Christopher McCandless

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Christopher "Chris" Johnson McCandless [ ˈkrɪstəfər ˈdʒɒnsən məˈkændlɨs ] (born February 12, 1968 in El Segundo , California ; † (probably) on August 18, 1992 in Denali Borough , Alaska ; also called "Alexander Supertramp") was a young adventurer and Dropouts . Jon Krakauer's article in the January 1993 issue of the journal Outside , Krakauer's book Into the Wild (Into the Wild) and Sean Penn's film adaptation of the same name made him known. McCandless roamed the United States with minimal equipment . He died of starvation in a remote area of ​​Alaska, possibly due to mold poisoning and an unbalanced diet of a certain variety of sweet clover .

Life

youth

McCandless grew up with his parents in the US state of Virginia . His father Walt was a radar technician and worked for NASA and for the aerospace sector. Walt required him to have a good degree and a brilliant career. Instead, McCandless developed an urge to be in the great outdoors as often as possible as a child.
He graduated from school without any problems. His parents urged him to study, which he also took up, although he often opposed his father. In April 1990, he received a BA in history and anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta . Although McCandless strictly rejected wealth, he was very hardworking and enterprising. He made good money on a photocopy service and drove tours for a pizza service. At school, in his free time and in discussions, he represented an uncompromisingly social to socialist view. Regardless, he was also a supporter of Ronald Reagan due to his radical libertarian attitude . He planned to smuggle weapons into South Africa after high school to fight apartheid there. He distributed food in impoverished parts of the city; in school he wrote essays denouncing injustice in the world. He developed a great interest in the works of Leo Tolstoy , Henry David Thoreau and Jack London . Through Tolstoy he made the decision to lead a life of chastity and without the vices of prosperity. Thoreau preached the return to a life as natural as possible and to blend in with nature (see Walden ). Ever since he read Jack London's (e.g. Wolfsblut ) he was fascinated by Alaska.

to travel

Inner USA

A few days after graduating from high school , McCandless drove his old car across the United States, but returned on time for the start of the semester at Emory University in Atlanta. Shortly after finishing his university studies, which he graduated with very good grades like high school, he left. He donated USD 24,000 (around EUR 19,800 at the 2002 exchange rate) from an inheritance to the Oxfam International aid organization . His equipment consisted of books, a rifle, a sleeping bag, a tent and other, smaller items. He stayed mostly in the western United States, but traveled by boat down the Colorado River to the Baja California at the sea. He was caught in a storm and nearly died when the paddle was lost. He managed to return to shore with a spare paddle. According to his notes, which Krakauer cites, he ate only fish and five pounds (2.25 kilograms) of rice for two months during this trip. McCandless befriended a few people; so he worked near Las Vegas in a McDonald's branch and lived in contact with or near hippie communities in California . He also worked with grain harvesters in South Dakota . He kept in touch with most of these travel acquaintances as far as possible, but not with his family.

Alaska

After almost two years of wandering, he set out for Alaska. He hitchhiked to Fairbanks . From there he sent the last postcards and letters. He borrowed a book from the university library that described the edible berries, fruits and plants of Alaska. Still, he was ill-equipped. He only had an old map and did without elementary aids such as an ax, insect repellent, snowshoes or a compass, because he wanted to survive in a natural, untouched environment as free from civilization as possible - as he himself called it: "live off the land" .
However, he did not go into any "real" wilderness . A driver dropped him off near Anchorage- Fairbanks, west of Healy , at the end of Stampede Road . There his march began on the Stampede Trail , westwards towards Denali National Park . By doing without aids, McCandless gave his lifestyle the desired degree of uncertainty and naturalness. At the time, in April, there was about 40 centimeters of snow. After crossing the Teklanika River , McCandless encountered a disused public service bus after a few days , which he used as a home for the next few months. For him it was the hoped-for wilderness near the national park. However, his choice fell on an environment with little natural food supply. With a small bore rifle bought in Fairbanks, he shot squirrels, rabbits, birds and ptarmigan, and the occasional wild geese and porcupines. He even shot a moose ; but he did not succeed in preserving the large amount of meat by smoking it. He picked berries, mushrooms and sweet clover . Because this type of diet was insufficient and he used more calories hunting for food than his prey provided, he gradually lost weight.
In July, McCandless decided to return to civilization. The river, which he was able to cross without major problems on arrival, now had so much water due to the summer snowmelt that it was impossible to wade through. Fatal proved that he lacked a (detailed) map, because it would be a little further downstream a simple, taut over the river hand-operated transporter bridge was drawn - - a rope on which a basket is mounted so that hunters can cross the river. ⊙ Several huts - some of which were stocked with food for emergencies by the national park administration - were located a few kilometers further up the river. In addition, the river there divides into several small river arms that it could have crossed. McCandless returned to the bus, hoping to hold out until help came by chance, largely due to the hunting season. He died around August 18, 1992, which Jon Krakauer estimated as the presumed time of death. Moose hunters found his body on the bus 19 days later. McCandless had lived alone in the wild for 113 days. The exact cause of death is unclear.

Causes of death

Jon Krakauer, who has extensively researched the path and death of McCandless for his report in Outside magazine and his subsequent book, offers several explanations for the dropout's supposed stuck and starvation. In doing so, he tends to defend him against the accusation of excessive carelessness, especially through the thesis of poisoning. The assumption that this occurred as a result of a mix-up of different plants - as the film Into the Wild later portrays - he casts doubt on; likewise the poisoning by the mold Rhizoctonia leguminicola, which was initially considered plausible . In a September 2013 article in the New Yorker, Krakauer reported that there was evidence that McCandless suffered from lathyrism from an unbalanced diet of Alpine sweet clover and starved to death as a result of the associated symptoms of paralysis. The ethnobotanical publication McCandless consulted prior to his migration into the wild did not mention any toxicity to the species Hedysarum alpinum . In a later article in the New Yorker, published on February 11, 2015, Krakauer made the poisonous amino acid L-canavanine ( food poison ) contained in the seeds of Hedysarum alpinum mainly responsible for the death of McCandless.

Krakauer, the author of the book Into The Wild , wrote an article for The New Yorker on September 12, 2013 , in which he explains new findings about McCandless' death. In his diary entry of July 30, 1992, McCandless was very certain that the seeds of a potato plant were the cause of his weakness attack. He wrote: “EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT [ATO] SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY. " McCandless died about three weeks after this entry. Researchers assumed that McCandless starved to death. The author Jon Krakauer suspected that poisoning had led McCandless to a fit of faintness, which is why the young McCandless was no longer able to move and get food. Krakauer visited the place where McCandless died and found the sweet clover Hedysarum alpinum (also known as wild potato) en masse. He then commissioned Thomas Clausen, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Alaska Fairbanks , to study the seeds of the Hedysarum alpinum plant. The professor stated in a 2007 article in Man's Journal that he could not find any toxins or alkaloids in the plant and would even eat the plant itself. It was not until 2013 that Jon Krakauer had 150 grams of fresh seeds from the same plant (Hedysarum alpinum) tested for beta-ODAP (oxalyldiaminopropionic acid) using high-performance liquid chromatography. He sent the seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The chemist Dr. Craig Larner found a 0.394 percent concentration of beta-ODAP in the seeds. This amount of beta-ODAP would be enough to cause lathyrism . Lathyrism causes slow paralysis and severe weakening of the body. As a result, the sick slowly starve to death. However, other scientists questioned the accuracy of the analysis. McCandless carried a book listing poisonous and edible plants. Since it was not known at the time that the wild potato Hedysarum alpinum was poisonous, this information could not be in the book that he was carrying. Jon Krakauer even says in his article that McCandless would probably not have starved if the Hedysarum alpinum plant had been listed as toxic, and that McCandless could still be alive today.

In the documentary The Call of the Wild, Ron Lamothe tries to mathematically prove that, according to McCandless' diary, the food supply - measured by the hunting success - including the (low-fat) vegetable food was not sufficient over the entire period in Alaska's nature. The wilderness dweller lost so steadily in body weight and was exposed to death through emaciation and starvation.

Public opinion

In contrast to Krakauer and many readers of his book, who are largely sympathetic to McCandless, there are also many negative statements about McCandless and those who try to romanticize his fate after the fact. Alaska Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote about:

“I'm constantly exposed to what I call the 'McCandless phenomenon'. Young people, almost always young men, come to Alaska to hold their own against a merciless wilderness and a landscape where the convenience of access and the possibility of rescue are practically non-existent […] McCandless was not particularly brave from my perspective, just stupid, tragic and thoughtless. First off, he spent very little time learning how to survive in the wild. He got onto the Stampede Trail without a map of the area. Had he had a good card, he could easily have saved himself [...] "

Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks , wrote in the Anchorage Daily News :

“Many in Alaska react with anger at his stupidity. You have to be a complete idiot, they say, to starve to death 20 miles from the Parks Highway in the summer . "

Molly Hartzog compared the depiction of McCandless in the press with that of mountaineer Aron Ralston , who had to amputate his own arm after an accident. The media would degrade McCandless, unlike Ralston, for his refusal to use technical aids to get out of his plight. While Ralston had conquered nature through technology and thereby survived, McCandless rightly died because of his rejection of human achievement. Hartzog analyzed this critically based on Kenneth Burke , since this representation goes hand in hand with the media representation of nature as a contrast to human culture. This medially constructed contrast stands for a patriarchal control of nature, which only allows certain groups and certain actions in the wilderness.

Bus 142 ( Magic Bus )

Hikers by Bus 142 on the Stampede Trail, McCandless' Alaska Lodging, 2009

The 142 ⊙ bus of the "Fairbanks City Transit System" used by McCandless , which once served as accommodation for road construction workers of the Yutan Construction Company, became a tourist destination after his death and especially after his life was screened. The main obstacle on the way there, along the Stampede Trail , is crossing the Teklanika River. The Alaska State Troopers report that river crossings require multiple rescue operations each year. In August 2010 floods drowned Claire Ackermann, a hiker from Switzerland, and in July 2019 Veranika Nikanava from Belarus was killed trying to cross.

On June 18, 2020, various government agencies coordinated an Alaska Army National Guard training mission to permanently remove the bus, which has been identified as a public safety issue after numerous rescue operations. He was flown to Healy in a CH-47 Chinook helicopter and then taken to a "safe" location on a flatbed truck . The bus can later be put on public display in museums or other exhibition locations in Alaska. Before that, hundreds of people tried to get on the bus every year.

A replica of the 142 bus was used as a magic bus in the production of the feature film Into the Wild . The bus can be viewed near the filming location, 49th State Brewery Company, Healy, Alaska. ⊙

Film adaptation and pop culture

Sean Penn filmed McCandless' life in 2007 under the title Into the Wild .

The folk singer Ellis Paul released the song The Ballad of Christopher McCandless on his album The Speed ​​of Trees in 2002 .

The released in 2000 album Cirque of Geir Jenssen , mainly known as the Biosphere is partly inspired by McCandless story.

The song “Supertramp” was released on the 2016 album “Songs for the Confused” by the Swiss folk-punk band Hendricks the Hatmaker.

literature

  • Jon Krakauer : Death of an Innocent . In: Outside , January 1993, partly online as PDF (5.53 MiB) . ( Full text at independent.co.uk )
  • Jon Krakauer: Into the Wild. Villard Books, New York NY 1996, ISBN 0-679-42850-X (German: In die Wildnis. Alone to Alaska. From the American by Stephan Steeger. Unabridged pocket edition, 12th edition. Piper, Munich et al. 2009, ISBN 978- 3-492-25067-2 ).
  • Back To The Wild - The Photographs And Writings of Christopher McCandless. The Christopher Johnson McCandless Memorial Foundation website , August 2012. E-book and DVD.
  • Carine McCandless: Wild Truth. The true story of the dropout idol from "Into the Wild" . From the American by Marie Rahn and Jens Plassmann, with a foreword by Jon Krakauer. btb Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-442-75458-8 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd A. Weil: Jon Krakauer and the myth of the wilderness on explorermagazin.de, accessed on July 12, 2010
  2. ^ John Krakauer: How Chris McCandless died , September 12, 2013, last accessed March 26, 2014.
  3. ↑ John Krakauer: How Chris McCandless died: An Update , February 11, 2015, last accessed April 15, 2016.
  4. ↑ https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i43/Chemists-Dispute-WildProtagonist-Chris-McCandless.html
  5. ↑ Information on The Call of the Wild (English)
  6. ^ Molly Hartzog: Scapegoating in the Wild: A Burkean Analysis of Two Outdoor Adventures Gone Wrong . In: Environmental Communication . tape 9 , no. 4 , 2015, p. 520-538 , doi : 10.1080 / 17524032.2014.983535 .
  7. ↑ Tragic Magic of the Wilderness report of the Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 1, 2019, accessed on June 20, 2020
  8. ↑ Alaska: Woman dies while hiking on the "Into the Wild" bus Report on the Internet portal reisereporter.de on July 30, 2019, accessed on June 20, 2020
  9. ↑ "This bus represents the breakout from civilization". July 22, 2020, accessed July 24, 2020 .
  10. ^ "Into the Wild" bus removed from the wilderness Report of the Süddeutsche Zeitung from June 19, 2020, accessed on June 20, 2020
  11. ↑ Alaska National Guard airlift "Into the Wild" bus from Stampede Trail .
  12. ↑ Nearly 30 years after 'Into the Wild' hiker's death, infamous bus removed from Alaska wilderness ( en ) In: KTVA . June 18, 2020. Accessed June 19, 2020.
  13. ↑ Eva Holland: Alaska airlift 'Into the Wild' bus out of the Wild ( s ) 18 June 2020. Accessed June 19, 2020th
  14. ↑ Touch: Biosphere - Cirque: The Drama of Discovery ( Memento from March 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME McCandless, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McCandless, Chris; Alexander Supertramp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American adventurer
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH El Segundo , California , United States
DATE OF DEATH around August 18, 1992
Place of death Denali Borough , Alaska , United States