A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to
Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months
later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside
magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name
turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, in
an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and
had been an elite athlete.
Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the
summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave
the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity,
abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet.
And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged
margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw,
transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had
become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.
Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran
in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless
remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by
more current journalistic fare. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’s
starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those
in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the
convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of
his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. In trying to un-
derstand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as
well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk
activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged
bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry
is the book now before you.
I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck
a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible.
Through most of the book, I have tried—and largely succeeded, I think—to
minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt
McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do
so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma
of Chris McCandless.
He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn
idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by
