Freeing My Mind

Last night was quite an interesting night. Lori was quickly falling asleep on the couch, so I decided to look through Netflix instant watch through my Xbox to see if something might catch my eye. I wasn’t planning on staying up too late, but I wanted something to help me wind down. I came to a film called Touching the Void. The ice climber hanging from the face of a steep snow covered mountain definitely got my attention. When I realized that the film was actually a docu-drama (a mix between a documentary and a reenactment of the accounts) I was even more interested. Stories of survival and what they say about human nature have always intrigued me. This particular story chronicles two young British gents who were the first to climb an extremely difficult part of the Andes mountains in Peru. All goes fairly well on the way up, but disaster strikes on the way down. I can honestly say that this was one of the most incredible stories of survival that I have ever heard. The reenactment along with the story  told by the two climbers themselves created one of the most inspirational stories I’ve ever heard. It’s on Netflix instant watch right now, but whatever you have to do to see it, I highly recommend Touching the Void.

As I said, I wasn’t planning on staying up too late, but by the end of Touching the Void, it was almost midnight and what I had just watched made my mind wonder down a dozen different trails. I wasn’t going to be sleeping any time soon, so I figured I would try and find another film that had something to do with survival and the outdoors. I remembered hearing about a specific movie and wanting to see it, but never had. I had no idea that when I finally found it, I was about to watch one of the greatest stories I had ever heard.

Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, graduated Emory University in Atlanta, GA in 1990. His father was a rocket scientist with NASA. Chris had everything going for him and would probably never have to worry about money again, but this wasn’t enough for him. He had a desire for adventure that wouldn’t be fed through any normal means. So that summer, Chris gave away his life savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, burned all the cash he had, destroyed all of his ID’s, ceased communication with his family and set out on the road. For the next two years, under the new name of Alexander Supertramp, he traveled the country by hitchhiking, kayaking, train jumping and a lot of walking. His ultimate goal was to make it to the Alaskan wilderness and live alone in the wild for as long as he could with minimal supplies. His love of writers such as Jack London and Henry David Thoreau fueled his philosophy and adventures, until the very end when Chris starved to death while living in an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

The stories of his travels and the people he met and influenced, while changed and at times exaggerated in the movie, were some of the most inspirational I have ever seen on film. Emile Hirsch’s performance as Chris McClandess is stunning and  Hal Holbrook’s portrayal of Ronald Franz, an elderly man that Alex meets just before heading to Alaska, is absolutely moving.

Supertramp’s journey was first chronicled by the author Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild and later by Sean Penn in his movie by the same name, which I watched last night. After the movie and until about 4am, I researched the life of Chris McCandless to better understand where he was coming from and what I felt God was trying to teach me through his story. It’s interesting to watch a character that you both admire and at the same time pity. Much of Chris’ philosophy seemed to be flipped on its head right at the end of his life when he wrote in the margin of Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, “Happiness is only real when shared.”

The last self-photo of Chris McCandless

Chris McCandless took his longing for freedom and adventure to the extreme and and this extremity is what eventually led to his death. Sometimes, though, we can only realize the true force of the God created nature within us when we see it taken to that type of extreme. I think our desire for freedom and adventure is actually one of the strongest emotions we have. We lose this desire when we think that we’ve found freedom, when in reality our fight for freedom is what sometimes binds us. Our adventure out to and now in San Francisco, along with stories such as the these and the stories of people we are meeting here, is awakening something within me. Honestly, I’m scared to death of it. It might not lead me to live a life of solitude in the Alaskan wilderness, but hopefully a life of extreme freedom just the same. I think the message of Jesus concerning freedom and the truth that Alexander Supertramp was searching for are one in the same. True freedom is not found in working to be free, but in being set free from the ropes of worldly success and satisfaction in order to live a life of adventure. The last thing that Chris ever wrote was “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all.”

Drop what your doing and see this movie.