Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Justin writes
, where he explores the meaning of travel, why we seek adventure, and how to incorporate more of it into our lives. Justin is an anthropologist so perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s fascinated by what he calls “the anthropology of wandering.”In the piece he’s written for us, Justin takes us on a journey into the book that first set him on this path. Enjoy!
—
In the summer of 2014, I graduated from Indiana University with degrees in anthropology and history. My partner (now wife) Hilary had also graduated, with her degrees in anthropology and Spanish. Hilary had spent a healthy portion of her young adult life tramping around Spain and South American countries, dedicating much of her time to volunteer work and studying, and being immersed in the cultures of Peru, Argentina, and Chile. I envied her globetrotting status. We met two years before at an archaeological field school in the mountains of western Wyoming, where I was on my second expedition of archaeological training. Upon reaching the end of an undergraduate career unemployed and with that nagging feeling of insurmountable debt corroding the brain, the first thing any sensible person ought to be doing is seeking employment and paying off loans. Not me. Being a responsible adult was going to have to wait because I had an irresistible itch to do something memorable, adventurous, and even reckless if necessary. I had to get something out of my system and thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail was how I aimed to do it.
~ ~ ~
Years before, a romantic and restless dream had spawned in my undeveloped high school brain. I wanted to experience the life of a modern nomad, drunk on wanderlust, exploring our country and any other place on the globe that fate might whisk me away to. I had a resonant surge of inspiration when I first read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild and saw Sean Penn’s 2007 film adaptation detailing the life of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a restive and idealistic young man (also coincidentally studying anthropology and history) in the early 1990s. In a Buddhist-like fashion, McCandless had forfeited his privilege, life savings of $25,000, relationships, social network, and predictable existence in favor of living a nomadic lifestyle on the road. This was an attempt to exempt himself from societal conformities, namely, consumerism, materialism, and the many inherent self-destructive and unjust elements of our society—as many an angst-ridden young man perceives it anyway.
Krakaeur’s narrative captivated me immensely and aligned with my adolescent worldview as no other story had. I connected deeply to this ethos of escaping modernity, shunning our unjust society, and transcending a world I found insufferable and deeply flawed. Like McCandless, I too had been engrossed in the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and Tolstoy, along with much of the philosophy of anarcho-primitivism (think Ted Kaczynski minus the bombs). And like many restless teenagers angry with so much of the world and the seemingly ludicrous system previous generations of adults had created, I yearned for an escape and to be free from the mindless societal games everyone else seemed to be unhappily playing—leading “lives of quiet desperation” as Thoreau would say. Breaking away from society was the closest thing to self-reliance and unadulterated liberty I could imagine at the time. I wasn’t going to be a wage slave, beholden to the rat race like all the rest of these suckers in society, I told myself. I was going to transcend it all, commune with nature, and live in Zen-like bliss in the wilderness. I was going to be the one to crack the code of living life unencumbered by debt, mindless work, materialism, and unwanted responsibilities. Egotistical know-it-all? No question about it! But surely we all can sympathize with the fantasies and ideals of our youth. Such passion is important to cultivate, after all.
I thought I’d have the courage to go on a McCandless-esque voyage of my own after high school. I didn’t. I entered community college and reluctantly began accumulating debt like everyone else by taking out too many student loans to learn an eclectic mix of psychology, history, philosophy, religion, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture. In other words, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was interested in just about everything and thought I was just biding my time before the great escape. I had plans to first make my way to my best friend’s property in eastern Kentucky in the foothills of the Appalachians. There they had a remote cabin deep in the woods where I could begin training to live independently before making my way out west. In the meantime, I was exercising and conditioning my body and mind in various ludicrous ways to endure what I anticipated would eventually be a harsh but rewarding lifestyle living a wayfaring existence. As embarrassing as it is to admit now, I would do things like run barefoot on gravel and meditate in cold water (please don’t ever ask me what the hell all this was about) and I learned to hunt and build traps (not very well, mind you) and identify wild plants for food. I told myself I’d break away from it all after this second stage of schooling. That didn’t happen either.
Next, I ironically did the last thing someone hell-bent on self-reliance should do, I joined the military, the Air National Guard, that is. This didn’t last long though. I stuck around for a year, doing all the necessary pull-ups, sprints, rank-structure memorization, and bathroom mopping until I wised up, became my own self-appointed lawyer, read through the contract I had blindly signed, and got out on a technicality. I should have listened to my grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War, for he knew I had severe problems with authority and could not stand being told what to do. I joined for all the wrong reasons and I’d concluded this path was certainly not for me. However, I was now more confident about what I wanted to do with my life, which was to study anthropology and archaeology, but fear and anxiety from somewhere had convinced me it wouldn’t be wise or financially savvy (that last part is most certainly true by the way, you will not grow wealthy as an archaeologist). Nevertheless, I committed to the study of these disciplines anyway and haven’t entirely regretted it yet.
~ ~ ~
Although I was never daring enough to burn my money and catapult myself onto the road like McCandless, I came to inculcate a model of adventure into my life in my unique way. It turns out that following the model of someone else’s life isn’t all that bold or interesting anyway. In choreographing my life, I discovered a whole new set of adventures I never would have experienced had I followed a path of narrowed reckless abandonment, as I now perceive some of McCandless’ decision-making. Although I undoubtedly would have experienced a whole realm of adventures living the vagabond lifestyle I spent years planning for, looking back from the vantage point of where my life is now, I can’t help but feel confident it would have likely been far more impoverished than the life I am leading.
Since meeting Hilary over a decade ago at our archaeological field school, we have found a sustainable way to incorporate adventure into our lives. We thru-hiked 1,300 miles of the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2014 from Mt. Katahdin in Maine to northern Virginia, ending up in Shenandoah National Park. We spent three winters living in Steamboat Springs, Colorado learning to ski and snowboard. I also spent those summers out west as an archaeologist, surveying and excavating all across parts of Montana and Wyoming, and spent a summer working with the Forest Service in Steamboat Springs where I got paid to backpack throughout the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest conducting archaeological reconnaissance surveys. We embarked on many trips exploring the Colorado Rockies and Utah desert during that time. We’ve been able to venture abroad on occasion to explore Italy, France, Belize, and Mexico together. Hilary and I moved in 2017 to Knoxville, Tennessee, where I continued cultivating my archaeological career, working throughout many southeastern states. In 2022, I earned my M.A. degree in anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Our son, Walden, was born in 2019, and we’ve since learned how to sustain our wanderlust as parents as we attempt to instill in him a love of travel and adventure.
As any bibliophile knows, many books conspire together to shape who we are and how we think about the world. But Into the Wild wasn’t just a book that inspired me, it was a book that propelled me into action and compelled me to live a life of adventure as best I could. If I’m being honest, on my more jaded days, I still feel like escaping from modernity. There’s a lot in this world that still rankles me to the point where I no longer want to be a part of the messiness that is humanity. However, there’s a funny thing about aging: When I first read about Christopher, I felt nothing but envy and admiration for the lifestyle he enacted. I remember thinking that he had probably witnessed far more beauty and adventure in his short sojourn than most of us do in a lifetime and yet as time has passed, I now feel a sense of pity for his early death and the impact that must have had on his family and friends. As contentious as some of his relationships appear to have been, I can’t help but wonder if the risks he took were truly worth it in the end. There was so much more of life he had yet to cultivate, experience, and contribute to.
What I once imagined as the takeaway from this book was a young man living the adventurous life everyone else was scared to live and giving the middle finger to a broken unjust society, I now see very differently in my mid-thirties with a family. There is a timeless tragedy, a deep sorrow wrapped up in Krakaeur’s story—McCandless is a symbol of passionate and intelligent, yet angry, self-righteous, damaged, and vulnerable youth. In the process of becoming adults, we easily forget what adolescence was like. Although there is a lot of variability in how each of us undergoes adolescence, there are overall shared qualities to the experience. It is a time of painful uncertainty and deep directionless emotions as we search and grapple for our purpose and meaning. We mustn’t forget that even the most privileged of youth suffer these maladies and can have fraught relationships which adds to the depth and poignancy of Krakeur’s tale of a very personal narrative. As young adults, we face a paradox in self-doubt as we are simultaneously conscious of our ignorance and inexperience, yet eager to prove our worth and value at a young age. What we dream for ourselves often conflicts with what parents and others in society may envision for us and many of us have to fight like hell to gain some semblance of respect for carving our paths. Being young is never easy and the world is often seen as ruthless, unjust, and unforgiving to us and others through the lens of our adolescent eyes, so much so that we act out in radical ways and desperately attempt to escape in whatever way will get us there, be it drugs, suicide, or physically running away. We need to remember that underneath the veneer of all that adolescent angst and anger is a child simply trying to make sense of this world.
As adults, we have to be better at conveying to younger generations that if they can hold on long enough, there will be untold joys and adventures they cannot yet fathom. But how do we do so without being patronizing? We must all learn to better channel the passions of our youth in ways that guide them toward living a life in balance within a world we all know is less-than-ideal. The challenge that remains for us all is how we can reach a better mental state of equanimity with the modern world in all its chaos and ugliness rather than veering toward the longing to escape it. Despite my changing views on McCandless, I still share the sentiment that I believe is at the core of Into the Wild: that adventure has a much larger role to play in our personal lives and society than we may realize—one that is more wholesome, sustainable, and conducive to our well-being.
P.S. For more ways of getting your writing in front of new readers, consider becoming a paying subscriber today.
Great essay. I also marveled at his story (and Krakauer's incredible prose), and couldn't agree more with your point: "There was so much more of life he had yet to cultivate, experience, and contribute to." That last bit - "contribute to" - is especially poignant, because in our hyper individualistic culture, young people don't get the message often enough that we all have a role to play and we are each needed for the flourishing of all. Finding community is another part of it - social isolation isn't all it's cracked up to be. In reality, Thoreau wasn't far from town, his mom cooked for him and did his laundry, and Emerson dropped by for conversation. There's been a lot written about this fiction of the romantic lone hero in the wilderness - a fascinating examination of an arguably damaging American myth.
Beautiful article! I too have always felt that McCandless just threw his life away. His reasons never made sense to me and I belong to the group which sees him as an irresponsible man. I totally get the feeling of being a nomad and exploring the world. But the adventure that we think we’ll have, will most definitely become a nightmare. I still sometimes feel like running away and become a monk, but I know the world is too cruel and honestly my body will assert its own imperatives in due time. I will need the comfort that I am accustomed to. It takes nothing to throw away your life. It takes a lot of courage to keep working and building your legacy as you age.