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Imagine, going from place to place by hitchhiking, walking through Alaska, being able to face things, people, and places that you or no one you know will ever be able to face in their lifetime. This is what Christopher McCandless took on. Yes he knew it would be a risk, but he wanted to have the opportunity to be able to live his life to the fullest; to be able to do those things that we will never be able to, and to try to make it through alive. Sadly though, this was not the case. Chris died as a victim of starvation shortly after he had made it through his 100th day living in the wild; he was just twenty four years old. Chris was a hero to people who want to be able to live their lives to the fullest, and he was wrongly accused of being an amateur. Christopher McCandless was right about following his dreams and should not be negatively regarded because of some of the small mistakes he had made. Gallien stated that, “Five feet seven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be 24 years old and said he was from South Dakota. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and ‘live off the land for a few months’” (Krakauer, 4). This is how Chris is described at the beginning of his journey. He had the right to get
away from his family after all of the horrible things that he had to discover about them on his own. Chris had to find out that he was born from unmarried parents, and the worst part was that his father was still married to another woman. Walt’s ex-wife also had one more child with Walt, Chris’s father, before Walt divorced her to live with Chris’s mother, Billie. People, including Chris’s mother, may wonder why he decided to leave, but this probably played a large role in his decision.
Chris McCandless died of starvation. One of the main reasons that he starved and died so quickly was because of something he ate. Chris was eating a wild potato root that was non-toxic, but there was another plant that looked almost identical. When Chris became extremely sick from eating one of these plants, people found that, “It was easy to imagine Chris McCandless making the same mistake as the Indian woman and becoming similarly incapacitated” (192). People thought that he had made the mistake of eating the wrong plant. Krakauer sent in the seeds of the poisonous plant, Chris was eating seeds and not roots at that time which is why he only sent in the seeds, and they came back as non- toxic. This was very puzzling, but they finally found that Chris only got sick because of the mold on the seeds. Because the seeds were in a plastic bag, and the moisture was locked inside, the seeds grew a toxic mold. It was unfair of people to speak harshly about and scold him and believe he was some inexperienced, uneducated person when the people who thought of him this way didn’t even know that they were the ones who had made a mistake.
Chris was also wrongly accused of mistaking a moose for a caribou. Gordon Samuel said, “When I read in the paper that he thought he’d shot a moose, that told me right there that he wasn’t no Alaskan. There’s a big difference between a moose and a caribou. A real big difference. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to be able to tell them apart” (177). Krakauer thought that Samuel was right so he wrote in the article that Chris was wrong about the moose. This was basically siding with all of the people who thought Chris was unknowledgeable and unprepared. After receiving more hate mail, and thinking that Chris might have been what everyone was accusing him of, Krakauer found out something that was interesting. Chris was right. The animal that he had shot was definitely a moose. Once again, Chris was assumed to be incorrect. The people who thought that he was wrong probably didn’t take a second look at the animal in order to say that he was the one that didn’t know what he was talking about. Chris might have been wrong about other things, but he was right this time.
There are many people who thought that Chris was not and is not worthy of all this attention. Dermot Cole stated, “To sell the story, they’ve made it into a fable. He’s been glorified in death because he was unprepared” (Power, 3). This is not a correct statement. This book was not made into a fable. Chris was not as unprepared as people think. Yes, there were times when he made mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes; it ’s part of being human. He did have food and guns and other things. The only thing that Chris was not unprepared for was the river overflowing. If you look back in the book, when he goes to the river to try to cross, he still has a pretty good supply of food. It was after he ingested the moldy seeds that he became severly ill. Chris was not what people thought he was. The people who feel as though he knew nothing about what he was getting himself into are wrong because if he had only known that the river would overflow at the time that he was there, he most likely would have survived.
In conclusion, Chris was a hero. He showed people that it is right to follow your dreams and that you can work hard and try to achieve anything. People should not speak so negatively of him for doing what he has wanted to do. He achieved many things through this journey, and died a happy man. You, as the readers, should also read about Chris McCandless and spread the word about him. So remember to tell people his story and how brave and enthusiastic he was about being able to live the life of his dreams. Ending with the words of Alexander Supertramp, Chris McCandless, “Two years he walks the earth. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild” (Krakauer, 163).
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