“Please return all mail I recieve to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again , I want you to know you are a good man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.”
In April 1992 , a young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness, never to return again. Author Jon Krakauer chronicles the story of this enigmatic young man in his book “Into The Wild”. I had picked this up on my way to Ladakh at the Bangalore Airport.The book,however,remained unread through the trip, packed off in a fellow trekker's backpack.Thanks to my incurable habit of picking up books every now and then (airports being an old favourite), I have accumulated a huge reading backlog ever since, something I have been trying to finish off during the past couple of weekends.
Krakauer's book raises some intriguing questions – what differentiates adventure from bravado,and how far would one go in search of raw, transcendent experience? A tryst with the unknown holds a seduction of it's own , and anyone with a passion for adventure can vouch for it. Krakauer relates it to his own climbing experiences , and a personal obsession to climb one of Alaska's remotest mountains – the Devil's Thumb that had overtaken him during his youth. He explores McCandless's personality almost with a personal vigour. An extremely intelligent and idealistic young man , captivated by the writings of Tolstoy, McCandless's strained relationship with his father pushed him into seeking refuge in his undisciplined imagination - a strange obsession to experience living off the wilderness in Alaska. Surprisingly , his encounters with others on his journey to Alaska reveal a more grounded side of his personality and the fact that he held no illusions around his venture into the wild. In fact , as the author delves deeper into the youngster's last few days in the Alaskan wilderness, what surfaces is that save for some insignificant blunders, McCandless would have walked out of the Alaskan woods in 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into it.
A somewhat dark read , a deep exploration of a very enigmatic personality and thought provoking questions around the limits of climbing as a sport ( which as the author himself puts it , becomes a 'psycho neurotic' tendency for some of the most obsessive climbers, an attempt to frame the torment of their own existence).
On a more cheerful note, I moved on to Michael Palin's ' Himalaya' , a day to day account of the BBC documentary series by the same name. Palin gives a befitting introduction -“ What the Sahara is to desert, the Himalayas is to mountains. Both share the same contradictory attractions, appealing and appalling, tempting and terrifying in equal, and ultimately irresistible,measure.” He traverses the Himalaya from the Khyber Pass, through Ladakh and Kashmir,enters Nepal and the mystic land of Tibet and concludes the grand journey in the Bay of Bengal - “ Mission accomplished. With the help of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra I'm swept away out into the Bay of Bengal , along with millions of tonnes of mud that was once the Himalaya”
Palin's first hand account of his experiences in the subcontinent are earnest – his predicament while filling a permit to buy alcohol in Rawalpindi which among other things , requires him to give his religion (“Agnostic with doubts”), his pleasure on discovering the many facets of Hindu mythology in Krishna's temple in Kathmandu (“Our gods don't tend to have girlfriends. It's something we've rather missed out on”) or his admiration for Wongchu,the Sherpa leader who accompanies him to Annapurna Base Camp (“ He is horrendously over-qualified for this sort of work, having twice summitted Everest. On one of those occasions he arrived at the top at 5.30 in the morning, so far ahead of the rest of the party that he lay down on top of Everest and fell asleep until they arrived. Now that is cool!”). The unmistakable attraction of the Himalaya lingers all through, and photographs by Basil Pao do justice to the captivating accounts. A thoroughly enjoyable travelogue, deja-vu for anyone who has travelled to the Himalays, highly recommended!
My reading backlog still continues though, am hoping to bridge more of the pile of unread books on my shelf before the year ends:)