Into the Wild

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing- to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows-a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.

john haines, the stars, the Snow, the fire: twenty-five years in the northern wilderness

Two framed photographs occupy the mantel in Carine McCand-less’s Virginia Beach home: one of Chris as a junior in high school, the other of Chris as a seven-year-old in a pint-size suit and crooked tie, standing beside Carine, who is wearing a frilly dress and a new Easter hat. “What’s amazing,” says Carine as she studies these images of her brother, “is that even though the pictures were taken ten years apart, his expression is identical.”

She’s right: In both photos Chris stares at the lens with the same pensive, recalcitrant squint, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of an important thought and was annoyed to be wasting his time in front of the camera. His expression is most striking in the Easter photo because it contrasts so strongly with the exuberant grin Carine wears in the same frame. “That’s Chris,” she says with an affectionate smile, brushing her fingertips across the surface of the image. “He’d get that look a lot.”

Lying on the floor at Carine’s feet is Buckley, the Shetland sheepdog Chris had been so attached to. Now thirteen years old, he’s gone white in the muzzle and hobbles around with an arthritic limp. When Max, Carine’s eighteen-month-old Rottweiler, intrudes on Buckley’s turf, however, the ailing little dog thinks nothing of confronting the much bigger animal with a loud bark and a flurry of well-placed nips, sending the 130-pound beast scurrying for safety.

“Chris was crazy about Buck,” Carine says. “That summer he disappeared he’d wanted to take Buck with him. After he graduated from Emory, he asked Mom and Dad if he could come get Buck, but they said no, because Buckley had just been hit by a car and was still recovering. Now, of course, they second-guess the decision, even though Buck was really badly hurt; the vet said he’d never walk again after that accident. My parents can’t help wondering-and I admit that I can’t, either-how things might have turned out different if Chris had taken Buck with him. Chris didn’t think twice about risking his own life, but he never would have put Buckley in any kind of danger. There’s no way he would have taken the same kind of chances if Buck had been with him.”

Standing five feet eight inches tall, Carine McCandless is the same height as her brother was, maybe an inch taller, and looks enough like him that people frequently asked if they were twins. An animated talker, she flips her waist-length hair from her face with a toss of her head as she speaks and chops the air for emphasis with small, expressive hands. She is barefoot. A gold crucifix dangles from her neck. Her neatly pressed jeans have creases down the front.

Like Chris, Carine is energetic and self-assured, a high achiever, quick to state an opinion. Also like Chris, she clashed fiercely with Walt and Billie as an adolescent. But the differences between the siblings were greater than their similarities.

Carine made peace with her parents shortly after Chris disappeared, and now, at the age of twenty-two, she calls their relationship “extremely good.” She is much more gregarious than Chris was and can’t imagine going off into the wilderness-or virtually anywhere else-alone. And although she shares Chris’s sense of outrage over racial injustice, Carine has no objection- moral or otherwise-to wealth. She recently bought an expensive new home and regularly logs fourteen-hour days at C.A.R. Services, Incorporated, the auto-repair business she owns with her husband, Chris Fish, in the hope of making her first million at an early age.

“I was always getting on Mom and Dad’s case because they worked all the time and were never around,” she reflects with a self-mocking laugh, “and now look at me: I’m doing the same thing.” Chris, she confesses, used to poke fun at her capitalist zeal by calling her the duchess of York, Ivana Trump McCandless, and “a rising successor to Leona Helmsley.” His criticism of his sister never went beyond good-natured ribbing, however; Chris and Carine were uncommonly close. In a letter delineating his quarrels with Walt and Billie, Chris once wrote to her, “Anyway, I like to talk to you about this because you are the only person in the world who could possibly understand what I’m saying.”

Ten months after Chris’s death, Carine still grieves deeply for her brother. “I can’t seem to get through a day without crying,” she says with a look of puzzlement. “For some reason the worst is when I’m in the car by myself. Not once have I been able to make the twenty-minute drive from home to the shop without thinking about Chris and breaking down. I get over it, but when it happens, it’s hard.”

On the evening of September 17, 1992, Carine was outside giving her Rottweiler a bath when Chris Fish pulled into the driveway. She was surprised he was home so early; usually Fish worked late into the night at C.A.R. Services.

“He was acting funny,” Carine recalls. “There was a terrible look on his face. He went inside, came back out, and started helping me wash Max. I knew something was wrong then, because Fish never washes the dog.”

“I need to talk to you,” Fish said. Carine followed him into the house, rinsed Max’s collars in the kitchen sink, and went into the living room. “Fish was sitting on the couch in the dark with his head down. He looked totally hurt. Trying to joke him out of his mood, I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I figured his buddies must have been razzing him at work, maybe telling him they’d seen me out with another guy or something. I laughed and asked, ‘Have the guys been giving you a hard time?’ But he didn’t laugh back. When he looked up at me, I saw that his eyes were red.”

“It’s your brother,” Fish had said. “They found him. He’s dead.” Sam, Walt’s oldest child, had called Fish at work and given him the news.

Carine’s eyes blurred, and she felt the onset of tunnel vision. Involuntarily, she started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth. “No,” she corrected him, “Chris isn’t dead.” Then she began to scream. Her keening was so loud and continuous that Fish worried the neighbors were going to think he was harming her and call the police.

Carine curled up on the couch in a fetal position, wailing without pause. When Fish tried to comfort her, she pushed him away and shrieked at him to leave her alone. She remained hysterical for the next five hours, but by eleven o’clock she had calmed sufficiently to throw some clothes into a bag, get into the car with Fish, and let him drive her to Walt and Billies house in Chesapeake Beach, a four-hour trip north.

On their way out of Virginia Beach, Carine asked Fish to stop at their church. “I went in and sat at the altar for an hour or so while Fish stayed in the car,” Carine remembers. “I wanted some answers from God. But I didn’t get any.”

Earlier in the evening Sam had confirmed that the photograph of the unknown hiker faxed down from Alaska was indeed Chris, but the coroner in Fairbanks required Chris’s dental records to make a conclusive identification. It took more than a day to compare the X rays, and Billie refused to look at the faxed photo until the dental ID had been completed and there was no longer any doubt whatsoever that the starved boy found in the bus beside the Sushana River was her son.

The next day Carine and Sam flew to Fairbanks to bring home Chris’s remains. At the coroner’s office they were given the handful of possessions recovered with the body: Chris’s rifle, a pair of binoculars, the fishing rod Ronald Franz had given him, one of the Swiss Army knives Jan Burres had given him, the book of plant lore in which his journal was written, a Minolta camera, and five rolls of film-not much else. The coroner passed some papers across her desk; Sam signed them and passed them back.

Less than twenty-four hours after landing in Fairbanks, Carine and Sam flew on to Anchorage, where Chris’s body had been cremated following the autopsy at the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. The mortuary delivered Chris’s ashes to their hotel in a plastic box. “I was surprised how big the box was,” Carine says. “His name was printed wrong. The label said christopher r. MCCANDLESS. His middle initial is really J. It ticked me off that they didn’t get it right. I was mad. Then I thought, ‘Chris wouldn’t care. He’d think it was funny.’ “

They caught a plane for Maryland the next morning. Carine carried her brother’s ashes in her knapsack.

During the flight home, Carine ate every scrap of food the cabin attendants set in front of her, “even though,” she says, “it was that horrible stuff they serve on airplanes. I just couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away food since Chris had starved to death.” Over the weeks that followed, however, she found that her appetite had vanished, and she lost ten pounds, leading her friends to worry that she was becoming anorectic.

Back in Chesapeake Beach, Billie had stopped eating, too. A tiny forty-eight-year-old woman with girlish features, she lost eight pounds before her appetite finally returned. Walt reacted the other way, eating compulsively, and gained eight pounds.

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.

“I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances,” Billie protests through her tears. “I just don’t understand it at all.”