When Chris McCandless graduated from Emory University, Atlanta, in June 1990, he sent his parents a letter containing his final reports. His letter ended ‘Say ‘Hi’ to everyone for me.’
No one in Chris’s family ever heard from him again.
He drove west out of Atlanta, and invented a new life for himself with a new name. He left his car in some woods and burned all his money, because, as he wrote in his diary, ‘I need no possessions. I can survive with just nature.’
For the next two years, he hitched to various parts of the United States and Mexico. He wanted the freedom to go where he wanted and work when he needed. For him, his life was very rich. ‘God, it’s great to be alive. Thank you! Thank you!’ his diary reads.
Chris came from a comfortable background. His father had a business which he ran efficiently, and he controlled his own family in a similar way. Chris and his father didn’t get on. When his parents didn’t hear from him for several months, they contacted the police, but they could do nothing. In July 1992, two years after Chris left Atlanta, his mother woke in the middle of the night. ‘I could hear Chris calling me. I wasn’t dreaming. He was begging, ‘Mom! Help me!’ But I couldn’t help him because I didn’t know where he was.’
Chris’s dream was to spend some time in Alaska, and this is where he went in April 1992. In early May, after a few days in the Alaskan bush, Chris found an old bus which hunters used for shelter. It had a bed and a stove. He decided to stay there a while. ‘Total freedom,’ he wrote. ‘My home is the road.’
However, reality soon changed the dream. He was hungry, and it was difficult to find enough to eat. He shot ducks, squirrels, birds, and sometimes a moose, and with these he ate wild potatoes, wild mushrooms, and berries. He was losing a lot of weight. On July 30 he wrote, ‘Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Can’t stand up. Starving. Danger.’ It seems that Chris was eating a part of the wild potato plant that was poisonous. He couldn’t get out of the bus to look for food. ‘I am trapped in the wild,’ he wrote on August 5.
He became weaker and weaker as he was starving to death. His final note says, ‘I have had a good life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!’
Then he crawled into his sleeping bag and lost consciousness. He probably died on August 18. One of the last things he did was to take a photo of himself, one hand holding his final note, the other hand raised in a brave goodbye. His face is horribly thin, but he is smiling in the picture, and the look in his eyes says ‘I am at peace.’