Into the Wild (or freedom's just another word )

It was with great trepidation that I went to see the film version of Into the Wild last night. It wasn't that I was dreading that Sean Penn's rendition of my beloved book would become a veritable Dead Man Camping, but well.... okay, well I, well.... it's true I was dreading that. I mean, come on! John Krakauer's book, in all it's factual drudgery and philosophical glory, rocked my little world in 1999, and without a doubt changed my life in so many inexorably delightful and frightening ways.

If truth be told, Krakauer's portrayal of an idealistic and romantic Alexander Supertramp is what lured me to the road in the first place. Certainly, there was an ocean of discontent at my status quo sort of life surging under my skin before my eyes ever glanced a page of that book. You see, I had been grinding myself down, what with all that applying myself and that ambition of youth stuff.

I think I averaged about 3 hours of sleep a day during those years, I was 23 and finishing up a zoology degree at UW, working on an ambitious undergraduate research project in the neurobiology department, all while working full-time graveyard shifts as a vet nurse in the animal emergency clinic and somehow managing to maintain a healthy semblance of a social life as well. Something was bound to give.

It wasn't simply Krakauer's book, but it certainly was the catalyst that opened my eyes to the idea of change and a less structured life. Enter a girl called Mizz. We met on the number 34 bus that took us to campus every morning. It turned out we were both in the same biochemistry class and she lived around the corner from me in Fremont. We soon became friends and she was one of those people who at 23 had already been to places I'd never even heard of. She knew somebody who had a cabin overlooking the Nenana river near the entrance to Denali National Park. She asked if I was interested in renting it for the summer with her. She also knew somebody who knew somebody and the next thing we knew we had jobs doing Living History performances in the park, you know the people who dress up as characters from the past and harass the visitors?

The pieces all fell together. I found someone to sublet my apartment. We packed up my old Saab and put up one of those cheesy signs in the window that said ALASKA OR BUST and headed north on I-5. We listened to a lot of Modest Mouse and Built to Spill and Alejandro Escovedo and then some books-on-tape from Tom Robbins and Edward Abbey and Dorothy Parker thus christening my Saab "Blanche" after a 'high-breasted blonde' in one of Parker's stories. We adopted fake accents and alter egos; she became an Australian and me a hapless Canadian (since I don't do accents well, eh?), we met some punk rock boys in Whitehorse who took us fishing with whiskey-soaked marshmallows for bait, we had a run-in with a Black Bear on a toilet break somewhere on the Cassiar Highway, and it was with tears that we unwittingly drove through a flock of migrating tiger-swallowtail butterflies and had to pick their delicate wings out of Blanche's menacing grill. It was Alexander Supertramp who I thought of through all these experiences. Did he soak in this pool in the Liard Hotsprings? Did he stop for gas at this station in the Yukon? Did he see the same herd of caribou cross the highway near Tok?


We arrived in Denali 7 years after Alexander Supertramp had died lonely and misguided in the back of an abandoned bus. It was with wide eyes and jaw dropped open that I listened the 'old timers' who had been working there in 1992 who suggested that Alex had found his way into the staff cafeteria at the Denali Village hotel on a regular basis. There were others I spoke to who told me they'd had their Stampede Trail cabin broken into that summer with the glint of a big city prosecuter in their eye and their hand on their hearts. I'm not sure if I buy any of it, and Krakauer reckons that that kind of conjecture was simply that, conjecture.

That summer something within me broke down a little bit. Focus shifted, life re-framed. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged. There were city kids and country kids, Southern Belles and vatos from the hood and because there was no one else around social boundaries were obsolete, every sorority girl from Connecticut and forty year old farm mechanic from Iowa and drug addict from Hollywood got on like a house fire. That summer I danced on tables, kissed a lot of boys and a girl too, backpacked solo through polychrome pass and was charged by two grizzlies, fell in love at least ten times (and once it even stuck, for reals like.), gorged on blueberries right off the bush, threw rocks at rocks, sang silly songs when hiking to warn off the bears, drank beers around a campfire every night playing deface it or taste it (a game for life), there was a ptarmigan I called Bobby McGee and a fox called Sly who visited me every shift I worked out at Savage Cabin, there were the orphaned teen age bears who terrorized me at the same cabin, I chopped wood and learned that I was afraid of heights after one too many close calls walking on railroad bridges over bottomless gorges, ooohed and aahhhhed while the Northern Lights danced overhead like neon wind.

Every paycheck was immediately spent at the Spike, a bar in an old railroad car that was mostly frequented by employees at the park. There was an old poet who bought you shots of goldschlagger and stared and your chest, sometimes he wore masks or took his clothes off at random intervals and always in public, but always imparted some scrap of wisdom that slowly changed my outlook on the world. He was the first man I'd encountered, and actually developed a friendship with, who was truly and fearlessly free. He worked summers as a tour guide in Denali and had been for some 20 odd years and every winter, he and his girlfriend made it a point to live in a different place each year, working when they needed to and living out of their old airstream caravan. As soon as I realized it was possible to spend a lifetime exploring, my wheels began slowly spinning.

Near the end of that magical summer, when the Teklanika was finally running lower, the thing to do was to hike out to the bus on the Stampede Trail. It was all the rage that year and random groups of people (often your hiking partner was dictated by whoever had the same day off as you) started making the pilgrimage to the bus and returning with bragging rights and photos like these.


(I don't know who these guys are, but I found this photo here, it says on his website that this photo was taken the year before I was there.) My feelings are still mixed about the en vogue onslaught to what was probably a sacred and magical place for Alexander Supertramp. Presumably, the pilgrimage is still carried out every summer by the college kids that go to work at the park, and probably will be all the more popular now that the film has come out.

It's not a particularly pretty hike, nor is it necessarily an easy one. The first 10 miles is a relatively flat, but boot-suckingly muddy track that is zig-zagged perpetually by an annoying rivulet of what we called Notagain Creek, but I'm not sure of it's actual name. You have to cross that motherfucker at least 15 times before you even reach the first river crossing. Your boots have overfilled and your feet are wet from the word go, and the day we attempted this journey we got caught out in a squall that seemingly came out of nowhere and didn't give us enough time to get the rain gear out before our packs were soaked through. We camped on the bank of the Teklanika that first rainy night, with an aim to cross the river in the morning, and spent a considerable amount of it shivering in our damp sleeping bags by the campfire under the tarp and reading Krakauer's book out loud to each other by the light of our headlamps.

In the morning we still had another 10 or so miles to go when I discovered that I'd managed to melt one of my hiking boots to a rock while drying it out by the campfire. Unfortunately, it was a portent of things to come that day. First things first, we had to cross the Teklanika River, Alex Supertramp's Rubicon, weary and cold from a frosty Denali night in wet gear. Despite giving it a good couple of hours, walking up and down the bank in a 1/2 mile in either direction, we couldn't find a good place to cross, the water chest high and neither girl particularly buff, we couldn't support each other strongly enough. When Megan slipped and nearly went under, our confidence was shaken enough to chalk this one up to experience. And though I was bitterly disappointed at the time, in retrospect I think it was all for the best. In the end, I don't think I really wanted to intrude on the cherished place a hapless kid died in just to get a notch on the belt of Denali cool. It was simply curiosity that brought me out this far and also a bit of reverence for someone who had such an mysteriously profound effect on me, even in death and through somebody else's words.

We spent the day instead lazily recovering by the river bank, throwing rocks at rocks, swapping your mama jokes and stories from home. It was a relatively uneventful day save for the bull moose that went running through our campsite and got tangled in our makeshift clothes-line, strewing our damp clothes through the dense willows and the lightness that was slowly unraveling in my heart. A new understanding was emerging of the destination not being nearly so important as the progress made on the journey.That night the storm had finally given up the last dregs of it's fury and when the clouds parted, the Northern lights were revealed against the infinite backdrop of the Milky Way. We lay on our backs on a mattress of softest tundra and warmed to the soul by the campfire, we marveled at the night sky as the Aurora danced and twirled overhead. At one point in the show, they formed a sort of wagon wheel directly over head, a perfect circle of the greenest light with glowing shafts directed inward like so many spokes. I considered this a different kind of portent, a sign from the heavens that my wheels were spinning in a new direction.

I didn't return to university that autumn, my wheels carried me next to the redwoods, then to the red rock desert of southern Utah and then on to coastal Maine and from there I just went on and on. I spent the next few years perpetually on the road, and there was a kind of freedom there that I hadn't known before or since. Janis said that freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, and things these days are sure piling up in the tattered cardboard box that holds the Things-I've-Got-To-Lose, in fact it's practically overflowing. Though life's a lot more complicated now than it ever has been, there's a contentment and comfort here in this stability I never could have imagined all those transient years and wouldn't trade now for all the blueberries in Denali National Park.