Into The Wild : Bullhead City

Chapter V : BULLHEAD CITY

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. Jack London, The Call of the Wild

All Hail the Dominant Primordial Beast! And Captain Ahab Too! Alexander Supertramp - May 1992

graffito found inside the abandoned bus on the stampede trail

When his camera was ruined and McCandless stopped taking photographs, he also stopped keeping a journal, a practice he didn't resume until he went to Alaska the next year. Not a great deal is known, therefore, about where he traveled after departing Las Vegas in May 1991. From a letter McCandless sent to Jan Burres, we know he spent July and August on the Oregon coast, probably in the vicinity of Astoria, where he complained that "the fog and rain was often intolerable." In September he hitched down U.S. Highway 101 into California, then headed east into the desert again. And by early October he had landed in Bullhead City, Arizona.

Bullhead City is a community in the oxymoronic, late-twentieth-century idiom. Lacking a discernible center, the town exists as a haphazard sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls stretching for eight or nine miles along the banks of the Colorado, directly across the river from the high-rise hotels and casinos of Laughlin, Nevada. Bullheads distinguishing civic feature is the Mohave Valley Highway, four lanes of asphalt lined with gas stations and fast-food franchises, chiropractors and video shops, auto-parts outlets and tourist traps.

On the face of it, Bullhead City doesn't seem like the kind of place that would appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstoy, an ideologue who expressed nothing but contempt for the bourgeois trappings of mainstream America. McCandless, nevertheless, took a strong liking to Bullhead. Maybe it was his affinity for the lumpen, who were well represented in the community's trailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats; perhaps he simply fell in love with the stark desert landscape that encircles the town.

In any case, when he arrived in Bullhead City, McCandless stopped moving for more than two months—probably the longest he stayed in one place from the time he left Atlanta until he went to Alaska and moved into the abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail. In a card he mailed to Westerberg in October, he says of Bullhead, "It's a good place to spend the winter and I might finally settle down and abandon my tramping life, for good. I'll see what happens when spring comes around, because that's when I tend to get really itchy feet."

At the time he wrote these words, he was holding down a full-time job, flipping Quarter Pounders at a McDonald's on the main drag, commuting to work on a bicycle. Outwardly, he was living a surprisingly conventional existence, even going so far as to open a savings account at a local bank. Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald's job, he presented himself as Chris McCandless, not as Alex, and gave his employers his real Social Security number.

It was an uncharacteristic break from his cover that might easily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts—although the lapse proved to be of no consequence because the private investigator hired by Walt and Billie never caught the slip. Two years after he sweated over the grill in Bullhead, his colleagues at the golden arches don't recall much about Chris McCandless. "One thing I do remember is that he had a thing about socks," says the assistant manager, a fleshy, garrulous man named George Dreeszen. "He always wore shoes without socks— just plain couldn't stand to wear socks. But McDonald's has a rule that employees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times. That means shoes and socks. Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang!—the first thing he'd do is peel those socks off. I mean the very first thing. Kind of like a statement, to let us know we didn't own him, I guess. But he was a nice kid and a good worker. Real dependable."

Lori Zarza, the second assistant manager, has a somewhat different impression of McCandless. "Frankly, I was surprised he ever got hired," she says. "He could do the job —he cooked in the back—but he always worked at the same slow pace, even during the lunch rush, no matter how much you'd get on him to hurry it up. Customers would be stacked ten-deep at the counter, and he wouldn't understand why I was on his case. He just didn't make the connection. It was like he was off in his own universe. "He was reliable, though, a body that showed up every day, so they didn't dare fire him. They only paid four twenty-five an hour, and with all the casinos right across the river starting people at six twenty-five, well, it was hard to keep bodies behind the counter. "I don't think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws.

"When Chris finally quit," Zarza admits, "it was probably because of me. When he first started working, he was homeless, and he'd show up for work smelling bad. It wasn't up to McDonald's standards to come in smelling the way he did. So finally they delegated me to tell him that he needed to take a bath more often. Ever since I told him, there was a clash between us. And then the other employees—they were just trying to be nice—they started asking him if he needed some soap or anything. That made him mad—you could tell. But he never showed it outright. About three weeks later, he just walked out the door and quit."

McCandless had tried to disguise the fact that he was a drifter living out of a backpack: He told his fellow employees that he lived across the river in Laughlin. Whenever they offered him a ride home after work, he made excuses and politely declined. In fact, during his first several weeks in Bullhead, McCandless camped out in the desert at the edge of town; then he started squatting in a vacant mobile home. The latter arrangement, he explained in a letter to Jan Burres, "came about this way:"

One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, and observing me, asked me if I was "sleeping out." I told him yes, and it turned out that he had this old trailer I could stay in for free. The only problem is that he doesn't really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on their land here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep things toned down and stay out of sight, because he isn't supposed to have anybody over here. It's really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer is nice, it's a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets working and a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name is Charlie, is something of a lunatic and it's rather difficult to get along with him sometimes.

Charlie still lives at the same address, in a small teardrop-shaped camping trailer sheathed in rust-pocked tin, without plumbing or electricity, tucked behind the much larger blue-and-white mobile home where McCandless slept. Denuded mountains are visible to the west, towering sternly above the rooftops of adjacent double-wides. A baby-blue Ford Torino rests on blocks in the unkempt yard, weeds sprouting from its engine compartment. The ammonia reek of human urine rises from a nearby oleander hedge.

"Chris? Chris?" Charlie barks, scanning porous memory banks. "Oh yeah, him. Yeah, yeah, I remember him, sure." Charlie, dressed in a sweatshirt and khaki work pants, is a frail, nervous man with rheumy eyes and a growth of white stubble across his chin. By his recollection McCandless stayed in the trailer about a month.

"Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy," Charlie reports. "Didn't like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes—know what I'm saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He'd get moody, wouldn't like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn't know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy!

"But like I was saying, Alaska—yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybe to find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway. Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had 'em bad. When he left, was around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for lettin' him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him."

In late November, McCandless sent a postcard to Jan Burres in care of a post-office box in Niland, a small town in California's Imperial Valley. "That card we got in Niland was the first letter from him in a long time that had a return address on it," Burres remembers. "So I immediately wrote back and said we'd come see him the next weekend in Bullhead, which wasn't that far from where we were."

McCandless was thrilled to hear from Jan. "I am so glad to find you both alive and sound," he exclaimed in a letter dated December 9, 1991.

Thanks so much for the Christmas card. It's nice to be thought of this time of year. ... I'm so excited to hear that you will be coming to see me, you're welcome anytime. It's really great to think that after almost a year and a half we shall be meeting again.

He closed the letter by drawing a map and giving detailed directions for finding the trailer on Bullhead City's Baseline Road.

Four days after receiving this letter, however, as Jan and her boyfriend, Bob, were preparing to drive up for the visit, Burres returned to their campsite one evening to find "a big backpack leaning against our van. I recognized it as Alex's. Our little dog, Sunni, sniffed him out before I did. She'd liked Alex, but I was surprised she remembered him. When the dog found him, she went nuts." McCandless explained to Burres that he'd grown tired of Bullhead, tired of punching a clock, tired of the "plastic people" he worked with, and decided to get the hell out of town. Jan and Bob were staying three miles outside of Niland, at a place the locals call the Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving a grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert. Come November, as the weather turns cold across the rest of the country, some five thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds congregate in this otherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun. The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society— a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.

When McCandless arrived at the Slabs, a huge flea market-swap meet was in full swing out in the desert. Burres, as one of the vendors, had set up some folding tables displaying cheap, mostly secondhand goods for sale, and McCandless volunteered to oversee her large inventory of used paperback books.

"He helped me a lot," Burres acknowledges. "He watched the table when I needed to leave, categorized all the books, made a lot of sales. He seemed to get a real kick out of it. Alex was big on the classics: Dickens, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Jack London. London was his favorite. He'd try to convince every snowbird who walked by that they should read Call of the Wild."

McCandless had been infatuated with London since childhood. London's fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordial world, his championing of the great unwashed—all of it mirrored McCandless's passions. Mesmerized by London's turgid portrayal of life in Alaska and the Yukon, McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk." He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. Among the residents of the Niland Slabs was a seventeen-year-old named Tracy, and she fell in love with McCandless during his week-long visit. "She was this sweet little thing," says Burres, "the daughter of a couple of tramps who parked their rig four vehicles down from us. And poor Tracy developed a hopeless crush on Alex. The whole time he was in Niland, she hung around making goo-goo eyes at him, bugging me to convince him to go on walks with her. Alex was nice to her, but she was too young for him. He couldn't take her seriously. Probably left her brokenhearted for a whole week at least."

Even though McCandless rebuffed Tracy's advances, Burres makes it clear that he was no recluse: "He had a good time when he was around people, a real good time. At the swap meet he'd talk and talk and talk to everybody who came by. He must have met six or seven dozen people in Niland, and he was friendly with every one of them. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around."

McCandless was especially attentive to Burres, flirting and clowning with her at every opportunity. "He liked to tease me and torment me," she recalls. "I'd go out back to hang clothes on the line behind the trailer, and he'd attach clothespins all over me. He was playful, like a little kid. I had puppies, and he was always putting them under laundry baskets to watch them bounce around and yelp. He'd do it till I'd get mad and have to yell at him to stop. But in truth he was real good with the dogs. They'd follow him around, cry after him, want to sleep with him. Alex just had a way with animals."

One afternoon while McCandless was tending the book table at the Niland swap meet, somebody left a portable electric organ with Burres to sell on consignment. "Alex took it over and entertained everybody all day playing it," she says. "He had an amazing voice. He drew quite a crowd. Until then I never knew he was musical."

McCandless spoke frequently to the denizens of the Slabs about his plans for Alaska. He did calisthenics each morning to get in shape for the rigors of the bush and discussed backcountry survival strategies at length with Bob, a self-styled survivalist.

"Me," says Burres, "I thought Alex had lost his mind when he told us about his 'great Alaskan odyssey,' as he called it. But he was really excited about it. Couldn't stop talking about the trip."

Despite prodding from Burres, however, McCandless revealed virtually nothing about his family. "I'd ask him," Burres says, " 'Have you let your people know what you're up to? Does your mom know you're going to Alaska? Does your dad know?' But he'd never answer. He'd just roll his eyes at me, get peeved, tell me to quit trying to mother him. And Bob would say, 'Leave him alone! He's a grown man!' I'd keep at it until he'd change the subject, though—because of what happened between me and my own son. He's out there somewhere, and I'd want someone to look after him like I tried to look after Alex."

The Sunday before McCandless left Niland, he was watching an NFL playoff game on the television in Burres's trailer when she noticed he was rooting especially hard for the Washington Redskins. "So I asked him if he was from the B.C. area," she says. "And he answered, 'Yeah, actually I am.' That's the only thing he ever let on about his background."

The following Wednesday, McCandless announced it was time for him to be moving on. He said he needed to go to the post office in Salton City, fifty miles west of Niland, to which he'd asked the manager of the Bullhead McDonald's to send his final pay-check, general delivery. He accepted Burres's offer to drive him there, but when she tried to give him a little money for helping out at the swap meet, she recalls, "he acted real offended. I told him, 'Man, you gotta have money to get along in this world/ but he wouldn't take it.

Finally I got him to take some Swiss Army knives and a few belt knives; I convinced him they'd come in handy in Alaska and that he could maybe trade them for something down the road."

After an extended argument Burres also got McCandless to accept some long underwear and other warm clothing she thought he'd need in Alaska. "He eventually took it to shut me up," she laughs, "but the day after he left, I found most of it in the van. He'd pulled it out of his pack when we weren't looking and hid it up under the seat. Alex was a great kid, but he could really make me mad sometimes."

Although Burres was concerned about McCandless, she assumed he'd come through in one piece. "I thought he'd be fine in the end," she reflects. "He was smart. He'd figured out how to paddle a canoe down to Mexico, how to hop freight trains, how to score a bed at inner-city missions. He figured all of that out on his own, and I felt sure he'd figure out Alaska, too."