An Alaska National Guard helicopter airlifts the “Into the Wild” bus from the Stampede Trail. Photo courtesy Alaska National Guard.
You may have seen a curious news item recently, namely that the Alaska National Guard used a Chinook helicopter to lift a deteriorating 74-year-old Fairbanks city bus out of the wilderness near Denali National Park. This never would have been newsworthy had it not been for the fact that it was probably the most famous decades-old bus in the world, being the one that had served as a hunters’ shelter for many years and that for several months in the summer of 1992 housed Christopher McCandless, the itinerant 24-year-old self-styled “Supertramp” who had ended up backpacking in Alaska after graduating from college, giving away most of the money he’d inherited from his family, and drifting nomadically across a number of western states, including a stint conducting an illicit solo kayaking trip through Grand Canyon.
This too would not have been news had it not been for the fact that McCandless was a relative neophyte to outdoor survival who deliberately hamstrung his own ability to survive in the wild by neglecting to mention his trip to his family and most of his friends and failing to take an adequate map with him, and that he ended up dying in the bus of some combination of starvation and poisoning from eating a toxic wild plant, a development that prompted writer Jon Krakauer to pen first an Outside magazine article and later the bestselling book Into the Wild about him, which in turn resulted in the production of a blockbuster Hollywood movie of the same title.
I read Krakauer’s magazine story as a fairly unfocused twentysomething, just before I moved to Arizona from the suburban Midwest, and because I had no job and no well-defined career path before me it instilled in me a shivery frisson of recognition—what if I too drifted sufficiently that I ended up, like McCandless, off the map alone, facing the most awesome of consequences?
I’ve been thinking about Into the Wild not just because of the photos of what had come to be called the “Magic Bus” being airlofted—a step the state of Alaska took because officials felt too many other young wanderers were venturing to the bus in a sort of homage to McCandless, and some of them too died in the process—but because in the days before the pandemic and before the budget cuts I used to teach a first-year seminar class about risk, and Chris McCandless was one of its stars, and if there is something that all of us have been thinking about a lot lately it is of course risk, both how to assess it and how to determine what level of it we are willing to abide.
McCandless’ story was the perfect entry point into stimulating discussions about these questions. Does a twentysomething have the right to risk and ultimately lose his life in the pursuit of a deeply felt but also deeply hazardous ideal of spending a summer alone in the wilderness? Well, perhaps—but was it OK that in doing this he cut himself off from his family, not letting them know where he was or what he was up to? What responsibility did he have to those who loved him? How ought we balance personal desire with social obligation? How do young men and young women differ in their answers to these questions, and how do those answers differ from those of older people? The questions gained an additional poignancy when after discussing the book and the movie we walked over to the county sheriff’s office for a look at the equipment the volunteer search-and-rescue team uses to try to save outdoor adventurers from their own risk-taking in the tumbled backcountry of Coconino County, and heard from the officer in charge that the search-and-rescue work itself poses considerable risks to the would-be rescuers. Try as we may to be free-standing individuals—and among the world’s nationalities Americans probably try harder to do so than anyone else—we remain tied into a tight knot of relationships and responsibilities. Even those we try to run from. Or maybe especially those we try to run from.
Knowing that the coming fall semester is sure to be very different I miss the energy of cramming into a too-small basement room in Bury Hall with the 18-year-olds or, early in the semester, embodying risk decision-making in a controlled way by visiting the university’s challenge course. There was a wide array of confidence levels among the students, with some being experienced rock climbers and some absolute neophytes to any activity involving being more than a few feet off the ground. No matter: they helped one another, and hooted and clapped when a newbie took an intimidating step or leap while suspended from ropes high in the trees.
So you can perhaps imagine that when I think about teaching a class this fall, and of leading a discussion among a smattering of masked students in a classroom, with other students watching remotely, or of teaching entirely online, I feel the weight of what the pandemic has burdened us with—or, more precisely, of what it has taken from us. I think about how there could be no better time to teach a class about risk than right now, but thanks to the potential health consequences a seminar class has to take a different form, and because of the resulting budget crisis the university is facing the idea of teaching an elective class not required for any particular major has become a quaint memory. No challenge course, no discussion about the philosophy of rock climbing or of how the American obsession with individualism is expressed in the gun rights debate, no musing about how climate change is the ultimate societal failure because it represents benefiting in the present while offloading the cost of the risks onto future generations.
No, this fall the walls of the classroom have busted wide open and we are all living in an exercise in applied risk management, with daily quizzes in when to wear a mask, what density of other human beings nearby is acceptable, how to be holed up with loved ones without driving one another nuts. There’s no syllabus, no one in charge—in America especially. There’s only us, reminded every day by biology that the one thing we can’t be is alone.
