Via Cracked.com, I ran across an interesting article about a guy who threw away all his worldly possessions and wandered unprepared into the Alaska wilderness and starved to death. It’s worth checking out, but I can’t help but disagree with some the author’s assertions. He weaves together a compelling narrative, trying to tease out the mysterious motivations behind the actions of our tragic hero, Chris McCandless. To do this, he must first reject the brutally obvious solution, which is that the guy was nuts:

[A]lthough he wasn’t burdened with a surfeit of common sense and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the realities of modern life, he was no psychopath. McCandless was in fact an honors graduate of Emory University, an accomplished athlete, and a veteran of several solo excursions into wild, inhospitable terrain.

Things we’ve learned so far: graduating from Emory and being an accomplished athlete meant he couldn’t possibly be a few marshmallows short of a s’more. You know, some people call Ted Kaczynski a psychopath, when in fact he was a PhD graduate.

Faulty logic aside, maybe McCandless was perfectly stable and just a little naive. After, we’re bluntly told:

McCandless was not mentally unbalanced. [...]

McCandless doesn’t really conform to the common bush-casualty stereotype: He wasn’t a kook, he wasn’t an outcast, and although he was rash and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he was hardly incompetent or he would never have lasted 113 days.

Yeah, about the whole “kook” thing:

His education had been paid for by a college fund established by his parents; there was some $20,000 in this account at the time of his graduation, money his parents thought he intended to use for law school. Instead, he donated the entire sum to the Oxford Famine Relief Fund. Then, without notifying any friends or family members, he loaded all his belongings into a decrepit yellow Datsun and headed west without itinerary, relieved to shed a life of abstraction and security, a life he felt was removed from the heat and throb of the real world. Chris McCandless intended to invent a new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience.

In July 1990, on a 120-degree afternoon near Lake Mead, his car broke down and he abandoned it in the Arizona desert. McCandless was exhilarated, so much so that he decided to bury most of his worldly possessions in the parched earth of Detrital Wash and then [...] burned his last remaining cash, about $160 in small bills.

He spent the next year or so as essentially a hobo. No, seriously.

When he eventually made it to Alaska and wandered into the woods without any real idea what he was doing, he discovered an abandoned bus that hunters had provisioned as a hunting shack. On one of the plywood panels that boarded up a broken window, he wrote this imminently sensible — and not at all unbalanced — screed:

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

Alexander Supertramp
May 1992

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not unbalanced, that’s Daniella A. Apple crazy. You are wrong. He graduated from Emory, you idiot.

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