So not long ago, we’re sitting in the office and I’m banging out a deadline – a case study about a tech outsourcer, I think – and Kristi’s cranking music off Pandora. A song comes on that catches my ear, and I ask her what it is. Eddie Vedder, “Society”. From the soundtrack to the 2007 movie “Into The Wild”.
I guess I’ve been living in a cave, because I’d never heard of the film. So I dug it up and watched it. It conjured up some stuff in me that a week later I’m still processing.
“Into The Wild” is a true story, based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. Back in August 1992, moose hunters in Alaska came across a decrepit bus stashed in the woods along the Stampede Trail, long ago converted into a makeshift shelter by local hunters. Inside was a dead man zipped up into a sleeping bag, weighing only 67 pounds, surrounded by the equipment, journals, camera and other chapters that told the story of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp.
After graduating with honors from Emory, 24-year-old Chris donated his $24,000 college fund to charity and vanished. Just packed up and went. For two years he wandered North America, under the pseudonym “Alexander Supertramp”. Riding the rails, hiking by foot, kayaking illegally down the Colorado River into Mexico, hitchhiking, working a granary in South Dakota.. not that his family had any idea where he was, despite their best efforts to find him.. finally Chris ventured alone into the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992 to live off the land. And he starved to death there.
Most of the book “Into The Wild” (I’m halfway through it, and so far the film is a pretty faithful adaptation) is pieced together from Chris’ journals, letters and postcards he sent to the people he met, and interviews with the people who met him on his long journey towards his great Alaska adventure. It’s a fascinating, often disturbing story of an often angry, arrogant ass who got so lost into his own narcissistic, Thoreau-esque posturing that he didn’t realize that he was simply committing slow motion suicide. Running away from everything: family, friends, school, jobs, church, politics, money, culture. Life. Until finally he found himself trapped in the very brutal solitude he wanted most, only to find that it wasn’t as noble and sanctifying as he’d spent two years preaching to people it was.
I’m not entirely sure why, a week later, I’m still mentally batting this story around. It unsettled me. It struck pretty close to home. I’m only a year or two younger than Chris would have been today, and like Chris, I spent much of the early 90’s digging into Thoreau and Emerson (I still have the battered collected-works paperbacks I carried everywhere with me back then), chasing dreams of enlightenment and natural simplicity. Of course, what I was really doing was trying to put some distance between myself, my life, and the crazy bullshit that I grew up with and soundly rejected. And the truth is, I can see my 20-year-old self doing what Chris did. The story’s a little too true for me.
(By the way: I’ve had a few glasses of wine tonight, so if I’m rambling, please forgive me. I’m a little loaded. I’m promising myself now that I won’t edit this tomorrow, so cope.)
The early 1990’s was a strange time to become an adult. The world came to an end – that’s the only way to describe it. Imagine if, next week, the United States simply ceased existing as a governmental entity, leaving fifty squabbling nuclear powers and chaos in its wake. Imagine the global chaos. A year after the bizarre spectacle of the Gulf War (remember that? the drama that set the stage for the Iraq War a decade later?), the Soviet Union – POOF! – collapsed and the world forever changed. And it was chaos. So as a 20-year-old, everything you’ve been told about the world and how the world works and what you should worry about and what you should strive for.. POOF. And everything thrown into question.
In every practical way that matters, the world – as we knew it, anyway, or thought we knew it – all came to an end. And it seemed for a little while that everything was up for grabs, that the rules were ripe to be rewritten. A lot of us went for that dream, in one way or another. I packed up and drove across the country. Quit my job and spent years on foot in Orlando trying to find myself. Did a lot of stupid things in my twenties. Even had the backpack-through-Canada idea, dreaming about the rugged wild of the Great White North (inspired I think, I’m amused at forty to say, by a 1990 issue of Playboy, really). So reading this story about this merry idiot in 1992 who actually did it and died stupidly in the process, it strikes a very old nerve.
You see, my 40-year-old self is older, more cynical, tired. We go into the office in the morning and I spend a couple hours sifting through email, updating databases, prepping for conference calls, angling our project deadlines to keep billing on track for the month. There’s a lot to manage, and people count on me to manage it. I have responsibilities and I take them seriously. There’s a mortgage to pay and a future to think about. My family relationships aren’t nearly what I’d like them to be, but they’re probably as good as they can get under the circumstances. We owe considerably more on our house than it’s worth. We need to start shopping for life insurance, need to get a new gardener, need to think about taxes and investments and retirement and dreams of the future. That 20-year-old feels a very, very long way away.
And it’s frustrating sometimes, because deep down, I feel like I should still be 20. It’s only when I get up off the couch and my knees creak painfully that I remember – oh yeah – I’m in early middle age now. I’m happily married, have a business, own a house. I’m not that kid anymore. I haven’t been that kid – the one who wrecked his knees on a 150-mile bike tour in 1993 – in a really long time.
And that’s okay.
With age comes perspective. An appreciation for how the tools and tricks of rhetoric shape how we see and think about the world; a healthy skepticism for the ideologies, faiths, manipulations, games, politics, stunts, rabbit holes and wild goose hunts that steer us off into strange, often dangerous paths, deep into the dark woods of the soul. Confidence matures. Knowledge widens. Emotions go deeper.
But you do get tired. And sometimes, on those mashed up days full of meetings and projects and emails and bills and the blizzard of adult life minutiae, it’s easy to lose sight of why any of it should mean a damn. The jaded cynicism takes over and you think of the woods, the great adventures, the elegant simplicity. The vanishing. The big holy “fuck it” that was an option at 20 years old, but that’s long behind you now.
And I think that’s why McCandless’s story struck such a nerve. Because the truth – the real truth, the truth few of us want to face up to – is that we’re domesticated creatures, little different from the dogs and cats that share our homes. As a species, we’re not adapted to nature, and haven’t been in a really long time. We’re adapted to civilization, creations of the tools created by our ancestors, and in that great venturing into the primeval wilderness we find only death. Civilization is our life support. Our creation turned around and created us.
If that’s true – and at this stage in my life, I think it is – then these budget plans, mortgage documents, client invoices, revised document drafts, gas prices, political conflicts.. this is all the actual wild. This is the wilderness from which we draw breath, the spirit of civilization that in turns sparks life in us, the children of civilization.
The Thoreau dream of natural simplicity, far from being a utopian fountain of youth, is only a brutal dash towards death and despair.
It’s that mashup I’ve been feeling lately, the press of modern life and the increasing difficulty of trying to keep track – and make sense – of it all. Because you see, here’s the thing. The 20-year-old me, the me that packed up a U-Haul and drove to California, the me that dreamed of a Yukon backpacking adventure, the me that dreamed and philosophized and struggled and imagined the sights of sunshine breaking over the exalted peaks of understanding.. that guy’s still in me, trying to figure out what the hell happened. And I point to Christopher McCandless. I say, look. That’s where your stupid, arrogant dreaming ends: zipped up in a sleeping back, alone, far from anyone who loved or even cared about you, back to the dust from whence you came. That’s the end of the road, dude.
And he responds, it’ll be different this time. I’m different. I’m special.
No, I say. You’re not. You’re just irresponsible. Shortsighted. Foolish. Impatient. Self-centered. Arrogant. Stupid.
Nevertheless, the debate continues.
And some days, when we have three conference calls on tap for the day, and we have to get designs out for the client who often takes three months to pay a bill, and there’s another three-hour angry support call with AT&T to deal with, and there’s a half dozen project deadlines to schedule.. sometimes the dreamer scores a win. It’s really a matter of waiting for the right moment and hitting hard when the defenses are down. When the mashup happens, that’s the moment to slam the puck towards the goal.
If he’d lived, McCandless would be in his early forties today. I wonder what he would be like today, if he’d survived his Alaskan adventure and grown into middle age. It’s a conversation I’d like to have, the real echo I guess of why the story resounded so strongly with me. Looking back from a good life, I wonder how he would tell the story of a lonely survival ordeal, deep in the Alaska nothing. I wonder if he’d see it as a beginning, a striking march towards truth. Or if he’d see it as a stupid risk taken in the brashness of youth.
Life is good; I have few complaints. It’s just interesting how, as the years pass, your definition of good becomes deeper and more nuanced, easy answers becoming fewer and farther between. Life gets tougher, but more rewarding.. the wages of civilization, our birthplace and benefactor. Life is good. Just not as simple as we imagine ourselves wanting it to be. It gets harder. It requires more of us. It demands that we stand taller, march farther, keep the faith longer, be stronger against the cynicism of anger and despair.. it calls for us to be better than reality lets us be.
On the hard days, the mashup days, it’s not easy. A glass or two of wine helps. A good wife I love desperately helps a lot. Nevertheless, a guy gets tired. But that’s the choice, the bravery of a life not ended starved in the woods, ventured away from the alluring simplicity that leads to a bitter end. It’s a life of real hope, with the real work that comes as its price. The slope gets steeper, and you push yourself harder and call upon deeper impulses to continue the ascent.
And, unlike the poor fool who dreams of the simple life, you have a story later to tell, a tale that maybe – perhaps, hopefully – might contain a shred of truth that illuminates another to dare a journey through the wild that is modern life.
Rinse and repeat, and life goes on. And you know, life really is good.