erikhalfacre wrote:I'm just going on what I was told. I'm not going to try and defend it as I would have no way of knowing for certain. All I will say is that I'm positive my source was un-measurably closer to Chris than any roommate. Perhaps there was some kind of misunderstanding.
I sense some backpedaling from this: "The 'roommate' he interviews is bogus." I strongly suspect your source is Carine, who has been using this "nobody was closer to my brother than I was" schtick for quite some time, but it's not evidence refuting Lamothe's interview with Chris's college roommate. I understand her emotional needs to hold her brother on a pedestal (it's good for the lecture circuit and her new book), but it's not the stuff of reason and fact. Of course, she could ante up with some more evidence, such as her communications with her brother after she left home following her high school graduation in 1989 and after he "disappeared" a couple months after his graduation from Emory. The Sean Penn film has her still living at home at that time. She didn't. In fact, she moved around, yet Chris still managed to write letters to her. Of course, Penn's film also made it appear that Chris and Carine didn't know about this other brother Quinn, yet the families vacationed together, and Chris once went on a boys-only outing with dad and his half-brothers, Quinn included. Carine, as the film's main family consultant, didn't let these facts get in the way of the narrative.
As for the seeds debacle Krakauer continues to try to prop up as an excuse for Chris's death, a close read of this hypothesis reveals this very same idea suggests that ODAP assures that the condition of someone in Chris's starving state only gets worse. Yet Krakauer ignores the evidence outlined in Chris's own journal and photos, which clearly show him to continue hunting and gathering food. The hypothesis says paralysis would have prevented such efforts. Folks, Chris starved to death. He was too proud to admit his mistakes. It was better for him to create an excuse (accidental poisoning), although mushroom poisoning matched up better with his symptoms. His journal twice mentions eating "many mushrooms," with the second round of consumption strongly suggesting the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms. In letters larger than his famous "moose!" declaration, McCandless lists "DREAM" not once but twice - the second with lines and arrows pointing back up to the original and to a bizarre notation of "IFN524Holes, At the Belt, At the Foot, Gives Frequency."
Krakauer completely ignores this notation. Why? Because it doesn't fit his narrative. Just as evidence regarding Chris's sexual preferences did not fit the "monk" narrative. As much as Carine or others would like to think of Chris as Jesus, he simply wasn't, assuming Jesus was a monk, which he probably was not.
If Lamothe does nothing else, he moves toward busting up some of the mythology that has been created. The interviews with the roommate and Will Forsberg are good journalism, even if they fly in the face of Hollywood.