Into the Wild Summary

Into the Wild has an author's note, 18 chapters and an epilogue, and every chapter is titled with a place name — several of them recurring, because the book loops back on itself rather than moving forward:

• 1-2. The Alaska Interior, The Stampede Trail — his last ride in, then the discovery of the body four months later
• 3-8. Carthage, Detrital Wash, Bullhead City, Anza-Borrego, Carthage, Alaska — the two years of wandering, and the people who took him in
• 9-10. Davis Gulch, Fairbanks — Everett Ruess and other young men who vanished into wilderness
• 11-13. Chesapeake Beach, Annandale, Virginia Beach — the family: his father, his mother, his sister, and what he found out in 1986
• 14-15. The Stikine Ice Cap — Krakauer stops the story entirely and tells his own
• 16-18. The Alaska Interior, The Stampede Trail, The Stampede Trail — the bus, the flooded river, and the death

The order is deliberately not chronological, and Krakauer warns you in the author's note. Every chapter also opens with epigraphs, many of them passages McCandless had highlighted in the books found with his remains — Tolstoy, Thoreau, Jack London, Pasternak — and several taken from his own postcards. Chapters fourteen and fifteen are the famous digression: Krakauer, aged twenty-three in 1977, attempting a new route on the Devils Thumb alone. He includes it, he says, in the hope that his own experience will throw some oblique light on the enigma of McCandless — a difficult father, the same youthful certainty, and the one difference that decided everything, which is that Krakauer got lucky and came home.

This Into the Wild summary begins with the last person to see him alive. On 28 April 1992 an electrician named Jim Gallien picked up a hitchhiker four miles outside Fairbanks and drove him to the head of the Stampede Trail near Healy. The young man gave his name as Alex, said he was from South Dakota, and would not say much else. Gallien thought he looked eighteen or nineteen. His pack was far too light, he had no map, no compass, no axe and no rifle bigger than a .22, and he refused a detour to Anchorage to buy proper gear. He did accept Gallien's rubber work boots, two grilled cheese and tuna sandwiches and a bag of corn chips. Gallien drove off assuming he would get hungry within a week and walk back out to the highway.

The young man was Christopher McCandless, born in 1968 and raised in Annandale, Virginia, the son of an aerospace engineer who had worked for NASA. He had graduated from Emory in May 1990 with a double major in history and anthropology and a 3.72 average, and had declined Phi Beta Kappa on the grounds that titles are irrelevant. Then he gave the remaining twenty-four thousand dollars of his college fund to OXFAM without telling his parents, and drove west.

In July 1990 a flash flood killed the engine of his yellow Datsun in a wash near Lake Mead. Rather than deal with rangers over an expired licence and no insurance, he hid the car under a tarp, buried his rifle, and burned the hundred and twenty-three dollars in his wallet — a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties, as Krakauer describes it. From that point he was Alexander Supertramp.

The two years that follow are the warmest part of the book, because of the people. Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old selling knick-knacks at flea markets, spotted him picking berries beside a California highway and fed him for a week; estranged from a son about his age, she wrote to him for two years afterwards. Wayne Westerberg picked him up outside Cut Bank, Montana and gave him work at his grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota, a town of 274 people that McCandless started calling home and used as a mailing address. In Topock, Arizona he saw a secondhand aluminium canoe for sale and on an impulse decided to paddle the Colorado four hundred miles to the Gulf of California — got lost in the Mexican canal system, was rescued by duck-hunting guides, spent thirty-six days without speaking to another person, and abandoned the canoe in January 1991 after nearly being blown out to sea.

And then Ronald Franz, who is the reason many readers cry. Eighty years old, a widower in Salton City who had lost his wife and only son to a drunk driver on New Year's Eve 1957 and quit whiskey six months later. He met McCandless in January 1992, taught him leatherwork, drove him to Colorado that March, and asked whether he could adopt him as a grandson. McCandless deflected — we'll talk about it when I get back from Alaska, Ron. Franz sold his furniture, bought a van and camped in the desert for eight months waiting.

Underneath all of this Krakauer places one discovery. On a road trip after high school in 1986, McCandless visited old neighbours in California and worked out that his father had for years kept two households, and had fathered another son with his first wife two years after Chris was born. He never confronted his parents. He told his sister the deception made his entire childhood seem like a fiction, and then expressed the rage obliquely, in silence and withdrawal, for six years.

He reached the bus in late April 1992 — Fairbanks City Transit Bus 142, a 1946 International Harvester dragged into the bush in 1961 to house a road crew and left behind with a broken axle as a shelter for trappers. He called it the Magic Bus and covered a wall with graffiti: two years he walks the earth, no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes, ultimate freedom, an extremist, an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. He shot a moose on 9 June, botched the butchering and lost most of it to maggots, and wrote that he wished he had never shot it — one of the greatest tragedies of his life. He was living on squirrels, grouse, jays, the occasional frog, and wild plants, and he was steadily losing more calories than he took in.

On 3 July he packed up and started walking out. Five days later he was back at the bus. The Teklanika River, an easy ankle-deep crossing in April, was now a chest-deep torrent of snowmelt.

The cruelty of the ending is in what he did not know. Standing at the same spot a year later with a topographic map in his pack, Krakauer found a gauging station half a mile downstream in the throat of the canyon — a steel cable across the four-hundred-foot gorge with a hand-hauled basket hanging from it, and the basket parked on McCandless's own side. Crossing would have been trivial. There was also a Park Service cabin stocked with emergency food six miles south, a three-hour walk. He knew about neither, because he had deliberately come without a map: he wanted to find a blank spot on the map, and since none were left, he solved the problem by getting rid of the map.

On 30 July the journal turns: extremely weak, fault of potato seed, much trouble just to stand up, starving, great jeopardy. On 5 August, day one hundred, he wrote that he had made it but was in the weakest condition of his life, that death loomed as a serious threat, and that he was too weak to walk out and had literally become trapped in the wild. On 12 August he taped a note to the bus door, written in block letters on a page torn from a Gogol novel, asking whoever found it to stay and save him — and he signed it Chris McCandless, having dropped the name he had used for two years. His last journal entry that day reads simply: Beautiful Blueberries. After that the journal records nothing but a tally of the days.

At some point in that final week he tore the last page out of a Louis L'Amour memoir and wrote on the blank side: I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all. He photographed himself outside the bus holding the note, looking, Krakauer thought, at peace. Then he got into the sleeping bag his mother had sewn for him. He probably died on 18 August. Three moose hunters found him on 6 September; at the autopsy his remains weighed sixty-seven pounds.

What actually killed him is still disputed, and Krakauer's own answer has changed four times, which critics count against him and he counts as following the evidence. The autopsy said starvation, and that has never been formally superseded. In the 1993 magazine article he thought McCandless had mistaken toxic wild sweet pea for edible wild potato; by the 1996 book he had abandoned that and argued the wild potato seeds carried a toxic alkaloid; around 2007 he suggested the seeds had gone mouldy in a damp bag; in 2013 he endorsed a theory involving the neurotoxin ODAP, which chemists publicly demolished. In February 2015 he retracted the ODAP claim outright, and the following month co-authored a peer-reviewed paper in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine identifying L-canavanine in the seeds at 1.2 per cent by weight and concluding it was highly likely to have contributed. The leading independent expert on those plants remains sceptical of the measurement, and nobody has replicated it. Many Alaskans have never needed a toxin at all: he burned more than he ate for four months on lean small game, and starved.

The epilogue takes his parents to the bus. Billie McCandless goes in first, smells her son's jeans, and recognises the silverware from her kitchen in Virginia. Walt asks how a boy with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain. Carine carries her brother's ashes home in her backpack. Ronald Franz learned the news from hitchhikers on 26 December 1992; he renounced God, withdrew from his church, and broke thirty-four years of sobriety with a bottle of whiskey in the desert — hoped it'd kill me, he said, but it didn't, just made me real, real sick.

The most-quoted passages, with the important distinction of who actually wrote each one:

"I now walk into the wild."

"HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences."

"I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

"Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul."

"It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it."

The first four are McCandless, not Krakauer: the title line closes his last postcard to Wayne Westerberg; the block-capital line is a note he pencilled in the margin of Doctor Zhivago beside an underlined passage, about three weeks before he died; the long passage is from a letter urging an eighty-one-year-old man to change his life; and the last is his farewell, written on the blank back of a page torn from a Louis L'Amour memoir. The final two are Krakauer's own prose. Note that the widely circulated "Happiness is only real when shared" adds a verb McCandless did not write, and that "happy trails" appears nowhere in his final note despite being attached to it all over the internet.