We're All Prospectors

I recently read Farley Mowat's memoir Never Cry Wolf after watching the movie in one of my classes. The book recounts his year spent in the Canadian wilderness observing wolves. As a government scientist, he had been sent into the arctic wilds to prove the widely held assumption: the blood thirsty wolves, who often kill simply for the joy of the hunt, were exterminating the caribou population. They assumed his report would confirm the common wisdom and provide warrant for the extermination of wolves in the area. His first-hand research, however, led him to quite different conclusions.

The book is delightful, and I highly recommend it. Mowat's dry wit pervades the book, regularly leading to bursts of audible laughter for the present reader. His paradigm-shifting observations about the lives of wolves still fascinate several decades after his research.

Come to find out, the book is standard reading in California public schools, which explains my wife's otherwise inexplicable distaste for the movie. The film captured my imagination as a young boy. Images of a man eating mice and running naked with the caribou leave an indelible mark on a preteen. The movie faithfully adapts the book, though it addresses questions that Mowat does not raise in the book. I hesitate to say that the movie is better than the book, but its more complicated portrayal of the protagonist makes for rich analysis. I'll note two important questions/themes in this post.

First, the movie grapples with the paradox of human interaction with wilderness. Simply stated: humans long for and need wild places, but their very presence threatens to destroy the wildness they seek. Near the end of Never Cry Wolf, Tyler (for some reason the film-makers balked at naming their protagonist Farley) takes indirect responsibility for the killing of two wolves. Hunters killed them for their furs, but Tyler realizes that by establishing his observation camp near the wolf den, he pointed the hunters to their prey. Simply by seeing the wolves, he threatened them. When other wolves arrive to adopt the orphaned pups, Tyler turns his back and refuses to watch them leave. He doesn't want to see where they are going. If they are to remain wild, as they should, he cannot even look at them.

Second, the movie explores Tyler's ambiguous motives for going into the wild. We might be tempted to romanticize Tyler as a purist who loves the wild country and its inhabitants for their own sake. He is the virtuous, selfless foil for the selfish, greedy hunters, we might think. He cares about the wolves; they care only about money. An encounter at the beginning of the movie complicates such assumptions.

During his hair-raising flight into the Canadian wilderness, Tyler converses with the pilot, Rosie. Tyler has been reticent to talk about why he is traveling into the back country, and Rosie assumes he is hiding his plans to mine a valuable ore. Not a bad policy, Rosie notes; it's best to keep your plans close to the vest. Tyler assures him that he has no plans to mine, and Rosie responds, "We're all of us prospectors up here, Tyler."

In other words, Rosie affirms that people might find the wilderness valuable for different reasons, but they all exploit that value for selfish aims. For his part, Rosie sees unconventional value in the wild country. The real gold isn't in the ground, he tells Tyler. It's in the south, sitting on couches in living rooms, bored to death and needing adventure. The wilderness provides limitless resources of adventure, and when we encounter Rosie later in the movie, he is bringing rich adventure-seekers into the arctic to hunt wild game.

The movie does not explicitly reveal the nature of Tyler's prospecting, but I think Rosie's comment calls the viewer to explore that question. Is Tyler any less exploitative than Rosie? Or are they simply seeking different selfish ends? If Tyler isn't seeking money in the wilderness, what is he seeking? Is it simply the well-being of the wolves, or are there less pure, more selfish motives at play?

I plan to post more on this second question later, using insights from the writings of Aldo Leopold. In the meantime, what do you think?

Into the Wild to Kill the False Self

After watching the beautifully made film, Into the Wild, one haunting question continues to echo: Why does Chris McCandless venture into the wilds of Denali National Park in Alaska?

The words he scratches into a piece of scrap wood in the "magic" bus reveal he tramped into the wilderness to find freedom, to escape the poisons of civilization, to flee his family, and to embrace adventure. Most telling of all, however, McCandless refers to his great Alaskan adventure as a climactic battle "to kill the false being within."

Killing the false self is his primary motivation, I would contend, and he succeeds, though not in the way he expected.

McCandless wanders into the wilderness assuming that the "false self" in need of killing is the self defined by money and career and "success" of a certain type. It is the self created for him by his father, a self he despises. He shreds his credit cards, adopts the moniker Alexander Supertramp, and embarks on a journey of hitchhiking, camping, and canoeing. His time of penniless living on the road peels away those layers of false identity, leaving him with a purer, rawer sense of self. It is not enough, however. The false self still breathes, if only weakly, and so McCandless goes into the Alaskan back country to deal the final death blow.

Near the end of his time in Alaska, however, he discovers another false self--one created by himself, but one as equally as false as his father's materialism. He enters the wilderness believing himself to be the strong, independent wanderer who loves life, who experiences it first hand apart from the buffer of civilization, and, most importantly, who needs no one. Throughout the film he shuns relationships. He's not anti-social--he makes friends easily and engages in meaningful conversations--but he doesn't need people, or so he thinks.

One conversation with his friend and surrogate grandfather Ron Franz reveals much. He tells Ron, as they sit together on a promontory overlooking the desert, "You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience." Meaning comes from experiencing the world around us, he claims, not from relationships with others. In his own family life, relationships have been marked by lies and deception and posing. He wants truth. He wants real experience. He tells Ron, "The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences," and he encourages him to leave his lonely house and see something new.

Ron promises the twenty-three year old McCandless that he will "take stock of that," and then he offers some reflections of his own. He tells Chris, "when you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines through you." On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on their perch.

McCandless doesn't initially understand (or at least appreciate) Ron's wisdom. Ron reminds McCandless of the divine beauty of human relationships, without denying his praise of new experiences. Sure, one might find enlightenment in the wilderness, but God reveals himself much closer to home. The divine light is seen even more clearly in the love of forgiveness. McCandless' false self of rugged independence shrugs off such sentimentality, however, and McCandless eventually leaves Ron to follow his quest to Alaska.

McCandless initially exults in his Alaskan solitude. But as the weeks progress, he finally feels loneliness. He highlights a passage in Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness, indicating the beginning erosion of the false self:

"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. . . . I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people for whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor--such is my idea of happiness."

Later, he even writes in the margins of a book, "Happiness only real when shared." He came to Alaska to "kill the false being within," and now he has succeeded. The strong, independent wanderer who needs no one, Alexander Supertramp, has died.

The final scene of redemption confirms his transformation. Suffering from the final stages of starvation, he writes a farewell note and signs his name, Christopher Johnson McCandless, claiming the family and the father he despised and abandoned. Then, as he lies down and prepares to take his last breath, he has a vision of the homecoming he'll never experience. He meets his parents in front of his childhood Atlanta home and embraces them, the smile spreading across his face. The prodigal has finally come home. He's finally forgiven his parents. On cue, the sun breaks from behind the clouds and shines on his tear-stained face as he gasps his final breath.