Chapter IV : DETRITAL
WASH
Paul
Shepard, Man in the Landscape: AHISTORIC VIEW OF THE ESTHETICS OF NATURE
The
bear-paw poppy, Arctomecon califomica, is a wildflower found in an
isolated corner of the Mojave Desert and nowhere else in the world. In late
spring it briefly produces a delicate golden bloom, but for most of the year
the plant huddles unadorned and unnoticed on the parched earth. A.
califomica is sufficiently rare that it has been classified as an
endangered species. In October 1990, more than three months after McCandless
left Atlanta, a National Park Service ranger named Bud Walsh was sent into the
backcountry of Lake Mead National Recreation Area to tally bear-paw poppies so that
the federal government might better know just how scarce the plants were. A.
califomica grows only in gypsum soil of a sort that occurs in abundance
along the south shore of Lake Mead, so that is where Walsh led his team of
rangers to conduct the botanical survey. They turned off Temple Bar Road, drove
two roadless miles down the bed of Detrital Wash, parked their rigs near the
lakeshore, and started scrambling up the steep east bank of the wash, a slope
of crumbly white gypsum. A few minutes later, as they neared the top of the
bank, one of the rangers happened to glance back down into the wash while
pausing to catch his breath. "Hey! Look down there!" he yelled.
"What the hell is that?"
At
the edge of the dry riverbed, in a thicket of saltbush not far from where they
had parked, a large object was concealed beneath a dun-colored tarpaulin. When
the rangers pulled off the tarp, they found an old yellow Datsun without
license plates. A note taped to the windshield read, "This piece of shit
has been abandoned. Whoever can get it out of here can have it." The doors
had been left unlocked. The floorboards were plastered with mud, apparently
from a recent flash flood. When he looked inside, Walsh found a Gianini guitar,
a saucepan containing $4.93 in loose change, a football, a garbage bag full of
old clothes, a fishing rod and tackle, a new electric razor, a harmonica, a set
of jumper cables, twenty-five pounds of rice, and in the glove compartment, the
keys to the vehicle's ignition.
The
rangers searched the surrounding area "for anything suspicious,"
according to Walsh, and then departed. Five days later another ranger returned
to the abandoned vehicle, managed to jump-start it without difficulty and drove
it out to the National Park Service maintenance yard at Temple Bar. "He
drove it back at sixty miles an hour," Walsh recalls. "Said the thing
ran like a champ." Attempting to learn who owned the car, the rangers sent
out a bulletin over the Teletype to relevant law-enforcement agencies and ran a
detailed search of computer records across the Southwest to see if the Datsuns VIN
was associated with any crimes. Nothing turned up.
By
and by the rangers traced the car's serial number to the Hertz Corporation, the
vehicle's original owner; Hertz said they had sold it as a used rental car many
years earlier and had no interest in reclaiming it. "Whoa! Great!"
Walsh remembers thinking. "A freebie from the road gods—a car like this
will make a great undercover vehicle for drug interdiction." And indeed it
did. Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make
undercover drug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national
recreation area, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating
out of a trailer park near Bullhead City. "We're still getting a lot of
mileage out of that old car even now," Walsh proudly reports two and a
half years after finding the Datsun. "Put a few bucks of gas in the thing,
and it will go all day. Real reliable. I kind of wondered why nobody ever
showed up to reclaim it."
The
Datsun, of course, belonged to Chris McCandless. After piloting it west out of Atlanta,
he'd arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6, riding a giddy Emersonian
high. Ignoring posted warnings that off-road driving is strictly forbidden, McCandless
steered the Datsun off the pavement where it crossed a broad, sandy wash.
He
drove two miles down the riverbed to the south shore of the lake. The
temperature was
120 degrees Fahrenheit. The empty desert stretched into the distance,
shimmering in the heat. Surrounded by chollas, bur sage, and the comical
scurrying of collared lizards, McCandless pitched his tent in the puny shade of
a tamarisk and basked in his newfound freedom.
Detrital
Wash extends for some fifty miles from Lake Mead into the mountains north of
Kingman; it drains a big chunk of country. Most of the year the wash is as dry
as chalk. During the summer months, however, superheated air rises from the
scorched earth like bubbles from the bottom of a boiling kettle, rushing
heavenward in turbulent convection currents. Frequently the updrafts create cells
of muscular, anvil-headed cumulonimbus clouds that can rise thirty thousand
feet or more above the Mojave. Two days after McCandless set up camp beside
Lake Mead, an unusually robust wall of thunderheads reared up in the afternoon
sky, and it began to rain, very hard, over much of the Detrital Valley.
McCandless
was camped at the edge of the wash, a couple of feet higher than the main
channel, so when the bore of brown water came rushing down from the high country,
he had just enough time to gather his tent and belongings and save them from being
swept away. There was nowhere to move the car, however, as the only route of egress
was now a foaming, full-blown river. As it turned out, the flash flood didn't
have enough power to carry away the vehicle or even to do any lasting damage.
But it did get the engine wet, so wet that when McCandless tried to start the
car soon thereafter, the engine wouldn't catch, and in his impatience he
drained the battery.
With
the battery dead there was no way to get the Datsun running. If he hoped to get the
car back to a paved road, McCandless had no choice but to walk out and notify
the authorities of his predicament. If he went to the rangers, however, they
would have some irksome questions for him: Why had he ignored posted
regulations and driven down the wash in the first place? Was he aware that the
vehicle's registration had expired two years before and had not been renewed?
Did he know that his drivers license had also expired, and the vehicle was
uninsured as well?
Truthful
responses to these queries were not likely to be well received by the rangers. McCandless
could endeavor to explain that he answered to statutes of a higher order— that
as a latter-day adherent of Henry David Thoreau, he took as gospel the essay
"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" and thus considered it his moral
responsibility to flout the laws of the state. It was improbable, however, that
deputies of the federal government would share his point of view. There would
be thickets of red tape to negotiate and fines to pay. His parents would no
doubt be contacted. But there was a way to avoid such aggravation: He could
simply abandon the Datsun and resume his odyssey on foot. And that's what he
decided to do.
Instead
of feeling distraught over this turn of events, moreover, McCandless was exhilarated:
He saw the flash flood as an opportunity to shed unnecessary baggage. He concealed
the car as best he could beneath a brown tarp, stripped it of its Virginia
plates, and hid them. He buried his Winchester deer-hunting rifle and a few
other possessions that he might one day want to recover. Then, in a gesture
that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud, he arranged all his paper
currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and
twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal
tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke.
We
know all of this because McCandless documented the burning of his money and most
of the events that followed in a journal-snapshot album he would later leave
with Wayne West-erberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska. Although
the tone of the journal—written in the third person in a stilted,
self-consciousness voice—often veers toward melodrama, the available evidence
indicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was
a credo he took seriously.
After
loading his few remaining possessions into a backpack, McCandless set out on July
10 to hike around Lake Mead. This, his journal acknowledges, turned out to be a
"tremendous mistake. ... In extreme July temperatures becomes
delirious." Suffering from heat stroke, he managed to flag down some
passing boaters, who gave him a lift to Callville Bay, a marina near the west
end of the lake, where he stuck out his thumb and took to the road. McCandless
tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and
power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law, savoring the intermittent
company of other vagabonds he met along the way. Allowing his life to be shaped
by circumstance, he hitched to Lake Tahoe, hiked into the Sierra Nevada, and spent
a week walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail before exiting the mountains
and returning to the pavement.
At
the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself Crazy Ernie
and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California; photographs of
the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded by goats and
chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, old appliances, and
mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven days with six other
vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had no intention of ever
paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutter in the yard,
pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot. Then he resumed
a life of constant motion, riding his thumb north and west through Red Bluff,
Weaverville, and Willow Creek.
At
Arcata, California, in the dripping redwood forests of the Pacific shore, McCandless
turned right on U.S. Highway 101 and headed up the coast. Sixty miles south of
the Oregon line, near the town of Orick, a pair of drifters in an old van
pulled over to consult their map when they noticed a boy crouching in the
bushes off the side of the road. "He was wearing long shorts and this
really stupid hat," says Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old rubber tramp who
was traveling around the West selling knick-knacks at flea markets and swap
meets with her boyfriend, Bob. "He had a book about plants with him, and
he was using it to pick berries, collecting them in a gallon milk jug with the
top cut off. He looked pretty pitiful, so I yelled, 'Hey, you want a ride
somewhere?' I thought maybe we could give him a meal or something.
"We
got to talking. He was a nice kid. Said his name was Alex. And he was big-time hungry.
Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he'd been surviving on
edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud of it. Said
he was tramping around the country, having a big old adventure. He told us
about abandoning his car, about
burning all his money. I said, 'Why would you want to do that?' Claimed he
didn't need
money. I have a son about the same age Alex was, and we've been estranged for a
few years now. So I said to Bob, 'Man, we got to take this kid with us. You
need to school
him about some things.' Alex took a ride from us up to Orick Beach, where we were
staying, and camped with us for a week. He was a really good kid. We thought
the world of him. When he left, we never expected to hear from him again, but
he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years Alex sent us a
postcard every month or two."
From
Orick, McCandless continued north up the coast. He passed through Pistol River,
Coos Bay, Seal Rock, Manzanita, As-toria; Hoquiam, Humptulips, Queets; Forks, Port
Angeles, Port Townsend, Seattle. "He was alone," as James Joyce wrote
of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. "He was unheeded, happy,
and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and
wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the
seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."
On
August 10, shortly before meeting Jan Burres and Bob, McCandless had been ticketed
for hitchhiking near Willow Creek, in the gold-mining country east of Eureka.
In an
uncharacteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents' Annandale address when the arresting
officer demanded to know his permanent place of residence. The unpaid ticket appeared
in Walt and Bil-lie's mailbox at the end of August.
Walt
and Billie, terribly concerned over Chris's vanishing act, had by that time already
contacted the Annandale police, who had been of no help. When the ticket arrived
from California, they became frantic. One of their neighbors was the director
of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approached this man, an army
general, for advice. The general put him in touch with a private investigator
named Peter Kalitka, who'd done contract work for both the DIA and the CIA. He
was the best, the general assured
Walt; if Chris was out there, Kalitka would find him.
Using
the Willow Creek ticket as a starting point, Kalitka launched an extremely thorough
search, chasing down leads that led as far afield as Europe and South Africa. His
efforts, however, turned up nothing—until December, when he learned from an inspection
of tax records that Chris had given away his college fund to OXFAM.
"That
really scared us," says Walt. "By that point we had absolutely no
idea what Chris could be up to. The hitchhiking ticket just didn't make any
sense. He loved that Datsun so much it was mind-boggling to me that he would
ever abandon it and travel on foot. Although,
in retrospect, I guess it shouldn't have surprised me. Chris was very much of the
school that you should own nothing except what you can carry on your back at a
dead run."
As
Kalitka was trying to pick up Chris's scent in California, McCandless was
already far away, hitching east across the Cascade Range, across the sagebrush
uplands and lava beds of the Columbia River basin, across the Idaho panhandle,
into Montana. There, outside Cut Bank, he crossed paths with Wayne Westerberg
and by the end of September was working for him in Carthage. When Westerberg was
jailed and the work came to a halt, and with winter coming on, McCandless
headed for warmer climes.
On
October 28, he caught a ride with a long-haul trucker into Needles, California.
"Overjoyed upon reaching the Colorado River," McCandless wrote in his
journal. Then he left the highway and started walking south through the desert,
following the riverbank. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock, Arizona, a
dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway intersects the
California border. While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminum canoe
for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down the Colorado
River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south, across
the border with Mexico. This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the
gulf, has little in common with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the
Grand Canyon, some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Emasculated by dams and
diversion canals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to
reservoir through some of the hottest, starkest country on the continent.
McCandless was stirred by the austerity of this landscape, by its saline
beauty. The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape
to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
From
Topock, McCandless paddled south down Lake Havasu under a bleached dome of sky,
huge and empty. He made a brief excursion up the Bill Williams River, a
tributary of the Colorado, then continued downstream through the Colorado River
Indian Reservation, the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, the Imperial National
Wildlife Refuge. He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath
escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown
mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage. Leaving the river for a day to
track a herd of wild horses, he came across a sign warning that he was
trespassing on the U.S. Army's highly restricted Yuma Proving Ground.
McCandless was deterred not in the least.
At
the end of November, he paddled through Yuma, where he stopped long enough to replenish
his provisions and send a postcard to Westerberg in care of Glory House, the Sioux
Falls work-release facility where Westerberg was doing time. "Hey
Wayne!" the card
reads,
How's
it going? I hope that your situation has improved since the time we last spoke.
I've been tramping around Arizona for about a month now. This is a good state!
There is all kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful. But apart
from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank you once again
for all your hospitality. It's rare to find a man as generous and good natured
as you are. Sometimes I wish I hadn't met you though. Tramping is too easy with
all this money. My days were more exciting when 1 was penniless and had to
forage around for my next meal. I couldn't make it now without money, however,
as there is very little fruiting agriculture down here at this time.
Please
thank Kevin again for all the clothes he gave me, I would have froze to death without
them. I hope he got that book to you. Wayne, you really should read War and Peace.
I meant it when I said you had one of the highest characters of any man I'd met.
That is a very powerful and highly symbolic book. It has things in it that I
think you will understand. Things that escape most people. As for me, I've
decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and
simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One day I'll get back to you
Wayne and repay some of your kindness. A case of Jack Daniels maybe? Til then
III always think of you as a friend.
GOD
BLESS You,
ALEXANDER
On
December 2, he reached the Morelos Dam and the Mexican border. Worried that he
would be denied entry because he was carrying no identification, he sneaked
into Mexico
by paddling through the dam's open floodgates and shooting the spillway below. "Alex
looks quickly around for signs of trouble," his journal records. "But
his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed or ignored. Alexander is
jubilant!" His jubilance, however, was short-lived.
Below the Morelos Dam the river turns into a maze of irrigation canals,
marshland, and dead-end channels, among which McCandless repeatedly lost his
way:
Canals
break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumbfounded. Encounters some canal
officials who can speak a little English. They tell him he has not been
traveling south but west and is headed for the center of the Baja Peninsula.
Alex is crushed. Pleads and persists that there must be some waterway to the
Gulf of California. They stare at Alex and think him crazy. But then a
passionate conversation breaks out amongst them, accompanied by maps and the
flourish of pencils. After 10 minutes they present to Alex a route which
apparently will take him to the ocean. He is overjoyed and hope bursts back
into his heart. Following the map he reverses back up the canal until he comes
upon the Canal de Independencia, which he takes east. According to the map this
canal should bisect the Wellteco Canal, which will turn south and flow all the
way to the ocean. But his hopes are quickly smashed when the canal comes to a
dead end in the middle of the desert. A reconnaissance mission reveals,
however, that Alex has merely run back into the bed of the now dead and dry
Colorado River. He discovers another canal about 1/2 mile on the other side of
the river bed. He decides to portage to this canal.
It
took McCandless most of three days to carry the canoe and his gear to the new canal.
The journal entry for December 5 records,
At
last! Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and heads south. Worries
and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller. . . . Local inhabitants help
him portage around a barrier. . . . Alex finds Mexicans to be warm, friendly
people. Much more hospitable than Americans. . . . 12/6 Small but dangerous
waterfalls litter the canal. 12/9 All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach
the ocean but merely peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded. Decides
he must be close to ocean and elects to try and work way through swamp to sea.
Alex becomes progressively lost to point where he must push canoe through reeds
and drag it through mud. All is in despair. Finds some dry ground to camp in
swamp at sundown. Next day, on 12/10, Alex resumes quest for an opening to the
sea, but only becomes more confused, traveling in circles. Completely
demoralized and frustrated he lays in his canoe at day's end and weeps. But
then by fantastic chance he comes upon Mexican duck hunting guides who can
speak English. He tells them his story and his quest for the sea. They say
there is no outlet to the sea. But then one among them agrees to tow Alex back
to his basecamp [behind a small motor skiff], and drive him and the canoe [in
the bed of a pickup truck] to the ocean. It is a miracle.
The
duck hunters dropped him in El Golfo de Santa Clara, a fishing village on the Gulf
of California. From there McCandless took to the sea, traveling south down the eastern
edge of the gulf. Having reached his destination, McCandless slowed his pace, and
his mood became more contemplative. He took photographs of a tarantula,
plaintive sunsets, windswept dunes, the long curve of empty coastline. The
journal entries become short and perfunctory. He wrote fewer than a hundred
words over the month that followed.
On
December 14, weary of paddling, he hauled the canoe far up the beach, climbed a
sandstone bluff, and set up camp on the edge of a desolate plateau. He stayed
there for ten days, until high winds forced him to seek refuge in a cave midway
up the precipitous face of the bluff, where he remained for another ten days.
He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over the Gran
Desierto— the Great Desert: seventeen hundred square miles of shifting
dunes, the largest expanse of pure sand desert in North America. A day later he
resumed paddling down the barren shore.
His
journal entry for January 11, 1991, begins "A very fateful day."
After traveling some distance south, he beached the canoe on a sandbar far from
shore to observe the powerful tides. An hour later violent gusts started
blowing down from the desert, and the wind and tidal rips conspired to carry
him out to sea. The water by this time was a chaos of whitecaps that threatened
to swamp and capsize his tiny craft. The wind increased to gale force. The
whitecaps grew into high, breaking waves. "In great frustration," the
journal reads,
he
screams and beats canoe with oar. The oar breaks. Alex has one spare oar. He calms
himself. If loses second oar is dead. Finally through extreme effort and much cursing
he manages to beach canoe on jetty and collapses exhausted on sand at sundown. This
incident led Alexander to decide to abandon canoe and return north.
On
January 16, McCandless left the stubby metal boat on a hummock of dune grass southeast
of El Golfo de Santa Clara and started walking north up the deserted beach. He had
not seen or talked to another soul in thirty-six days. For that entire period
he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and what marine life he could
pull from the sea, an experience that would later convince him he could survive
on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush.
He
was back at the United States border on January 18. Caught by immigration authorities
trying to slip into the country without ID, he spent a night in custody before concocting
a story that sprang him from the slammer, minus his .38-caliber handgun, a "beautiful
Colt Python, to which he was much attached."
McCandless
spent the next six weeks on the move across the Southwest, traveling as far
east as Houston and as far west as the Pacific coast. To avoid being rolled by
the unsavory characters who rule the streets and freeway overpasses where he
slept, he learned to bury what money he had before entering a city, then
recover it on the way out of town. On February 3, according to his journal,
McCandless went to Los Angeles "to get a ID and a job but feels extremely
uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately."
Six
days later, camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with Thomas and Karin, a young
German couple who had given him a ride, he wrote, "Can this be the same
Alex that set out in July, 1990? Malnutrition and the road have taken their
toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring."
On
February 24, seven and a half months after he abandoned the Datsun, McCandless returned
to Detrital Wash. The Park Service had long since impounded the vehicle, but he
unearthed his old Virginia plates, SJF-421, and a few belongings he'd buried
there. Then he hitched into Las Vegas and found a job at an Italian restaurant.
"Alexander buried his backpack in the desert on 2/27 and entered Las Vegas
with no money and no ID," the journal tells us.
He
lived on the streets with bums, tramps, and winos for several weeks. Vegas
would not be the end of the story, however. On May 10, itchy feet returned and
Alex left his job in Vegas, retrieved his backpack, and hit the road again,
though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a camera underground you
won't be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus the story has no picture
book for the period May 10, 1991-January 7, 1992. But this is not important. It
is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the
fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive!
Thank you. Thank you.
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