Love Letters: Chris McCandless

What the man from "Into the Wild" taught me about staying.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

This post is part of Love Letters, an ongoing series about men I know, men I’ve loved, or men who changed me.

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Hey Chris,

Almost six months to the day after I was born, a moose hunter found your body in the Alaskan wilderness. You were 24.

When you were found, you had been dead for over two weeks, which means our lives overlapped by a few months. I was a newborn while you were out there, alone.

I honestly can’t imagine what it must have been like for the poor moose hunter to stumble across the abandoned bus where you lived the last chapter of your life (according to your makeshift record book, found among your few possessions) and find your thin corpse. You were a young, intelligent, handsome man who struggled to find enough food at the end of your life. How horrible it must have been—how very, very sad. You join, now, a league of fabled wanderers who struck out into nature and never came back. Many were never found again. You were.

Many people have tried to understand you. I first read your story in the moving book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which recounts your death and life, and was later adapted into a film. Krakauer's book is an impressive feat of investigative reporting, but it also attempts to guess at your reasons, and I struggle with that part of it. I found the book in high school, and it had a profound impact on me.

Not only does the book attempt to place you in a canon of fellow wayfarers, people who fled the world, but it also reaches for something like understanding. It does the common error I try to avoid when reading literature: it drags your life into the middle of the room and attempts to beat meaning out of it. I don't want to do that to you. I want to give you your mystery, your unknowableness.