Chapter VII : CARTHAGE
Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
It is true that many
creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are
extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the
shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative
person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment
in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative
pursuits are themselves pathological...
[A]voidance behavior
is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization.
If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant
might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some
kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly,
dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
Anthony Storr,
Solitude : A RETURN TO THE SELF
The
big John Deere 8020 squats silently in the canted evening light, a long way
from anywhere, surrounded by a half-mowed field of South Dakota milo. Wayne Westerberg's
muddy sneakers protrude from the maw of the combine, as if the machine were in
the process of swallowing him whole, an overgrown metal reptile digesting its
prey. "Hand me that goddamn wrench, will you?" an angry, muffled
voice demands from deep within the machine's innards. "Or are you guys too
busy standing around with your hands in your goddamn pockets to be of any
use?" The combine has broken down for the third time in as many days, and
Westerberg is frantically trying to replace a hard-to-reach bushing before
nightfall. An hour later he emerges, smeared with grease and chaff but
successful. "Sorry about snapping like that," Westerberg apologizes.
"We've been working too many eighteen hour days. I guess I'm getting a
little snarly, it being so late in the season and all, and us being shorthanded
besides. He was counting on Alex being back at work by now." Fifty days
have gone by since McCandless's body was discovered in Alaska on the Stampede Trail.
Seven
months earlier, on a frosty March afternoon, McCand-less had ambled into the office
at the Carthage grain elevator and announced that he was ready to go to work. "There
we were, ringing up the morning's tickets," remembers Westerberg,
"and in walks Alex with a big old backpack slung over his shoulder."
He told Westerberg he planned on staying until April 15, just long enough to
put together a grubstake. He needed to buy a pile of new gear, he explained,
because he was going to Alaska. McCand-less promised to come back to South
Dakota in time to help with the autumn harvest, but he wanted to be in
Fairbanks by the end of April in order to squeeze in as much time as possible
up North before his return.
During
those four weeks in Carthage, McCandless worked hard, doing dirty, tedious jobs
that nobody else wanted to tackle: mucking out warehouses, exterminating vermin,
painting, scything weeds. At one point, to reward McCandless with a task that
involved slightly more skill, Westerberg attempted to teach him to operate a
front-end loader.
"Alex
hadn't been around machinery much," Westerberg says with a shake of his
head, "and it was pretty comical to watch him try to get the hang of the
clutch and all those levers. He definitely wasn't what you'd call mechanically
minded." Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense. Many
who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have great difficulty
seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest. "Alex wasn't a total space
cadet or anything," says Westerberg; "don't get me wrong. But there
was gaps in his thinking. I remember once I went over to the house, walked into
the kitchen, and noticed a godawful stink. I mean it smelled nasty in there. I
opened the microwave, and the bottom of it was filled with rancid grease. Alex
had been using it to cook chicken, and it never occurred to him that the grease
had to drain somewhere. It wasn't that he was too lazy to clean it up—Alex
always kept things real neat and orderly—it was just that he hadn't noticed the
grease."
Soon
after McCandless returned to Carthage that spring, Westerberg introduced him to
his longtime, on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gail Borah, a petite, sad-eyed
woman, as slight as a heron, with delicate features and long blond hair.
Thirty-five years old, divorced, a mother of two teenage children, she quickly
became close to McCandless. "He was kind of shy at first," says
Borah. "He acted like it was hard for him to be around people. I just
figured that was because he'd spent so much time by himself.
"I
had Alex over to the house for supper just about every night," Borah
continues.
"He
was a big eater. Never left any food on his plate. Never. He was a good cook,
too. Sometimes he'd have me over to Wayne's place and fix supper for everybody.
Cooked a lot of rice. You'd think he would of got tired of it, but he never
did. Said he could live for a month on nothing but twenty-five pounds of rice.
"Alex
talked a lot when we got together," Borah recalls. "Serious stuff,
like he was baring his soul, kind of. He said he could tell me things that he
couldn't tell the others. You could see something was gnawing at him. It was
pretty obvious he didn't get along with his family, but he never said much
about any of them except Carine, his little sister. He said they were pretty
close. Said she was beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would
turn their heads and stare."
Westerberg,
for his part, didn't concern himself with McCandless's family problems. "Whatever
reason he had for being pissed off, I figured it must have been a good one. Now
that he's dead, though, I don't know anymore. If Alex was here right now, I'd
be tempted to chew him out good: 'What the hell were you thinking? Not speaking
to your family for all that time, treating them like dirt!' One of the kids
that works for me, fuck, he don't even have any goddamn parents, but you don't
hear him bitching. Whatever the deal
was with Alex's family, I guarantee you I've seen a lot worse. Knowing Alex, I
think he must have just got stuck on something that happened between him and
his dad and couldn't leave it be."
Westerberg's
latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship
between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung.
Given Walt's need to exert control and Chris's extravagantly independent nature,
polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt's authority through high school
and college to a surprising degree, but the boy raged inwardly all the while.
He brooded at length over what he perceived to be his father's moral
shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parents' lifestyle, the tyranny of their
conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled—and when he finally did, it was
with characteristic immoderation.
Shortly
before he disappeared, Chris complained to Carine that their parents' behavior was
"so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful and insulting that I finally
passed my breaking point." He went on:
Since
they won't ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduation I'm going to
let them think they are right, I'm going to let them think that I'm
"coming around to see their side of things " and that our
relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt,
swift action I'm going to completely knock them out of my life. I'm going to
divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots
again as long as I live. I'll be through with them once and for all, forever.
The
chill Westerberg sensed between Alex and his parents stood in marked contrast
to the warmth McCandless exhibited in Carthage. Outgoing and extremely
personable when the spirit moved him, he charmed a lot of folks. There was mail
waiting for him when he arrived back in South Dakota, correspondence from
people he'd met on the road, including what Westerberg remembers as
"letters from a girl who had a big crush on him, someone he'd gotten to
know in some Timbuktu—some campground, I think." But McCandless never
mentioned any romantic entanglements to either Westerberg or Borah.
"I
don't recollect Alex ever talking about any girlfriends," says Westerberg.
"Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have a
family some day. You could tell he didn't take relationships lightly. He wasn't
the kind of guy who would go out and pick up girls just to get laid."
It
was clear to Borah, too, that McCandless hadn't spent much time cruising
singles bars. "One night a bunch of us went out to a bar over in
Madison," says Borah, "and it was hard to get him out on the dance
floor. But once he was out there, he wouldn't sit down. We had a blast. After
Alex died and all, Carine told me that as far as she knew, I was one of the
only girls he ever went dancing with."
In
high school McCandless had enjoyed a close rapport with two or three members of
the opposite sex, and Carine recalls one instance when he got drunk and tried
to bring a girl up to his bedroom in the middle of the night (they made so much
noise stumbling up the stairs that Billie was awakened and sent the girl home).
But there is little evidence that he was sexually active as a teenager and even
less to suggest that he slept with any woman after graduating from high school.
(Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that he was ever sexually intimate
with a man.) It seems that McCandless was drawn to women but remained largely
or entirely celibate, as chaste as a monk.
Chastity
and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed,
one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that
included Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," in which the
nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces "the demands of the flesh." Several
such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins
filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless's distinctive hand. And in the
chapter on "Higher Laws" in Thoreau's Walden, a copy of which
was also discovered in the bus, McCandless circled "Chastity is the
flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like,
are but various fruits which succeed it."
We
Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently
healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements
of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless's
apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corollary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least
in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes
that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded
passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most
prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, misfits,
and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems
to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His
yearning, in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact.
McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled
beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself. And
thus was he drawn north, to Alaska. McCandless assured both Westerberg and
Borah that when his northern sojourn was over, he would return to South Dakota,
at least for the fall. After that, it would depend.
"I
got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last big adventure,"
Westerberg offers, "and that he wanted to settle down some. He said he was
going to write a book about his travels. He liked Carthage. With his education,
nobody thought he was going to work at a goddamn grain elevator the rest of his
life. But he definitely intended to come back here for a while, help us out at
the elevator, figure out what he was going to do next." That spring,
however, McCandless's sights were fixed unflinchingly on Alaska. He talked
about the trip at every opportunity. He sought out experienced hunters around town
and asked them for tips about stalking game, dressing animals, curing meat.
Borah drove him to the Kmart in Mitchell to shop for some last pieces of gear.
By
mid-April, Westerberg was both shorthanded and very busy, so he asked McCandless
to postpone his departure and work a week or two longer. McCandless wouldn't
even consider it. "Once Alex made up his mind about something, there was
no changing it," Westerberg laments. "I even offered to buy him a
plane ticket to Fairbanks, which would have let him work an extra ten days and
still get to Alaska by the end of April, but he said, 'No, I want to hitch
north. Flying would be cheating. It would wreck the whole trip.'"
Two
nights before McCandless was scheduled to head north, Mary Westerberg, Wayne's
mother, invited him to her house for dinner. "My mom doesn't like a lot of
my hired help," Westerberg says, "and she wasn't real enthusiastic
about meeting Alex, either. But I kept bugging her, telling her 'You gotta meet
this kid,' and so she finally had him over for supper. They hit it off
immediately. The two of 'em talked nonstop for five hours."
"There
was something fascinating about him," explains Mrs. Westerberg, seated at the
polished walnut table where McCandless dined that night. "Alex struck me
as much older than twenty-four. Everything I said, he'd demand to know more
about what I meant, about why I thought this way or that. He was hungry to
learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted
on living out his beliefs.
"We
talked for hours about books; there aren't that many people in Carthage who
like to talk about books. He went on and on about Mark Twain. Gosh, he was fun
to visit with; I didn't want the night to end. I was greatly looking forward to
seeing him again this fall. I can't get him out of my mind. I keep picturing
his face—he sat in the same chair you're sitting in now. Considering that I
only spent a few hours in Alex's company, it amazes
me how much I'm bothered by his death."
On
McCandless's final night in Carthage, he partied hard at the Cabaret with Westerberg's
crew. The Jack Daniel's flowed freely. To everyone's surprise, McCandless sat
down at the piano, which he'd never mentioned he knew how to play, and started
pounding out honky-tonk country tunes, then ragtime, then Tony Bennett numbers.
And he wasn't merely a drunk inflicting his delusions of talent on a captive
audience. "Alex," says Gail Borah, "could really play. I mean he
was good. We were all blown away by it."
On
the morning of April 15, everybody gathered at the elevator to see McCandless off.
His pack was heavy. He had approximately one thousand dollars tucked in his
boot. He left his journal and photo album with Westerberg for safekeeping and
gave him the leather belt he'd made in the desert.
"Alex
used to sit at the bar in the Cabaret and read that belt for hours on
end," says Westerberg, "like he was translating hieroglyphics for us.
Each picture he'd carved into the leather had a long story behind it."
When
McCandless hugged Borah good-bye, she says, "I noticed he was crying. That
frightened me. He wasn't planning on being gone all that long; I figured he
wouldn't have been crying unless he intended to take some big risks and knew he
might not be coming back. That's when I started having a bad feeling that we
wouldn't never see Alex again."
A
big tractor-semitrailer rig was idling out front; Rod Wolf, one of Westerberg's
employees, needed to haul a load of sunflower seeds to Enderlin, North Dakota,
and had agreed to drive McCandless to Interstate 94. "When
I let him off, he had that big damn machete hanging off his shoulder,"
Wolf says. "I thought, 'Jeeze, nobody's going to pick him up when they see
that thing.' But I didn't say nothin' about it. I just shook his hand, wished
him good luck, and told him he'd better write."
McCandless
did. A week later Westerberg received a terse card with a Montana postmark:
April18. Arrived in
Whitefish this morning on a freight train. I am making good time. Today I will
jump the border and turn north for Alaska. Give my regards to everyone. Take
care, Alex
Then,
in early May, Westerberg received another postcard, this one from Alaska, with a
photo of a polar bear on the front. It was postmarked April 27, 1992.
"Greetings from Fairbanks!" it reads,
This is the last you
shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to
catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here.
Please return all
mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return
South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again, I
want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild.
Alex.
On the same date McCandless sent a card
bearing a similar message to Jan Burres and Bob:
Hey Guys!
This is the last
communication you shall receive from me. I now walk out to live amongst the
wild. Take care, it was great knowing you.
Alexander.
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