Every time I mention this guy people come out of the woodwork with all sorts of crazy explanations for why he died, all of them an effort to deny reality so that it doesn’t mess up the fictional beliefs they are emotionally attached to.
There are so many guys out there who want so badly to believe that solitary people can survive extended periods of time simply on what they catch, kill, or pluck out of the woods - which is absolutely not true. It wasn’t true a hundred years ago, and it’s not true today.
It is amazing to see these people fly into denial and do acrobatics around the true cause of McCandless’s death. They want to believe anything except for the truth: He simply starved. To accept this means they would have to give up their childish, false beliefs about single men being able to live completely on only what the woods provide.
Here’s the truth: McCandless starved. There wasn’t any food to keep him alive. He got so weak that even if food did show up, he wouldn’t have had the energy to get it. Solitary persons cannot live for extended periods of time merely on what they catch, kill, or pluck from the woods. It’s not a matter of skill. It’s a matter of what is possible or not, and it’s not possible.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
