Human Side Podcast 06: McCandless in the Wild

A discussion of Chris McCandless, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, and why some young men must go on adventures.

Alaska

View of Resurrection Bay from the second floor of the Seward Library

In the summer of 2014, to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the Good Friday Earthquake in southern Alaska, the Seward Public Library exhibited a series of crayon, pastel, ink and pencil drawings made by a class of Seward schoolchildren in 1964, one week after the 9.2 magnitude quake.

On display were marvelous renderings of the fires that burned on the waterfront, billowing black smoke, buildings and homes and cars destroyed, exploding Texaco and Standard Oil tanks, Resurrection Bay covered in a burning oil fire, boats washed up into the town, and tiny stick figures fleeing towards the mountains from a giant tidal wave. 

Most interesting among the drawings were two by little Jimmy Bradford. In what a half century later would be labeled "Fake News", little Jimmy Bradford had illustrated two alternate factual accounts of the tragedy and its devastation. 

In the first of little Jimmy Bradford's drawings a Nazi warplane flies over the town dropping its munitions onto the defenseless citizens. In the second, a giant reptile, perhaps a dinosaur, has emerged from Resurrection Bay and is rampaging through the buildings on the waterfront.

Perhaps the Seward boy was expressing his incredulity with the official explanation for his town's destruction. But it should be assumed possible too, that little Jimmy Bradford did indeed observe a giant sea creature and an enemy bomber from a war concluded 20 years previous, and that his account was deliberately left unreported by the main stream media.

On This Day, 3 Years Ago

Some members of Front Dock at Tony's Bar, St Patrick's Day 2014

Only Jason was in green. The Russians were bringing in the p-cod. This was us at Tony's, where we started the celebration. Dominic, pictured laughing, was still with the dock crew. He would be fired in the last days of p-cod season, when the work ran 20 hours a day, the Russians arriving in boats one after the other through the night and it was blowing a gale with wind and sleet and snow. Dom couldn't handle it and walked off the crane. Even Charles was down on the dock pitching fish and running one of the cranes and raving like a madman. I got on the crane Dom abandoned and had to  forklift two boats at a time. It was a helluva spot Dom put the crew in walking off. But this picture comes before all that. Dom was a good guy after all. This was St Patty's Day and we were just getting started here. Mad Jack had brought us downtown in his quacking taxi. 

There was a movie crew rumored to be in Seward and on this night the locals thought I was an actor in this film that was to be shot. I did nothing to dissuade this presumption and encouraged it and Jason and Dom spread fabulous lies about my acting career. The movie plot was some sort of secret but we explained it all: there were Alaska bears and snowmobiles and Inuit hunters in the film. Extraordinary things were happening. We made promises to get these locals in the film and took their phone numbers. The locals offered their snowmobiles and expertise. We said we would need it all, most definitely. Dom, I said, was a production assistant. He would be in touch with them.

Then, naturally, we met more people as the night got drunker. These people were from Los Angeles and they were the actual film crew. Jason, fish pitcher and the film's head of cinematography, was now concerned our lies would be exposed, and had us flee to the Yukon where we ran into more of the Los Angeles crew. Things got sloppy after that. Things I cannot write, that I might tell you if we were together and there was a solemn promise made not to repeat these things. For a St Patty's Day is not complete if it does not get a little strange and Seward late in the night and early morning could get as strange as ever.

The Wild Chorus: Aphorisms

35. Even Reason itself is shot through with wild mystery. All the reasonable arguments have come to nothing; look at the history of your West, your politics and philosophy, your great civilization. It is not through more 'changing the world' that the world will be righted. To let the world alone, rather. Allow mystery its rightful place. The world is fine enough. But man must first recover his humility to accept a diminished place in it. 

36. Allow the wave to bear you up — those more powerful forces than men — to you know not where. There is pleasure and ecstasy in submission. To give in to the divinities once again.
 

44. When God did not answer his prayer for fiat wealth God was no longer necessary. Then no more did wealthy men attribute their financial success to divinity, only to themselves. In capitalism, men became gods.
 

49. The wild chorus is never unsung. Let the last land primates go extinct. Then remove the birds from the air, the fish from the seas. Let them all go away. Let men go next. Yet the wild chorus sings on. At that dark hour, when all appears dead, what is first heard as silence becomes a roar.
 

70. The economies of scale have defeated all other forms of life. The hunt is no more. Each summer in Alaska the fishermen are less. The world has been limited to a single species and a single language, and finally a single currency and a single form of life. The forests and rivers and mountains and skies have been transformed into numbers in a bank account. With the continuing concentration of global wealth into the hands of an ever select few, the idea of conspiracy becomes ever more plausible.
 

73. Men have learned the language of generality. They no longer can speak specifically of village life. They speak of the global, the virtual. Mars is next, they say.
 

79. Still the wild chorus sings of places and local practices, so many hidden transcripts, perhaps each year more forgotten. It sings of animals gone and animals hidden; of gods deceased and gods in waiting. And so the wild chorus will one day sing of Reason and argument, of the great ideas of men long passed. This time as all the others shall pass. There can be no progress, my brothers, and that is a good thing.

In the City, Again (miscellaneous remarks)

Adventuring off into the world to write about things. Writing about things never before made legible. Such projects implicitly bring along the legible world, a world of fiat and governance, both state and corporate. Legibility is the bedrock of that form of life. Through legibility the state and corporation expand. Any man that writes has not yet departed from the form of life rooted in legibility. It is a disguised departure at best. Most likely he will return to the legible world to publish his discoveries.

After all the travel I live again in the city. Like all the others, I have taken on commitments and obligations. I look for work. I have done this before. I am again no different than any other city man. Our concerns are the same. Any interest in other forms of life is now a hobby, something to be done while not in the pursuit of fiat. Am I defeated? Perhaps. Will I try again for something outside this form of life? Perhaps. Perhaps I will fade away. Fill an apartment with new things and use alcohol to console my spirit.

Woe to him who would get a peek outside his form of life, and then to return.

Why should ruins not be allowed to disappear without any trace? Why should the dead be disturbed, dug up and sent to museums for infinite preservation? Why do men stricken with legibility fear the prospect of extinction? Being completely forgotten?

Is the destruction of Palmyra by ISIS any different than what the government archaeologists did with the Anasazi artifacts at Range Creek? Is it any different to destroy something with dynamite than to dig it up, tag it, put it in a plastic bag, and send it far away to a museum to be stored in a drawer? Range Creek is perhaps now more empty of ancient forms of life than Palmyra.

His understanding of the ruin is his understanding of himself. It cannot be anything else. The ruin of long ago men and their form of life is a dirt covered mirror.

The inability of archaeologists and their sciences to account for the meaning of prior forms of life and their divinities will be no different than when the men of new gods uncover the books of the scientists. The godless men of legibility and their libraries of books will be as incomprehensible as the cave drawings, as the Chaco Meridian, et al.

Things slow down. A man ages. His youth — suddenly, one day — is gone. He knows it is gone before the others do. Youth has discarded him. The world looks at him differently. He can no longer be regarded as youthful, given a benefit of the doubt for youthful errors. Indeed, it is expected of him that he be like everyone else; that he be a modest success, a contributing member of a fiat based, consumption focused society. Only because of his youth was he able to live in contrast to that society, for it was his youth that charmed other men (not all of them) into giving him a free pass, a gentle, knowing smile, and sometimes their assistance. But once youth is gone the man who lives contrary to a fiat society becomes pathetic, and he is regarded as such.

Legibility leads to silence, if it is properly understood and followed to its extreme. Rimbaud understood this before the age of 20. He lived out the implications of writing and Cartesianism while still in his teens, and saw it all for what it was: mierde. There was only travel then left to him. There was Java and Africa. He went looking for something. But there was only gunrunning and slave trading for fiat. He learned many languages. He amassed a small fortune. It was all for nothing, he said. All for nothing, this traveling all around. There was nothing to do with the fiat but worry about it. As the doctors amputated his leg in Marseille he was being praised in Paris as the greatest of poets. But the praise of the poetry he had written in youth meant nothing to him. He was dead a few months later age 37. The brilliant poetry was as irrelevant as the bank accounts, the explorations, all the learning. It all comes to nothing.

In the absence of the gods, the terminus of legibility is hopelessness.

Gods cannot exist for one man. Gods must exist for many. There can be no lone pioneer who discovers divinity. Rather, a community of men must together be visited by divinities and receive them.

It was my error to believe I could do it all on my own. It is perhaps a profoundly American error, modeled upon the mythic stories of the pioneers who made these United States. But the history of pioneering was never men alone, but men supported by other men through trade. Mountain men such as Jim Bridger would have died without their being accepted among the tribes. Today in the Alaskan wilderness, Heimo Korth and his wife live as much from the fiat earning from their winter trapping as from their hunting. As his native wife Edna says, No one from my people would live alone as Heimo does. You do not survive alone.

Uncollected Aphorisms

27 January 2015

Invidia. Envy. That the Colombian should be permitted to obtain that for which he has never worked. But there was a second element to it: that this obtaining should also cause harm to he who had formerly possessed it. Not only to have it for himself, but also that he who previously had it should feel its loss painfully. It was a particularly acute and malicious feature of Colombian daily life. It resulted in the seducing of novios to injure a girlfriend; the constant chiseling for pesos; all sorts of lies and deceptions; the continuous threat of thievery even among family members.

7 October 2014

“We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.” — quote of unknown origin

28 July 2014

Neither hobby nor career, I was never interested in their tourism. Rather to live it out however it went, however it ended, however good or bad, whatever it led to. To recognize what waves bear a man up instead of ignoring or fighting against them, is to have found his metier. 

9 June 2014

Credit surplus is the outpacing of life on earth. Men racing ahead tearing out ahead past the earths natural edges. The earth is not a limit but is instead a home. To tear it apart is to make men homeless. 

Surplus man is linked to the earth through various proxies, each proxy erected upon another, higher and higher, further and further from the soil, ever more tenuous and unstable at this height. Surplus man topples falls back to the earth. What appears tragic in his fall is looked back upon as comedy, that only a fool would try to live beyond his home. 

6 April 2014

Believe in Jesus they said. That was all. There were other doctrines to be agreed to. A man had a whole framework of ideas it was first necessary to accept before belief was possible, before he could become faithful in act. But religion of the axial age was behavior, not doctrine. 

It appears the axial age focus on religious behavior was a response to a new behavior, perhaps brought about by the revolution of farming and urban life. These holy men of the axial age were translating older ideas in an effort to sustain how men had lived before agriculture. This latest age seeks to sustain how men were before agriculture through Reason and the law of the state. 

But a surplus of men chasing a tiny bit of capital for ownership can only cause competitive and warlike behavior. Even the hunting tribes would become violent when their hunting grounds were threatened. 

Man today lives in continual threat. 

13 March 2014

The divinity in men was eradicated long ago as men learned farming and the skills of the city. But the divinity in women, denied those urban skills, lived on. The female became mans reminder of what was divine, she was the looking glass of gods. Only when cities became built for women and ruled by women were the gods finally banished.

5 March 2014

For more than 30 years The Xtratuff boot has been the official footwear of Alaska fishermen and cannery workers. A seasoned worker brings his own or goes down to the True Value for a new pair. Nobody who knows and can afford them wants to be caught in the free cheap black company issue throwaway boots offered to workers. 

In 1988 in Chicago you weren't really on the school basketball team unless you wore the Nike Air Jordan sneaker. My parents refused me them on account of their price—I can still recall my dismay—and me and another boy were the only ones on the team without them. But here in Alaska with no parents to defer to, I buy Xtratuffs and make myself part of the team.

I did have some concerns as the boot disappointed all of Alaska last year. Honeywell bought the Xtratuff, eliminated the old boot factory in Rock Island, IL and moved production to China. The boots were now $30 more to purchase. The plastic failed. The heels ripped apart in the first month of use. Fishermen and cannery workers across the state were furious. Boots that once lasted a decade now sometimes lasted a week.

Departure

A fisherman leaves Alaska

A Hunter Learns to Scavenge

 

Dutch Harbor, AK

49. In the world of surplus the hunt is rendered unnecessary. That first connection to the earth and its animals, the sky and the gods, is lost.

53. Man's surpluses have their effect throughout the food chain. His surpluses allow the other animals to share in his domestication: to forgo the hunt, to begin the forgetting of that which joined them to the earth. The animals become joined to surplus man.

55. At Dutch Harbor, AK groups of bald eagles pushed the lids off trash dumpsters to get at the refuse inside. In the mornings you came upon them, their heads popping up above the lip of the dumpsters to watch you.

56. The noble hunter becomes a scavenger. The quality of his meat deteriorates as the bird of prey becomes the consumer of human waste. The great eagle becomes less than carrion.

57. At first men thought it wondrous the great eagle had come down from his soaring hunt to be near them. They posed for pictures near the eagle. They marveled at the thick feathers that covered his legs, the yellow feet and his great hooked talons. The eagle's strength was something to behold this close. The eagle was a symbol of so much, particularly for the American.

58. But man would soon think it unbecoming of the eagle to sift through his trash, to use his sharp beak to pick at the wrappers of his Hot Pockets, and to forgo the hunt along the slopes of the mountain. As the eagle becomes more comfortable he will approach ever nearer to man, and perhaps one day eat he will eat from his hand. After man's awe has worn off it will begin to bother him that the eagle waits for him and to be fed. Then will commence his disgust with the eagle. All that he admired in the eagle, its distant soaring power, will have been destroyed.

63. To men of surplus the animals are little more than lesser evolved humans, a distant reminder of man's past and testament to how great he has become. At most the animals are a subject of study in the universities, an academic or hobbyist's interest.

72. Man resents the scavenger of his waste because it takes freely without regard for the principle of labor: that all things made by surplus man, even his refuse, must be paid for in currency or toil. He has contempt for all that live off his efforts, even that which he sends to the landfills.

88. Domestication: a destruction of the spirit, a deterioration of the meat.

103. To have a connection with an animal is to be its killer. The hunter's intimacy with the natural world and its animals is unknown to the city dweller. Though he has never hunted, the city dweller condemns the hunt as cruel all while his excesses of consumption damage the animals in a more profound, yet hidden, way.

Dialogue on Wind

Maximin

new essay on leggings8:11 PM

Moraline

I will read it8:11 PM

I have written aphorisms to the gods8:11 PM

Maximin

remember the famous essay on moraline free about the letter from the editor8:12 PM

Moraline

Which one? There were 28:12 PM

Of chestnuts or iraqis8:12 PM

Maximin

ah, yes, the gods, i glanced over it and realized i needed to sit down with it. it is on my to-do list tonight.8:12 PM

iraqis. You wrote that no one knows why a man writes what he writes8:13 PM

Moraline

i had very clear thoughts atop my forklift but i lost them a little after I sat to write those aphorisms.8:13 PM

Maximin

i too don't know why i had to write an essay on leggings. i was worried afterwards that people would think it is important to write about women's fashion, that i set the wrong example.8:13 PM

Moraline

ah yes the mystery of why a man writes something. only an academically trained man would ask that why8:13 PM

Maximin

i was perplexed by the leggings--or what was once called hooker pants.8:14 PM

so many beautiful women in hooker pants8:14 PM

Fish House

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

 

There was bad news coming out of the Fish House. Salmon season had just opened and already half the workers had quit the slime lines. Of the four lines only two were running. There were only the Somalis and a few of the mental defectives left to work them. The salmon backed up and the Fish House Lead had a nervous breakdown. He began to shake violently, unable to speak, and laid down on pile of fish guts and passed out. When they got him awake he tried to quit but the foreman wouldn't let him. There was talk we were to be pulled off the dock and sent inside to help.

 

"You don't want to go in there," said One-Eyed Eddie. He had started out in the Fish House twelve years ago. "I got out and I never want to go back. You don't want to go in there."

 

The next day the Plant Manager sent us.

The Death of Francisco Flores

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

 

It was a beautiful late summer day. Salmon season was ending and the seiners were coming into the harbor after two months of fishing on the Sound. The Kaylor T had made its last contracted trip and the big tender was docked beside a seiner that was having its nets and a small skiff craned up onto the dock. The captain of the Kaylor T had gone to the Fisherman's Lounge to wait his turn at the crane. He wanted a huge section of steel housing removed from the deck and put into storage at the fishery until next season.

The Plant Manager told Francisco Flores to get the old mobile crane truck. The captain of the Kaylor T was an old friend. There was no reason to call him down just to move the ship to the dock-mounted crane.

Francisco Flores drove the old mobile crane to the edge of the dock above the Kaylor T and secured the stabilizer legs. He extended the boom out and began lowering the hook. It was low tide and the boat far below the dock in the water, and Francisco Flores let out a lot of cable to get the hook down to One-Eyed Eddie. It was a huge section of metal housing that covered half the deck. Nobody had any idea what it weighed. Eddie secured the big four-ways sling to each of the corners and he clasped the hook to it. "Winch up! Winch up!" Eddie yelled, signaling with his index finger.

The Iraqi

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

The Iraqi named Menter was a refugee from the war. He came from Baghdad to Alaska in the middle of winter through a job placement program for refugees. He came to America already unhinged and his discovery of alcohol, cocaine and loose Alaskan women had only unhinged him further. His English was a barely comprehensible mumbling of words that he ended with a smile. He seemed altogether harmless if you didn't know him better.

The Iraqi enjoyed smashing things. He would push over and kick the 160lb. metal totes while cleaning them, making huge booming crashes along the dock. Down in the ship holds where we pitched black cod and halibut, Menter would overhead slam the fish into the metal totes. Esteban would joke that he was trying to re-kill them.

For many months he had an off-on relationship with the moody, big-boned Russian girl from Alaskan Fish and Game. Her job was to stand on the salmon sorting belt and do some sort of analysis on the brains of red salmon. She would lobotomize the reds by cutting off their foreheads with a knife and then, with a tweezers, pluck out the tiny brain and place it on the back of her hand. She examined the brain for a moment before flicking it away and beginning again on another salmon.

Every few days the Iraqi threatened to kill her. He left hundreds of messages on her cell phone saying, "I kill you. Bitch I kill you." Sometimes he threatened to bomb the cannery and kill everyone.

Something Strange

Gil, the crew chief, came over to our table.

"We got nothing more coming in until after lunch. Maybe we get a salmon boat then, man." He grinned. Bald-headed and squinting he always looked happy. He was a good chief and a good man and we all liked to work for him. "Come back after lunch and see what's going on, man."

"Okay, man."

"Yeah, man. Go into the town. See what's going on in the town. You might see something strange."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, man. School just let out. Maybe you see something strange. Maybe come across it,"  Gil grinned broadly and showed the yellowed stubs of teeth. "Yeah, man, something strange."