Out of the Wild

My resistance to watching Sean Penn's Into the Wild held up almost as long as my initial resistance to seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, and for the same reason: I hate to see a good book insulted by Hollywood. OK, the movie hobbits grew on me with time, but the first time I heard Movie Frodo say, "Oh, Sam, I cawn't do this," I almost gave up. What is it about Hollywood and this "no-can-do" attitude that pretty much amounts to a rule that you must, in any movie, insert that line, verbatim, and fling it in the viewer's face so that there will be no doubt, no matter how stupid the viewing public may be, about the chief complication of the movie. It's this! And I'm serious about "this" -- do a text search of scripts, and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not here blogging to try and outdo David Denby and his critic's complaints, but I will quickly comment that I felt a little bit manipulated by the movie and its grand production values. Penn took what I considered to be Krakauer's minorly mistaken bias in favor of giving McCandless the benefit of many doubts (Was there a suicidal impulse? Should his willful ignorance be contemptible to skilled, cautious outdoorsmen?) and inflated it into a completely skewed, symphonic statement that "this genius kid led a short happy life that was deeper and better than any of the rest of ours, so we should watch this movie with glazed-over cervine eyes and admire the hell out of him." Krakauer's skillful trick was to build a sturdier kind of bridge to McCandless' experience through less extreme examples of half-baked kid adventurers like Everett Reuss and young Krakauer himself. But the movie completely ignored that subtle trick in favor of sensory and romantic totalkrieg.

In any case, seeing Into the Wild certainly did me a big favor by revving up my existential engine and making me think a little bit about where I'm at right now in my own wanderings in the vale of tears -- what have I got out of living beyond the age of 26, instead of dying of thirst in Death Valley, or down a crevice in the Cordillera Blanca? What have years of rambling around in hills, rivers and lakes done for me? Do I still feel anything like what McCandless felt when he was living his last good weeks?



Or, more immediately, how do I feel about coming so far and so quickly from Wild and wondrous Alaskan places, straight out of my six-month sabbatical and straight into corporate work and city scenes?

The shock of such displacement is nothing new to any real outdoorsperson. You'll get Back Shock in a small degree after a long weekend in the hills, and a larger degree after a week-long trip, and to a truly significant degree after you've just finished, for instance, the John Muir Trail. When I finished the JMT at 19, thin as a rail from from dramatic caloric deficit caused by Supertrampish stupidity regarding food caches, I remember coming back to Walnut Creek and thinking,"man, this life of multi-lane traffic and seventeen strip malls and 500 TV channels is so complicated, so unpleasantly more challenging, in its way, than hiking 15 miles 5000 feet up and down rockbound mountains every day." We can only imagine feelings of the Alaskan climber that Krakauer describes in the book (who did not appear in the movie in any form) -- a dude who was climbing for 145 days by himself on the snow and ice of Mt. Hunter, and almost immediately on getting back, got a job washing dishes. After 145 days of solitude, striving, and stark and savage natural beauty. Picture it.

But in my own little way, I have often found the contrast to be exhilirating. I still vividly remember one of the first Sierra backpacking weekends I took way back when I first started living and working in California. During the morning, I drove into the city and did a "requirements" meeting with people from the city government, as a step in developing custom software for them; but then I started the weekend immediately after lunch break and drove straight from the heart of San Francisco, out through the great valley, and deep up into the western Sierra Nevada. By midnight I was reclining against a hunk of granite and picking trout bones out of my teeth, enraptured by the contrast and the richness of a life in which you could design a database application in the morning and be casting an elk hair caddis to wild trout by dusk.



In most cases, the type of contrast created on the way out into wild places is much more joyful than what you get on the way back. A weekend out in the hills is never enough. But if you get to spend enough time out, and have a complete experience such as I had in Alaska this summer, then you come back full of the joy of un-wild living. After making your own coffee every morning for weeks, often under a sodden tarp, with increasingly stale grinds in grudgingly rationed doses, what can be nicer than going to a cafe and having bottomless refills of delicious, fresh-ground city brew? When you've already caught all the silver salmon you can handle, then why not recline and watch the beautiful people stroll by, not casting or paddling or putting up a tent or anything -- indeed, in your civilized, well-earned sloth, probably not moving a single muscle as you sit and watch the world go by? For while, few things are nicer than that.

For a while. As I do my blogging tonight, I'm sitting in my nice new city apartment in San Francisco. After ten years in Beserkely, living in the hills or right on their faulty escarpment, I have made the move to Quake Gotham. And it's fine: I ride the train to work down the peninsula, do my part for the economy, and save away cash for the next big adventures. I drive five minutes down to Islais Creek, and paddle out through the dump fumes and industrial ruins in the same old bay full of stripers and commuter ferries. There's no shortage of good coffee, good food, and beautiful people around the block on 18th street. But a while is a while, and I do think I might go visit my good old Pit next weekend, or the Sierras, or someplace just a little further out, than in.