Into the Wild

This was one book I did not want to read the end of. It was the end of Chris McCandless, in the book "Into the wild". I had seen the movie based on this book and was deeply affected by that too and today the book refreshed all those feelings and then some. For those who have not seen the movie or read the book, it is about Chris, a 24 year old guy from a Washington D.C. suburb who traveled around the US and then starved to death on his dream Alaskan adventure. The book talks about the flak Chris got from people about being reckless, arrogant and ill-prepared for his fatal trip. Some of the criticism was justified, and may be even necessary at the time to dissuade other young people from undertaking similar expeditions without thinking about death as a very possible outcome. His death however was not due to recklessness or arrogance, but due to a unfortunate mistake he made in eating a poisonous fungus on the food he picked from the forest.

What stuck me most about Chris in the movie and now with the book, was his selfishness. He did not think about his parents, siblings or friends before his own mission. And it was a selfish mission at that, meant to satisfy no one but himself. I admire that about him. Parental love is such that one owes it to one's parents to out-live them. No parent should see their child die. Besides his parents, he got emotionally attached to a lot of other people on the way, or rather people got attached to him, but he stuck to his resolve and moved away from everyone with no known remorse. Being the kind of person who gets attached to people rather quickly, I find this to be the hardest thing to do.

The book itself is not all about Chris. It talks about other travellers who perished while trying to achieve their dreams of conquering or at least surviving nature's extreme terrains. I am sure more people come out of these expeditions alive than dead, but this book is not about people who survived (except for the author himself). So I can only speculate what the survivors experience when all is done. Do they feel elated at having achieved what they set out to do, or feel underwhelmed that their challenge was not bigger than them? Can they ever stop unless they go far enough to some place that kills them?