McCandless' Journey Exists Only in the Gray

Having a child run away from home - It's every parents worst nightmare, behind perhaps college tuition and   filing taxes. A dense tangle of feelings must rush through your mind as a parent, anger, sadness, regret. However I'd argue a sense of  inadequacy paralalls.  even the deepest anger and depression. Where did we go wrong? What was it we didn't provide for our baby? While nearly  half of childhood runaways cite physical abuse as their reason for running from home the majority of runaways mention some form of abuse or parental limitation. This means most kids run away from their home in attempts to leave behind their past, rarely do they consider what they might be running to.  McCandless is unlike perhaps any other runaway. McCandless was running towards something, reaching for some thing he knew existed however was unsure of its whereabouts. The family, trust fund, prestigious education he left behind was just but collateral that was swept along in his journey. Having said all this, I began to get the sense McCandless' journey was special in some way. In the kind of way where you can't explain all the details, the kind of way where the exclusive group of people able to accurately tell the tale have passed on. But then again, that just adds to the narrative as the story evolves from an accurate re-accounting but rather a journey of our own with questions, hypothetical and skepticism. From just reading Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild I constructed a mystified  impression of the event that actually transpired with an inquisitive thirst yet still a drifting skepticism. Then came the Youtube videos.

"Things you may not know about Chris McCandless"

This video has accumulated over 114,00 views and is completely useless. Others may focus on the narration or the interviewee but I paid special attention to the trees, the landscape, the sky. It was real. Every thing was de-mystified, the awe and wonder of it all drained just like that. The words of the man in the video began to mesh with my disappointing and I began forming a new layer of pessimistic skepticism. This time I considered If McCandless may have been just another privileged kid going through a phrase, experimenting with drugs, bored with life or even mentally ill. Perhaps none of these examples were true but that didn't matter. It was enough to suck the apprehension from the story and along with it much of my interest. The end of the video revealed that McCandless carried a wallet with multiple forms of identification and 300 dollars in cash. Again I questioned the bad-ass impression I had previously composed as I saw that even he was prone to ridiculous looking ID pictures. Furthermore the discovered cash drove the nail into my coffin of belief in McCandless' story as I decided the scene in Into the Wild where McCandless burns all his remaining money may be closer to fiction than journalism/bibliography. 

I would argue the effort expended into telling McCandless's story and the videos/ biopics dedicated to coloring in the areas of the narrative that appear gray are the last things he would want. McCandless deserves to exist in the gray, searching.