Fear and Limping (Alone) in Las Vegas

This week’s post is not about ways to save money or plan for a retirement. There’s not even much here about climbing. I spent some time alone this week, and as such, fell (pun intended) into a bit more of a contemplative mood. This is an essay on wild places, loneliness, and the compounding emotional effects of night. Finally, and perhaps unexpectedly, we examine the continued relevance of the death of Chris McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness.

Into the Wild

I’ve just finished re-reading Into the Wild (1996). This classic John Krakauer saga chronicles the story of a young man from a seemingly well-to-do family, Chris McCandless, who died alone in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. As the common narrative goes, his death marked the culmination of a two-year transcendental journey in search of enlightenment and peace from a tortured childhood.

I didn’t realize how popular this book has become; apparently required reading now in many high schools and colleges. It’s also highly controversial. Folks have equally strong impressions on whether McCandless was a stoic, Jack London-fueled cult hero who chose hardship as a means for growth, or as many Alaskans fancy him, a questionably suicidal, upper-crust suburban fool who starved to death due to his own arrogance, hubris, and lack of preparation.

I have always leaned towards Krakauer’s admittedly sympathetic and likely romanticized views on Chris McCandless. While I never felt drawn to such extremes—a two-year penniless traverse of the west and an ill-fated attempt to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness—I feel I understand his motivations. Many have taken a trite interpretation of the story and distilled it down to either two extremes: “nature is great and materialism sucks,” or “what a spoiled idiot!” I think neither bookend interpretation captures the essence of what this young man set out to achieve. Perhaps most importantly, neither interpretation captures what he was running from.

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Running to or from the Wild?

When I first read Into the Wild, I was nearly the same age as Chris McCandless when he lived and died in Alaska: I at 22, and McCandless at 24. His ill-fated story resonated deeply with me at the time. The narrative clearly reflected my own often-unspoken misgivings of modern society and my deep and strong pull—not to nature on its own right—but to wild places. And what did I want with these places? Likely an escape.

I, like McCandless in Krakauer’s telling, truly discovered myself in my college years. Free to largely dictate my own life and schedule, I started finding better ways to cope with what I must now honestly label as anger. I looked at others through a filter of resentment, especially anyone who aimed to limit my fierce and fiery sense of independence or those who were in any way materialistic. I thought that a tendency to live a lavish life or to spend money freely was a weakness in character; a feeble attempt to be accepted amongst an equally mis-informed herd.

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In fact, I recall a time in high school where I sat around with two other friends. We were probably halfway through one thing or another that was illegal at our (or any) age. I casually mentioned that I thought individuals were made worse by many aspects of society and that we’d be better off returning to our original roots in nature. After the two of them stopped looking at me like confused dogs, we probably shifted the conversation back to headlining acts at Bonnaroo or something. I kept it to myself from there.

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On Being Alone and Solo Adventure

As an introvert, I’ve always been able to enjoy my own company. I’ve frequently found big parties, crowds, or even conferences to be draining, if not abhorrent. This comfort in my own skin and occasional disdain for social norms and niceties led me to many solo backpacking trips in the mid-2000s. I’d venture out to intentionally remote wilderness lands of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and then Arizona, hoping to see no one. The more obscure, the better. I wanted to be there alone.

Unfortunately, I often experienced more than relaxation or joy. The first day—bright with sun and the endorphin effect of physical effort—fueled the contentment I sought. However, the setting sun often left me in a deep and profound state of loneliness and isolation. I often wondered what the hell I was doing. Miles from anywhere and anyone, I listened intently at each snapping branch and every subtle breeze in an eerie, solitary, and dark world.

Morning always made the world beautiful again. All the sinister and foreboding elements of night were rendered moot with each sunrise, flooding warm light onto my tent, reminding me again why I came to these far-flung wilds.

And despite the constant theme of loneliness, I kept coming back. Each night, alone in my tent or in a sleeping bag on barren earth, I’d try and convince myself that I didn’t need to be here. The passing of time, however, always seemed to dilute those feelings. After several weeks back in “the real world” the pull of the wild always returned.

The Changing Seasons of Life

As I aged, I met a wonderful woman, entered a career in a big city, and subsequently discovered climbing. As such, my free-spirited idealism waned and the solo wilderness trips all but ceased. Precious vacation time was used for other (arguably saner) forms of exploration, or far less primitive camping and climbing trips. Most importantly, I slowly started to find contentment in life, amongst people (one person in particular). I hadn’t found that ease alone in the backcountry.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t still experience that void. I spent years hiking in the Front Range of Colorado, always disappointed by the sheer volume of outdoor enthusiasts and difficulty “getting away from it all.”

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This Week Alone in Las Vegas

The point of all this is that my need to be “out there” will always persist. This week I decided to head down to Las Vegas for a solo bouldering trip to Red Rock. The canyons, a stunning series of towering sandstone and limestone cliffs, form a dramatic western backdrop to a city otherwise stereotypically known for glitz, glamour, and ripping you for every dollar you own.

After nine weeks of house living, I was once again ready to hitch up the trailer and spend four nights in one of my least favorite campgrounds ever, the Red Rock Canyon Campground. Mrs. CC was decidedly not interested in going. I certainly could have justified an affordable Las Vegas hotel room, but I still felt the need to gather some semblance of nature, hence the campground.

Red Rock Canyon Campground

The Red Rock Canyon campground isn’t anything special, and certainly not at $20 per night. The campground is nestled in a windy, sun-drenched, and gravel-filled valley of barren and parched earth. Punctuating the landscape is small scrub, cactus, and a few lonely Joshua trees. To the west lies a ridge of drab and monotonous dark brown mudstone and layered gray limestone, forming a topographic barrier to the spectacular views of Red Rock Canyon proper. During the day, helicopter traffic is common, and the campground is at 80-90% capacity even mid-week in late February. What the campground lacks in pristine wilderness is made up by its proximity to both Red Rock and the Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin, which for better or worse, are a 10–15-minute drive to the west or east, respectively.

I reverse my camper into spot #36 mid-day on Monday. The sound of turning tires over gravel grabs the attention of a deeply tanned and leather-skinned camper busy switching out a propane tank on his larger RV. The campground is otherwise quiet, with abandoned tents and tarps flapping in the light breeze. The sun is glaring off the southern aspects of RVs and sporadic metallic picnic shelters. This is nature, I guess.

I spend the next hour or two hurrying to set up camp. While eating a light snack, I flip through the thick guidebook for my first visit to the Kraft boulder field. I’m waiting for the sun to dip below the ridgeline and temperatures to drop from the highs near 70 degrees.

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The Roll: Limping in Las Vegas

An hour later and I’m warm and ready to fire. My warmup was short, but I feel rested and ready to try hard. I throw my pads below a flash-level boulder, a problem I intend to do first try but without certainty. Three moves in and I make a dynamic and committing deadpoint to a left-hand knob. Catching my balance, I bring my right hand across my body, desperately driving dynamically again to another small hold.

As I hit the hold with my right hand, I look away too soon. I miss latching the hold, and I’m unexpectedly ejected hard earthward. In my overzealous excitement to try some hard moves, I inadvertently placed the pads just off from this spot. My right foot is the first to land between two large cobbles, and it rolls…hard. I hit my ass firmly on a rounded sandstone boulder, and roll backwards onto more cobbles, meanwhile raising my hands to protect my head.

This all sounds really dramatic. It wasn’t. I fell about two feet, rolled my ankle and sort of hurt my butt on a rounded rock. Within 30 minutes of my first climbing day of the trip, the trip was over. I watch my ankle swell quickly, causing some concern that I might have broken it. Good, I can walk. I pack my belongings in an embarrassed state of disbelief, sulking and limping the (thankfully) short distance back to my truck in an incredible golden hour desert light show. I came all the way to Las Vegas and climbed two warm-up problems.

The Night

That night I’m back at my camper, alone, and wondering once again why the hell I’m out here. Sure, there’s some outcome bias at play. It’s easy to imagine how I might feel different if I’d gone and crushed a bunch of boulders in good conditions, returned to a celebratory beer and dinner, and perhaps even ventured out for a fireside chat with some friendly strangers in the campground. Instead, however, I’m nursing an increasingly swollen and bruised ankle, sipping a consolation beer, and spilling part of my dinner on the stove—alone. And to literally add insult to injury, as I hobble out to gather some items from my truck, I notice a beauty of a Phillips head screw emerging plainly from my driver’s side rear tire.

Fantastic, thank you Phillip!

Alone in the Night

It’s something about the night that makes the mind spin. Night evokes strong emotions, and those emotions are amplified by orders of magnitude when alone.

I’ve often wondered how alone McCandless felt along his journey, particularly at night and particularly in Alaska. His many “selfies,” developed in a camera found after his death show a beaming, proud, and triumphant young man holding his prized kills of porcupine, squirrel, goose, and even a moose in the mid-day Alaskan sun. That said, we know that “selfies” are rarely for the self, intended instead to convey an ideal expression of emotion or sense of place to others. Did McCandless smile at night, alone in the long-abandoned Fairbanks Bus 142?

A Connection to Humanity

It seems that his decision to leave the Alaska bush was at least partially influenced by a call back to humanity. McCandless’s journal notes that he finished reading Tolstoy’s Family Happiness the day before his attempted departure from the wild. Highlighted passages include:

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others…

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; the work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps—what more can the heart of a man desire?

The book, Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak was also found with McCandless’s remains. In it, the following passage was highlighted:

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…And this was most vexing of all.

Next to this passage, in blocked letter format, McCandless now famously wrote in the margin,

“HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

It’s tempting to assume that when McCandless found the Teklanika River raging with late-summer glacial till, the smiling all but ceased. He was trapped. The notations in Doctor Zhivago noted above were made after his attempt to return from the wild. Perhaps these musings suggest an increasing sense of loneliness compounded by years of rigid moral abstinence, suppressed human intimacy, and isolationism from a perceived conformist and materialistic society. Perhaps he began to palpably sense his own mortality for the first time.

Approximately three weeks later, unable to overcome a massive caloric deficit in his weakened state likely brought on by accidental poisoning, he was dead.

What Will Nature Yield?

I realize that the parallels between McCandless’s demise in the Alaskan interior and my ankle roll and tire patch in west Las Vegas are grossly incongruous. But as someone who strongly desires to be in nature, sometimes even preferably alone and for complicated reasons, it’s hard not to notice our inherent similarities. I recognize the difference in magnitude and seriousness between our outdoor pursuits—or perhaps stupidity and selfishness, sentiments particularly strong amongst Alaskans. But I still can’t quite shake this nagging draw of remote places and the solace/misery I find in them.

Why do I submit myself and my wife to loneliness? Why is it never enough just to be home and take a hike or climb for the day? In my late thirties, I know that these trips would be much more enjoyable in the company of friends. Why not stay at home until I can round up some folks for companionship? What am I looking for, and will I ever find it there? Did McCandless find what he sought? Judging by the ease and contentment in his self-portraits, it seems he did. He looks far from suicidal to me. But whatever epiphany he discovered came too late.

I’ll never be able to answer these questions. At some point, probably soon, I’ll find myself watching the sun set again, sensing the dread of looming night. The sun will again rise; I’ll smile and bask in the innocent expanse of a land I can’t quite shake. Until then, and I’m learning more every day, if McCandless had one notion correct, it was this: happiness may only be real when shared.

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