09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 67
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Some trips took him farther afield. In 2012,
John had traveled to Cape Town as part
of an ORU mission trip, and in 2013 he
returned for three months. After graduating
in 2014, John traveled to Kurdistan with
More than a Game, a Christian soccer
charity, then headed back to Cape Town
for a third stint there. By the summer of
2015, John seemed to have decided to live
as much of his life outdoors as possible.
He qualified as a wilderness medic. He led
trekking expeditions around Mount Adams
in Washington. For three years, beginning
in 2016, he worked for six months as a park
guide in Northern California, basing himself
at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area,
where he lived in a one-room cabin owned
by the National Park Service.
More and more, John was choosing to
experience the outdoors alone. He back-
packed solo around South Africa and India.
Back in the U.S., he made treks around
Whiskeytown and along California’s Lost
Coast, spending days by himself. At times,
John complained of loneliness. “One thing
I learned for certain: man was not made to
be alone,” he wrote after an 11-day hike on
the Pacific Crest Trail in 2014. But his com-
pulsion for the wilderness often found him
heading out unaccompanied. He started
a blog called That Solitary Path. He filled
his Instagram feed with pictures of empty
tracks heading into the hills, tiny tents in
vast landscapes, and one-man campsites
high up in the snow, his hiking gear artfully
arranged in the foreground.
To his few hundred followers, John’s life
appeared to be that of a bold outdoorsman.
He called himself an explorer, and his posts
depicted an existence almost continuously
on the road, chasing down a new peak or
trekking route or ice-cold swimming hole ina hidden mountain
ravine. He liked to
pose for selfies as if
roaring and tell sto-
ries of close escapes,
such as making it
off the Cascades as
a wildfire closed in
and recovering from
a rattlesnake bite.
His descriptions of
his ethnicity—he
wrote “part Irish,
part native American
(Choctaw), part Af-
rican, and part Chi-
nese and southeast
Asian” in his jour-
nal—suggested he
was experimenting
with a more complex
and worldly identity. On Instagram, he pre-
sented himself as the consummate trail bro.
He was almost always “super stoked” by the
prospect of a “super rad” hike with a fellow
“wildman” or “legends.” “Dang,” his follow-
ers would comment. “Legit, bro.”
Only rarely did the mask slip. “Ah man,
don’t envy it,” he replied to one admirer. “It’s
hard, and the pics only show the good parts.”
In truth, John was censoring more than his
moods. In his first posts, he quoted psalms
and missionaries. But after his first trip to
the Andamans in 2015, he cut back on refer-
ences to his beliefs, mostly confining himself
to the cryptic Latin hashtag #SoliDeoGloria,
“Glory to God alone.” On the Andamans, his
posts of beaches and scuba dives suggested
that his trip was just one more adventure.
In Chennai, en route to his first stay on the
islands, he met Elkanah Jebasingh, 25, a
machine-learning specialist for Amazon’s
Alexa program. The pair would connect
whenever John passed through, a total of
four times by October 2018. John appeared
“quite open,” Elkanah recalls. “He showed
his face to people.” After John’s death, when
Elkanah read about his friend’s true reason
for being on the islands, he was stunned.
All that John had told him was that he had
friends in the Andamans. “He never told me
anything about his mission.”
John’s reticence reflected a conscious
hardening of his faith. From his late teens,
Patrick wrote, his son countenanced no
“questioning or criticizing” of “this adven-
ture of evangelism.” Patrick felt “excluded
from any input.” In his journal, John asked
God to “please continue to keep all of us in-
volved hidden from the physical and spiritual
forces who desire to keep the people here in
darkness.” John’s rad life wasn’t exactly a
front, but it hid his clandestine objective.Patrick concluded that John’s prior exploits
were all in preparation for Sentinel Island.
By late 2016, Patrick felt that time was run-
ning out to try and stop his son. John had made
a second trip to the Andamans and seemed
more determined than ever. Brian, who
found his brother’s single-mindedness just as
disturbing, told his father that there was “no
way to change his stubborn mind.” Patrick
decided that he had to try. He confronted his
son, telling him that what to him might seem
like righteous commitment was evidence to
anyone else of a trapped and blinkered mind.
“In my observation, he was selectively col-
lecting whatever preacher’s doctrines were
in favour of his self-directed, self-governed,
self-appointed plan,” he wrote.
John stuck to his belief that it was his duty
to go to North Sentinel. The islanders were
damned to “eternal fire” if they never heard
the Gospel, and as an outdoorsman with
a knack for making friends in new places,
John was one of the few souls in Christen-
dom who could save them. It felt ordained,
John said, like God was calling him. Patrick
believed his son was deceiving himself. This
wasn’t just about helping the Sentinelese or
obeying God. This was about John’s Messiah
complex. He described his son as a victim of
fantasies, fanatacism, and extremism.
The argument ended without resolution,
and Patrick never raised the matter again.
But for the next two years he was haunted
by their quarrel—and by John’s certainty. He
was never able to shake the feeling that he
was watching his son walk calmly and con-
fidently toward his own death.PART TWO
To reach the Andamans, you fly to
India’s east coast, then continue toward
the horizon. The islands appear out of the
ocean after two hours over open water—first
one, then five, then dozens of dots of dark
jungle ringed by bright halos of shallows.
Only when the plane banks does a small
settlement of rusted roofs and dusty roads
appear at the end of a forested headland,
the one sign of human habitation where
otherwise there is only water, mudflats,
beaches, and trees.
On the ground, Port Blair initially resem-
bles any provincial Indian town. The slums
are squeezed onto its highest, most distant
hills. From there, tight alleys tumble down
past orphanages and temples, past the A1
Chicken and Mutton Centre, past gold
traders and haberdashers, before emerging
at the wharves and open sewers of Junglee
Ghat, where the last of the Great Anda-
manese warriors, defeated and ruined byThe North
Sentinelese,
photographed
in 2006