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.

Waltzing the Cat, by Pam Houston

This 1998 novel-in-stories delves into the adventuresome love-challenged life of Lucy O’Rourke: mid-thirties, photographer, river guide, child of alcoholics, who doesn’t trust herself and finds untrustworthy men to practice her self-sabotage on. The writing is salty, frank, often funny, but also barbed. She knows (mostly) what she’s doing, that she can’t travel to the land of reliable lovers from where she lives on precipices – but that doesn’t stop her from her next fling. 

She has a handful of steadfast friends who keep trying to aim her better directions, but they can’t keep pace with her explorations heading all the wrong places. These are great stories – she can spin a yarn with such intensity, you know the dangerous parts have to be true: “[W]e were about to go straight down over the seven-story rock. We would fall through the air off the face of that rock, land at the bottom of a seven-story waterfall, where there would be nothing but rocks and tree limbs and sixty-some thousand feet per second of pounding white water which would shake us and crush us and hold us under until we drowned.” 

 She injects notes of mysticism as straightforward reportage: “ ‘I saw Carlos Castaneda in an airport last week,’ I said. ‘He tried to tell me some important things.’… I was getting closer to something then and I could feel it, like maybe I had jumped, for a moment, onto the wheel that makes everything turn, and at any second it might send me flying backwards, and I didn’t want to miss anything in the moment I was there.” 

That’s Houston in a nutshell: she’s flung, she’s in free-fall, but meanwhile the sight is amazing and all she can do is take it all in – thoughts about survival, personal well-being, are submerged. She cycles through men with fine qualities and deep failings, having thrills and fun and grief, but as each one fades into “that was never going to work” she bobs back to the surface, more exhilarated than chastened, unable to keep the next collision from pulling her down. As she claws her way through the Tenebrae of her disastrous upbringing, the reader realizes being sensible and steady is beyond her, so we just come along for a highly entertaining ride. You should too.