Into The Wild : Chesapeake Beach

Chapter XI : CHESAPEAKE BEACH

Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute—life or truth or beauty—of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago passage highlighted in one of the books found with Chris McCandless's remains. "Need for a purpose" had been written in McCandless's hand in the margin above the passage.

Samuel Walter McCandless, Jr., fifty-six years old, is a bearded, taciturn man with longish salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Tall and solidly proportioned, he wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a professorial demeanor. Seven weeks after the body of his son turned up in Alaska wrapped in a blue sleeping bag that Billie had sewn for Chris from a kit, Walt studies a sailboat scudding beneath the window of his waterfront townhouse. "How is it," he wonders aloud as he gazes blankly across Chesapeake Bay, "that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain?"

The McCandless home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, is tastefully decorated, spotless, devoid of clutter. Floor-to-ceiling windows take in the hazy panorama of the bay. A big Chevy Suburban and a white Cadillac are parked out front, a painstakingly restored '69 Corvette sits in the garage, a thirty-foot cruising catamaran is moored at the dock. Four large squares of poster board, covered with scores of photos documenting the whole brief span of Chris's life, have occupied the dining-room table for many days now.

Moving deliberately around the display, Billie points out Chris as a toddler astride a hobby horse, Chris as a rapt eight-year-old in a yellow rain slicker on his first backpacking trip, Chris at his high school commencement. "The hardest part," says Walt, pausing over a shot of his son clowning around on a family vacation, his voice cracking almost imperceptibly, "is simply not having him around anymore. I spent a lot of time with Chris, perhaps more than with any of my other kids. I really liked his company even though he frustrated us so often."

Walt is wearing gray sweatpants, racquetball shoes, and a satin baseball jacket embroidered with the logo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite the casual attire, he projects an air of authority. Within the ranks of his arcane field—an advanced technology called synthetic aperture radar, or SAR—he is an eminence. SAR has been a component of high-profile space missions since 1978, when the first SAR-equipped satellite, Seasat, was placed into orbit around the earth. NASA's project manager for that pioneering Seasat launch was Walt McCandless.

The first line of Walt's resume reads "Clearance: Current U.S. Department of Defense Top Secret." A little farther down the page an account of his professional experience begins: "I perform private consulting services aligned with remote sensor and satellite system design, and associated signal processing, data reduction and information extraction tasks." Colleagues refer to him as brilliant. Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an undercurrent of nervous energy. Even from across the room it is apparent that some very high voltage is crackling through his wires. There is no mistaking whence Chris's intensity came.

When Walt talks, people listen. If something or someone displeases him, his eyes narrow and his speech becomes clipped. According to members of the extended family, his moods can be dark and mercurial, although they say his famous temper has lost much of its volatility in recent years. After Chris gave everybody the slip in 1990, something changed in Walt. His son's disappearance scared and chastened him. A softer, more tolerant side of his personality came to the fore.

Walt grew up poor in Greeley, Colorado, an agricultural town on the high, windswept plains up near the Wyoming line. His family, he declares matter-of-factly, "was from the wrong side of the tracks." A bright child, and driven, he won an academic scholarship to Colorado State University in nearby Fort Collins. To make ends meet, he held down an assortment of part-time jobs through college, including one in a mortuary, but his steadiest paycheck came from playing with Charlie Novak, the leader of a popular jazz

quartet. Novak's band, with Walt sitting in on piano, worked the regional lounge circuit,

covering dance numbers and old standards in smoky honky-tonks up and down the Front Range. An inspired musician with considerable natural talent, Walt still plays professionally from time to time.

In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I, casting a shadow of fear across America. In the ensuing national hysteria Congress funneled millions upon millions of dollars into the California-based aerospace industry, and the boom was on. For young Walt McCandless —just out of college, married, and with a baby on the way—Sputnik opened the door to opportunity. After receiving his undergraduate diploma, Walt took a job with Hughes Aircraft, which sent him to Tucson for three years, where he earned a master's degree in antenna theory at the University of Arizona. As soon as he completed his thesis—"An Analysis of Conical Helices"—he transferred to Hughes's big California operation, where the real action was, eager to make his mark in the race for space. He bought a little bungalow in Torrance, worked hard, moved quickly up the ladder. Sam was born in 1959, and four other children—Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, and Shannon— followed in quick succession. Walt was appointed test director and section head for the Surveyor 1 mission, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon. His star was bright and rising.

By 1965, however, his marriage was in trouble. He and his wife, Marcia, separated.

Walt started dating a secretary at Hughes named Wilhelmina Johnson—everyone called her Bil-lie—who was twenty-two years old and had dark, striking eyes. They fell in love and moved in together. Billie got pregnant. Very petite to begin with, in nine months she gained only eight pounds and never even wore maternity clothes. On February 12, 1968, Billie gave birth to a son. He was underweight, but healthy and animated. Walt bought Billie a Gianini guitar, on which she strummed lullabies to soothe the fussy newborn.

Twenty-two years later, rangers from the National Park Service would find that same guitar on the backseat of a yellow Datsun abandoned near the shore of Lake Mead. It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parentchild dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor's candy drawer.

In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. "He wasn't happy about it," Billie remembers, "because it meant he had to do extra schoolwork. So he spent a week trying to get himself out of the program. This little boy attempted to convince the teacher, the principal—anybody who would listen—that the test results were in error, that he really didn't belong there. We learned about it at the first PTA meeting. His teacher pulled us aside and told us that 'Chris marches to a different drummer.' She just shook her head."

"Even when we were little," says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, "he was very to himself. He wasn't antisocial— he always had friends, and everybody liked him—but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn't seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely."

When Chris was six, Walt was offered a position at NASA, prompting a move to the nation's capital. They bought a split-level house on Willet Drive in suburban Annandale. It had green shutters, a bay window, a nice yard. Four years after arriving in Virginia, Walt quit working for NASA to start a consulting firm— User Systems, Incorporated— which he and Billie ran out of their home.

Money was tight. In addition to the financial strain of exchanging a steady paycheck for the vagaries of self-employment, Walt's separation from his first wife left him with two families to support. To make a go of it, says Carine, "Mom and Dad put in incredibly long hours. When Chris and I woke up in the morning to go to school, they'd be in the office working. When we came home in the afternoon, they'd be in the office working. When we went to bed at night, they'd be in the office working. They ran a real good business together and eventually started making bunches of money, but they worked all the time."

It was a stressful existence. Both Walt and Billie are tightly wound, emotional, loath to give ground. Now and then the tension erupted in verbal sparring. In moments of anger, one or the other often threatened divorce. The rancor was more smoke than fire, says Carine, but "I think it was one of the reasons Chris and I were so close. We learned to count on each other when Mom and Dad weren't getting along."

But there were good times, too. On weekends and when school was out, the family took to the road: They drove to Virginia Beach and the Carolina shore, to Colorado to visit Walt's kids from his first marriage, to the Great Lakes, to the Blue Ridge Mountains. "We camped out of the back of the truck, the Chevy Suburban," Walt explains. "Later we bought an Airstream trailer and traveled with that. Chris loved those trips, the longer the better. There was always a little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it."

In the course of their travels, the family visited Iron Mountain, Michigan, a small mining town in the forests of the Upper Peninsula that was Billies childhood home. She was one of six kids. Loren Johnson, Billies father, ostensibly worked as a truck driver, "but he never held any job for long," she says. "Billies dad didn't quite fit into society," Walt explains. "In many ways he and Chris were a lot alike."

Loren Johnson was proud and stubborn and dreamy, a woodsman, a self-taught musician, a writer of poetry. Around Iron Mountain his rapport with the creatures of the forest was legendary. "He was always raising wildlife," says Billie. "He'd find some animal in a trap, take it home, amputate the injured limb, heal it, and then let it go again. Once my dad hit a mother deer with his truck, making an orphan of its fawn. He was crushed. But he brought the baby deer home and raised it inside the house, behind the woodstove, just like it was one of his kids."

To support his family, Loren tried a series of entrepreneurial ventures, none of them very successful. He raised chickens for a while, then mink and chinchillas. He opened a stable and sold horse rides to tourists. Much of the food he put on the table came from hunting—despite the fact that he was uncomfortable killing animals. "My dad cried every time he shot a deer," Billie says, "but we had to eat, so he did it." He also worked as a hunting guide, which pained him even more. "Men from the city would drive up in their big Cadillacs, and my dad would take them out to his hunting camp for a week to get a trophy. He would guarantee them a buck before they left, but most of them were such lousy shots and drank so much that they couldn't hit anything, so he'd usually have to shoot the deer for them. God, he hated that."

Loren, not surprisingly, was charmed by Chris. And Chris adored his grandfather. The old man's backwoods savvy, his affinity for the wilderness, left a deep impression on the boy. When Chris was eight, Walt took him on his first overnight backpacking trip, a three day hike in the Shenandoah to climb Old Rag. They made the summit, and Chris carried his own pack the whole way. Hiking up the mountain became a father-son tradition; they climbed Old Rag almost every year thereafter.

When Chris was a little older, Walt took Billie and his children from both marriages to climb Longs Peak in Colorado—at 14,256 feet, the highest summit in Rocky Mountain National Park. Walt, Chris, and Walt's youngest son from his first marriage reached the 13,000-foot elevation. There, at a prominent notch called the Keyhole, Walt decided to turn around. He was tired and feeling the altitude. The route above looked slabby, exposed, dangerous. "I'd had it, OK," Walt explains, "but Chris wanted to keep going to the top. I told him no way. He was only twelve then, so all he could do was complain. If he'd been fourteen or fifteen, he would have simply gone on without me."

Walt grows quiet, staring absently into the distance. "Chris was fearless even when he was little," he says after a long pause. "He didn't think the odds applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge." Chris was a high achiever in almost everything that caught his fancy. Academically he brought home As with little effort. Only once did he receive a grade lower than B: an F, in high school physics. When he saw the report card, Walt made an appointment with the physics teacher to see what the problem was. "He was a retired air force colonel," Walt remembers, "an old guy, traditional, pretty rigid. He'd explained at the beginning of the semester that because he had something like two hundred students, lab reports had to be written in a particular format to make grading them a manageable proposition. Chris thought it was a stupid rule and decided to ignore it. He did his lab reports, but not in the correct format, so the teacher gave him an F. After talking with the guy, I came home and told Chris he got the grade he deserved."

Both Chris and Carine shared Walt's musical aptitude. Chris took up the guitar, piano, French horn. "It was strange to see in a kid his age," says Walt, "but he loved Tony Bennett. He'd sing numbers like 'Tender Is the Night' while I accompanied him on piano. He was good." Indeed, in a goofy video Chris made in college, he can be heard belting out "Summers by the sea/Sailboats in Capri" with impressive panache, crooning like a professional lounge singer. A gifted French-horn player, as a teen he was a member of the American University Symphony but quit, according to Walt, after objecting to rules imposed by a high school band leader. Carine recalls that there was more to it than that: "He quit playing partly because he didn't like being told what to do but also because of me. I wanted to be like Chris, so I started to play French horn, too. And it turned out to be the one thing I was better at than he was. When I was a freshman and he was a senior, I made first chair in the senior band, and there was no way he was going to sit behind his damn sister."

Their musical rivalry seems not to have damaged the relationship between Chris and Carine, however. They'd been best friends from an early age, spending hours together building forts out of cushions and blankets in their Annandale living room. "He was always really nice to me," Carine says, "and extremely protective. He'd hold my hand when we walked down the street. When he was in junior high and I was still in grade school, he got out earlier than me, but he'd hang out at his friend Brian Paskowitz's house so we could walk home together."

Chris inherited Billie's angelic features, most notably her eyes, the black depths of which betrayed his every emotion. Although he was small—in school photographs he is always in the front row, the shortest kid in the class—Chris was strong for his size and well coordinated. He tried his hand at many sports but had little patience for learning the finer points of any of them. When he went skiing during family vacations in Colorado, he seldom bothered to turn; he'd simply crouch in a gorilla tuck, feet spread wide for stability, and point the boards straight down the hill. Likewise, says Walt, "when I tried to teach him to play golf, he refused to accept that form is everything. Chris would take the biggest swing you ever saw, every time. Sometimes he'd hit the ball three hundred yards, but more often he'd slice it into the next fairway.

"Chris had so much natural talent," Walt continues, "but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up. He resisted instruction of any kind. I'm a serious racquetball player, and I taught Chris to play when he was eleven. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he was beating me regularly. He was very, very quick and had a lot of power; but when I suggested he work on the gaps in his game, he refused to listen. Once in a tournament he came up against a forty-five-year-old man with a lot of experience. Chris won a bunch of points right out of the gate, but the guy was methodically testing him, probing for his weakness. As soon as he figured out which shot gave Chris the most trouble, that was the only shot Chris saw, and it was all over." Nuance, strategy, and anything beyond the rudimentaries of technique were wasted on Chris. The only way he cared to tackle a challenge was head-on, right now, applying the full brunt of his extraordinary energy. And he was often frustrated as a consequence. It wasn't until he took up running, an activity that rewards will and determination more than finesse or cunning, that he found his athletic calling. At the age of ten, he entered his first running competition, a ten-kilometer road race. He finished sixty-ninth, beating more than one thousand adults, and was hooked. By the time he was in his teens, he was one of the top distance runners in the region.

When Chris was twelve, Walt and Billie bought Carine a puppy, a Shetland sheepdog named Buckley, and Chris fell into the habit of taking the pet with him on his daily training runs. "Buckley was supposedly my dog," says Carine, "but he and Chris became inseparable. Buck was fast, and he'd always beat Chris home when they went running. I remember Chris was so excited the first time he made it home before Buckley. He went tearing all over the house yelling 'I beat Buck! I beat Buck!'"

At W. T. Woodson High School—a large public institution in Fairfax, Virginia, with a reputation for high academic standards and winning athletic teams—Chris was the captain of the crosscountry squad. He relished the role and concocted novel, gruel-ing training regimens that his teammates still remember well. "He was really into pushing himself," explains Gordy Cucullu, a younger member of the team. "Chris invented this workout he called Road Warriors: He would lead us on long, killer runs through places like farmers' fields and construction sites, places we weren't supposed to be, and intentionally try to get us lost. We'd run as far and as fast as we could, down strange roads, through the woods, whatever. The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory. Then we'd run at a slightly slower pace until we found a road we recognized and race home again at full speed. In a certain sense that's how Chris lived his entire life."

McCandless viewed running as an intensely spiritual exercise, verging on religion. "Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us," recalls Eric Hathaway, another friend on the team. "He'd tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available. As impressionable high school kids, we were blown away by that kind of talk."

But running wasn't exclusively an affair of the spirit; it was a competitive undertaking as well. When McCandless ran, he ran to win. "Chris was really serious about running," says Kris Maxie Gillmer, a female teammate who was perhaps McCandless's closest friend at Woodson. "I can remember standing at the finish line, watching him run, knowing how badly he wanted to do well and how disappointed he'd be if he did worse than he expected. After a bad race or even a bad time trial during practice, he could be really hard on himself. And he wouldn't want to talk about it. If I tried to console him, he'd act annoyed and brush me off. He internalized the disappointment. He'd go off alone somewhere and beat himself up.

"It wasn't just running Chris took so seriously," Gillmer adds. "He was like that about everything. You aren't supposed to think about heavy-duty stuff in high school. But I did, and he did, too, which is why we hit it off. We'd hang out during snack break at his locker and talk about life, the state of the world, serious things. I'm black, and I could never figure out why everyone made such a big deal about race. Chris would talk to me about that kind of thing. He understood. He was always questioning stuff in the same way. I liked him a lot. He was a really good guy."

McCandless took life's inequities to heart. During his senior year at Woodson, he became obsessed with racial oppression in South Africa. He spoke seriously to his friends about smuggling weapons into that country and joining the struggle to end apartheid. "We'd get into arguments about it once in a while," recalls Hathaway. "Chris didn't like going through channels, working within the system, waiting his turn. He'd say, 'Come on, Eric, we can raise enough money to go to South Africa on our own, right now. It's just a matter of deciding to do it.' I'd counter by saying we were only a couple of kids, that we couldn't possibly make a difference. But you couldn't argue with him. He'd come back with something like 'Oh, so I guess you just don't care about right and wrong.'" On weekends, when his high school pals were attending "keg-gers" and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives. "Chris didn't understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry, especially in this country," says Billie. "He would rave about that kind of thing for hours."

On one occasion Chris picked up a homeless man from the streets of B.C., brought him home to leafy, affluent Annandale, and secretly set the guy up in the Airstream trailer his parents parked beside the garage. Walt and Billie never knew they were hosting a vagrant.

On another occasion Chris drove over to Hathaway's house and announced they were going downtown. "Cool!" Hathaway remembers thinking. "It was a Friday night, and I assumed we were headed to Georgetown to party. Instead, Chris parked down on Fourteenth Street, which at the time was a real bad part of town. Then he said, 'You know, Eric, you can read about this stuff, but you can't understand it until you live it. Tonight that's what we're going to do.' We spent the next few hours hanging out in creepy places, talking with pimps and hookers and lowlife. I was, like, scared. "Toward the end of the evening, Chris asked me how much money I had. I said five dollars. He had ten. 'OK, you buy the gas,' he told me; 'I'm going to get some food.' So he spent the ten bucks on a big bag of hamburgers, and we drove around handing them out to smelly guys sleeping on grates. It was the weirdest Friday night of my life. But Chris did that kind of thing a lot."

Early in his senior year at Woodson, Chris informed his parents that he had no intention of going to college. When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning "twentieth- century inventions," more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you. "That put us into kind of a tizzy," Walt admits. "Both Billie and I come from blue- collar families. A college degree is something we don't take lightly, OK, and we worked hard to be able to afford to send our kids to good schools. So Billie sat him down and said, 'Chris, if you really want to make a difference in the world, if you really want to help people who are less fortunate, get yourself some leverage first. Go to college, get a law degree, and then you'll be able to have a real impact.'"

"Chris brought home good grades," says Hathaway. "He didn't get into trouble, he was a high achiever, he did what he was supposed to. His parents didn't really have grounds to complain. But they got on his case about going to college; and whatever they said to him, it must have worked. Because he ended up going to Emory, even though he thought it was pointless, a waste of time and money."

It's somewhat surprising that Chris ceded to pressure from Walt and Billie about attending college when he refused to listen to them about so many other things. But there was never a shortage of apparent contradictions in the relationship between Chris and his parents. When Chris visited with Kris Gillmer, he frequently railed against Walt and Billie, portraying them as unreasonable tyrants. Yet to his male buddies—Hathaway, Cucullu, and another track star, Andy Horowitz—he scarcely complained at all. "My impression was that his parents were very nice people," says Hathaway, "no different, really, than my parents or anyone's parents. Chris just didn't like being told what to do. I think he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole idea of parents."

McCandless's personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim do-gooder who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and then and was an incorrigible ham.

Perhaps the greatest paradox concerned his feelings about money. Walt and Billie had

both known poverty when they were young and after struggling to rise above it saw nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of their labor. "We worked very, very hard," Billie emphasizes. "We did without when the kids were little, saved what we earned, and invested it for the future." When the future finally arrived, they didn't flaunt their modest wealth, but they bought nice clothes, some jewelry for Billie, a Cadillac. Eventually, they purchased the townhouse on the bay and the sailboat. They took the kids to Europe, skiing in Breckenridge, on a Caribbean cruise. And Chris, Billie acknowledges, "was embarrassed by all that."

Her son, the teenage Tolstoyan, believed that wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently evil—which is ironic because Chris was a natural-born capitalist with an uncanny knack for making a buck. "Chris was always an entrepreneur," Billie says with a laugh. "Always."

As an eight-year-old, he grew vegetables behind the house in Annandale and then sold them door-to-door around the neighborhood. "Here was this cute little boy pulling a wagon full of fresh-grown beans and tomatoes and peppers," says Carine.

"Who could resist? And Chris knew it. He'd have this look on his face like I'm damn

cute! Want to buy some beans?' By the time he came home, the wagon would be empty, and he'd have a bunch of money in his hand."

When Chris was twelve, he printed up a stack of flyers and started a neighborhood copy business, Chris's Fast Copies, offering free pickup and delivery. Using the copier in Walt and Billie s office, he paid his parents a few cents a copy, charged customers two cents less than the corner store charged, and made a tidy profit.

In 1985, following his junior year at Woodson, Chris was hired by a local building contractor to canvass neighborhoods for sales, drumming up siding jobs and kitchen remodelings. And he was astonishingly successful, a salesman without peer. In a matter of a few months, half a dozen other students were working under him, and he'd put seven thousand dollars into his bank account. He used part of the money to buy the yellow Datsun, the secondhand B210.

Chris had such an outstanding knack for selling that in the spring of 1986, as Chris's high school graduation approached, the owner of the construction company phoned Walt and offered to pay for Chris's college education if Walt would persuade his son to remain in Annandale and keep working while he went to school instead of quitting the job and going off to Emory.

"When I mentioned the offer to Chris," says Walt, "he wouldn't even consider it. He told his boss that he had other plans." As soon as high school was over, Chris declared, he was going to get behind the wheel of his new car and spend the summer driving across the country. Nobody anticipated that the journey would be the first in a series of extended transcontinental adventures. Nor could anyone in his family have foreseen that a chance discovery during this initial journey would ultimately turn him inward and away, drawing Chris and those who loved him into a morass of anger, misunderstanding, and sorrow.