94 ... Gabriel MorrisAt least I didn’t plan to take my life right away. I’d read an article
in Outside magazine, following the last summer I worked in Denali
National Park. (I’d worked there summers while attending the Uni-
versity of Alaska.) This article told about a young man, Chris Mc-
Candless, who had starved to death just outside the park during the
same summer that I was there. After leaving his home on the East
Coast and hitchhiking across the country, he had made his way up to
interior Alaska, hiked alone into the snow-covered tundra just north
of the park boundary, and tried to live off the land. He came across
an abandoned school bus—an emergency shelter for hunters during
winter—and lived in it through the late spring and into the summer,
while he hunted and foraged for food.
He realized eventually that there wasn’t enough food out there
to keep him well fed and, besides, he was ready to get back to civi-
lization. But what he didn’t know was that he had crossed a frozen
river along the way. When he tried to hike back out to the highway,
he found that the rushing river, which had thawed in the previous
months, now trapped him. He didn’t know that he could have sim-
ply followed the river down to the busy Denali Park road, crammed
with tourist buses. Instead, he hiked back to the abandoned bus and,
over the next two months, starved to death.
McCandless had kept a journal, which was found along with his
body at the end of the summer. In it he had chronicled his slow death
by starvation. Although it had, of course, been painful, he recounted
many moments of joy, and in the final few weeks of his life the pain
and hunger were apparently replaced by an indescribable bliss. He
seemed clearly to have experienced that which they call becoming
“one with nature.”
I decided that this was how I wanted to die. If I was going to leave
this beloved planet behind, then I wanted do so in a state of peace
and joy, even if it meant first enduring more pain in the process. I
planned the coming summer around this decision to hike out into
the wilderness and perhaps never return. After going to the annual
Rainbow Gathering—in New Mexico that summer—I would fly up