Last June I came across John Krakauer’s “Into The Wild,” a gripping recount of the two-year wanderings of college graduate Christopher McCandless — a journey that inevitably led to his starvation in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992.

Originally published in 1993 as an article in Outside magazine, the 9,000-word story received such high acclaim that Krakauer, after developing a border-line obsession with the mystery during his research, set out on a trek of his own to expand on his writings. He set out to discover why a 22-year-old man — someone from a well-to-do East Coast family with roots in NASA; a degree from a prestigious university and good enough grades for Harvard Law School; and by all Western standards, was successful and happy with a promising future — would donate his life savings to charity, burn his Social Security Card, chop up his personal identification and travel to Alaska to “live off the land.”

Krakauer was intrigued, confused, frustrated and exhausted. It just didn’t make sense. And after two years of following McCandless’ footsteps across the country to merge his article into a full-length, non-fiction book (1996’s “Into The Wild”), he still wasn’t sure.

To be honest, though, I don’t think anyone ever was (or ever can be, for that matter).

McCandless, as Krakauer recounts, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., with a double major in history and anthropology. He was a bright student: A’s and A-minuses graced his final report card.

Following graduation, he donated his life savings to Oxfam International (a charity organization that, rather ironically, works towards fighting hunger). He eliminated his record, changed his name to “Alexander Supertramp” and hit the road, west-bound.

During the two-year journey that followed, he threw himself into a life of minimalism. He befriended blue-collar workers and self-proclaimed “traveling hippies.” He ventured from North Dakota to Mexico and Reno to Los Angeles, working low-wage jobs and preparing for his “great Alaskan adventure.” He created an entirely new identity for himself. All the while, his family — mother, father and one sister — never heard a word of his whereabouts.

On Sept. 6, 1992, after two years of a desperate, heart-wrenching search for their son, his family finally received news of his discovery — as a frozen, 67-pound corpse in an abandoned bus on the Alaskan Stampede Trail.

The media coverage that followed was intense, and reception of McCandless’ fate became immensely two-sided. Some claimed he was a Thoreau-like hero and sympathized with his death as an unfortunate, tragic accident. Others saw him as a naïve idiot living out a fantasized dream, who essentially committed suicide by going into the wilderness with such little preparation.

“The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you,” wrote Sherry Simpson from the Anchorage Press. “(McCandless’) death was not a brilliant f***-up. It was not even a terribly original f***-up. It was just one of the more recent and pointless f***-ups.”

However, Krakauer publicly defends McCandless, claiming that it was a desire to be lost, not foolishness, that led to his untimely death.

“Alaska has long been a magnet for unbalanced souls, often outfitted with little more than innocence and desire, who hope to find their footing in the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier,” he writes in “Death of an Innocent,” the original article in Outside magazine. “… more than such few dreamers have met predictably unpleasant ends.”

So maybe that’s what McCandless really was: a “lost soul” looking to strip himself of societal ties and live off the land in the wilderness, living out the writings of his favorite authors, Jack London, Tolstoy and Thoreau.

(I’d highly encourage everyone to read “Death of an Innocent” and “Into the Wild” — they’re very well-written and will give you a much better look into McCandless’ life).
But the ultimate mystique of it all — and the catalyst to my continuing obsession over the story — is that McCandless never got a chance to explain his actions.

And looking back on everything, I don’t think he deserves such harsh criticism. It’s hard to make a judgment since nobody actually understands what was on his mind. There are clues, sure; but really, it’s difficult to tell.

Admittedly, it was foolish to venture into the Alaskan wilderness with so few supplies and knowledge of the area. But I do agree with Krakauer that McCandless was just “looking for a blank spot on the map” — he didn’t want to know where he was because to him, that was part of the adventure.

I wouldn’t necessarily peg him an idiot or a hero; I really just think he loved — and maybe overly-romanticized — the idea of wandering. Even though the territory had already been mapped and discovered, to McCandless, not bringing a map made it new and mysterious. And that’s what he genuinely wanted.

Recounting the journal entries he left behind, he actually appears to be at peace at the time of his death. His last message read:

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

I’m still left to wonder what would have amounted if he had stayed alive for an additional two weeks — just long enough for the local moose hunters who happened by his campground to take him to the nearest town for immediate medical attention.

I’d like to think he would have written a book about his travels; maybe spoken publicly about his personal philosophies. Ultimately, I’d hope he would have explained, above all else, why he decided to do what he did.

But I guess we’ll never know.