The Closet Alexander Supertramps of the World

“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.

Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.’

-Christopher Johnson McCandless a.k.a. “Alex Supertramp” in a letter to acquaintance Ronald A. Franz”

I will begin by telling how I found this book. I was on my way home from work when I got the sudden itch to check out the BookSale branch at Shaw Boulevard, a good one-hour away from where I’m supposed to get off the bus. I went in there with the hopes of finding a good book to add to my ever-growing treasure pile. I was done scouring almost all the fiction shelves without finding even a single book that I liked until I remembered that I haven’t checked out the bottom shelves. So I went down on my knees and started looking through every badly stacked book there was on the bottom pile (nothing irritates me more than finding books that are haphazardly arranged). This part really happened: on the last line of the  shelf, farthest left, second to the last book, I saw a copy of Into The Wild in very good condition for only 45 pesos. It took more than a month for me to finally get the chance to read the book. Considering the massive TBR (to-be-read) pile that I have, that is the regular pace of how I buy and read books. I finally finished the book yesterday (it took me only a day to finish it) and let me tell you that I haven’t felt this way towards a book in a very long time.

Into The Wild tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a free-spirit who longed to live a life close to nature and far from this selfish society. He grew up in a well-off family (his Father worked for NASA), was highly intelligent (he considered going to Harvard Law School) and was well-read (has a penchance for Jack London and Leo Tolstoy’s works). Right after graduating college, he decided to donate all the contents of his bank account (more than $24,000 to OXFAM) and head on the road. For more than two years, he lived as a nomad, burned his money, abandoned his car, hopping from train to train, hitchhiking from one town to the next, in preparation for his ultimate adventure: his adventure to Alaska.

He reached the Alaskan wilderness and managed to survive, until for four months later, his body was found in severe state of deterioration on a bus near Denali National Park and Reserve. His body weighed only a meager 30 kg, a confirmation that he died of starvation.

(on top) Christopher McCandless and the bus where he was found dead, (on bottom) Emile Hirsch as Christopher on the movie adaptation)

As I’m typing this, Eddie Vedder’s amazing soundtrack to the movie adaptation is on loop and I am overwhelmed with too much emotions that I cannot quite understand yet. I am trying to put it into words because I know that something as moving as this should be remembered forever.

I guess what terribly moved me about McCandless’ story is the fact that there is an Alexander Supertramp in all of us. The part of us that wants to leave everything behind, without the excess baggage of life and materialistic world and just hit the road and never look back. The only difference with this Alexander Supertramp is that he actually had the guts, the reserve, the will, the strong belief to get out and actually do it. As romanticized as it may be by literature and movies, I guess the universal truth is that there is beauty in living with the bare essentials and being in one with nature and embracing the solitude. In his letter to Ronald Franz, he said that we just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. This is where the Alexander Supertramps of my kind fail.

Sure we get that feeling of being trapped here in the city. We feel suffocated by the daily toxicities of urban living, of what the mainstream media is feeding us, of the same complaints, the same rants of the same people and we pack our bags and go out on a trip. But on that three-day weekend trip, isn’t it funny that we spend it still glued to our gadgets, forever trying to connect to Facebook and check our emails every chance (or wifi signal) we get? The Alexander Supertramps I know are all guilty of that, including me. This Alexander Supertramp is committed to the kind of life he chose. For two years, he was always on constant motion. He was meeting different kind of people along the way and this is where he failed.

In his want to be on a relentless journey, he veered away from situations that would tie him down with personal relationships. He kept road acquaintances at bay and always made sure to leave before things got intimate with people. On the other hand, the people he met always had this sense of protectiveness towards him. In the entire time that he was away from his family, never did once he made an effort to write to his parents. (He only wrote to his sister whom he loved dearly as shown by the diary he kept during his travels. He kept tabs on the people he met along by the way by sending them postcards and even urging them to stop living a sedentary life and start a life out of their comfort zones.) It was only until his last few days that McCandless has reached a realization about the recluse life he led.

He was right when he wrote that ‘You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.’ I couldn’t agree more. We tend to overlook other things in life other than the people around us. Isn’t it amazing how people can live an amazing life away from everything else and get a lot out of that experience? However, living solely on that kind of life, I think, is not the be all end all. We still need human relationships. That is something we cannot run away from. Maybe what should be done is to make sure that we cherish relationship with only the people that really matter to us. Being around destructive people or relationships serve as the fuel to that need to get-away. We want to rid of the hate, the idiocy, the hypocrisy because who could stand that? But, what’s more important is to let go of the things that don’t add to our growth, live freely, test our limits, know the answer and come back and share it with the people who we truly love and care for. Because just like what Chris McCandless wrote on the border of one books he kept rereading in the wild: HAPPINESS (is) ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.

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