The Janus Circle Project

Making Peace with Chris McCandless

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me, I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--that my body might,--but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

--Thoreau, Ktaadn

I’ve been away from this blog, on a journey unconnected with Geography. Last year I wanted to work out what was required in order to enter personal experience as a writer. It seemed a simple enough question: How should I live if I want to open myself to experience through writing, if I want to make myself present to all occasions not though brute or magical immediacy but by means of the presence-through-absence that marks the relationship of readers and writers? Is it, I wondered, even possible thus to uncover and tell the truth?

This, I think, is the essential inquiry that oriented the very different lives of Thoreau, Henry James, and Hemingway. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that the answer, if one is to be had, isn’t simple.

I’m not sure what I’ve learned through the thousands of pages I’ve written and read in the interim – but I would sum it all up in this formulation: The private is the enemy of the personal in all strong writing.

Hence the value, for writers anyway, of blogs and readers.

I took today off from work, trying to catch up on books and thoughts neglected in the wake of too many professional projects. I started the day with a haircut given by an attractive woman named Shari, whom I took to be in her early 30s. She had tousled blond hair, a slender but active build, and the low smoky voice of a 1940’s femme fatale. I’m not often attracted to unknown women – they lack stories and thus interest, so I wondered why Shari was cutting hair for a living, but I didn’t really want to ask, fearing the answer might leave her less interesting than she was at the outset.

While Shari worked, we went through the obligatory small talk about my day and the good fortune of a sunny morning in chilly Minnesota.

“Maybe spring is actually coming,” she laughed.

“I wouldn’t rule out one more snow,” I countered.

She asked what I was up to on this beautiful morning. I said I was going to do some reading and perhaps look for hard-to-find trading cards for my eight-year-old son.

This led to a quick conversation about all three of my children – the oldest in Germany, the middle one in Oregon.

“And you,” I said, “do you have family here?”

Shari was standing behind me, but she looked up to her reflection in the mirror, which is where we were holding our displaced conversation: “Me, I can’t have kids.”

“Oh.”

“No, it’s just that preemies run in my family. I’m an only child and so was my mother. So no kids for me.”

“I’m sorry – I mean if that was something you would want.”

“It’s fine,” Shari said, getting back to my hair. “I mean, I’m 41, and I’ve made my peace with it. It’s my mother who’s having the problem.”

“Your mother?”

“She’s been talking about not being a grandmother – not unless I end up with someone with kids, anyway.”

How had I landed here? I wondered, worrying about opening wounds. What is beauty when it thinks of itself as barren?

But Shari finished up, took my credit card, and was already asking the next customer about his day before I could gather my things and make my way outside.

True to plan, I came to the nearest Caribou coffee shop – a rare treat in my overcrowded schedule. I took out Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which I’ve been meaning to finish for the last three weeks. Caitlin and I watched the Sean Penn film several months back, and I had a visceral response. As the book cover reads:

“In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopehr Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter”

Krakauer and Penn both depict McCandless as a spiritual seeker searching out a more authentic connection with his own experience. In many ways, McCandless simply played out an extreme version of the drama pushing countless young people to experiment, challenge, and unsettle the wisdom of the world offered by their elders.

But I took an unreasonable dislike to the McCandless character in the film. “That’s because he’s just like you,” Caitlin observed, when I began venting at the hubris and self-centeredness of the film’s lead. “You went off into the mountains of Colorado when you were his age and nearly starved. You knew even less about living off the land than he did.”

“But I survived.”

“You were lucky – that’s all. And didn’t you say you rafted the Snake River in Idaho on that trip – with no experience?”

That’s the problem with long-term relationships. It’s difficult to bluff your way free of moments like these. As a young man, I had indeed taken an ill-considered trip into the mountains, and I took my first wife with me. So I wasn’t as brave or sincere as McCandless. But I couldn’t leave it there. I couldn’t let this young man die without my understanding.

So I bought the Krakauer book and began to read.

The Caribou chain of coffee houses is styled after the ski lodges and cabins of the great north – the walls feature pictures of mountains, moose, rocky streams, and caribou. It seemed like the ideal place to finish McCandless’ story after my haircut with Shari, but at the next table two women in their mid-50s sat down and picked up a conversation they’ve clearly been having for years. One was moderately attractive – with the well-preserved body and face of a woman who still considers herself a possible catch. She wore make-up, snug jeans, a flattering pullover. The other woman had let herself go and was wearing sweats, a scowl, and a mop of untended hair. As the conversation revealed, both were single.

“I’ve been on a couple of dates,” the attractive woman said. “But nothing is really happening.”

“No?” the friend queried.

“Maybe it’s not time,” the attractive woman mused, swirling coffee in her cup and placing it untasted back onto the table. “I mean, I write thousands of affirmations every month. Thousands of them.”

“I know.”

“But it’s the same thing every Monday. Panic. Nothing but panic. I don’t know how to get through the week. I was fine on Sunday, and today, panic. And all that’s changed is my perspective.”

“It takes time,” the friend offered.

“I don’t know how to see what I want,” the attractive woman continued, faster now. “I read all these books, and they say I have the life I want – that I’m alone because I WANT to be. And that’s so hard for me to take. I don’t know what buttons are being pushed in me or why I’m letting them be pushed.”

I tried to block the conversation as it grew more lonely and bleak. I had only a short time to finish the journey with McCandless, and he had not yet starved to death in the sleeping bag sewn for him by his mother.

Then, as the two women next to me explored the undiscovered country of their despair, I came across this passage in Krakauer, explaining why McCandless went into the wild:

“Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature of the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.”

--Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 183

This, I thought, was a beautiful example of discovering the instability of distinctions like inner/outer, self/other. We need such distinctions if we are going to function with an identity. But we are misled if we believe these lines are natural, are discovered instead of constructed. This, I saw, was the insight I had been searching for both in the Colorado mountains and in the more recent journey through the haunted spaces of my regained suburban home. Any sincere search will eventually lead toward balance -- if you manage to survive the process. Perhaps this was an insight that could help the women at the next table, but they were already gone.

Discontinuous Creatures

The lakes of Minnesota are still half-covered with ice. I walked a shore this evening, casting spinners along the shelf-line, hoping a bass or northern was watching from a warm pocket somewhere below. But I’ve kayaked this particular lake for nearly eight years now. There are no places for bass or pike along the route I took – they are all under the half-eaten ice that remains.

So I picked my way across dried rushes, branches, and mud, watching geese chase each other across a low island about 200 yards out – competing for nesting space around the perimeter. Muskrats and redwing blackbirds were busy, and a trio of glum fishermen sat on upturned plastic buckets on the far shore, watching their lines, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled high and tight, their hands in their pockets.

Caitlin was in Minneapolis most of the day, where she is taking a class to get certified in web-based course design. They keep trying to offer her a scholarship and entry into their master’s program, but she smiles her becoming smile and says she already has a Ph.D. – she’s not looking for more diplomas.

But she’s happy (I think) – excited and learning. She talks about ideas again – Heidegger and epistemology, Oprah and social capital. Tonight she was telling me about a new theory regarding triggering memory. And she’s asking me to add books to our oversized library. She hasn’t done that since grad school.

Caitlin called on her lunch break. I had just picked Noah up from art class – where he had been working on Cezanne-like sketches. “Where do you want to eat,” I asked after looking over his little still life portfolio.

There was no hesitation in his answer: Famous Dave’s Barbecue.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Your mom would want us to eat something healthy.”

“Oh, she would be very angry,” he laughed. “So can we go? Can we?”

Pretending to act daring when we “boys” have the chance to pursue our wayward tastes beyond the reach of his health-conscious mother is one of the joys of Noah’s life. And since our karate class (which usually follows art) was cancelled for the day, we had time on our hands.

“Famous Dave’s it is,” I agreed.

Noah was mixing the various barbecue sauces, trying to devise a recipe of his own, when Caitlin called. I could hear wind blowing in her cell phone.

“So where are you?” she asked, expecting us to be up to no good.

“Oh, having a healthy lunch,” I answered, putting an index finger to my lips, signaling Noah for quiet.

“Yeah,” Noah added, ignoring me, and speaking directly to his mother. “A healthy lunch at Famous Dave’s.”

On the other end of the phone, Caitlin laughed. We had lived up to her expectations. “Guess where I am,” she said, clearly wanting to move to the next topic.

“I thought you were in class at Saint Thomas.”

“Almost – but I don’t have to be back for 45 minutes. So I’m walking through Loring Park. It’s windy, but it’s already getting green in the city.”

She wanted to tell me she was eager for summer, for biking and hikes, and our trips into the city. But I was stalled, my imagination locked on the image of her walking through Loring Park. Three years ago, we took the same route in order to find an apartment for me – a place to live close to our son while Caitlin moved on with her life.

That life circled back to our home together and a second marriage with each other. And it has been so rewoven that I can usually miss the seam connecting this life to that other one. But the seam runs through Loring Park.

Earlier in the day, while Noah was at art class, I went to a locally-owned coffee shop in Lakeville. I’d stopped there once before, but they’ve now added a wine bar. The locals are still adjusting to the change, and I stationed myself at a high table where I could watch them come and consider the great matter of scones or muffins with their coffee. At my table, I was reading from Bataille’s Erotism. Why I was reading Bataille on an April day while waiting on my son was another matter – but I copied this passage:

"The likelihood of suffering is all the greater since suffering alone reveals the total significance of the beloved object. Possession of the beloved object does not imply death, but the idea of death is linked with the urge to possess. If the lover cannot possess the beloved he will sometimes think of killing her; often he would rather kill her than lose her. Or else he may wish to die himself. Behind these frenzied notions is the glimpse of a continuity possible through the beloved. Only the beloved, so it seems to the lover--because of affinities evading definition which match the union of bodies with that of souls--only the beloved can in this world bring about what our human limitations deny, a total blending of two beings, a continuity between two discontinuous creatures. Hence love spells suffering for us in so far as it is a quest for the impossible, and at a lower level, a quest for union at the mercy of circumstance. Yet it promises a way out of our suffering. We suffer from our isolation in our individual separateness. Love reiterates: 'If only you possessed the beloved one, your soul sick with loneliness would be one with the soul of the beloved.' Partially at least this promise is a fraud. But in love the idea of such a union takes shape with frantic intensity, though differently perhaps for each of the lovers. And in any case, beyond the image it projects, that precarious fusion, allowing as it does for the survival of the individual, may in fact come to pass. That is beside the point; this fusion, precarious yet profound, is kept in the forefront of consciousness by suffering as often as not, by the threat of separation."

---Bataille, Erotism, p.20

I read Bataille’s words and felt what Thoreau meant when he observed:

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them according to his ability, by his words and his life.”

--Thoreau, Walden

I take it as a sign that, the ice of our lakes notwithstanding, springtime miracles are already underway whenever a moralist like Thoreau speaks for an immoralist like Bataille – each glossing the other.