The Animal Dialogues - Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, by Craig Childs

These remarkable stories, published in this fine book in 1997, are as brief as three pages and as long as eighteen. Childs spends time in wild places, primarily the American Southwest, but also ranges from mountains in Mexico to Vancouver Island and the Yukon, writing about creatures as diverse as praying mantis, ravens, mountain goats, smelt, rattlesnakes… Every story has its context, the encounter (sometimes multiples), and opportunities for amazement or amusement. 

For example, he lived some time in a tipi in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Quickly his dwelling was overrun by mice. He obtained a cat, which ran away. He obtained another cat, which hunted mice prolifically in the area outside the tipi while steadfastly ignoring those inside, while Childs was at his wits’ end, astounded at all the places that are not mouse-proof whatever you do. 

Along the way he offers insights into the physical capacities, behaviors, and choices of wild creatures, his deep respect for them leading his curiosity. He writes about netting smelt in the tide off Vancouver Island with a group of Native Americans, realizing at some point that the couple hundred fish they have caught will all have to be cleaned. Sort of dampens the thrill of the catch. He writes about a red spotted toad an inch long, a water-loving creature he discovers in a desert canyon far from the nearest possibility of water – and yet, there it is, thriving. 

He writes about an epically-bad mosquito season in the Yukon, and makes this observation, “If a mosquito is released in still air, it will come directly to you even if you are standing one hundred feet away. Through the air, the mosquito senses the carbon dioxide of your breath, lactic acid from your skin, traces of acids emitted by skin bacteria, and the humidity and heat of your body. If there is a slight breeze, a mosquito may find you from across the length of a football field.” He respects the insect’s adaptations and its intricate neurons – by the time you finish this story you realize the mosquitoes are always going to win. 

If you have even the slightest interest in the natural world, you will discover wonders in these pages.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

This book, published in 1995, grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in January, 1993, five months after its subject, Christopher McCandless (who called himself Alex, and Alexander Supertramp) died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness. Krakauer, an adventurer in the same mold as McCandless, dug deeper after the article was published – who was Chris/ Alex McCandless? Why did he end up alone in an abandoned bus, missing a couple of key opportunities to trek out? Was it hubris, ignorance, or the courage of his convictions, that compelled him away from the practical resources that would have saved him? 

Krakauer asks these questions and more as he retraces McCandless’s footsteps from his college days in Atlanta, to wandering across the south, the desert, nearly drowning in the Gulf of California, living on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the sort of rag-tag community that can only exist in such marginal places. Along the way, McCandless, with his combination of intellectual curiosity, adventurous spirit, and candor, made deep impressions on those he encountered. 

Perhaps because he was young, idealistic, and fixated on his quest for an adventure that would challenge him to the marrow, he evoked protectiveness and generosity from those who gave him rides, offered him jobs and shelter, and tried to temper his singlemindedness. They saw in him a roving son, grandson, brother, or in Krakauer’s case, a kindred spirit, and wanted to help him on his quest, advise him, or lay bare the folly of his pursuit. 

McCandless left enough of a record – in journal scraps, letters and postcards to those he met, and in the margins of books – to provide insight into his convictions. Here’s a quote from a letter he sent to a grandfather living in the Mojave Desert, who had provided him shelter for some weeks: 

“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. 

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.” 

If you have only the haziest memory of your own youthful follies, read this book. You may tell yourself, “I’d never do anything that dumb,” but if you’re honest, you might admit that you did your own foolish things – from curiosity, from a yen for what lies over the horizon, from an itch daily life could not scratch. We remember Chris/Alex McCandless because he was an extreme manifestation of the questing spirit that takes so many of us on our own adventures, away from our comfort zones to an edge where we can see further, and imagine more, and return (if we do) greater in spirit.