Favorite Web Articles

[Mr Verdant Green]

Here are some of my favorite web articles on Christopher McCandless that I’ve found in my searching:

1) Simpson, Sherry. I Want To Ride In The Bus Chris Died In. Anchorage Press, February 7 - February 13, 2002, Vol. 11 Ed. 6.

Not the most favorable view but still well written and good description of the bus.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070405043705/http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives/documentb965.html


2) Roberts, David. Jon Krakauer + Sean Penn: Back Into the Wild. National Geographic online.

National Geographic interview of Sean Penn. Written by a longtime friend of Jon Krakauer. Interesting insight about how the film was made and the book was written.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/news/into-the-wild.html


3) Keyes, Christopher. On Location: I Want This Movie to Grip People in the Heart. Outside Magazine, September 2007.

Interview with Sean Penn, Emile Hirsh, Wayne Westerberg, Walt, Billy, and Carine McCandless all on the set of the film as its being made.

http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200709/into-the-wild-movie-1.html


I will post more as I find them.

[Mr Verdant Green]

Here’s a writeup and slideshow of the Oprah episode (9/20/2007) featuring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsh, Jon Krakuaer, and (briefly) Carine McCandless.

http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Sean-Penns-Latest-Passion/

[GoNorth]

An interview with Jan Burres:

http://www.joplinglobe.com/weekend/local_story_011165123.html

[Offbyone]

Nice interview with Jan Burres:

In November of 1991, he wrote a letter to Burres to tell her that he was in Bullhead City, Ariz. He was working at a McDonald’s there, trying to save money to fund what he called his “Alaskan odyssey.”

But the name on the envelope wasn’t familiar to her.

“He had signed it Chris McCandless,” she said. “I thought, ‘Who is that?’ It looked like Alex’s handwriting.”
******
“He had this killer Kelty backpack. I asked him about it once and he said, ‘I’m a rich kid, and my dad bought it for me.’”

[Mr Verdant Green]

I’ve been meaning to include this one for a while. GoNorth was nice enough to give the link in another forum thread. Thank you, GoNorth!

This is an article written by Chip Brown and published in The New Yorker on February 8, 1993. It’s comparable and, I would argue, in some ways better than Krakauer’s original article. It mentions some small details of the story not mentioned so much elsewhere such as how Christopher McCandless had to wear a mosquito head net and how he used the numbers, circles, and dashes to mark the days.

http://www.chipbrown.net/articles/intowild.htm

[Offbyone]

From the Chip Brown article:

“…….His adventure in Alaska capped a series of epic journeys that began in 1986, the year he graduated from W.T. Woodson High School, in the Washington D.C., suburb of Fairfax, Virginia. But in some sense he had been rehearsing for the road all his life. At two, he once trotted out of the house before sunrise to raid a candy drawer at a neighbor’s house down the street. At ten, a skinny boy with spidery lashes and his mother’s enormous brown eyes, he took up cross-country running; he ran with the family dog, and won his age group in competitions. Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” was one of his favorite songs….”
******
I graduated from high school in 1974. One of my high school friends commented one day that one of his favorite songs was Roger Miller’s 1964 recording of “King of the Road”. I wondered why my friend had liked a song so much that was so old, recorded when my friend was 8 years old. For Chris the song was recorded 4 years before he was born so now I am really puzzled by his liking a song this old. Was it one of Walt’s favorites and Chris picked up on this from his dad?

[pezar]

The 1964 recording of King of the Road seems to be one of those songs that's always popular. I heard it all the time growing up (born in 1974). Personally, I think that the song Dreamline by the Canadian-American rock band Rush (from their 1991 album Roll The Bones) reminds me more of Chris.

I thought it was interesting how Chris went back and forth between "Alexander Supertramp" and "Chris McCandless", as noted by Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg. He seems to have used both names interchangeably. I guess he couldn't decide whether to make a clean break with his past or not. I can't help thinking that the "best of the best" PI Walt and Billie hired must have been pretty incompetent, if he couldn't pick up on the fact that Chris had a NV Dept of Health card in his real name, and used it to get a job at McD's in Bullhead. It's like Chris was daring somebody to blow his cover.

[Offbyone]

“…..The summer after high school, Chris set out on the first of his adventures, a cross-country trek of conventional proportions. He drove south in a yellow Datsun, then west to Texas and California. He returned via Nevada, wide-eyed at the casinos, the show-girls, the three-dollar steaks. He had his father’s Texaco credit card for emergencies. He hated obliging his parents with call home every three days, and in subsequent summers he added those phone check-ins to the list of things he could do without. He logged more than ten thousand miles on that first trip. When he came home a few days before leaving for the start of the fall term at Emory, he had a beard that made him look like Jesus, and a machete under his coat……”
******
In the movie they make it look like Ron Franz gave him the machete.

[Offbyone]

Twenty or so miles due west of Healy, not far from the boundary of Denali National Park, a derelict bus—a blue and white, 1940s-vintage International from the Fairbanks City Transit System—rusts incongruously in the fireweed beside the Stampede Trail. Many winters ago the bus was fitted with bedding and a crude barrel stove, then skidded into the bush by enterprising hunters to serve as a backcountry shelter. These days it isn't unusual for nine or ten months to pass without the bus seeing a human visitor, but on September 6, 1992, six people in three separate parties happened to visit it on the same afternoon, including Ken Thompson, Gordon Samel, and Ferdie Swanson, moose hunters who drove in on all-terrain vehicles.

http://outsideonline.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_2.html

[Offbyone]

Each time he left South Dakota, McCandless would leave behind photos and journals. McCandless often sent postcards to Westerberg, who would post them on a bulletin board in the town of Carthage “because everyone knew him,” Westerberg said.

http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20071214/COMMUNITY_NEWS/71213009