Into The Wild : The Stampede Trail

Chapter XVIII : THE STAMPEDE TRAIL

It is nearly impossible for modem man to imagine what it is like to live by hunting. The life of a hunter is one of hard, seemingly continuous overland travel.... A life of frequent concerns that the next interception may not work, that the trap or the drive will fail, or that the herds will not appear this season. Above all, the life of a hunter carries with it the threat of deprivation and death by starvation.

John M. Campbell ,THE HUNGRY SUMMER

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with,love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago - passage highlighted in one of the books found with Christopher Mccandless's remains; underscoring by Mccandless

After his attempt to depart the wilderness was stymied by the Teklanika's high flow, McCandless arrived back at the bus on July 8. It's impossible to know what was going through his mind at that point, for his journal betrays nothing. Quite possibly he was unconcerned about his escape routes having been cut off; indeed, at the time there was little reason for him to worry: It was the height of summer, the country was a fecund riot of plant and animal life, and his food supply was adequate. He probably surmised that if he bided his time until August, the Teklanika would subside enough to be crossed.

Reestablished in the corroded shell of Fairbanks 142, McCandless fell back into his routine of hunting and gathering. He read Tolstoys "The Death of Ivan Ilych" and Michael Crichtons Terminal Man. He noted in his journal that it rained for a week straight. Game seems to have been plentiful: In the last three weeks of July, he killed thirty-five squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs, all of which he supplemented with wild potatoes, wild rhubarb, various species of berries, and large numbers of mushrooms. But despite this apparent munificence, the meat he'd been killing was very lean, and he was consuming fewer calories than he was burning. After subsisting for three months on an exceedingly marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric deficit. He was balanced on a precarious edge. And then, in late July, he made the mistake that pulled him down.

He had just finished reading Doctor Zhivago, a book that incited him to scribble excited notes in the margins and underline several passages:

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

"NATURE/PURITY," he printed in bold characters at the top of the page.

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled "refuge in nature" in black ink. Next to "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness. .. . And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."

It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that McCandless's long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. It can be interpreted to mean that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community. But we will never know, because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read.

Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, there is an ominous entry in the journal: "EXTREMLY WEAK. FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY." Before this note there is nothing in the journal to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances. He was hungry, and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health. Then, after July 30, his physical condition suddenly went to hell. By August 19, he was dead.

There has been a great deal of conjecture about what caused such a precipitous decline. In the days following the identification of McCandless's remains, Wayne Westerberg vaguely recalled that Chris might have purchased some seeds in South Dakota before heading north, including perhaps some potato seeds, with which he intended to plant a vegetable garden after getting established in the bush. According to one theory, McCand-less never got around to planting the garden (I saw no evidence of a garden in the vicinity of the bus) and by late July had grown hungry enough to eat the seeds, which poisoned him.

Potato seeds are in fact mildly toxic after they've begun to sprout. They contain solanine, a poison that occurs in plants of the nightshade family, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and lethargy in the short term, and adversely affects heart rate and blood pressure when ingested over an extended period. This theory has a serious flaw, however: In order for McCandless to have been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many pounds of them; and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato seeds, if he carried any at all.

But other scenarios involve potato seeds of an entirely different variety, and these scenarios are more plausible. Pages 126 and 127 ofTanaina Plantlore describe a plant that is called wild potato by the Dena'ina Indians, who harvested its carrotlike root. The plant, known to botanists asHedysarum alpinum, grows in gravelly soil throughout the region.

According to Tanaina Plantlore, "The root of the wild potato is probably the most important food of the Dena'ina, other than wild fruit. They eat it in a variety of ways— raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it especially dipped in oil or lard, in which they also preserve it." The citation goes on to say that the best time to dig wild potatoes "is in the spring as soon as the ground thaws.... During the summer they evidently become dry and tough."

Priscilla Russell Kari, the author ofTanaina Plantlore, explained to me that "spring was a really hard time for the Dena'ina people, particularly in the past. Often the game they depended on for food didn't show up, or the fish didn't start running on time. So they depended on wild potatoes as a major staple until the fish came in late spring. It has a very sweet taste. It was—and still is— something they really like to eat."

Above ground the wild potato grows as a bushy herb, two feet tall, with stalks of delicate pink flowers reminiscent of miniature sweet-pea blossoms. Taking a cue from Kari's book, McCandless started to dig and eat wild potato roots on June 24, apparently without ill effect. On July 14, he began consuming the pealike seed pods of the plant as well, probably because the roots were becoming too tough to eat. A photograph he took during this period shows a one-gallon Ziploc plastic bag stuffed to overflowing with such seeds. And then, on July 30, the entry in his journal reads,  

"EXTREMLY WEAK.

FAULT OF POT. SEED. . . ."

One page after Tanaina Plantlore enumerates the wild potato, it describes a closely related species, wild sweet pea,Hedysarum mackenzii. Although a slightly smaller plant, wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart. There is only a single distinguishing characteristic that is absolutely reliable: On the underside of the wild potato's tiny green leaflets are conspicuous lateral veins; such veins are invisible on the leaflets of the wild sweet pea. Kari's book warns that because wild sweet pea is so difficult to distinguish from wild potato and "is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food." Accounts of individuals being poisoned from eating H. MacKenzii are nonexistent in modern medical literature, but the aboriginal inhabitants of the North have apparently known for millennia that wild sweet pea is toxic and remain extremely careful not to confuse H. Alpinum with H. MacKenzii.

To find a documented poisoning attributable to wild sweet pea, I had to go all the way back to the nineteenth-century annals of Arctic exploration. I came across what I was looking for in the journals of Sir John Richardson, a famous Scottish surgeon, naturalist, and explorer. He'd been a member of the hapless Sir John Franklin s first two expeditions and had survived both of them; it was Richardson who executed, by gunshot, the suspected murderer-cannibal on the first expedition. Richardson also happened to be the botanist who first wrote a scientific description of H. MacKenzii and gave the plant its botanical name. In 1848, while leading an expedition through the Canadian Arctic in search of the by then missing Franklin, Richardson made a botanical comparison of H. Alpinum and H. Mackenzii. H. Alpinum, he observed in his journal,

furnishes long flexible roots, which taste sweet like the liquorice, and are much eaten in the spring by the natives, but become woody and lose their juiciness and crispness as the season advances. The root of the hoary, decumbent, and less elegant, but larger flowered Hedysarum MacKenzii is poisonous, and nearly killed an old Indian woman at Fort Simpson, who had mistaken it for that of the preceding species. Fortunately, it proved emetic; and her stomach having rejected all that she had swallowed, she was restored to health, though her recovery was for some time doubtful.

It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mistake as the Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated. From all the available evidence, there seemed to be little doubt that McCandless—rash and incautious by nature—had committed a careless blunder, confusing one plant for another, and died as a consequence. In the Outside article, I reported with great certainty that H. MacKenzii, the wild sweet pea, killed the boy. Virtually every other journalist who wrote about the McCandless tragedy drew the same conclusion.

But as the months passed and I had the opportunity to ponder McCandless s death at greater length, the less plausible this consensus seemed. For three weeks beginning on June 24, McCandless had dug and safely eaten dozens of wild potato roots without mistaking H. MacKenzii for H. Alpinum; why, on July 14, when he started gathering seeds instead of roots, would he suddenly have confused the two species?

McCandless, I came to believe with increasing conviction, scrupulously steered clear of the toxic H. MacKenzii and never ate its seeds or any other part of the plant. He was indeed poisoned, but the plant that killed him wasn't wild sweet pea. The agent of his demise was wild potato, H. Alpinum, the species plainly identified as nontoxic in Tanaina Plantlore.

The book advises only that the roots of the wild potato are edible. Although it says nothing about the seeds of the species being edible, it also says nothing about the seeds being toxic. To be fair to McCandless, it should be pointed out that the seeds of H. Alpinum have never been described as toxic in any published text: An extensive search of the medical and botanical literature yielded not a single indication that any part of H. Alpinum is poisonous.

But the pea family (Leguminosae, to which H. Alpinum belongs) happens to be rife with species that produce alkaloids— chemical compounds that have powerful pharmacological effects on humans and animals. (Morphine, caffeine, nicotine, curare, strychnine, and mescaline are all alkaloids.) And in many alkaloid-producing species, moreover, the toxin is strictly localized within the plant.

"What happens with a lot of legumes," explains John Bryant, a chemical ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, "is that the plants concentrate alkaloids in the seed coats in late summer, to discourage animals from eating their seeds. Depending on the time of year, it would not be uncommon for a plant with edible roots to have poisonous seeds. If a species does produce alkaloids, as fall approaches, the seeds are where the toxin is most likely to be found."

During my visit to the Sushana River, I collected samples of H. Alpinum growing within a few feet of the bus and sent seed pods from this sample to Tom Clausen, a colleague of Professor Bryant's in the Chemistry Department at the University of Alaska.

Conclusive spectrographic analysis has yet to be completed, but preliminary testing by Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, indicates that the seeds definitely contains traces of an alkaloid. There is a strong likelihood, moreover, that the alkaloid is swainsonine, a compound known to ranchers and livestock veterinarians as the toxic agent in locoweed.

There are some fifty varieties of toxic locoweeds, the bulk of which are in the genus Astragalus— a genus very closely related to Hedysarum. The most obvious symptoms of locoweed poisoning are neurological. According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, among the signs of locoweed poisoning are "depression, a slow staggering gait, rough coat, dull eyes with a staring look, emaciation, muscular incoordination, and nervousness (especially when stressed). In addition, affected animals may become solitary and hard to handle, and may have difficulty eating and drinking."

With the discovery by Clausen and Treadwell that wild potato seeds may be repositories of swainsonine or some similarly toxic compound, a compelling case can be made for these seeds having caused McCandless s death. If true, it means that McCandless wasn't quite as reckless or incompetent as he has been made out to be. He didn't carelessly confuse one species with another. The plant that poisoned him was not known to be toxic—indeed, he'd been safely eating its roots for weeks. In his state of hunger, McCandless simply made the mistake of ingesting its seed pods. A person with a better grasp of botanical principles would probably not have eaten them, but it was an innocent error. It was, however, sufficient to do him in.

The effects of swainsonine poisoning are chronic—the alkaloid rarely kills outright. The toxin does the deed insidiously, indirectly, by inhibiting an enzyme essential to glycoprotein metabolism. It creates a massive vapor lock, as it were, in mammalian fuel lines: The body is prevented from turning what it eats into a source of usable energy. If you ingest too much swainsonine, you are bound to starve, no matter how much food you put into your stomach.

Animals will sometimes recover from swainsonine poisoning after they stop eating locoweed, but only if they are in fairly robust condition to begin with. In order for the toxic compound to be excreted in the urine, it first has to bind with available molecules of glucose or amino acid. A large store of proteins and sugars must be present to mop up the poison and wring it from the body.

"The problem," says Professor Bryant, "is that if you're lean and hungry to begin with, you're obviously not going to have any glucose and protein to spare; so there's no way to flush the toxin from your system. When a starving mammal ingests an alkaloid— even one as benign as caffeine—it's going to get hit much harder by it than it normally would because they lack the glucose reserves necessary to excrete the stuff. The alkaloid is simply going to accumulate in the system. If McCandless ate a big slug of these seeds while he was already in a semi-starving condition, it would have been a setup for catastrophe."

Laid low by the toxic seeds, McCandless discovered that he was suddenly far too weak to hike out and save himself. He was now too weak even to hunt effectively and thus grew weaker still, sliding closer and closer toward starvation. His life was spiraling out of control with awful speed.

There are no journal entries for July 31 or August 1. On August 2, the diary says only, "TERRIBLE WIND." Autumn was just around the corner. The temperature was dropping, and the days were becoming noticeably shorter: Each rotation of the earth held seven fewer minutes of daylight and seven more of cold and darkness; in the span of a single week, the night grew nearly an hour longer.

"DAY 100! MADE IT!" he noted jubilantly on August 5, proud of achieving such a significant milestone, "BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD.—NO GAME."

If McCandless had possessed a U.S. Geological Survey topographic map, it would have alerted him to the existence of a Park Service cabin on the upper Sushana River, six miles due south of the bus, a distance he might have been able to cover even in his severely weakened state. The cabin, just inside the boundary of De-nali National Park, had been stocked with a small amount of emergency food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for the use of backcountry rangers on their winter patrols. And although they aren't marked on the map, two miles even closer to the bus are a pair of private cabins—one owned by the well-known Healy dog mushers Will and Linda Forsberg; the other, by an employee of Denali National Park, Steve Carwile—where there should have been some food as well.

McCandless's apparent salvation, in other words, seemed to be only a three-hour walk upriver. This sad irony was widely noted in the aftermath of his death. But even if he had known about these cabins, they wouldn't have delivered McCandless from harm: At some point after mid-April, when the last of the cabins was vacated as the spring thaw made dog mushing and snow-machine travel problematic, somebody broke into all three cabins and vandalized them extensively. The food inside was exposed to animals and the weather, ruining it.

The damage wasn't discovered until late July, when a wildlife biologist named Paul Atkinson made the grueling ten-mile bushwhack over the Outer Range, from the road into Denali National Park to the Park Service shelter. He was shocked and baffled by the mindless destruction that greeted him. "It was obviously not the work of bear," Atkinson reports. "I'm a bear technician, so I know what bear damage looks like. This looked like somebody had gone at the cabins with a claw hammer and bashed everything in sight.

From the size of the fireweed growing up through mattresses that had been tossed outside, it was clear that the vandalism had occurred many weeks earlier." "It was completely trashed," Will Forsberg says of his cabin. "Everything that wasn't nailed down had been wrecked. All the lamps were broken and most of the windows. The bedding and mattresses had been pulled outside and thrown in a heap, ceiling boards yanked down, fuel cans were punctured, the wood stove was removed—even a big carpet had been hauled out to rot. And all the food was gone. So the cabins wouldn't have helped Alex much even if he had found them. Or then again, maybe he did."

Forsberg considers McCandless the prime suspect. He believes McCandless blundered upon the cabins after arriving at the bus during the first week of May, flew into a rage over the intrusion of civilization on his precious wilderness experience, and systematically wrecked the buildings. This theory fails to explain, however, why McCandless didn't, then, also trash the bus. Carwile also suspects McCandless. "It's just intuition," he explains, "but I get the feeling he was the kind of guy who might want to 'set the wilderness free.' Destroying the cabins would be a way of doing that. Or maybe it was his intense dislike of the government: He saw the sign on the Park Service cabin identifying it as such, assumed all three cabins were government property, and decided to strike a blow against Big Brother. That certainly seems within the realm of possibility."

The authorities, for their part, don't think McCandless was the vandal. "We really hit a blank on who might have done it," says Ken Kehrer, chief ranger for Denali National Park. "But Chris McCandless isn't considered a suspect by the National Park Service." In fact, there is nothing in McCandless's journal or photographs to suggest he went anywhere near the cabins. When McCandless ventured beyond the bus in early May, his pictures show that he headed north, downstream along the Sushana, the opposite direction of the cabins. And even if he had somehow chanced upon them, it's difficult to imagine him destroying the buildings without boasting of the deed in his diary.

There are no entries in McCandless's journal for August 6, 7, and 8. On August 9, he notes that he shot at a bear but missed. On August 10, he saw a caribou but didn't get a shot off, and he killed five squirrels. If a sufficient amount of swainsonine had accumulated in his body, however, this windfall of small game would have provided little nourishment. On August 11, he killed and ate one ptarmigan. On August 12, he dragged himself out of the bus to forage for berries, after posting a plea for assistance in the unlikely event that someone would stop by while he was away. Written in meticulous block letters on a page torn from Gogol's Taras Bulba, it reads:

S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS ISNO JOKE. IN THE NAME OFGOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU.

He signed the note"CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?" Recognizing the gravity of his predicament, he had abandoned the cocky moniker he'd been using for years, Alexander Supertramp, in favor of the name given to him at birth by his parents. Many Alaskans have wondered why, in his desperation, McCandless didn't start a forest fire at this point, as a distress signal. There were two nearly full gallons of stove gas in the bus; presumably, it would have been a simple matter to start a conflagration large enough to attract the attention of passing airplanes or at least burn a giant SOS into the muskeg.

Contrary to common belief, however, the bus doesn't lie beneath any established flight path, and very few planes fly over it. Over the four days I spent on the Stampede Trail, I didn't see a single aircraft overhead, other than commercial jets flying at altitudes greater than twenty-five thousand feet. Small planes did no doubt pass within sight of the bus from time to time, but McCandless would probably have had to start a fairly large forest fire to be sure of attracting their attention. And as Carine McCandless points out,

"Chris would never, ever, intentionally burn down a forest, not even to save his life. Anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn't understand the first thing about my brother."

Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire. In advanced stages of famine, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to cold, physical and mental exhaustion.

The skin becomes discolored. In the absence of key nutrients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain, inducing convulsions and hallucinations. Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.

On August 12, he wrote what would prove to be the final words in his journal: "Beautiful Blueberries." From August 13 through 18, his journal records nothing beyond a tally of the days. At some point during this week, he tore the final page from Louis L'Amour's memoir,Education of a Wandering Man. On one side of the page were some lines L'Amour had quoted from Robinson Jeffers's poem, "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours":

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

The mountains are dead stone, the people

Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,

The mountains are not softened or troubled

And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief adios: "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

Then he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him and slipped into unconsciousness. He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he'd walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.

One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaska sky, one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. His face is horribly emaciated, almost skeletal. But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours —because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it's not apparent from the photograph.

He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.