Emily Pachoud

Envs 11A

10/14/19

Professor Ted Grudin

Wilderness and the Loss of the Creature

Christopher McCandless sought an adventure in a place where the effects of humans

were not visibly seen and where he would find no other humans, and this to him was the

“wilderness”, which he found in Alaska. When he found himself actually in this wilderness, he

struggled with staying totally independent in some ways, but his lack of maps and guidance

allowed him to nearly avoid the “loss of the creature” that Walker Percy describes, until

happening upon the “magic school bus”. While Chris did venture into the wild on his own using

his own skills and knowledge, he does fall victim to the luxuries of this human-created bus in

order to keep himself alive. What he accomplishes is far better than what many people could do,

but it was not enough for him to claim that it really was just him and nature.

Chris built up his idea of wilderness to be a place where he would not “see a single

person, no airplanes, no sign of civilization” (Krakauer 159). While this was a difficult

expectation in such an industrialized, populated, and fully explored world, the bush in Alaska

provided a good enough version of this. To Chris, however, it was a ​perfect​ example of

wilderness. As long as he did not see any signs of other humans, he was satisfied. In addition to

being alone, “the powerful romantic attraction of primitivism”, like Cronon discusses, was likely

a factor in why Chris was attracted to Alaska and the idea of wilderness (Cronon 7). He wanted

to “live off the land” and not rely on current technology or human inventions, thereby returning
to a more primitive way of life (Krakauer 4). Cronon also mentions how many people believed

that “wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism”, and ​Into the Wild ​frequently

discusses Chris’s desire for independence and to survive on his own, so he likely saw wilderness

this way (Cronon 7). He could get along very well with people and would sometimes socialize a

lot, but his deepest desire was to be alone in Alaska- the wilderness. He was pretty clear about

his view of what wilderness was, so when he decided to inhabit the bus in Alaska, it was

baffling.

The “magic school bus” was arguably a piece of civilization. Humans created it and

inhabited it. Perhaps because no one was currently in it, Chris assumed it was abandoned and did

consider it an adopted part of nature and the wilderness. However, his living in the bus tainted

the intended experience of just Chris and the wilderness, nothing else, for the bus contained

supplies and “unnatural” shelter. Therefore, he failed to have a fully sovereign experience due to

his usage of the bus and its supplies, for being sovereign would require relying on nothing but

your own survival skills and abilities, which was Chris’s original plan. Chris sleeping on a

mattress in a bus was more like camping than totally living off of the land. His desire to “map the

area, improvise a bathtub, collect skins and feathers to sew into clothing, construct a bridge

across a nearby creek, repair mess kit, blaze a network of hunting trails” made it appear that his

true goal was to conquer nature (Krakauer 165-66). Some may say that this would be changing

and civilizing the area, but Chris would still technically be living off of the land. So if in addition

to this, he had built his own shelter instead of using the bus, he would have been utilizing nature

fully. If one is living off of the land, then not having an artificial shelter is quite important.
 However, Chris still seemed to mostly avoid the “loss of the creature” due to the fact that

he went to Alaska by himself, with no maps or guidance, thereby allowing him to experience it

purely, without influence. Chris was not in Alaska as a tourist, and he was not there just to

sightsee. He was experiencing it as an explorer with no tools to guide him, so every new area he

happened upon was like a brand new discovery to him. In this way, he had not experienced the

“loss of the creature” that includes basing one’s satisfaction on “​the degree to which [something]

conforms to the preformed complex” in that person’s mind (Percy 1). Chris had no preformed

complex of Alaska, with the exception of him assuming it was an uninhabited wilderness. This

was not a detailed or specific enough expectation to ruin his experience in Alaska. Although he

was inspired by Thoreau and others who spoke of nature and wilderness, he did not know exactly

what to expect out of Alaska, except a lack of civilization, which allowed him to have a pure

experience. His time in the bus just allowed him a slightly safer experience that made it less of a

true, sovereign, “wilderness” experience.

 Works Cited

Krakauer, Jon. ​Into the Wild.​ New York, Anchor Books, 2015.

Cronon, William. “​The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” 1995.

PDF file.

Percy, Walker. “The Loss of the Creature.” PDF file.