THE DECISION TO MAKE AN ALASKA BUS VANISH.
Even very vigorous consumers of the news may have missed the item from late June announcing that the Alaska National Guard removed the worldfamous “Into the Wild” bus from its location west of the town of Healy. This was the disabled “Magic Bus” around which a confused and inept 24-year-old man, Christopher Mccandless, made a botched effort to “live off the land” and ended up dying of starvation sometime in August 1992.
The non-fiction writer Jon Krakauer turned Mccandless’ story into the bestselling book Into the Wild (1996), which was adapted as a Hollywood movie in 2007. Mccandless quickly became the subject of other books, magazine features and films. Krakauer’s Mccandless is a photogenic idealist who got astonishingly far with an improvised approach to wilderness adventuring, intentionally spurning preparedness and study. The author acknowledges that the young man made absurd mistakes, but he has also spent a great deal of time chasing alternative theories of Mccandless’ death, which might provide a slightly less embarrassing excuse for having died in the bush.
His concerted glamorization of Mccandless made the bus — formerly Fairbanks City Transit System Bus 142 — a tourist attraction. (The bus had been towed to the site in 1960 to serve as cheap accommodation for work crews at an antimony mine.) The bus was located on the Stampede Trail, an old tundra path between Healy and a wilderness airport further to the west, which is still in very occasional use. Mccandless died about 40 kilometres from civilization, rather than the hundred or so you might assume from second-hand versions of his story. (The first 13 kilometres of trail west of Healy are gravelled road.)
But getting to the spot from Healy or vice-versa requires a river crossing that, for whatever reason, foiled Mccandless halfway into his ordeal when he decided to get off the land instead of living off of it. Since the movie hit theatres, two european hikers have drowned (in 2010 and 2019) trying to reach Bus 142. dozens more have needed rescuing, although none have followed
Mccandless in starving to death because they shot a moose and couldn’t figure out how to preserve it. (Nor, for those who think Krakauer’s evolving theories have merit, have any died because they ate tremendous heaps of toxic seeds or mouldy legumes to compensate for the absence of moose steak.)
The taxpayers of the vast denali Borough finally decided the bus was more trouble than it was worth, and schemed with state authorities to have the National Guard remove it using a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Guardsmen of the 207th Aviation Regiment, for whose purposes the whole thing was deemed a training exercise, successfully whisked the bus to an undisclosed “secure site.” There it shall sit while politicians decide whether (and where) to display it permanently.
As they surely will. Mccandless’ “Magic Bus” had been in increasing disrepair over time, and it has been shot up and lightly vandalized by some visitors since he died in it. The good folks of the 207th were acting to save the physical artifact, not to prepare its destruction. As a preserved museum piece situated in an accessible place, it can earn Alaskans more tourist dollars than ever, and at much less risk to overconfident europeans. The National Guard executed Operation yutan on Jun. 18 with a minimum of advance publicity. The lower 48 states were shrewdly not given the opportunity to object to the removal of the bus.
Mccandless himself was unavailable for consultation on the move. No doubt its mercenary nature will infuriate his shade, just as his memory infuriates many Alaskans, who tend to feel strongly that nature is better respected than befriended. Mccandless was playing a wilderness game whose rules demanded forethought and brute calculation. These are two qualities that define those who live off the land successfully anywhere on earth.
But then, such people aren’t usually just hippie wanderers either; even a smidgen of local knowledge would have been a big help to Mccandless. To me it is somehow wonderful that the confiscation of Bus 142, which in normal times might have been a suspenseful live television event filling up a slow day on CNN, went mostly unremarked in a world consumed by millions or billions of little negotiations with nature — nature, that is, in a particular new manifestation as a bat virus.