Taking a cue from Kari’s book, McCandless started to dig and eat wild potato roots on June 24, apparently without ill effect. It was-and still is- something they really like to eat.”Ībove ground the wild potato grows as a bushy herb, two feet tall, with stalks of delicate pink flowers reminiscent of miniature sweet-pea blossoms. So they depended on wild potatoes as a major staple until the fish came in late spring. Often the game they depended on for food didn’t show up, or the fish didn’t start running on time. Priscilla Russell Kari, the author of Tanaina Plantlore, explained to me that “spring was a really hard time for the Dena’ina people, particularly in the past. They eat it in a variety of ways-raw, boiled, baked, or fried-and enjoy it especially dipped in oil or lard, in which they also preserve it.” The citation goes on to say that the best time to dig wild potatoes “is in the spring as soon as the ground thaws… During the summer they evidently become dry and tough.” The plant, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum, grows in gravelly soil throughout the region.Īccording to Tanaina Plantlore, “The root of the wild potato is probably the most important food of the Dena’ina, other than wild fruit. Pages 126 and 127 of Tanaina Plantlore describe a plant that is called wild potato by the Dena’ina Indians, who harvested its carrotlike root. This theory has a serious flaw, however: In order for McCandless to have been incapacitated by potato seeds, he would have had to eat many, many pounds of them and given the light weight of his pack when Gallien dropped him off, it is extremely unlikely that he carried more than a few grams of potato seeds, if he carried any at all.īut other scenarios involve potato seeds of an entirely different variety, and these scenarios are more plausible. They contain solanine, a poison that occurs in plants of the nightshade family, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, headache, and lethargy in the short term, and adversely affects heart rate and blood pressure when ingested over an extended period. Potato seeds are in fact mildly toxic after they’ve begun to sprout. According to one theory, McCand-less never got around to planting the garden (I saw no evidence of a garden in the vicinity of the bus) and by late July had grown hungry enough to eat the seeds, which poisoned him.

In the days following the identification of McCandless’s remains, Wayne Westerberg vaguely recalled that Chris might have purchased some seeds in South Dakota before heading north, including perhaps some potato seeds, with which he intended to plant a vegetable garden after getting established in the bush. There has been a great deal of conjecture about what caused such a precipitous decline. Then, after July 30, his physical condition suddenly went to hell. He was hungry, and his meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Before this note there is nothing in the journal to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances. Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, there is an ominous entry in the journal: “EXTREMLY WEAK. But we will never know, because Doctor Zhivago was the last book Chris McCandless would ever read. It can be interpreted to mean that he was ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community. It is tempting to regard this latter notation as further evidence that McCandless’s long, lonely sabbatical had changed him in some significant way. Next to “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness… And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” McCandless starred and bracketed the paragraph and circled “refuge in nature” in black ink. Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

“NATURE/PURITY,” he printed in bold characters at the top of the page.

Into the wild book pages