Into the Mild

My mother recently passed along a book to me: John Krakauer's Into the Wild, from whence the same-named recent film was developed. For those who don't know, it's the story of Chris McCandless, who graduated from Emory University in 1990 and decided, after reading too much Thoreau, that he wanted to opt out of society, disappear, and "live off the land" for a few
years.

Unfortunately, his idea of living off the land included spending a period of several months alone in the Alaskan bush. He hiked down the trail into the wilderness, uneducated and ill-prepared, and ended up starving to death.

Reading this book, for me, has meant vacillating wildly between feeling appalled (McCandless vanished without a word, allowing his family to spend two years agonizing over what might have happened to him) and, at the other end, feeling this weird mix of inspiration and jealousy at the life depicted in it.

The book is rife with other examples of men -- always men, Thoreau-worshipping dudes who felt simultaneously disgusted with society's modern trappings and fascinated by the solitude of the country's most inhospitable places -- who also wandered ill-equipped into the wild. My (morbid) favorite is the larger-than-life Texan who arranged a pilot to fly him into the Alaskan wilderness for the summer, but met his end when the cold weather returned and nobody appeared to fly him back out. (Why? Oh, because he forgot to arrange his own return trip. Oops!)

But in spite of their foolhardiness, not all of them died, and even the ones who did got to experience a sort of freedom that allures and frustrates me all at once. Because no matter what, it's something that I, as a woman, am barred from experiencing.

Not that woman are physically incapable of doing this sort of thing. Certainly, we all can hitch-hike across the country, sleep by the side of the road, trust our lives to the kindness -- or barring that, the indifference -- of strangers.

But it wouldn't work. Imagine a 22 year-old girl striking out on her own, completely alone, becoming a hobo and simply drifting from place to place in search of solitude, or nature, or a life outside society's walls. Would she even last two years, get as far as Alaska, have the chance at starving to death in the woods? Or is it far more likely that she'd end up raped, or dead, or both, within the first few months?

* * *

And on that note -- given the grim chances of my vanishing into a life of trampery, itinerant labor, and desert camping -- I'm doing the next best thing and jetting off to the wilds of Oakland, CA, for the weekend.