Thursday, July 03, 2008

People Going "Into the Wild"


It was bound to happen. People who loved Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild, or saw the recent Sean Penn movie that won several awards (and rightly so), are making pilgrimages to deep Alaska to follow in the footsteps of Chris McCandless and his last days.

From the story:

Alexander and his fellow travelers want, in particular, to see the old abandoned bus where the 24-year-old Virginian starved to death after more than three months alone in the harsh landscape.

"That's sort of the heart of the story," said Alexander, 44, of Arlington, Va. "It's almost like a Jim Morrison grave site, where people just want to go see it."

This is exactly what residents in the interior town of Healy, 25 miles east of the bus, feared with the release last fall of the movie adapted from Jon Krakauer's best-seller of the same name.

They envisioned hordes of copycats making dangerous pilgrimages in the footsteps of a character often seen as a spiritual visionary rather than an ill-prepared misfit, as many Alaskans view McCandless.

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