INTO THE WILD

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“He was like that about everything. You aren’t supposed to think about heavy-duty stuff in high school. But I did, and he did, too, which is why we hit it off. We’d hang out during snack break at his locker and talk about life, the state of the world, serious things. I’m black, and I could never figure out why everyone made such a big deal about race. Chris would talk to me about that kind of thing. He understood. He was always questioning stuff in the same way. I liked him a lot. He was a really good guy.”

McCandless took life’s inequities to heart. During his senior year at Woodson, he became obsessed with racial oppression in South Africa. He spoke seriously to his friends about smuggling weapons into that country and joining the struggle to end apartheid. “We’d get into arguments about it once in a while,” recalls Hathaway. “Chris didn’t like going through cha

On weekends, when his high school pals were attending “keg-gers” and trying to sneak into Georgetown bars, McCandless would wander the seedier quarters of Washington, chatting with prostitutes and homeless people, buying them meals, earnestly suggesting ways they might improve their lives.

“Chris didn’t understand how people could possibly be allowed to go hungry, especially in this country,” says Billie. “He would rave about that kind of thing for hours.”

On one occasion Chris picked up a homeless man from the streets of B.C., brought him home to leafy, affluent A

On another occasion Chris drove over to Hathaway’s house and a

“Toward the end of the evening, Chris asked me how much money I had. I said five dollars. He had ten. ‘OK, you buy the gas,’ he told me; ‘I’m going to get some food.’ So he spent the ten bucks on a big bag of hamburgers, and we drove around handing them out to smelly guys sleeping on grates. It was the weirdest Friday night of my life. But Chris did that kind of thing a lot.”

Early in his senior year at Woodson, Chris informed his parents that he had no intention of going to college. When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning “twentieth-century inventions,” more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.

“That put us into kind of a tizzy,” Walt admits. “Both Billie and I come from blue-collar families. A college degree is something we don’t take lightly, OK, and we worked hard to be able to afford to send our kids to good schools. So Billie sat him down and said, ‘Chris, if you really want to make a difference in the world, if you really want to help people who are less fortunate, get yourself some leverage first. Go to college, get a law degree, and then you’ll be able to have a real impact.’”

“Chris brought home good grades,” says Hathaway. “He didn’t get into trouble, he was a high achiever, he did what he was supposed to. His parents didn’t really have grounds to complain. But they got on his case about going to college; and whatever they said to him, it must have worked. Because he ended up going to Emory, even though he thought it was pointless, a waste of time and money.”

It’s somewhat surprising that Chris ceded to pressure from Walt and Billie about attending college when he refused to listen to them about so many other things. But there was never a shortage of apparent contradictions in the relationship between Chris and his parents. When Chris visited with Kris Gillmer, he frequently railed against Walt and Billie, portraying them as unreasonable tyrants. Yet to his male buddies-Hathaway, Cucullu, and another track star, Andy Horowitz-he scarcely complained at all. “My impression was that his parents were very nice people,” says Hathaway, “no different, really, than my parents or anyone’s parents. Chris just didn’t like being told what to do. I think he would have been unhappy with any parents; he had trouble with the whole idea of parents.”

McCandless’s personality was puzzling in its complexity. He was intensely private but could be convivial and gregarious in the extreme. And despite his overdeveloped social conscience, he was no tight-lipped, perpetually grim do-gooder who frowned on fun. To the contrary, he enjoyed tipping a glass now and then and was an incorrigible ham.

Perhaps the greatest paradox concerned his feelings about money. Walt and Billie had both known poverty when they were young and after struggling to rise above it saw nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of their labor. “We worked very, very hard,” Billie emphasizes. “We did without when the kids were little, saved what we earned, and invested it for the future.” When the future finally arrived, they didn’t flaunt their modest wealth, but they bought nice clothes, some jewelry for Billie, a Cadillac. Eventually, they purchased the townhouse on the bay and the sailboat. They took the kids to Europe, skiing in Breckenridge, on a Caribbean cruise. And Chris, Billie acknowledges, “was embarrassed by all that.”

Her son, the teenage Tolstoyan, believed that wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently evil-which is ironic because Chris was a natural-born capitalist with an unca

As an eight-year-old, he grew vegetables behind the house in A