Thursday, April 03, 2008
Into the Wild
I'm sitting in a quiet house. My roommate's out. The neighbors have put the baby to sleep. The kitty cat is curled up in a ball at the foot of my bed.
I am alone, but I can hear the passing cars down the block. And I'm on the Internet. I have electricity and a roof. I have a glass of water from the tap. I know if I turn and look towards my window, I will see a street light gleaming in. I even have a calendar on the wall to remind me what day it is.
Alexander Supertramp had none of these things. Chose to have none of these things. Chose to donate $24,000 to charity, ending his bank account. Chose to burn his last few dollar bills and cut up his identification and credit cards. Chose to leave his car in Arizona, and hitchhike to the next place.
Chose to work only to pave his path to a new life: in Alaska. Into the Wild.
He had read enough for a lifetime, and had all the words he could ever need, or so he thought, upstairs, where he could retrieve them whenever he needed.
He learned to hunt, clean, and cook his daily meals. He learned how to farm. He did not learn which plants he could eat, and almost died while starving and eating the wrong ones. They were said to cause tremendous pain, and stop the digestive process.
Once, someone asked him, "What are you running from?"
And his response was something more like, "Why are you still here? You're going to live a long life, and yet you live like you're dying. New experiences and challenges are what keep you young. That is what you need to stay alive."
Something like that.
The climax in his story was one of killing a moose and not cleaning it in time. "The greatest tragedy of my life," he said. "I wish I never shot the moose." Because it was covered with maggots before it was even halfway cooked, and went to waste.
It went to waste because he bit off more than he could chew. Just like the wild. The wild took him in the way that he took it: swallowed him whole.
The fact that he was living up alone in that bus in the snow for so, so long, before he finally died, says something, especially when the moose hunters found his body just two weeks later: They were not meant to find him alive. He was not meant to leave Alaska alive.
His life had served his purpose, and he had found his true meaning of happiness, and said, "It is meant to be shared."
He once also said he would give up love, among other things most humans want and need, for truth. Truth of all things. Truth in the abstract sense is nonetheless real, and he found it.
I'm sitting in a quiet house. My roommate's out. The neighbors have put the baby to sleep. The kitty cat is curled up in a ball at the foot of my bed.
I am alone, but I can hear the passing cars down the block. And I'm on the Internet. I have electricity and a roof. I have a glass of water from the tap. I know if I turn and look towards my window, I will see a street light gleaming in. I even have a calendar on the wall to remind me what day it is.
Alexander Supertramp had none of these things. Chose to have none of these things. Chose to donate $24,000 to charity, ending his bank account. Chose to burn his last few dollar bills and cut up his identification and credit cards. Chose to leave his car in Arizona, and hitchhike to the next place.
Chose to work only to pave his path to a new life: in Alaska. Into the Wild.
He had read enough for a lifetime, and had all the words he could ever need, or so he thought, upstairs, where he could retrieve them whenever he needed.
He learned to hunt, clean, and cook his daily meals. He learned how to farm. He did not learn which plants he could eat, and almost died while starving and eating the wrong ones. They were said to cause tremendous pain, and stop the digestive process.
Once, someone asked him, "What are you running from?"
And his response was something more like, "Why are you still here? You're going to live a long life, and yet you live like you're dying. New experiences and challenges are what keep you young. That is what you need to stay alive."
Something like that.
The climax in his story was one of killing a moose and not cleaning it in time. "The greatest tragedy of my life," he said. "I wish I never shot the moose." Because it was covered with maggots before it was even halfway cooked, and went to waste.
It went to waste because he bit off more than he could chew. Just like the wild. The wild took him in the way that he took it: swallowed him whole.
The fact that he was living up alone in that bus in the snow for so, so long, before he finally died, says something, especially when the moose hunters found his body just two weeks later: They were not meant to find him alive. He was not meant to leave Alaska alive.
His life had served his purpose, and he had found his true meaning of happiness, and said, "It is meant to be shared."
He once also said he would give up love, among other things most humans want and need, for truth. Truth of all things. Truth in the abstract sense is nonetheless real, and he found it.
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