The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snow-shoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.
— “The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Northern Wilderness” by John Haines
I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, but I’m still thinking about it all the time.
The first quote isn’t even from the book itself, but from another one the author quotes at the beginning of Chapter 13. Back when I was single, I used to take my dog and disappear in the woods whenever I had a little free time, and while I’m neither as romantic or as big of a free spirit as Chris McCandless, I feel like I understand his and this other author’s escapist desires perfectly.
McCandless was thrilled to be on his way north, and he was relieved as well—relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.
The tendency to need “space”, to stay away from deep relationships while paradoxically also longing for them, the desire to travel to far-away places where I can start my life over with a blank slate, is all too familiar to me. As I’ve learned, these are all signs of an avoidant attachment style, caused by a very specific pattern of parental negligence in early childhood. It took me a long time to accept this about myself, and even longer to more or less fix it.
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, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
This is from a letter Chris wrote to an old friend of his. When I was young, I also shared his distaste for conformism and the lack of flexibility, even to a point of cowardice, that characterizes normalcy in our society. The entire paragraph reads like something I could have written in my early 20s. I’ve mellowed out since then, and I’ve become much more understanding of people who want to play it safe, especially after my baby daughter was born, and I became aware of the weight of the responsibility that comes along with the immense joy of parenthood.
At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn’t yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who’d entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.
In my case—and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless—that was a very different thing from wanting to die.
Here the author is defending Chris’s motivations and rejecting the simple armchair psychology explanations of his actions. He, like me, considers his young self very similar to Chris, and he feels like he can confidently reject the sensationalistic death wish theory. I also feel that Chris’s intentions were entirely pure and noble, and while I’m nowhere near as brilliant or interesting a person as him, I can’t help but think that in another life, something very similar could have happened to me.