By Oggy Bleacher
In 1989 I decided I wanted to die in Alaska. I wanted to live there too of course, but only until I died in a suitably romantic setting, possibly mauled by a bear or torn to pieces by a pack of wolves. Dying in Alaska was all I could talk about.
“I don’t want you to disturb my remains,” I instructed my father, “Just leave my bones to erode into the soil…as nature intended.”
“That’s nice,” he muttered as he browsed the newspaper.
I waved a copy of Martin Eden in his face. “Jack London died in Alaska. He was a real man.”
“Jack London died in California, a sick old drunk. He was a loathed socialist and he...”
“You’re just saying that because he actually lived an important and adventure filled life, something you would know nothing about. Look at you sitting there with your coffee and danish. So elite! So repulsive! How long would you last in a truly wild environment? Could you survive ten minutes without espresso?”
My father put the paper down.
“What are you saying? What is your point?”
“My point is that when I die in Alaska I want to be left alone. I want the sun to bleach my bones on the slopes of Denali.”
“You want to die in Alaska? Be my guest. Are you done with the Sports section?”
“So that’s it,” I said as I shook my head. “You’re officially the worst father in the world.”
In the fall of 1989 I convinced a high school buddy to drive from New Hampshire to the interior of Alaska where we enrolled in the University of Fairbanks. I considered Fairbanks the base camp for my adventure into Denali National Park, where I would succumb, heroically, to the elements or fall into a glacial crevasse. Naturally, my studies suffered. What was the point in studying the gene distribution of fruit flies when my destiny lay in the belly of a bear? My one regret was that I would be unable to see my father’s horrified, repentant expression when he came to learn of my death.
One development that hadn’t occurred to me is that autumn, the time of falling leaves and cool but comfortable weather, lasts approximately eight minutes in Fairbanks. You ride your bicycle to an American Literature class and must take a dog sled back to the dorm. Kids trick or treat on cross-country skis. Snow falls uninterrupted for fifteen weeks, until the temperature drops below -30, a temperature at which precipitation actually becomes a solid blanket of fog that simply hovers in the air, freezing eyeballs on contact. You can actually hear your breath freezing as it leaves your mouth. On the rare day the ice fog lifted I could see Mt. McKinley 130 miles to the south but there was hardly a line of folks volunteering to drive me to my death.
Instead, I wandered into the woods behind the college and built a log hut, my “Trappers Cabin”. It was then I learned why the early gold hunters built their cabins BEFORE THE SNOW FELL. The drifts were at least five feet deep and often impassible without snowshoes. Still, I managed to cut down enough trees to assemble a crooked cabin in which I spent a few long nights surrounded by damp and suffocating smoke. When I started a fire, all the snow on the roof would melt into the cabin and create a muddy pit for a bed. I was dying alright, but not nearly fast enough.
The author standing by his magnificent Alaskan palace.
Far from admiring my efforts, my Alaskan friends simply considered me an impulsive idiot who was needlessly tempting fate. Camping was a way of life for them, but it was never done carelessly. Survival was hard enough, they explained, with all the modern conveniences like maps, high tech gear and all-terrain vehicles. Neglect to wear two pairs of socks and you might as well kiss your toes goodbye. If you leave your map at home then please write your next of kin on it so we know where to send your remains.
Of course, I vehemently disagreed.
“Spiritual purity can only be obtained in an environment of my own design! Do you think Jack London ate fast food? Did he drive a car? Did he do anything but test the limits of his endurance?”
My lab partner looked at me.
“Come on! Are you going to do any work this semester?”
It is one thing to dream of a glorious death on the glaciers surrounding North America’s highest mountain, it is another thing to actually step foot on those glaciers. The closest I would get in the 10 months I first lived in Alaska was the isolated road that wove through undulating tundra, populated only by caribou and fox. Standing near a visitor’s center in the park, I knew I had reached my Waterloo. By that point I was on crutches following a mishap with a steel-jaw trap. Climbing the mountain, or even a long flight of stairs, was impossible. In the shadow of the giant white eruption of rock I vowed I would return when I was in better condition. I wanted to die in the wilderness, but I also wanted to survive long enough to reach the summit. My journey postponed, I limped onto the shuttle bus and began the slow commute back to civilization.
“We learn by doing.” These words are echoed by most teachers. The difference between reading about the frontier life and living the frontier life is significant. Indeed, if I told you that there are plenty of books about sex, so there’s no need to experience it yourself, what would you say? Is casual sex really something we all need to reinvent? That’s how I felt about the pursuit of pure self-reliance. There are layers of sensation and emotion that just can’t accurately be described, but must be embraced. Neither wisdom nor orgasms are found in books. You’ve got to work for both. The School of Hard Knocks, The University of Life, and countless other catch-phrases make Alaska the logical destination for primitivists aka soul-searchers just like seekers of pleasure end up in the back of dad’s car. Both have their rewards; both have their price.
Christopher McCandless, the object of a popular book by Jon Krakauer and an upcoming feature film adaptation written and directed by Sean Penn, took his self-defining philosophy to its extreme, thus the subject of “Into the Wild” is the pursuit of identity. How do we identify ourselves in a world of 6 billion creatures like us? Should we passively adopt the values of others or should we investigate their origins, even if that means “starting from scratch” on an isolated tundra or deserted island? For McCandless, the answer was inescapable and led him, like myself and others, to the untainted, unforgiving testing ground that is Alaska.
A couple years later I found myself rolling into Jackson Hole, Wyoming on my bicycle. The trip from New Hampshire had taken nearly four months, two longer than my over-confident estimate. A complete stranger invited me into his house and told me to “Take it easy. Rest up.” But I had other plans. Four months on a bicycle had given me time to design a foolproof plan to summit Denali. I would leave my bike in Jackson Hole, then hitchhike to Alaska where I still had an active bank account (I had renounced ATM machines and the telephone), withdraw all my money ($79) and buy supplies for my summit attempt of Denali. I was fit and confident. I could bicycle 120 miles in one day carrying 75 pounds of equipment. Starting from the Atlantic Ocean, I had manually crossed the continental divide! Now was my best chance to conquer my old nemesis. My new friend in Jackson Hole told me that my plan was simply insane. I had no mountain climbing experience, no high altitude experience, no money, inadequate equipment and was nowhere near Alaska.
“That’s what my father would say!” I shouted, and set out for Alaska the next day.
It took five unpredictable weeks to hitchhike to Fairbanks from Jackson Hole. I was, for example, attacked by a drunken Eskimo wielding a double bladed battleaxe. I floundered for one week in a town called Wonowon (101 mile of the Alaskan Highway). During that week I was married once and divorced once. I crossed the Canadian border the really hard way (think 1492 AD). Near Laird Hot Springs I was handed a bag of home baked cookies by a motorcyclist wearing a WWI German Infantry helmet. I was in two car accidents, witnessed one lynching and avoided starvation by playing blues harmonica with a guitarist from England. I also broke both my collarbones and separated my right shoulder. And I hadn’t even reached Alaska yet!
When I finally arrived in Fairbanks (two years after I had dropped out of college and hitched to California) I was in the worst condition of my life. I dragged my backpack into the Fairbanks Rescue Mission and spent two months as a hell-bound heathen, one week as a born-again Christian, and another two weeks as a hell-bound heathen. Walking to the library and back was a challenge that sometimes took hours. I could not tie my shoe laces. The homeless drunks of Fairbanks were dying all around me and when I sought treatment a free clinic physician told me I had Parkinson’s disease. Instead of going to Mt. McKinley, it turned out that I had brought Mt. McKinley to me to the point that I would be lucky to get out of Alaska alive.
Amazingly, two bunks away from me, between a Vietnam vet with recurring flashbacks of a POW camp and a man who had been severed in half during a car accident, was a skinny kid about my age with no apparent drug addiction. I made a habit not to talk to anyone because they would either try to “save” me or else ask me for money I didn’t have. But this kid, this skinny kid with brown hair and an east coast accent, was different. Like me, he didn’t belong in a homeless shelter with disabled veterans, drunks, and displaced Eskimos. He was on a mission that proved I wasn’t even the first person in 1992 (let alone ever) to undertake an absurd Alaskan journey.
In one of my journals I probably have his name (or the name he gave me) written down. It isn’t important. What is important is that for the first time ever I didn’t have to convince somebody why I had come to Alaska. This kid claimed to have recently canoed down the Yukon River (eating his own dog on the way) and was saving up money for a Trans-Alaska trek by working at the nearby Sizzler. At first I wanted to marry him. Here was one person who understood why I needed to come to Alaska and test myself, to do it all the hard way. I didn’t have to explain why I preferred to dig through trash for my supper or why I was repulsed by the idea of washing my clothes in a machine. On his days off we would walk to the library and validate our own carefully constructed personal philosophies. His parents didn’t understand him either. He had renounced cars, telephones, ATM cards, technology, possessions and long term goals. Just like me! Life would be lived with what was in front of us, the tangibles, or it would not be lived at all. He understood that if you distil life down to only the exciting parts then you’ll learn lessons faster. The best way to keep life exciting is to always do it the hard way. Don’t buy a map, draw a map. Trust your senses. Depend only on yourself.
“Of course! That’s what I think too!”
This kid had a top drawer personality. He was excited about life, fearless, funny as hell, sang in the shower, mocked religion by openly debating the volunteer preachers (“On what day did God make homosexuals?”), worked efficiently when he was on kitchen duty, always made his bed, and he was healthy. I truly envied his damn health. His talk about trekking all around Alaska made me incredibly jealous. He was going on a great, probably fatal, quest but my body was so broken that I had to piss sitting down. I had torn several ligaments in my legs, my back was permanently bent and my shoulders throbbed chronically. I could never go with him. Anyway, he didn’t invite me. Remember, depend only on yourself.
At some point the honeymoon ended and the kid started to annoy me. He bragged about all this expedition equipment he had buried outside of town, equipment he couldn’t possibly have afforded. He told and retold the tale of eating his dog in Canada, a story I found very unlikely since the Yukon River is a hell of a long river to canoe down. If I recalled playing baseball in high school, he claimed to have been drafted by the Dodgers. I had bicycled halfway across the continent but he had bicycled to Peru and back. Everything I said was a cue for him to tell a more outrageous anecdote. I started to suspect he hadn’t actually done any of it, that he really did belong in the Rescue Mission with the many schizophrenics. After all, he had invented a game we played at the library where we would take turns pretending to commit suicide with an imaginary shotgun. I still chuckle when I make gun fire sound effects and I imagine his slow motion pantomime of blowing his head off. (I liked to pretend to blast out my chest to save my face for identification purposes) Crazy or not, the kid annoyed me. He had to remind me ten times a day what was wrong with civilization (refined sugar and clothing). And he had an answer for everything, like how to cure meat or what berries to eat in the wild or how computers actually worked. We once argued about how long you could stay afloat in the Arctic Ocean.
“I’d grab a whale and climb in its mouth to keep warm,” was his serious answer on how to survive.
How can you debate with someone like that? I found myself using phrases out of my father’s mouth. “That’s crazy!” “Don’t be stupid.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Aren’t you going to take a map?” For turning me into my father I hated the kid even more. He was so smug and over-confident. If he wanted to hike 1000 miles across the tundra then let him.
“You’ll learn the hard way,” I said. (Exactly what my father would have said.)
“That’s the only way to learn,” he responded. (Exactly what I would have said.) He was a “get in the last word” kind of guy.
The Author, sensibly dressed for -30 degree weather in his quilted baseball cap.
Maybe to spite him, to get in my own last word, I left without saying goodbye. I vanished in the night after I had met a couple who let me hitch a ride out of town. I no longer saw my wolf-ravaged carcass on the slopes of Denali. The kid’s enthusiasm for reckless wandering made me question the behavior that had landed me at the shelter in the first place.
A kindly counselor offered me an isolated cabin in central Washington State. I hitchhiked there, lived on apples and rice, bathed regularly in a nearby stream, and began to meditate on my life. The first thing I realized was that I had been given a rare opportunity. I’d met myself, conversed with myself, watched a movie with myself, washed dishes with myself, listened to a sermon with myself and generally lived with my mirror image for two months. We had both come to Alaska for a great adventure. The only difference was that while I had to turn around within sight of the summit, this strange kid was still healthy enough to keep climbing. Other than that he was exactly like me in every way…and I didn’t like him. He was mouthy, prone to exaggerate, a braggart, insensitive, preachy, and egotistical…exactly like me. Meeting the kid turned me into my father, and turned the kid into a more stubborn and self-assured…me. These observations shook my self-confidence. Also, I couldn’t ignore the short physical description I had peeked at during my visit to the Fairbanks free clinic:
“Male. 20s. body odor. Lice. homeless. fixation on abusive father and mtn. climbing. Mtpl. chronic injuries.”
Instead of becoming a hero in a Jack London novel, I had become a villain in a Charles Dickens novel.
I never saw my Alaskan brother again. When the Krakauer article was first published in Outside Magazine I received no fewer than five clipped copies in the mail from all corners of the United States with notes like “You have to read this!” and “Remind you of someone?” You can imagine my reaction. I’ve owned several copies of the subsequent book and eagerly await the film’s release. How will such an unusual story be captured? If I had so much trouble explaining myself to my immediate family then what chance does a feature film have to capture the pursuit of an elusive pure experience? I’m concerned by trailer images of Chris with triumphantly raised arms. This is speculation that Krakauer fortunately never toyed with. We don’t know what Chris acted like when he was alone. I can tell you that when I passed a sign for the continental divide I didn’t raise my arms in triumph. I collapsed in a drainage ditch near the side of the road and wept. I figured it would be all downhill to California.
Thankfully, Sean Penn did not cut corners in the production. He did not settle for the more economical setting offered by British Colombia. Instead, Penn went to the source by retracing Christopher’s (and therefore my) hitchhiking journey up the Alaskan Highway to Fairbanks. One hopes that a story that originates in the mysterious psyche of a young man can be told through the landscapes he loved so much. Most of us can predict what would happen if we renounced civilization and attempted to live off the land. That’s the easy part of the adaptation. The hard part will be connecting a tale of outward “adventure” to the philosophical turmoil that caused it. Dramatic sunsets are one thing, but what of the fire in Chris’s heart that never set? What of the principles that could not be explained or ignored? If Penn can capture the doomed pursuit of perfection then he will have told a story worth telling. The rest, I believe, belongs in National Geographic. Let’s just say that I don’t plan to go back to Alaska and after seeing the film I hope I don’t have to.
In case you’re wondering, the dates of my stay at the shelter do not correspond with Christopher McCandless’s trip through Fairbanks. He entered the outback in the spring of ’92 and I arrived in Fairbanks later that summer, months after he had been living off moose meat and berries. Though he bore a resemblance to Chris (as do I), the kid I met could not have been Chris. If he had been Chris I speculate the encounter would have hardly altered. He would have made a similar impression on me, and I on him. He could not have been persuaded to change his plans, nor could I, nor could the kid. All three of us were cut from the same cloth, though in varying degrees of decay. We were out of place in every place we had ever been so we believed our place lay off the map. What better way to find that elusive location than by leaving the maps behind and entering the least populated area of land in North America? We recognized society as a false, poisonous environment where wisdom was impossible to obtain so we turned our backs on it. Technology was a complication that prevented our transcendence so we shunned it. Our parents were satanic because they tempted us from the true path, so we cut off all contact with them. To this day my father insists McCandless should have brought a map. To this day I argue that he absolutely could not even consult a map. For only in uncharted Alaska would he find his answers, or at least some souls who understood his questions.
The kid I met had so much creative potential and was wasting it cleaning toilets in a homeless shelter and serving boiled shrimp at the Sizzlers buffet. This infuriated me. The kid had met a distracted cripple (me) with a complete indifference to everything, who would say things like, “This will all be dust one day. Hand me the shotgun.” Chris McCandless found a purpose that transcended time and place. When survival became an instinct, when the experiment ceased to be an experiment, he found what I had been denied, and exactly what we all were looking for. However briefly, he stood atop the summit, above the clouds, below him the quietly desperate fumbled through their petty lives. It was all meaningless. It was all meaningful.
The author, ready for baptism.
Oggy Bleacher still imagines a wolf-ravaged carcass on the slopes of Denali, but it’s not him, it’s someone else. Thanks in part to his immunity to Parkinson’s disease, Oggy now lives in Los Angeles.
