which upon an already debilitated organism such as McCandless could go a long way in explaining why he did not actively seek escape from his fatal predicament . After being unable to cross the Teklanika , McCandless did not attempt to follow the river either up or downstream , which would have probably saved his life either way , for the river is braided upstream , allowing for a much safer passage , and there was a rudimentary bridge composed of an aluminum basket and a steel cable erected for the needs of a gauging station established in 1970 , still perfectly functional in the summer of 1992 , about twenty minutes downstream from where McCandless tried to cross the Teklanika on his way back from the wild . While his return to the bus three days after his failed attempt to escape the wild could be understood as a need to find temporary rest and refuge while he recouped himself and does not necessarily imply suicidal tendencies – as some of his most virulent detractors , mostly Alaskans , often conclude – the fact that he did not attempt to flee again and remained in the bus until his death is indeed puzzling , and his final two self-portraits show a smiling , if very gaunt individual holding a goodbye note : “ I have had a happy life and thank the lord . Goodbye and may god bless all !” This strange acceptance and almost welcoming of death contradicts the proud survivalist who poses next to the animals he has just killed in most of his other self-portraits , and one could deduce that the large consumption of psychoactive mushrooms when he was already very severely malnourished may have inhibited most of his elementary survival skills , a wellknown effect of hallucinogenic drugs , not to mention his digestive process . If too weak to walk out of the wild by himself , as the note found on the door of the bus seems to indicate , McCandless could have at least signaled his presence to the authorities by lighting a fire , for there was some helicopter activity in the area precisely around the time of his death . The effect of the mushrooms is duly consigned in his log , for the word “ dream ” appears next to “ many mushrooms ” on the entry corresponding to his eighty-ninth day in the wild ; as Husky points out , the word “ dream ” is the largest entry in the entire log in terms of font size ; we could add that it is also the only entry in the entire log the first letter of which has been darkened , along with the arrows that accompany it . It is followed by the following cryptic , both poetic and disturbing lines : “ 2 infinity holes 1 at the belt 1 at the foot gives frequency ,” which do suggest intoxication more than clarity .
During the summer of 92 , while Christopher McCandless lived in the bus , three cabins nearby were vandalized ; as stated by the owner of one of them , Will Forsberg , it had never happened before and it has never happened since , and although the park rangers exempted Christopher McCandless from any wrong doing
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