alexander is jubilant!”

His jubilance, however, was short-lived. Below the Morelos Dam the river turns into a maze of irrigation canals, marshland, and dead-end channels, among which McCandless repeatedly lost his way:

Canals break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumb­founded. Encounters some canal officials who can speak a little English. They tell him he has not been traveling south but west and is headed for the center of the Baja Peninsula. Alex is crushed. Pleads and persists that there must be some waterway to the Gulf of California. They stare at Alex and think him crazy. But then a passionate conversation breaks out amongst them, accompanied by maps and the flourish of pencils. After 10 min­utes they present to Alex a route which apparently will take him to the ocean. He is overjoyed and hope bursts back into his heart. Following the map he reverses back up the canal until he comes upon the Canal de Independencia, which he takes east. Accord­ing to the map this canal should bisect the Wellteco Canal, which will turn south and flow all the way to the ocean. But his hopes are quickly smashed when the canal comes to a dead end in the middle of the desert. A reconnaissance mission reveals, however, that Alex has merely run back into the bed of the now dead and dry Colorado River. He discovers another canal about 1/2 mile on the other side of the river bed. He decides to portage to this canal.

It took McCandless most of three days to carry the canoe and his gear to the new canal. The journal entry for December 5 records,

At last! Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads south. Worries and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller... Local inhabitants help him portage around a bar­rier... Alex finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans...

12/6 Small but dangerous waterfalls litter the canal.

12/9 All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach the ocean but merely peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded. Decides he must be close to ocean and elects to try and work way through swamp to sea. Alex becomes progressively lost to point where he must push canoe through reeds and drag it through mud. All is in despair. Finds some dry ground to camp in swamp at sundown. Next day, on 12/10, Alex resumes quest for an open­ing to the sea, but only becomes more confused, traveling in cir­cles. Completely demoralized and frustrated he lays in his canoe at day’s end and weeps. But then by fantastic chance he comes upon Mexican duck hunting guides who can speak English. He tells them his story and his quest for the sea. They say there is no outlet to the sea. But then one among them agrees to tow Alex back to his basecamp [behind a small motor skiff], and drive him and the canoe [in the bed of a pickup truck] to the ocean. It is a miracle.

The duck hunters dropped him in El Golfo de Santa Clara, a fishing village on the Gulf of California. From there McCandless took to the sea, traveling south down the eastern edge of the gulf. Having reached his destination, McCandless slowed his pace, and his mood became more contemplative. He took photographs of a tarantula, plaintive sunsets, windswept dunes, the long curve of empty coastline. The journal entries become short and per­functory. He wrote fewer than a hundred words over the month that followed.

On December 14, weary of paddling, he hauled the canoe far up the beach, climbed a sandstone bluff, and set up camp on the edge of a desolate plateau. He stayed there for ten days, until high winds forced him to seek refuge in a cave midway up the precip­itous face of the bluff, where he remained for another ten days. He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over the Gran Desierto—the Great Desert: seventeen hundred square miles of shifting dunes, the largest expanse of pure sand desert in North America. A day later he resumed paddling down the bar­ren shore.

His journal entry for January 11, 1991, begins “A very fateful day.” After traveling some distance south, he beached the canoe on a sandbar far from shore to observe the powerful tides. An hour later violent gusts started blowing down from the desert, and the wind and tidal rips conspired to carry him out to sea. The water by this time was a chaos of whitecaps that threatened to swamp and capsize his tiny craft. The wind increased to gale force. The whitecaps grew into high, breaking waves. “In great frustration,” the journal reads,

he screams and beats canoe with oar. The oar breaks. Alex has one spare oar. He calms himself. If loses second oar is dead. Fi­nally through extreme effort and much cursing he manages to beach canoe on jetty and collapses exhausted on sand at sun­down. This incident led Alexander to decide to abandon canoe and return north.

On January 16, McCandless left the stubby metal boat on a hummock of dune grass southeast of El Golfo de Santa Clara and started walking north up the deserted beach. He had not seen or talked to another soul in thirty-six days. For that entire period he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what marine life he could pull from the sea, an experience that would later con­vince him he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush.

He was back at the United States border on January 18. Caught by immigration authorities trying to slip into the country without ID, he spent a night in custody before concocting a story that sprang him from the slammer, minus his .38-caliber hand­gun, a “beautiful Colt Python, to which he was much attached.”

McCandless spent the next six weeks on the move across the Southwest, traveling as far east as Houston and as far west as the Pacific coast. To avoid being rolled by the unsavory characters who rule the streets and freeway overpasses where he slept, he learned to bury what money he had before entering a city, then recover it on the way out of town. On February 3, according to his journal, McCandless went to Los Angeles “to get a ID and a job but feels extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately.”

Six days later, camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with Thomas and Karin, a young German couple who had given him a ride, he wrote, “Can this be the same Alex that set out in July, 1990? Malnutrition and the road have taken their toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring.”

On February 24, seven and a half months after he abandoned the Datsun, McCandless returned to Detrital Wash. The Park Ser­vice had long since impounded the vehicle, but he unearthed his old Virginia plates, SJF-421, and a few belongings he’d buried there. Then he hitched into Las Vegas and found a job at an Ital­ian restaurant. “Alexander buried his backpack in the desert on 2/27 and entered Las Vegas with no money and no ID,” the jour­nal tells us.

He lived on the streets with bums, tramps, and winos for several weeks. Vegas would not be the end of the story, however. On May 10, itchy feet returned and Alex left his job in Vegas, retrieved his backpack, and hit the road again, though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you won’t be tak­ing many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no pic­ture book for the period May 10, 1991-January 7, 1992. But this is not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great tri­umphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.

CHAPTER FIVE

BULLHEAD CITY

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control.

jack london, the call of the wild

All Hail the Dominant Primordial Beast! And Captain Ahab Too! Alexander Supertramp - May 1992

graffito found inside the abandoned bus on the stampede trail

When his camera was ruined and McCandless stopped taking photographs, he also stopped keeping a journal, a practice he didn’t resume until he went to Alaska the next year. Not a great deal is known, therefore, about where he traveled after departing Las Vegas in May 1991.

From a letter McCandless sent to Jan Burres, we know he spent July and August on the Oregon coast, probably in the vicin­ity of Astoria, where he complained that “the fog and rain was often intolerable.” In September he hitched down U.S. Highway 101 into California, then headed east into the desert again. And by early October he had landed in Bullhead City, Arizona.

Bullhead City is a community in the oxymoronic, late-twenti­eth-century idiom. Lacking a discernible center, the town exists as a haphazard sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls stretching for eight or nine miles along the banks of the Colorado, directly across the river from the high-rise hotels and casinos of Laughlin, Nevada. Bullheads distinguishing civic feature is the Mohave Valley Highway, four lanes of asphalt lined with gas stations and fast-food franchises, chiropractors and video shops, auto-parts outlets and tourist traps.

On the face of it, Bullhead City doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstoy, an ideologue who expressed nothing but contempt for the bour­geois trappings of mainstream America. McCandless, neverthe­less, took a strong liking to Bullhead. Maybe it was his affinity for the lumpen, who were well represented in the community’s trailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats; perhaps he simply fell in love with the stark desert landscape that encircles the town.

In any case, when he arrived in Bullhead City, McCandless stopped moving for more than two months—probably the longest he stayed in one place from the time he left Atlanta until he went to Alaska and moved into the abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail. In a card he mailed to Westerberg in October, he says of Bullhead, “It’s a good place to spend the winter and I might finally settle down and abandon my tramping life, for good. I’ll see what happens when spring comes around, because that’s when I tend to get really itchy feet.”

At the time he wrote these words, he was holding down a full-time job, flipping Quarter Pounders at a McDonald’s on the main drag, commuting to work on a bicycle. Outwardly, he was living a surprisingly conventional existence, even going so far as to open a savings account at a local bank.

Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald’s job, he presented himself as Chris McCandless, not as Alex, and gave his employers his real Social Security number. It was an unchar­acteristic break from his cover that might easily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts—although the lapse proved to be of no consequence because the private investigator hired by Walt and Billie never caught the slip.

Two years after he sweated over the grill in Bullhead, his col­leagues at the golden arches don’t recall much about Chris McCandless. “One thing I do remember is that he had a thing about socks,” says the assistant manager, a fleshy, garrulous man named George Dreeszen. “He always wore shoes without socks— just plain couldn’t stand to wear socks. But McDonald’s has a rule that employees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times. That means shoes and socks. Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang!—the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off. I mean the very first thing. Kind of like a statement, to let us know we didn’t own him, I guess. But he was a nice kid and a good worker. Real dependable.”

Lori Zarza, the second assistant manager, has a somewhat dif­ferent impression of McCandless. “Frankly, I was surprised he ever got hired,” she says. “He could do the job—he cooked in the back—but he always worked at the same slow pace, even during the lunch rush, no matter how much you’d get on him to hurry it up. Customers would be stacked ten-deep at the counter, and he wouldn’t understand why I was on his case. He just didn’t make the connection. It was like he was off in his own universe.

“He was reliable, though, a body that showed up every day, so they didn’t dare fire him. They only paid four twenty-five an hour, and with all the casinos right across the river starting people at six twenty-five, well, it was hard to keep bodies behind the counter.

“I don’t think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws.

“When Chris finally quit,” Zarza admits, “it was probably because of me. When he first started working, he was homeless, and he’d show up for work smelling bad. It wasn’t up to McDonald’s standards to come in smelling the way he did. So finally they del­egated me to tell him that he needed to take a bath more often. Ever since I told him, there was a clash between us. And then the other employees—they were just trying to be nice—they started asking him if he needed some soap or anything. That made him mad—you could tell. But he never showed it outright. About three weeks later, he just walked out the door and quit.”

McCandless had tried to disguise the fact that he was a drifter living out of a backpack: He told his fellow employees that he lived across the river in Laughlin. Whenever they offered him a ride home after work, he made excuses and politely declined. In fact, during his first several weeks in Bullhead, McCandless camped out in the desert at the edge of town; then he started squatting in a vacant mobile home. The latter arrangement, he explained in a letter to Jan Burres, “came about this way:”

One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, and observing me, asked me if I was “sleeping out.” I told him yes, and it turned out that he had this old trailer I could stay in for free. The only problem is that he doesn’t really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on their land here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep things toned down and stay out of sight, because he isn’t supposed to have anybody over here. It’s really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer is nice, it’s a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets working and a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name is Charlie, is some­thing of a lunatic and it’s rather difficult to get along with him sometimes.

Charlie still lives at the same address, in a small teardrop-shaped camping trailer sheathed in rust-pocked tin, without plumbing or electricity, tucked behind the much larger blue-and-white mobile home where McCandless slept. Denuded moun­tains are visible to the west, towering sternly above the rooftops

of adjacent double-wides. A baby-blue Ford Torino rests on blocks in the unkempt yard, weeds sprouting from its engine compartment. The ammonia reek of human urine rises from a nearby oleander hedge.

“Chris? Chris?” Charlie barks, scanning porous memory banks. “Oh yeah, him. Yeah, yeah, I remember him, sure.” Char­lie, dressed in a sweatshirt and khaki work pants, is a frail, ner­vous man with rheumy eyes and a growth of white stubble across his chin. By his recollection McCandless stayed in the trailer about a month.

“Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy,” Charlie reports. “Didn’t like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes—know what I’m say­ing? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t know what it was. I was like that once, but then I real­ized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy!

“But like I was saying, Alaska—yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybe to find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway. Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had ‘em bad. When he left, was around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for lettin’ him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him.”

In late November, McCandless sent a postcard to Jan Burres in care of a post-office box in Niland, a small town in California’s Imperial Valley. “That card we got in Niland was the first letter from him in a long time that had a return address on it,” Burres remembers. “So I immediately wrote back and said we’d come see him the next weekend in Bullhead, which wasn’t that far from where we were.”

McCandless was thrilled to hear from Jan. “I am so glad to find you both alive and sound,” he exclaimed in a letter dated De­cember 9, 1991.

Thanks so much for the Christmas card. It’s nice to be thought of this time of year... I’m so excited to hear that you will be coming to see me, you’re welcome anytime. It’s really great to think that after almost a year and a half we shall be meeting again.

He closed the letter by drawing a map and giving detailed direc­tions for finding the trailer on Bullhead City’s Baseline Road.

Four days after receiving this letter, however, as Jan and her boyfriend, Bob, were preparing to drive up for the visit, Burres returned to their campsite one evening to find “a big backpack leaning against our van. I recognized it as Alex’s. Our little dog, Sunni, sniffed him out before I did. She’d liked Alex, but I was surprised she remembered him. When the dog found him, she went nuts.” McCandless explained to Burres that he’d grown tired of Bullhead, tired of punching a clock, tired of the “plastic people” he worked with, and decided to get the hell out of town.

Jan and Bob were staying three miles outside of Niland, at a place the locals call the Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving a grid of empty concrete founda­tions scattered far and wide across the desert. Come November, as the weather turns cold across the rest of the country, some five thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds congregate in this otherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun. The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture com­prising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually un­employed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relation­ships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.

When McCandless arrived at the Slabs, a huge flea market-swap meet was in full swing out in the desert. Burres, as one of the vendors, had set up some folding tables displaying cheap, mostly secondhand goods for sale, and McCandless volunteered to oversee her large inventory of used paperback books.

“He helped me a lot,” Burres acknowledges. “He watched the table when I needed to leave, categorized all the books, made a lot of sales. He seemed to get a real kick out of it. Alex was big on the classics: Dickens, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Jack London.

London was his favorite. He’d try to convince every snowbird who walked by that they should read Call of the Wild.”

McCandless had been infatuated with London since child­hood. London’s fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great unwashed—all of it mirrored McCandless’s passions. Mes­merized by London’s turgid portrayal of life in Alaska and the Yukon, McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.” He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensi­bilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilder­ness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary ex­istence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.

Among the residents of the Niland Slabs was a seventeen-year-old named Tracy, and she fell in love with McCandless during his week-long visit. “She was this sweet little thing,” says Burres, “the daughter of a couple of tramps who parked their rig four ve­hicles down from us. And poor Tracy developed a hopeless crush on Alex. The whole time he was in Niland, she hung around mak­ing goo-goo eyes at him, bugging me to convince him to go on walks with her. Alex was nice to her, but she was too young for him. He couldn’t take her seriously. Probably left her broken­hearted for a whole week at least.”

Even though McCandless rebuffed Tracy’s advances, Burres makes it clear that he was no recluse: “He had a good time when he was around people, a real good time. At the swap meet he’d talk and talk and talk to everybody who came by. He must have met six or seven dozen people in Niland, and he was friendly with every one of them. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.”

McCandless was especially attentive to Burres, flirting and clowning with her at every opportunity. “He liked to tease me and torment me,” she recalls. “I’d go out back to hang clothes on the line behind the trailer, and he’d attach clothespins all over me. He was playful, like a little kid. I had puppies, and he was always putting them under laundry baskets to watch them bounce around and yelp. He’d do it till I’d get mad and have to yell at him to stop. But in truth he was real good with the dogs. They’d fol­low him around, cry after him, want to sleep with him. Alex just had a way with animals.”

One afternoon while McCandless was tending the book table at the Niland swap meet, somebody left a portable electric organ with Burres to sell on consignment. “Alex took it over and enter­tained everybody all day playing it,” she says. “He had an amaz­ing voice. He drew quite a crowd. Until then I never knew he was musical.”

McCandless spoke frequently to the denizens of the Slabs about his plans for Alaska. He did calisthenics each morning to get in shape for the rigors of the bush and discussed backcountry survival strategies at length with Bob, a self-styled survivalist.

“Me,” says Burres, “I thought Alex had lost his mind when he told us about his ‘great Alaskan odyssey,’ as he called it. But he was really excited about it. Couldn’t stop talking about the trip.”

Despite prodding from Burres, however, McCandless revealed virtually nothing about his family. “I’d ask him,” Burres says, “ ‘Have you let your people know what you’re up to? Does your mom know you’re going to Alaska? Does your dad know?’ But he’d never answer. He’d just roll his eyes at me, get peeved, tell me to quit trying to mother him. And Bob would say, ‘Leave him alone! He’s a grown man!’ I’d keep at it until he’d change the sub­ject, though—because of what happened between me and my own son. He’s out there somewhere, and I’d want someone to look after him like I tried to look after Alex.”

The Sunday before McCandless left Niland, he was watching an NFL playoff game on the television in Burres’s trailer when she noticed he was rooting especially hard for the Washington Redskins. “So I asked him if he was from the B.C. area,” she says. “And he answered, ‘Yeah, actually I am.’ That’s the only thing he ever let on about his background.”

The following Wednesday, McCandless announced it was time for him to be moving on. He said he needed to go to the post of­fice in Salton City, fifty miles west of Niland, to which he’d asked the manager of the Bullhead McDonald’s to send his final pay-check, general delivery. He accepted Burres’s offer to drive him there, but when she tried to give him a little money for helping out at the swap meet, she recalls, “he acted real offended. I told him, ‘Man, you gotta have money to get along in this world/ but he wouldn’t take it. Finally I got him to take some Swiss Army knives and a few belt knives; I convinced him they’d come in handy in Alaska and that he could maybe trade them for some­thing down the road.”

After an extended argument Burres also got McCandless to ac­cept some long underwear and other warm clothing she thought he’d need in Alaska. “He eventually took it to shut me up,” she laughs, “but the day after he left, I found most of it in the van. He’d pulled it out of his pack when we weren’t looking and hid it up under the seat. Alex was a great kid, but he could really make me mad sometimes.”

Although Burres was concerned about McCandless, she as­sumed he’d come through in one piece. “I thought he’d be fine in the end,” she reflects. “He was smart. He’d figured out how to paddle a canoe down to Mexico, how to hop freight trains, how to score a bed at inner-city missions. He figured all of that out on his own, and I felt sure he’d figure out Alaska, too.”

CHAPTER SIX

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