Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 104

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Popular Culture Review

two famous climbers, Krakauer made the comment that hauling up 500-pounds of
gear on ropes as the three made their way up the face amounted to “blue-collar
climbing.” Krakauer’s comment, made after flying in from Cape Town, South
Africa, with the support of National Geographic, would be utterly mysterious if it
were not generally known that the arduous guided campaigns, complete with regi
ments of Sherpas for ferrying supplies to successive camps, necessary for an as
cent of Everest are his basis for comparison.
Significantly, the spirit of climbing Krakauer admires is captured best by
a non-climbing figure to whom Krakauer dedicated an entire book: Christopher
Johnson McCandless, whose unsuccessful struggle to survive on his own in Alaska
one summer provides the material for Into the Wild, published in the same year as
the Everest accident. McCandless, a graduate of Emory University and a product
of what Krakauer calls “a well-to-do East Coast family,” is portrayed in the book
as a romantic in pursuit of transcendental experience, a Tolstoian hero who re
nounces the worldly concerns of his father. Krakauer is strongly drawn to
McCandless — who, among other things, burned all of his remaining cash after
giving away his educational trust fund to charity — and compares McCandless’s
driven and competitive father to his own.
My father was a volatile, extremely complicated person, possessed
of a brash demeanor that masked deep insecurities. If he ever in
his entire life admitted to being wrong, I wasn’t there to witness it.
But it was my father, a weekend mountaineer, who taught me to
climb... [he] loved his five children deeply, in the autocratic way
of fathers, but his worldview was colored by a relentlessly com
petitive nature. Life, as he saw it, was a contest. He read and
reread the works of Stephen Potter— the English writer who coined
the terms one-upmanship and gamesmanship — not as social sat
ire but as a manual of practical stratagems. He was ambitious in
the extreme, and like Walt McCandless, his aspirations extended
to his progeny. (Into The Wild 147).
Krakauer describes how, in responding to his father’s requirement that he
excel and enroll in medical school, he rebelled. Repentantly, Krakauer writes:
“He’d built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and
I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage” by pursuing an
amateur career in climbing (Into The Wild 148-49).
Ironically enough for descriptions of a sport denoting alpine purity and
elevated desires, excremental imagery signals adolescent arrogance and disrespect
for his father’s wishes. In Eiger Dreams Krakauer also uses excremental imagery