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Comment by mikorym | Hacker News Reader

As a South African growing up in a rural area, I always saw Into the Wild as an example of how Alaskans—or other people who don't die in the woods—with common sense are thrown under the bus in favour of general Americans with more gripping stories that unfortunately revolves around a couple of stupid decisions.

It's a great story to make a movie about, but isn't the daily life of an Alaskan a great story too? It appears that it isn't seen as a cautionary tale at all, but an instruction on how to "go back to nature".

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I've always thought of Dick Proenneke[1] as what McCandless could have/should have been. Despite attempting a similar thing (go detach from civilization as much as possible, though Proenneke didn't take it to the same extreme), Proenneke was actually prepared and talented in the kinds of crafts necessary to have a good life in the wilderness - guy was a crazy-good outdoorsman in general, on top of great carpentry/woodworking[2]/general jury-rigging.

The best part is that he took an 8mm camera and filmed a lot of his work, including building his cabin from almost entirely indigenous materials. Those films ended up as the (PBS-involved?) documentary Alone in the Wilderness[3].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke

[2] https://www.nps.gov/lacl/learn/historyculture/proennekes-cab...

[3] https://youtu.be/iYJKd0rkKss (partial)

Totally agreed. Alone in the Wilderness is such an inspiration to me.

This. Every time McCandless comes up - and bless him for his youthful misadventure - I think of the documentary Alone in the Wilderness.

It's one of my favorite films of all time, and have watched it numerous times. He had the right training and planning, knowledge, skills, equipment and support (a friend visisted regularly with supplies) to achieve it successfully.

I love that the film footage was recorded by himself, some of it is just gorgeous scenery. He demonstrates the hard work necessary to build everything for survival.

What McCandless attempted (and failed at) was entirely different from what most Alaskans are doing. He was trying to detach himself from dependence on the rest of civilization.

I've spent a lot of time in harsh wilderness. I've climbed Andes peaks, camped in deserts in the southwestern US, slept in tents in the Appalachian mountains in February in sub-zero temperatures. At no point was I ever not dependent on civilization. I always wore manufactured protective gear, slept in manufactured shelters, ate the products of agriculture, drank water I had hauled in from the modern water treatment. I know a lot of the local edible plants, but even when I've made a salad of garlic mustard and morels, it has always been an option to go to the store if I was still hungry afterward, or go to the doctor if I got sick from what I had eaten.

I've never thought of him as a failure at all. He did something significant for himself and left a legacy.

Most Alaskans live in towns with lives similar to that of other Americans. They go to work, buy groceries, do laundry, watch TV. Not a "great" story except in the sense of celebrating the ordinary.

I guess, but as a kid, I practically lived in the thick woods around our house.

As a boy, it was awesome to live in a place where carrying a khukuri (or small sword) wasn't so out of the ordinary, and I have fond memories of bushwhacking trails, coming home smelling of earth and picking the inevitable spiders out of my clothes.

> I guess, but as a kid, I practically lived in the thick woods around our house.

You were just enjoying nature and going back to the safety of civilization at night. McCandless was trying to break his dependence on civilization entirely. There's nothing wrong with what you were doing, I do it myself. But it's not the same thing.

I lived like that growing up in Virginia. Mid-Atlantic has many areas like this. Minus the Nepali souvenirs though.

And I had the same experience growing up in rural southeastern Ohio. Bushwhacking, spending a lot of time in and near rivers and streams, walking the fields, hunting small game. The specific place where I grew up has largely lost most of this, minus the water. I wonder if other places have lost pieces of it, too.

For someone like me who has rarely seen snow in my 45 years on this planet, getting a glimpse of an ordinary life in extraordinary climate is quite interesting.

Nothing wrong with doing laundry with a better view than 90% of the rest of humanity. I was a really studious kid and only later came to appreciate the area where I am from.

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