1st Essay

Charles Tewalt
Wayne Berg
English 121-12
2 February 2007
The Flights of Men
The Alaskan frontier, abound with it’s endless opportunities to explore, journey, or disappear into the wilderness, has drawn people to this frontier for centuries. Each year many people lose the battle with the Alaskan elements. So, why then, is the story of Chris McCandless so special? Perhaps it was his undertaking of an adventure so large in scale that many with five times McCandless’ experience have yet to attempt it. Or, perhaps it was to undertake his own soul flight. We may never know for certain, but one certainty remains, Chris McCandless was ambitious, mysterious, and alone. The question is not why he did this, but rather, was he successful?
To some the answer comes rather easily, yet others ponder it for a while. To them it is not a black and white answer. Concerning survival most say Chris was obviously not a success, since he perished in his bus. Others disagree, “…I admire what he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month after month, is incredibly difficult.” (New Humanities Reader, pg. 306) Living off the land was a secondary challenge to Chris, he must survive so therefore the land is his garden. Chris went to Alaska to find himself, that is obvious by his largest miscalculation, leisure time. It is apparent that Chris greatly if not tragically underestimated the huge time investment it would be to become truly self sufficient in a land as unforgiving as the Alaskan interior. The proof, is his carrying of several books. The variety of the books suggest that they were to aid him on his journey to find himself and his place in this world. He bought into the romanticized versions of these authors own journeys into the wild and of the success of
their soul flights. This was Chris’ greatest error and the one that cost him his life.
Over fifty years prior to Jon Krakauer telling of Chris’ tale Into the Wild, a poet was writing about the same soul flight. Wallace Stevens penned a poem titled The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain. In his prose we find a maze of symbolism that express the journey to find greater understanding of something. That something is a journey, perhaps one of the soul, like Chris, or perhaps one of religion or self conflict. No matter what the personal reason for the journey they all are in one group, internal struggle for perspective. The mountain is a widely used symbol in writing to explain or symbolize struggle, with a challenge in the climbing of the mountain and the reward of the view or perspective once on top. Stevens uses his words to make a poem that shows the same quest to gain perspective over ones internal struggle. We as humans will all come to our own mountain to climb or poem to write or wilderness to conquer. It’s in us all to try to understand the unexplainable.