Hymn for the Deviant

The film version of "Into the Wild" has recently hit theatres. It's the story of Chris McCandless, the son of a wealthy Virginia family who drops out of school, empties and gives away nearly $25,000 from his bank account, then treks across the country to "find himself," only to die alone in the Alaskan wilderness. The movie is being lauded for its visual beauty and philosophical depth. I read the book a number of years ago.

What initially struck me about McCandless' story was his selfish thinking and careless ways. He alienated himself from his family and just dropped out of society. He sent little notes and postcards here and there, but my memory of it is that he just cut himself off from the people who he'd been connected to. And while severing the umbilical chord is often necessary as one travels into adulthood, shutting the door on his family seemed very cruel to me.

McCandless ended up dying from his carelessness. He ultimately found himself alone in the countryside, unable to find enough food to live on and could not escape his predicament because the high water season of Alaska had trapped him in. His lack of understanding and possible respect of the harsh landscape he had traveled to resulted in him starving to death, one of the most horrible ways a person can die. When I finished the book, I found I had very little sympathy for Chris McCandless. That was about ten years ago.

Now that the story is back in the media again, I find myself revisiting my thoughts on this young man. The things I originally took from the story are probably not that different than what many people would have. McCandless was clearly marching to the beat of his own drum. He was a fruitcake who traded in a life of ease and comfort and opportunity for one with no guarantees or stability. Who does that kind of thing? Only an idiot, right?

When I was a kid, I remember thinking my mom's sister was kind of crazy. When she was in college, she backpacked around Europe, sleeping here and there as she went. Later she joined The Peace Corps and ended up getting pregnant by some guy in South America. She came home alone, gave birth, and then eventually moved clear across the country from where her family lived on the East Coast to reside in California as a single parent. None this sat very well with her mom and dad, and I recall getting the general impression that Aunt Kathe was kind of "out there." Now that I've gotten older though, I'm come to realize that not only was Aunt Kathe pretty cool, she was probably much cooler, more interesting, and daring than my own conservative family was.

Why is it that our society so often condemns those people who refuse to be normal? Chris McCandless didn't want the life of ease he'd been born into, so he challenged himself. My Aunt wasn't content to follow the path that everyone else did, so she struck out on her own terms and made her own life. These people weren't doing the things the way everyone else does them. In a way, they were embodying the very ideals our country was founded upon: individualism and freedom of choice, and yet because they made choices that weren't "normal," they were often met with scorn and mockery.

Didn't Thoreau embark on a journey similar to McCandless'? Isn't he hailed as an American Icon now? Didn't Christ battle an empire and generations of religious thinking? Didn't Picasso defy every artistic tradition laid before him? And what about Luther, or Copernicus, or Ghandi? Every one of these people were called insane by one person or another, and yet instead of being forever defined as "crack-ups," we now think of them more as "break-throughs." Maybe it's something to know that one day people will see your genius, individualism, and perseverance, but for some of these guys it may have been cold comfort at best.

I wish I had half the balls of people like Chris McCandless or my Aunt. I could say that I'm married now, have a family, a good job, a great house, and a nice life, but that might not have mattered to them. For now, maybe the best I can do is learn their stories and impart their wisdom to those around me, hoping to inspire others to embark on their own journeys "into the wild."

More Things I Think About While You're On Your Cell Phone

Ever wonder why we don't have British accents here in America?

Think about it. All of the early colonists were from England. They established settlements here in America and the towns that survived were eventually populated by more people from the UK. Sure, there were people born here who never set foot in England, but their parents were English. Their grandparents were English. Their neighbors were English. Every person those first Americans knew were either from England or descended from people from there.

Our speech is formed and modeled by the folks around us. We make sounds really out of mimicry more than anything else. A child of deaf parents, ones with altered speech as a result of their deafness, will grow up with slightly altered speech themselves. If you live in the south, you're going to speak with a southern accent because every one around you talks that way.

So then why don't all of us have British accents?

Someone always tells me that our accents have faded... that that's what happens over time. Really? Did they fade in England? Have they disappeared in other parts of the world too? Then I'm told that because America is full of people from so many different places, we've developed a neutral accent as a result... kind of a mix of a thousand accents, which results in nothing discernible in our speech. Really? I'm pretty sure that England has just as diverse a population as we do here. It's not like people don't travel and relocate there from all over the world. So what gives?

Bloody hell, man!