On June 18, 2020, Carine McCandless got a call from Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. Corri Feige, the commissioner at the time, wanted to give her a heads-up: the abandoned bus where Carine’s brother, Chris, had briefly lived and then died was at that moment dangling in midair below a Chinook helicopter, on its way to a flatbed trailer and then to storage in a government facility. The bus made famous by Into the Wild was finally being hauled out.

Carine didn’t have a clue that this might be coming, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. The bus, which sat roughly 20 miles down a rough 4×4 trail from the nearest highway, had been a source of concern to Alaskan authorities for years. Too many visitors, inspired by her brother’s story, had gotten into trouble while attempting to visit the site; too many formal and informal rescues had been necessary. In the previous decade, in separate incidents, two young women died on their treks. Both drowned while attempting to cross the cold, fast-moving Teklanika—the same river that had barred Chris, who was 24 when he died, from retreating to the highway as his food supply ran out.

In the eerily quiet early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed that someone in the local government had decided that now was the time to remove the temptation of the bus for good.

Carine understood why she hadn’t been given more warning. “The commissioner didn’t know me,” she says. “She didn’t know if I was going to contact a bunch of people and tell them to go surround the bus and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ” Carine wouldn’t have done that, but she didn’t blame the state for holding its cards close.

The commissioner let her know that the department intended to wait a few days to announce the removal so the family could digest it privately. But even in the relative emptiness of rural Alaska news travels fast, and a famous bus in flight is hard to miss. As the two women talked, Carine’s phone began to ping. And ping. Text messages and social media notifications poured in—an experience shared by other people with a connection to the story. (A short while later, Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam front man who created the haunting for the 2007 movie version of Into the Wild, told Carine: “My phone hasn’t blown up this fast since the Cubbies won the World Series!”) Even before Carine checked any of those messages, she had a feeling that the news was out.

Sure enough, a resident of the Healy area, Melanie Hall, had gone for a walk on Stampede Road—the paved portion of the historic overland trail that leads to where the bus sat for 60 years—when she spotted a helicopter with an enormous load. That looks like a bus, she thought as it flew closer, and moments later she knew: it was the bus. By the time Hall made it to a nearby gravel pit where the Chinook set the large vehicle down, another neighbor had arrived, and so had the borough mayor. As the bus was loaded onto a long trailer, Hall snapped photos she later posted on Facebook. A friend reposted them, and from there the pictures were shared and shared. The images went viral, and the state government began fielding media inquiries about the removal.

The Department of Natural Resources didn’t have much to say at first, except that the bus was being moved to an undisclosed location, its long-term fate also under wraps. Feige, the commissioner who’d contacted Carine, issued a statement. “We encourage people to enjoy Alaska’s wild areas safely, and we understand the hold this bus has had on the popular imagination,” it said. “However, this is an abandoned and deteriorating vehicle that was requiring dangerous and costly rescue efforts, but more importantly, was costing some visitors their lives. I’m glad we found a safe, respectful and economical solution to this situation.”

That night as I packed for a canoe trip, I scrambled to put together a news item for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online. “There’s something strange and bittersweet about knowing the story is over now,” I wrote.

But I was wrong. A new chapter in the long, layered story of Bus 142 had just begun.

The post The ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Was a Pilgrimage Site in the Wilderness. Can It Hold Up in a Museum? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Survival-themed reality television rides a fine line between authenticity and artifice. The scrapes, bruises, and bug bites are real enough; the hunger, cold, and other discomforts endured by the contestants are too. And yeah, a guy on Survivor fell face-first into a campfire that one time. But for the most part, the contestants on these shows are playing a game: one with clear rules, fixed time limits, and medical teams on standby.

Blair Braverman knows this fine line well—she appeared on the hit Discovery series Naked and Afraid in an episode that aired in March 2019, lasting 14 days on the South Africa-Botswana border before illness forced her to leave. (She wrote about it all in harrowing detail for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.)

After that experience, Braverman wondered: What would happen if a made-for-TV survival scenario suddenly became a real fight for survival? How would the contestants react, in both action and emotion?

“I had become obsessed with this idea of a reality show where people play at survival and it turns into real survival, and they have to grapple with that shift and with what the reality of survival actually is versus what they thought it was going to be when they signed up for a show about it,” she says.

Until a cast of camera-ready castaways gets stranded in real life (and survive to tell us about it), that’s a question only fiction can try to answer. Braverman, 34, is a nonfiction author and dogsled racer based in Wisconsin, who published a widely acclaimed memoir in 2016 called Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. She hadn’t written fiction since college. So at first, she triedÌęto give the idea away. But when she attempted to hand the concept off to novelist friends, “No one was as obsessed with it as I was.”

It was January 2021, and her slate of dogsled races for the year was still up in the air because of pandemic restrictions. Braverman realized if she wanted to know what happens in her imagined scenario, she would have to sit down and write it herself.

The result is her debut novel, , which was released on November 1.

The book follows Mara, a young woman who grew up off-grid and gets recruited, via her survival school job, onto a new reality show called Civilization. It’s not a typical competition show: no one gets voted off the island. Instead, Mara and her four teammates have to work together to survive, starting from only the barest essentials. The show’s conceit is that the group will have to find a way to build a new human society in six weeks. Anyone can tap out and walk away at any time, and everyone who’s still there at the end of the game gets the prize money. But things go awry, and shit gets real.

Braverman’s characters are informed by her experience on reality TV—for instance, while on Naked and Afraid, she went eleven days with hardly anything at all to eat. She has a vivid memory of how helpless she felt, looking at the landscape where she’d been planted in the South African bush, “seeing food all around me and not knowing how to get it into a state that I could eat.” And crucially, she understands not just what it feels like to be cold and hungry and vulnerable, but what it feels like to be filmed—to become a product for the entertainment of others, while being cold and hungry and vulnerable. Without some of those details, she says, the book “would’ve been flatter.”

But she didn’t rely solely on her own memories. She also interviewed other former contestants from variousÌęshows, and took their experiences into account as she crafted her story. In those interviews, she says, “a theme that came through was there was some pressure for people to stay on. They could not afford not to make the money. So even if they thought they were really in danger, they were like, I need to win this amount of money.”

Naked and Afraid has no prize money, so, she says, “I was not in that situation. But this show in the book does have prize money, and that certainly affects people’s decisions.”

She and her husband, Quince Mountain (who was also cast in an episode of Naked and Afraid), had done a lot of research on survival skills as preparation for their TV stints: practicing fire-starting techniques, building traps, and memorizing what they could about edible flora and fauna. But for the book, she needed to expand on that base of knowledge. Partly due to pandemic travel challenges, which would have made it difficult for her to research a far-flung tropical location, she set Civilization in the north woods of Wisconsin, her own stomping grounds. “That was definitely a second choice,” she says, “but I ended up really appreciating it because it gave me a chance to learn about the woods differently, and engage with them differently than I do on an everyday basis when I’m hiking or running my dogs.” She went out into the forest with expert friends, learning about mushrooms, fish,Ìęand plants.

The writing came fast, and by the spring of 2021, she had a first draft. That meant she could revise her second draft while also refining her knowledge of the seasonal changes that her characters experienced: summer’s bloom and fade. “I was going out every single day with a notebook, and walking for an hour or two and just taking notes of every detail I noticed changing in the environment every day,” says Braverman. “And then I would incorporate those details into the book.”

The carefully foraged sensory details will please lovers of nature and outdoor writing, but Small Game is not a slow, musing, meandering kind of book. It’s a thriller, gripping and unsettling, and a very human story—about physical vulnerability and resilience, but also about the unraveling mental states of people under duress.

In the end, did Braverman manage to answer her own question about what would happen if an artificial survival scenario became frighteningly real? “I think I did get an answer,” she says. “I feel like that question is more settled for me, and it was something I’d been so curious about for years. I would love to hear other people’s perspectives because everyone is going to have a different answer to that question. But I figured out my answer.”

The post After Appearing on ‘Naked and Afraid,’ Blair Braverman Wrote a Novel About a Survival Reality Show appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When I was laid up with COVID-19 earlier this summer (a two-week period that I like to call “Netflix and ill”), I noticed something: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson appears in a lot of jungle-themed movies. They’re almost a natural habitat for his typical on-screen personas: he swings machetes, he fights dangerous wildlife, he raises one eyebrow very high and makes deadpan jokes while he sweats and glistens. In fact, of the 44 feature-length films in which he is listed as an actor , I identified nine that involve a jungle. Even assuming I haven’t missed any, that’s more than 20 percent!

There was only one thing to do next: watch every one of them. Here they all are, assessed for both their overall jungle-y-ness and the sheer charm of their muscled megastar:

The Rundown (2003)

https://youtu.be/IxldDkiYv2U

These were the early days of Johnson’s movie career, when he was still officially performing as “The Rock” and the world was just starting to realize how funny and charming the wrestling star could be on a big screen. In The Rundown, he plays a bounty hunter sent by a wealthy client to retrieve his wayward son (Seann William Scott, still in his post-American Pie heyday) from a gold-mining town in the Amazon. There are fights and jokes and lots of sweaty jungle scenery. Along the way, our hero takes notes on local recipes, hoping to open a restaurant when he finally quits the bounty hunting business. But the lighthearted buddy-action vibes sometimes sit awkwardly alongside a genuinely bleak and brutal storyline about the mine owner who controls and exploits the area.

Jungle Cred: 5/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor:Ìę5/5

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012)

Unless you have kids or are particularly into Jules Verne, this sequel to the 2008 Brendan Fraser film, Journey to the Center of the Earth, may have passed you by. Our hero plays Hank, stepdad to angsty teenage Verne-obsessive Sean (a baby-faced, pre-Hunger Games Josh Hutcherson). The pair journey to Palau, first, and then on to a, uh, mysterious island (Hawaii stands in for both), where big animals are tiny and small animals have grown large. The plot details don’t bear thinking too hard about, but Johnson is endearing as the stepfather working hard to earn a teen’s approval. Witness him offering valuable life advice about the “,” a scene that I’m sure helped seal his win for “favorite male buttkicker” at the Kids’ Choice Awards in 2013. Bonus: he .

Jungle Cred: 3/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Moana (2016)

Admittedly, Moana is more an ocean story than a jungle story, and Johnson’s character, the roguish demi-god Maui, never sets foot on the lushly forested tropical island of Motunui that Moana is trying to save. But this is a great movie, and The Rock is great in it. If you haven’t watched it in a while, watch it again. .

Jungle Cred: 2/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Solidarity to all my fellow millennials who were mildly traumatized by , but I promise the 2017 iteration is much less sinister. Updated for the video game era, it involves four high-schoolers who get sucked into an old gaming console, where they drop into new bodies and become their Jumanji-world avatars. They are led by The Rock (who makes the most of the joke that his body is ), along with Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and the very funny Karen Gillan. To win and escape the game, they have to navigate a jungle (once again, Hawaii gets tapped for set duty) full of threatening wildlife and retrieve a gem from a bad guy. I had low expectations for a reboot, but the movie is really pretty sweet and a lot of fun.

Jungle Cred: 4/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Rampage (2018)

A science experiment goes very wrong, and a wolf, a crocodile, and a gorilla—who happens to be The Rock’s best friend—are transformed by CRISPR gene editing into super-sized super-predators. Somehow this movie manages to be utterly absurd and kind of upsetting (if you love animals) at the same time. The only jungle is a manmade one at the San Diego wildlife sanctuary where George, the gorilla, lives. But TheÌęRock’s love for George feels pure and real.

Jungle Cred: 0/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

If you haven’t followed the F&F saga, some necessary backstory: in Fast 5, Luke Hobbs (The Rock) was introduced as a federal agent chasing our very fast and very furious gang of heroes through the favelas of Brazil before eventually becoming a reluctant ally. Furious 7 brought us Jason Statham as Deckard Shaw—a serious baddie who, by F8, had also kind of come around. In this spinoff from the main series, they both move to center stage. Most of the story takes place in Europe, but eventually, the characters are forced to flee to Hobbs’s homeland of Samoa (where Johnson’s family is actually from, though Hawaii plays Samoa here). And although technically the grassy area where The Rock —gathering his brothers and friends against the invading techno-baddies—looks to my untrained eye more like than , it’s at least jungle-adjacent. We’re counting it.

Jungle Cred: 1/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

Dr. Smolder Bravestone is back—and, OK, true, the gang leaves the jungle behind after only a few minutes to battle wildlife and steal a gem from a bad guy in a desert this time (plot twist!). But, again, the movie is a pleasant surprise, funnier and sweeter than any sequel to a reboot has a right to be.

Jungle Cred: 1/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Red Notice (2021)

https://youtu.be/3HYvyFYNXLU

The Rock is an FBI profiler, Ryan Reynolds is an art thief, Gal Gadot is also an art thief, and this action-heist-comedy about their convoluted plotting against each other is one part Ocean’s Twelve, one part Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, one part Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, and one part Fast 5. If that sounds like too many flavors to you, well, you might be onto something. But it’s worth watching just to see Johnson and Reynolds play the odd couple—Reynolds does his Deadpool , while The Rock is his straight man, and somehow keeps a straight face. Jungle-wise, there’s an early scene on Bali, with visible tropical foliage, and a later one in the Argentinian jungle that is a bit more substantial: people swing machetes and sweat.

Jungle Cred: 2/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

Jungle Cruise (2021)

Adapted from the vintage Disneyland ride of the same name, Jungle Cruise features Emily Blunt as an adventure-seeker in World War One-era London, hoping to travel to the Amazon to locate the mythical “Tears of the Moon,” a flower that cures all sickness. Her eventual riverboat captain? The Rock. Trying to turn any amusement park ride, let alone one that’s known for its , into a compelling movie is a challenge—and the meta approach the filmmakers take to addressing that history doesn’t always land. But Blunt and Johnson have real chemistry, great actors like Paul Giamatti and Jesse Plemons have fun with the secondary characters, and that alone is almost enough to float the boat along.

Jungle Cred: 4/5
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Charm Factor: 5/5

The post Here’s Every Movie in Which Dwayne Johnson Walks into a Jungle appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The other day I searched for Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book in my local library’s database. I live in the Yukon, in northern Canada, and usually when I search for a decades-old book in the library’s extensive Arctic and Antarctic collections, I find what I need. But this time, every copy of Endurance was already checked out. Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, Endurance, had just been located 10,000 feet down on the floor of the Weddell Sea, and Lansing’s classic is the definitive tale of of the extraordinary eventsÌęthat followed the 1915 sinking: Shackleton and his crew, over the course of two years, fought their way through Antarctica and made it back home. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the book was in high demand.

Luckily for those of us who are fired up about the discovery of the Endurance shipwreck, there is plenty to read and watch to slake our thirst for polar adventure and suffering. The last decade alone has seen the publication of a flurry of books about lesser known expeditions to the poles: Andrea Pitzer’s tells the story of a 16th-century voyage to the high Russian Arctic that became a yearlong battle for survival, while , from șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű alum Hampton Sides, and , by Julian Sancton, both New York Times bestsellers, recount tragically unsuccessful 19th-century attempts at being the first to the North and South Poles, respectively. A little older, but still underrated, is , by the late David Roberts—think Touching the Void but set in 1913 Antarctica.

We rounded up our favorite true and fictional accounts of polar adventure and disaster. Pour yourself a hot beverage, and dive in.

Endurance, Alfred Lansing

Lansing’s book about how Shackleton and his men survived the loss of the EnduranceÌęremains a classic for a reason: working in the 1950s, the author was able to interview many of the surviving crewmen, and he was given access to nearly every written diary that made it off the ice. More than 60 years after its publication, is a bridge to a different era. It remains worth a read—if you can get your hands on a copy. (For a more recent account of Shackleton’s expedition, check out Caroline Alexander’s 1998 bestseller .)

The Terror (AMC, season one)

Book after book has been written about the lost Franklin expedition: two British navy ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and more than 120 men, vanished during a search for the Northwest Passage in the late 1840s. For polar-history buffs, the story is a well-beaten path. But season one of AMC’s The Terror (now ), based on of the same name, takes a hard turn away from the usual approach. Instead of depicting what was most likely a slow, painful collapse into starvation and scurvy, the show’s creators inflict a supernatural doom on Franklin and his men. The Arctic they move through is ominous and hostile, and they are stalked by a violent force that they can’t understand. The result is a gripping period piece turned horror story, fabulously acted and frighteningly told.

Ice Ghosts, Paul Watson

Journalist Paul Watson was on board the vessel that located one of the two lost Franklin ships, Erebus, off the coast of King William Island in 2014. (The Terror was also found nearby, two years later.) revisits the doomed expedition and its disappearance in the 1840s, but it also brings the narrative up to the present, telling the story of the Parks Canada divers, the marine archaeologists, and the Inuit knowledge-keepers who put the pieces of the Arctic’s most famous puzzle together and found the ships after more than 160 years of failed searches.

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead’s celebrated novel is not strictly about the polar regions. tells the story of a fictional female pilot, Marian Graves, and her attempt to circumnavigate the globe, by plane, from north to south. Graves vanishes off the coast of Antarctica on the final leg of her journey, and the novel pivots between two timelines: her (fascinating, eventful, sometimes grim) life leading up to that moment, and the story of Hadley Baxter, a recently disgraced Hollywood starlet who has been cast to play Graves in a present-day biopic. The narrative is vivid, enriched by real-life details from the histories of aviation and exploration, and by Shipstead’s own travels to Greenland and Antarctica. The book also has something to say about our fascination with the people who vanish into the planet’s wildest places and the limits of what we can know about their deaths, or their lives.

The Last Viking, Stephen R. Bown

Non-Canadians may have missed this compelling recent biography of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who in the early 20th century bagged nearly every major remaining polar prize. Amundsen led the first team of European explorers to sail the Northwest Passage, traversing the North American Arctic from east to west, before heading to Antarctica to beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. (Bown also suggests that Amundsen may have been the first to truly reach the North Pole.) His exploits changed polar exploration, cementing a shift away from the ponderous siege-style tactics favored by British military expeditions and toward a lighter, nimbler approach, and in his later years he was also an early adopter of aircraft for polar travel. portrays him as, in a way, the first modern explorer: forever cash-strapped, dependent on publicity and sponsorship, and skilled at navigating not only sea ice but the tensions that arise when exploration becomes your business.

Against the Ice (Netflix)

This year, Netflix brought us Against the Ice, a re-creation of the marooning of Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen in 1909 after he set out with six men to determine whether Greenland was a singular landmass and therefore Denmark’s dominion. While Mikkelsen and his engineer were scouting for records of a previous,Ìędoomed Greenland expedition, the rest of the crew jumped on a passing fishing boat and headed home. The two were left to fend off blizzards, polar bears, and isolation-induced hallucinations while they awaited rescue. The film was shot on location in Iceland and Greenland, and it compellingly captures the brutal conditions and loneliness of a polar expedition.

The post Our Favorite Books and TV Shows About Polar Exploration (and Disaster) appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In his latest book, , the celebrated novelist Richard Powers explores an intense father-son relationship on an ailing planet. As wildfires rage and floodwaters rise, widower Theo and his unusual young child, Robin, attempt to understand why so little is being done to stop the accelerating effects of climate change. Powers’s previousÌęnovel, , won a Pulitzer Prize, and now Bewilderment has been longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s also the inaugural pick for the relaunch of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Book Club, and we’ve been discussing the book for the last month in (which we encourage you to join). șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęcorrespondent Eva Holland, who reviewedÌę”ț±đ·ÉŸ±±ô»ć±đ°ùłŸ±đČÔłÙÌęfor șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, reached Powers by phone to talk about how the novel came to be, why its message matters so much, and how he thought up the book’s dramatic ending.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: What was the genesis of this novel?
Powers: Thematically, it originated as a branch or a bud off of The Overstory, exploring our alienation from the more-than-human world, and the realization that we’re going to have to come back to planet Earth and join the community of interdependent living things as just one among many rather than as the dominant controller of all the rest. I thought it would be interesting to tell a story about an individual person who begins that journey.

I had read some years ago about this strange therapy called , and this technology made me think of machine-mediated telepathy, or a kind of empathy machine, as it ends up being called in the book. I had started a story with an experimenter and a subject and the tensions and clashes between them, and I had written some way into that story, but I began to feel that there was something wrong. So I set the book aside for a while and I just spent several days outside. I live in the Great Smoky Mountains in southern Appalachia—the national park is just a couple of hundred yards from my front door—and I have a thousand miles of hiking trails in that park. And when I hit the wall with writing I just like to go out and walk. I did that for several days.

And then one day I was several miles down a trail; I hadn’t seen humans in a while. And I had this sensation of a child riding on my shoulders—like I was giving a child a lift after he had grown too tired to walk. It was this very odd, fleeting hallucination. I imagined him scampering down and walking alongside me and looking at all the things—the cascades of the river along the trail, the heron in the water. I just imagined him being overwhelmed by all of this lushness. The Smokies is a temperate rainforest and it’s incredibly lush, incredibly biodiverse. And I just thought: Who is this guy? And then a little while later I realized—that’s my hero. And so I raced back to the trailhead and got home and started making notes, and lived with that boy and his father for the next couple of years.

You mentioned that it was a bud or an offshoot of your last novel, The Overstory. Did you feel like you had more to say about planetary health and people who are moved to protect the earth?
I had had this moment of awakening while writing Overstory, and this realization that so much of our contemporary literary fiction doesn’t bring in place or the more-than-human, and I knew whatever I wrote next, I would try to be respectful of this idea that we can’t really tell stories about ourselves without bringing into that narrative all of the other kinds of life that we really depend upon to be who we are. That literature of human exceptionalism that says “we’re the only interesting party on this planet, the only one with agency or consequence or sanctity”—I no longer wanted to write stories like that.

There were times reading Bewilderment when I felt almost called out by Robin—when he would confront Theo and say, Why isn’t anybody doing anything? I felt put on the spot, like, why Čč°ù±đČÔ’t we doing more? Did you intend for that child’s voice to be pointing out what should be obvious to so many of us adults: that we’re just not doing enough?
I’m very interested in this question of eco-trauma among the young. Robin is an unusual boy, he lies very far from the mean of just about any kind of distribution curve that you’d draw for children his age, and the book initially begins with this question of: What’s the right way forward for this child with this problem? And Theo himself doesn’t know. He gets a couple of different diagnoses and the condition is medicalized. But little by little, in the interaction between father and son, the story does this reverse. We see this boy who, perhaps because of his unusual nature, has a kind of moral clarity and is asking a perfectly valid question that no adult would know how to answer—the question of ‘What’s wrong with Robin?’ slowly gets replaced by this question, ‘What’s wrong with the adult world?’

This condition of eco-trauma is very widespread. However unusual or different Robin is, he’s absolutely representative of a condition that is epidemic among young people. A sense of anger, a sense of fear, a sense of bewilderment in the face of what’s happening—that moral precision of childhood, that black and white quality that simply sees what should be happening and what is happening, and wants to know why the two things Čč°ù±đČÔ’t the same. Theo’s crisis is not just how to protect his son, it’s how to answer his son.

I thought that was so well done and so unsettling. I felt our collective deficiency in being able to answer Robin. I’ve seen a lot of comments from readers about Robin’s voice. How did you build Robin?
I drew on extraordinary children who I had had a kind of surrogate parental relationship with when I was younger. A nephew of mine, a niece of mine, and the child of a colleague of mine—they were each extraordinary in a different way, and I think that’s part of the message of the book, that whatever we know about aggregate diagnostic categories and certain components or behaviors that correlate strongly, statistically, with some of those categories, it’s important not to mistake the diagnostic category for the individual. You have to particularize, you have to allow a character to be his own collection of unusual traits—sometimes contradictory, sometimes not as strongly correlated with the condition that he supposedly partakes in.

One question posed in the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Book Club was why you chose a father-son relationship to explore these larger issues of the climate crisis and mass extinction?
I think it’s because, to give it the greatest possible authority and the greatest possibly emotional intimacy that I as a writer was capable of giving it, I had to channel my own experience. And while I myself am not a father, I have a lot of experience being a son, and I remember with great precision the challenges that I presented to my own father.

There is a line in The Overstory about how all the best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind—the only thing that’ll do that is a good story. We don’t transform because of graphs and figures and statistics and rational arguments. We transform because we have allowed ourselves to make an empathetic leap with someone else, and to participate in their vantage point, and to identify with them however different they are from us. We ask ourselves, What would the world feel like if I were not myself but this other person? That’s what art does, that’s why art is the great empathy machine. Especially narrative art. And it did seem to me that if I wanted to explore that question of a change in consciousness, that the best way to do it was through a very narrow and very personally focused story.

The ending is very dramatic! How did you find your way to ending the story in a way that satisfied you?
When I used to teach writing, years ago, I would tell my students that the challenge of finding an ending to a story is that you’re looking for something that is both surprising but inevitable. You’re following a trajectory, and you’re watching the consequences, this chain of choices and consequences that drives a narrative forward, and you may think you know where the story’s going, but to do justice to your characters and to the plot that you’ve set in motion, you also have to make constant course corrections along the way.

And that’s what happened to me. I had a sense of where the story was going, and I knew that I was kind re-creating the that Plato writes about—the story about someone who breaks out of this narrow confine and realizes that they’ve been mistaking emotion for reality, and they get outside and they experience the truth of their situation, and then they go back into the cave and try to communicate to other people that there is a real world out there. So I knew the broad outlines of the fable that I was basing my story on. And I was following that, but also trying to do justice to these two very particular characters. When I got to the nine-tenths point, and I had seen Robin’s rise in emotional intelligence and then his regressing to the mean at the end of the story, I didn’t know what was going to happen. And then I did. And it was really eerie. Some part of me had already known—all the necessary groundwork was already there. I realized that I was surprised by my discovery of how the book had to end, but it was inevitable.

One more question from a reader that I think will be a nice one to end on. How do you deal with climate anxiety and paralysis? How do you maintain hope?
It is the essential question of our time, and very complicated to answer. But in brief: I have worked my way to seeing that most of our fear and terror has to do with the knowledge that there is no way forward into this crisis and through this crisis that doesn’t involve great suffering, disruption, and pain, and lots of death. Yet a lot of our despair comes about because we see the world addressing this question as a problem of chemistry and engineering, and not of change in consciousness or change in culture. We’re afraid that there is no other kind of cultural configuration than human exceptionalism; we live in a culture that equates meaning with accumulation, and we don’t know how to get out of it.

Critic and theorist famously said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And that’s why we’re terrified. No matter what we do on the chemistry end, on the reduction end, if meaning still means accumulation, we’re not going to change who we are or what we want. So the crisis is going to cause us great pain and suffering, and nothing is going to be different. If, however, we recover what so many cultures around the world have known throughout so much of human history, and begin to realize there are other ways of finding meaning—in our connections with other living things, with interbeing, with rehabilitation, with taking joy in living where we live, in committing to place and understanding what place wants, in being present and attentive and understanding the incredible diversity and agency of the more-than-human world, we may find that the world of the future has more possibility for meaning, more work and more meaningful engagement, than the world of the present.

If we are afraid that life won’t survive the climate crisis that we’ve unleashed, I think we can console ourselves with the fact that life has survived mass extinctions that were caused by changes in the earth that are much more extreme than the ones we’ve set in motion. So in all likelihood, life will survive anything that we throw at it. Then the question is, will we be around in any capacity? I believe that our collective ingenuity and resourcefulness will, if we can transform our consciousness, find ways of rehabilitating and re-entering the community of living things, and finding a durable and renewable way of being on the planet. So if there is life and if we are around, the question is: What will replace our sense of meaning in the present? And what is hope? Hope is a willingness to commit to engage the future. In the world that I’m describing, if there is more work, and more meaning, even if it is accompanied by upheaval and pain and suffering, it may ultimately be better to make that leap into a new kind of culture and to find greater purpose than anything that the culture of commodity-mediated individualist human exceptionalism now offers us. Hope in the future will consist of tying us back together to the living planet. Ìę

This interview has been edited for length andÌęclarity.

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We’re relaunching the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Book Club this week, and to celebrate we’re publishing a series on how the booming genre of climate fiction is helping us see our changing planet in a new light. You can learn more about the book club here,Ìęor join us onÌęÌęto discuss our October pick,Ìę, a new work of climate fiction by Richard Powers.

, the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, is the most alarming flavor of dystopian fiction: the kind that feels dangerously, unsettlingly familiar. It’s set in a near future that’s never precisely dated—it could be ten years from now, or five, or one. The American president is a braying autocrat who postpones elections and types only in all caps; the South is flooded, and the West is burning (Carson City, Nevada, and San Bernardino, California, are disposed of in a single sentence); deadly zoonotic pathogens are hopping from livestock to people; violent militias are on the move. The news is a persistent drumbeat of horror, an only slightly amplified version of our own times.

All of that, though, is just the grim backdrop to a more intimate story at the heart of the novel. Unlike Powers’sÌęlast book, , a sweeping 500-page epic that follows nine major characters across many years of their lives, Bewilderment unfolds withinÌęwithin a single year, and most of the action involves just two people.

Theo is an astrobiologist whose wife, a leading animal-rights activist, has died in a car wreck. His research focuses on the potential for life elsewhere in the universe: he’s not a UFO hunter but, rather, uses what little we know about the stars and planets outside our solar system, and all that we know about the different ways that life can be sustained, to try to identify places in the universe where another version of life might exist.ÌęTo that end, Theo uses algorithms, complex calculations, and an imagination fueledÌęby a lifelong sci-fi habit to consider the possibilities.

Increasingly, though, his work is neglected as he struggles to care for Robin, his young son, who was an unusual kid even before his mother’s death. Doctors have offered a range of potential diagnoses, but Theo resists the medicalization of his son, even as the boy diverges further and further from his classmates and his occasional outbursts of rage become more frequent. Eventually, with trouble at school piling up and the threat of social workers hanging over his head, Theo decides to have Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy. The rest of the book’s action flows from that decision, as Robin’s personality changes in unpredictable, almost supernatural ways. Among other things, his existing love for animals and wild places becomes more focused and purposeful.

The young climate activist Greta Thunberg has famously and Robin shares a similar starkness of vision. He simply can’t understand how the people around him—Theo included—could be aware of the climate crisis and all its attendant sub-crises, could understand their deadly implications, and still just continue with their lives. “Mom says everything’s dying,” he tells his father one morning, invoking the dead woman who dedicated her life to saving animals, as they argue about whether he should keep attendingÌęgrade school. “Do you believe her?”

He goes on, “Because if she’s right, there’s no point in school. Everything will be dead by the time I get to tenth grade.”

Theo is left to ponder: “Did I believe her? Her facts were beyond doubt. Everything she claimed was common knowledge to scientists everywhere. But did I believe her? Had mass extinction ever once felt real?” Robin’s urgent clarity on the most important issue of our time contrasts uncomfortably with the apathy that most of us feel every day, even those of us who care deeply about the environment. Confronted with that clarity, I spent a good portion of this novel slightly sick to my stomach.

Powers’s writing becomes expansive and lyricalÌęwhenever Theo and Robin venture into nature. Their shared loveÌęof the wild world is expressed through close attention, and the level of detail serves to invite the reader to pay closer attention, too. On an autumn road trip that the father and son take to the Great Smoky Mountains, Powers writes, “Fog clotted in the mountain folds.”

“Before us, a remnant of a range once much higher than the Himalayas endured as rounded foothills,” he continues a little later. “Lemon, amber, and cinnamon—the whole run of deciduous colors—flowed down the watersheds. Sourwoods and sweet gums covered the ridge in crimson. We rounded the bend into the park. Robin breathed out a long, astonished vowel.”

Powers has always been known for incorporating scientific research into his novels—The Overstory based entire storylines, as well as a key character, on . BewildermentÌęis similarly built on a foundation of realÌęscience. The type of semi-speculative, exploratory space research that Theo does is well established and . , used to treat everything from insomnia, anxiety, and depression to migraines and epilepsy (though scientists its effectiveness as a therapy). Most important, of course, is the fact that the climate crisis is real and accelerating. Floods, fire, plagues, mass animal die-offs—this past summer alone, we’ve seen it all. And still, here most of us sit: tweeting, shopping for more stuff online, dreaming about all the places we’ll fly on passenger jets once the current pandemic abates. Sure, we understand the facts. But do we believe?

Cynicism and apathy abound. The earnestness required to be a dedicated environmentalist is not terribly fashionable these days. I’ve often felt embarrassed to look back at the animal-loving, crusading kid I once was, more sociable than Robin, but nevertheless walking around with a button on my school bag that demanded “Equal rights for all species” and selling off my toys at a yard sale to raise money for the local animal shelter. Theo, too, cringes sometimes as his son launches his naive little campaigns, the child believing he can make a difference.

I can’t tell for sure whether Richard Powers himself still believes that we can make a difference. Comparisons to The Overstory are inevitable, both because that book was enormously successful and influential, and because it was also a call to action for the health of our planet. But I, at least, experienced The Overstory as a gentler book than Bewilderment—it seemed to offer a fantastical epic rather than a dystopian future. Powers’s new novel reads as angrier, or perhaps just more frustrated. We are running out of time, it seems to say. Get over yourselves. Snap out of it already.

Robin’s blunt questions are uncomfortable because we know, keenly, that we don’t have good answers for them right now. We’re failing the next generation, and we’re failing ourselves. While Robin’s classmates might laugh at him, we could all use more ofÌęhis urgency and empathy.

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OftenÌęwhen we talk about a big, ambitious book, we reach for the language of geography. We describe the terrain it covers; we say that it sprawls, or ranges widely. The book is framed as a kind of passage through the world: we might talk about a protagonist’s journey, or an author’s exploration of a topic.

In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, all of those analogies are made literal.Ìę

’s 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of Marian Graves, a fictional female pilot who disappeared in 1950 while attempting an unprecedented north-south circumnavigation of the earth. She had only one leg left in her trip, a final leap from Antarctica to New Zealand, when she vanished, Earhart-style, in the South Pacific. Shipstead takes readers through the events of Marian’s life leading up to that moment, from her parents’ doomed marriage and her unorthodox childhood, roaming semi-feral with her twin brother in the Montana woods, to the complex web of desires, ambitions, and romantic entanglements that prompt her to herÌęfinal flight.Ìę

Braided with Marian’s story is a contemporary narrative. Hadley Baxter, a troubled young Hollywood starlet, attempts to rebound from scandal by playing Marian in an Oscar-bait biopic. But Marian and Hadley have more in common than a casting decision: Hadley’s own parents crashed into Lake Superior in a small plane when she was a toddler, andÌęlike Marian, she was raised, to the extent that she was raised at all, by a dissolute uncle. Her parents’ fate matches what’s known of her character’s final act, and while Marian yearns for the sky, the specter of what she calls the “sharp gannet plunge” of lives being extinguished in cold, dark water looms throughout both timelines.

Great Circle is a big novel but not a daunting one: an impressive array of historical research is integrated seamlessly, and the story is propulsive. The characters are compelling, and their choices, even the extraordinary ones, make sense within their worlds. Shipstead’s sentences are luminous, her metaphors precise: a luxury steamship crossing the North Atlantic at night is “a jeweled brooch on black satin”; in the present day, Hadley looks down from a hillside mansion at “the big flat circuit board of Los Angeles planing off into the pale haze.” Anyone who’s felt a little plane rattle up off a rough dirt runway will recognize their experience in Marian’s; anyone who hasn’t will get a taste of the sensation.

Those details were earned through deep research, trips to the archives, and Shipstead’s own experiences. She grew up in Orange County, California, and is now based in Los Angeles, where many of her friends work, in one way or another, in the film industry. She has written two previous andÌęvery well-regarded novels: , an award-winning New York Times bestseller, and . She was traveling between her first and second release, figuring out what to work on next, when she got the idea for Great Circle.Ìę

Shipstead was in Auckland, New Zealand, and spotted a statue of , the first pilot to fly solo from England to New Zealand, outside the city’s main airport terminal. Batten was one of a cohort of female pilots who were enormously famous in the early, daring years of aviationÌębut who have since largely slipped from mainstream public memory. The exception, Amelia Earhart, is known more for her disappearance than her accomplishments. The rich history of female aviation, and how little of it we choose to remember, got Shipstead chewing on narrative ideas that involve disappearance and death. “It’s so often the same thing,” she says, “but as a society we process it really differently.”

Shipstead let the idea linger for a couple of years before really sitting down to write in the fall of 2014. Around that time, she also began to get assignments to write travel stories (including șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű), and a fruitful cross-fertilization began. Over several years, her reporting took her to the far-flung islands of the Pacific—Hawaii, the Cook Islands, sub-Antarctic New Zealand—and around the circumpolar region, from Greenland and Alaska to Svalbard, in Arctic Norway, and the Canadian high Arctic. The map of Marian’s journey began to take shape.Ìę

The trickiest and most critical place to reach was Antarctica. The southern continent was crucial to the story of Marian’s disappearance, and Shipstead says she didn’t think she could imagine her way throughÌęit. Landing on the Greenland ice sheet in a C-130 for a travel story would give her some sense of the flat, frozen immensity at the poles, but she wanted more. The gap in her research was resolved unexpectedly: on an assignment to the sub-Antarctic, she met an expedition leader who worked in the region and they hit it off. He invited her along on a cruise, and so, she says, “our first date, really, was a five-week-long sea voyage to Antarctic. That was a really strange way of getting that wish granted.”

There were other lucky breaks. During a visit to an aviation museum in Missoula, Montana, Marian’s hometown, Shipstead was hanging around, sitting in the cockpit of a vintage airplane on display, when she was invited along by a couple of pilots who were taking a 1927 Travel Air 6000 up for a spin. “That became the plane that Marian learned to fly, because I’d been in it, I’d been in the actual aircraft, in the exact right place,” she says. “That was really serendipitous and incredibly useful.”

Shipstead’s travels were supplemented by wide-ranging research into the times and places that Marian and her brother, Jamie,Ìępass through. The early history of aviation is woven into the fabric of the novel, but so is the story of Prohibition-era Montana, of bootleggers and cross-border flights to Canada. When World War II breaks out in Europe in 1939, the novel absorbs and makes use of several little-known pockets of history: the “combat artists” who painted and drew the front lines for the United States military; the crew of female pilots in England who flew warplanes around from base to base before their next missions across the channel; the bloody battles in remote corners of the world, like the Aleutian Islands. “Once I came across it, in it went,” she says.

Shipstead’s brother, a former pilot and Air Force veteran who, like Marian, had grown up intoxicated by airplanes, helped with the technical details, like what models of planes Marian might have flownÌęand how far she could have gone on a tank of fuel. Shipstead wanted Marian’s circumnavigation plan to have been just barely within the realm of feasibility at the time she made the attempt—nearly impossibleÌębut not completely out of reach. That largely determined the timing of the flight in the novel, which matched up with a real-life Antarctic expedition that could have offered Marian a refuelling station, and with the existence of several new postwar runways in the South Pacific. Shipstead knows she may not satisfy every detail-loving aviation buff out there, but, she says, “I tried to keep it all tethered to reality as much as possible.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in Cessnas and Twin Otters, taking off from or landing on ice and ocean and earth, so I felt very at home in Marian’s world. At first, Hadley’s share of Great Circle felt like an interruption to me. But as the novel unspooled, I appreciated her perspective more and more. A lifetime after Marian’s disappearance, the filmmakers try to reconstruct her, but to a reader, it’s clear that the gap between her life and their story is a yawning crevasse. The contemporary timeline shows us how much is lost when a person dies or disappears andÌęhow much becomes unknowable, no matter how much historical research we might dig up.Ìę

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Here are some adjectives that come to mind when I think about Mount Everest: expensive, frustrating, problematic, fraught. The state of the climbing industry on the planet’s tallest mountain disgusts me sometimes: the crowds and the down-suited lineups; the money (who spends it, who receives it, who needs it the most); the reports of climbers stepping over their gasping, dying peers on their way to the summit. Observing from afar, it can seem like Everest today breeds everything that’s ugly in outdoor pursuits.Ìę

And yet, like so many of us, I can’t look away. I tore through a pair of new books about two very different expeditions. Both of them fueled my mixed feelings about the mountain.

Ed Caesar’s Ìętells the story of Maurice Wilson, a British war veteran who, in the early thirties, came up with a bold idea to fly a small plane from England to Everest, land on its lower slope, and solo-climb the rest of the way, becoming the first person to reach the summit. There was a major flaw in Wilson’s plan, though—he was neither a pilot nor a climber.Ìę

The resulting journey was remarkable. Wilson, undaunted by his own ignorance, took flying lessons and managed to pilot his plane as far as India before British imperial officials, keen to avoid a diplomatic disaster over restricted access to the mountain, rushed to ground him. (Neither Tibet nor Nepal was keen on foreign climbers back then.) With his plane seized, Wilson disguised himself as a local priest and proceeded overland, illegally sneaking into Tibet and walking 300ÌęmilesÌęto the mountain’s north side to start his climb. He got much further in his mission than you might expect, though Everest wouldn’t be successfully summited for nearly another two decades after his attempt.Ìę

Caesar, ,Ìętells the story in impressive detail, drawing on years of archival research, and he brings to life a historical character who is both fascinating and maddening. The narrative follows Wilson as he survives the trenches of World War I and then travels the globe for years, mostly breaking hearts and spending other people’s money,Ìębefore fixating on Everest. It’s gripping at every turn, but reading about him left me torn: I wasÌęput off by his arroganceÌębut pulled in by the sheer chutzpah of the effort. There were no crowds on the mountain in 1934, when Wilson took his shot, but his hubris and dangerous obsession with the summit would be at home there today. Still, despite Wilson’s misguided stubbornness, it’s impossible not to root for him.

Jennifer Hull’s Ìęrecounts another ill-fated Everest expedition. In April 2015, just a year after 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall, veteran mountain guide Dave Hahn and a group of clients were resting at Camp I. Suddenly,Ìęa massive earthquake struck, triggeringÌęan avalanche that destroyed much of Base Camp below themÌęand buryingÌęEverest in tragedy for the second climbing season in a row. Hull, a writer based in New Mexico (where Hahn also lives during the off-season),Ìęweaves together Hahn’s background and life in the mountains, his group’s trek to Base Camp, and, ultimately, the quake and the avalanches it unleashed.Ìę

The book wades into terrain that some climbing stories prefer to avoid. Hull is blunt about the financial incentivesÌęand lack of other prospectsÌęthat drive many Sherpa guides onto the mountain, risking their lives to support the ambitions of wealthy foreign climbers. She does not shy away from Everest’s inequitiesÌęand the ways in which they are painfully exposed, particularly when people die. But she also shows how Hahn and his fellow climbersÌędisplayÌęthe best of what mountaineering asks of its practitioners: a powerful drive, paired with skills and abilities honed over years of effort. And she captures the rewards, too: laughter shared with a team, the satisfaction of pure exhaustion, and a fleeting glimpse at something so much greater than ourselves. Hahn, so experienced and well regarded, so committed to his group, is the perfect vehicle for the story.Ìę

Carefully researched and sensitively written, Shook is a vivid reminder that those infamous conga lines of Everest climbers are made up of individual people, each with their own dreams and goals. Hull’s workÌęshowcases the care and pride that great mountain guides—Sherpa and otherwise—have for their profession, and it offers a window into a community that outsiders can be quick to judge.

You could argue that the thirties were a purer time in Everest climbing compared with today’s circus, but I found Hahn to be a more compelling, if quieter, figure than Wilson. His storyÌęshows that ego and money Čč°ù±đČÔ’t the only things left on Everest.

Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę

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I tried, and failed, to count the bites when I came off the river. In front of a mirror, I stripped down and took in the welts that swelled on my shoulders and elbows and, well, basically everywhere. Twisting to check my back, I could see pale, unravaged skin where my life jacket had protected with in a thick layer of foam. But my exposed skin was covered in swollen red bumps.

I had spent a week rafting a lower section of the Nahanni, an iconic river in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The first half of the trip was sun-scorched bliss, but in the final few days the canyon walls fell away, the current slowed, and regiments of mosquitoes emerged from the brushy, wet terrain. By day we outran them, but at night I watched three or four alight on my exposed fingers as I pitched my tent. I ended up, best I could tell, with 200 to 300 angry bites.

I didn’t grow up the One the Bugs Like Best. “They don’t really bother me,” I could have said as a teen, airily, playing soccer between cornfields on a muggy summer eveningÌęor floating in a canoe on a warm lake. But something changed when I moved cross-country from eastern Ontario to the northwestern Yukon: now I seemed to smell particularly sweet to the local bloodsuckers. And bitten, I reacted as never before, swelling and scratching. It was like losing a superpower. What happened to me?Ìę

Researchers don’t entirely understand what draws mosquitoes to some and not others. There are known factors: Exhaling carbon dioxide gives us away to a mosquito’s sensors, for a start. Pregnant women are extra vulnerable, since they give off more; the same goes for people exercising and breathing hard. (Bad news for that campsite bocce tournament.) There’s evidence to suggest that mosquitoes prefer type O blood, and genetics are also at play. One study found that identical twins matched each other in attractiveness to mosquitoes, while fraternal twins were more varied.Ìę

There’s also a surprisingly limited understanding of the physiology of the ensuing itch. We know that only female mosquitoes bite, and that when scientists cut their salivary ducts, they can still biteÌębut no itch occurs. We also know that people can become desensitized to bites over time, and thatÌęno matter how hard won, it doesn’t transfer to other mosquito species, of which there are more than 3,500 in the world. That may have been what happened to me when I moved:Ìęmy resistance no longer applied.Ìę

So what can we do? Wearing light colors can help, and—sorry, campfire drinkers—at least one study suggests that avoiding alcohol might help, too. I could have mitigated the itching and swelling on that river trip by taking a daily antihistamine as a preventative measure. Bug jackets or head nets are unstylish but effective, and splashing on some deetÌęmakes a difference, too. Anti-itch creams can stave off excessive scratching, which breaks the skin and can leadÌęto scarring or infection.

When all else fails, just know that our bites are the price we pay, in blood, for the memories we keep long after the itch fades.

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The abandoned Fairbanks city bus that Christopher McCandless lived and died in has been removed from the Alaska backcountry. Photos that went Ìęon Thursday show the bus being hauled out by a Chinook helicopter and then loaded onto a long flatbed trailer for transport to an unknown location. Ìęthat the bus was removed in a collaboration involving the state’s departments of transportation, natural resources, and military and veterans’ affairs, at the request of the Denali Borough.
Ìę
McCandless occupied the bus, located outside the town of Healy near the boundary of Denali National Park, during the spring and summer of 1992. He died there in mid-August, and his story was made famous by Jon Krakauer—first in a now-classic șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű story, “Death of an Innocent,” and then in his bestselling 1996 book, Into the Wild.
Ìę
The bus had been abandoned along the Stampede Trail, then a rough road to a now-defunct mine, in the early 1960s. It became a popular fall and winter shelter for hunters and trappers, but had never been a summer destination pre-McCandless. The book’s publication changed that. Hikers, often inspired by McCandless’ commitment to leading an adventurous life, began to seek out the bus in a kind of pilgrimage soon after. When the movie version of Into the Wild was released in 2007, their numbers increased significantly. “We didn’t really feel an impact from the bus until the movie came out,” Rusty Lasell, then the chief of Healy’s Tri-Valley Volunteer Fire Department, told me in 2013. (.) But that impact, when it came, was significant. When I spoke to Lasell in early September of that year, he had already overseen a dozen rescues of bus-bound hikers that summer alone, most of them trapped on the wrong side of the fast-moving and unpredictable Teklanika River.
Ìę
The Teklanika is what makes the 20-mile hike to the bus so fraught—and it’s the obstacle that prevented McCandless from hiking out to the highway when he began to starve. It’s cold and fast, and it can rise quickly, slamming the door shut behind hikers who have already crossed to the bus side, or sweeping them off their feet and downstream. The first hiker to die on her way to the bus was a young woman who drowned in 2010. The second, a 24 year-old newlywed, died last summer.
Ìę
Locals have discussed the idea of removing the bus, to stop the hikers and the rescues, since at least 2007, which was when I first learned about and Ìęthe pilgrimage phenomenon. In 2013, when I reported a long feature Ìęand the risks they take, one Healy local told me that he’d heard of vigilante plans to blow it up if it wasn’t airlifted out. Others told me they weren’t sure whether removing it would even stop the hikers, or if they’d keep coming anyway. Now I suppose we’ll find out.
Ìę
If there was ever a time to try to stem the flow of stranded hikers and helicopter rescue missions, it’s during this pandemic summer. Still, the news of the abrupt removal, 30 years after McCandless’ residency, caught me off guard. I’ve followed the saga of the bus for 13 years, the entire span of my writing career, and there’s something strange and bittersweet about knowing the story is over now. I’m not sad, exactly—my feeling has always been that there are better ways to enjoy Alaska’s endless wilderness, and to honor McCandless’ ideals, than to schlep down a boggy quad trail in the footsteps of hundreds of other hikers. And I’m keenly aware of the route’s dangers: in 2013, I watched three hikers get swept away, and one of them nearly drown, while attempting a crossing of the Teklanika.
Ìę
And yet, and yet. I’m willing to bet that even some Alaskans, who’ve tended to view the bus and the hikers as a nuisance at best and an outright menace at worst, are feeling that strangeness. As Clay Walker, mayor of the Denali Borough, told , “I know it’s the right thing for public safety
 At the same time, it’s always a little bittersweet when a piece of your history gets pulled out.”
Ìę
The movie featured an exact replica of the original bus, and for what it’s worth, it still sits outside a brewery in Healy. You can stop by and raise a glass after you’ve hiked down some other trail.

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