Into the Wild

 

“I now walk into the wild.”

It was the last words of Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, written on a postcard to a friend before he walked into the Alaskan wilderness.  Four months later he was dead.

His post-college adventures included a kind of ascetic lifestyle that was preparing him for this audacious attempt to “live off the land” in an abandoned bus rarely occasioned by hunters in this isolated piece of Alaska.

It’s not that he didn’t like people.  He was deeply loved by those who had the good fortune of crossing his path for a time and were enriched by the experience.  I read their accounts in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild” as well as saw it played out in the Sean Penn movie of the same name. This was due in great part to his shedding of superficial concerns and focussing on what is most essential to simply being human.  He made connections with people who saw his heart, honesty, and hard work as a rare commodity in a consumer-driven society where short cuts and pleasure-seeking cheapen so much in and around us.

I was fascinated to learn online that Chris has had his “detractors” or those who think he was just a foolish kid who threw his life away.  I understand why some would think that but I also think they don’t *get* him or really understand his motivations.  These were motivations that likely included seeking a deeper experience of the world by looking inward and minimizing external distractions.  For someone who lacks an inner life the “external distractions” may be all they think exists and can be grasped.

Here I’m reminded of words by Fr. Roman Braga, the spiritual father of a monastery I visited a few times in my twenties.  He had spent 11 years in the Romanian gulag as a young man (a year of that in solitary confinement) and spoke about an “inner universe” that is vastly more expansive than the external universe we know with its innumerable stars and galaxies.  It is in this inner universe where we find the connection with God who transcends time and space.  Didn’t Jesus tell us “the Kingdom of God is within you”?  And what is larger than that?

So, I think his motivations were noble despite the fact it turned out tragically.  I sought this type of escape oftentimes as a younger man traveling around the globe in search of something deeper in myself.  It oftentimes put me in perilous situations but I always found a way through, looking for whatever might be just around the next bend.  Maybe God Himself was sitting there on a stool smoking a pipe and waiting for me to arrive for a chat.  And then as T.S. Elliot would have it “What we call the beginning is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

My travels came to an end.  Unlimited freedom came to an end (and none too soon for me to live out a few more years if truth be told).  I had a family and carried on but in a different way of looking for that place that Chris thought he found by escaping into the wild.

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