Bending Rules: An Essay on Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham

Gurinder Chadha’s, Bend it Like Beckham, opened April 12, 2002. The film tells the story of a young soccer enthusiast, Jess Bhamra, portrayed by Parminder Nagra, who battles to play soccer despite her contemporary Sikh family's objections. It was an international and inspirational hit for female soccer fans, and proponents of women’s right. The film raises pertinent questions in the lives of Asian-Indian families, and Indian immigrants throughout the world, struggling to balance the expectations of gender roles, family and religious traditions. We’ll discuss some of these in the context of this fun film set in present-day Great Britain.

Bend it Like Beckham is a libertarian film, poking fun at those who seek to perpetuate the stereotype of the submissive, perhaps subjugated Asian female. Its comedy has brought fresh energy to girls struggling against these stereotypes, in the athletic, vocational, and domestic arenas. But, liberty is a two-sided coin. On the one side is freedom, the other, responsibility. The tension in this movie is played out in Jess’s choice between meeting her obligation to attend her sister’s wedding, or playing in the “big game,” which happens to have fallen on the same day. On a deeper note, and perhaps unscripted, Jess’s father must wrestle with adhering to the fundamental libertarian principles of equality for Sikh women, and the old Indian religious sexism and oppression that writer, Gurmeet Kaur, claims modern Sikh families haven fallen prey to (Kaur, 2004). What father and daughter decide is what drives this movie.

Jess is intrigued with the extraordinary talent of soccer superstar, David Beckham, whose status in England rivals that of Michael Jordan in the US. While thousands of boys and girls dream of being like Mike, the same holds true in England, where thousands of youth dream of bending it like Beckham. The film had the effect of inspiring a generation of young Indian females to start kicking up a fuss, so much so that the first girls football league was established in India in January 2003 (McGivering, 2003).

RELIGION
Religion plays a very important role in the life of an Indian person. Roughly 80% of Asian-Indians are Hindus, yet a substantial number are Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, or Taoist. It is unheard of for a Hindu to marry outside their race, much less their religion. In the movie we saw that it would cause uproar if a Sikh would think of marrying a Muslim. This is why arranged marriages are still very common amongst the Indian culture.

This is an apparent contradiction to Sikh history and literature. Sikhism advocates active and gender-equal participation in congregation, academics, healthcare, and military activity, among other aspects of society. Female subordination, the practice of taking father's or husband's last name, practicing rituals that imply dependence, are all alien to the Sikh principles, proscribed by Guru Nanuk (Kaur, 2004). At a 2004 Chicago symposium reflecting on the current status of Sikh women, Kaur lamented the contemporary ignoring of this essential Sikh pillar, stating,

"Indian culture has downgraded women in many ways for centuries: They have been deemed unworthy of education; restricted to being child bearers and housekeepers. In general, the male children have received preferential treatment in all areas of life. Women have been subjected to economic, social, cultural and judicial oppression from birth to death. They were regarded as a source of sin and obstruction to a man’s salvation; they were declared devoid of intelligence. Sadly to say, Sikhs have succumbed to the ways of [puritanical] Indian Culture rather than the ideals of the Guru. Equality between men and women in Sikhism has become mere rhetoric. The status of Sikh women is so far from the truth of the Guru’s teachings, that women have become incapable of independent identity without a male figure…inferior in education, and hence not rising beyond traditional roles; and devoid of leadership qualities.”

This is a sad outcome that suggests a sad future for girls like Jess. Kaur concludes,

“The worst part is that subjugation has become so much a part of our lives that we do not even acknowledge that it exists. If Sikhism is to flourish as a Universal religion, a faith of new age, there is a need to break out, untangle the web of culture, and reach to the core of the Guru’s teachings. There is a need for men to step in and do their part.”

This is Jess’s father’s dilemma in this film. We believe Chadha’s movie is an attempt to promote the noble aspects of Sikhism. Mr. Bahmraais in a position, therefore, to begin to untangle this web; his challenge is to step away from the old way, at least for a while, and into Jess’s world where dreams can become a reality according to Sikh teachings.

Marriage and religion are very important subjects with the Indian culture. A counselor should be sensitive when dealing with these issues. Counselors should ask questions about their client’s culture or religion if they are not familiar. They should take into consideration the client’s lifestyle and background, especially when dealing with clients who are under age. It will be very rare for an Indian person to seek therapy because they would rather speak to a family member or a friend. Going to a therapist is looked down upon. When working with the Indian population, a therapist should be sensitive to the cultural differences between therapist and client.

FAMILY
Throughout the course of the movie, family was a central theme. This is a family-oriented society and not individualistic. The community identifies persons based on their family, and this has an impact on all aspects of life. This impact is so significant that a marriage can be canceled if a member of the family was spotted in a position contrary to societal norms. It is therefore essential that all members of the family be seen as good citizens and true to their religious orientation. A failure to do this could lead to ostracism, which will bring emotional turmoil to those individuals.

The impact of the family is significant; it affects the choice of career, education, future spouse, and even hobbies of a family member, especially children, as was the case for Jess. A failure to comply with the desires of the family in one of these areas can lead to familial problems. These problems create significant emotional turmoil for the parents, which sometimes result in them blaming themselves for bad parental training, or being evil in their previous life.

Chadha touched on issues of sexuality throughout her script. In Indian culture, premarital sex was not permitted. If people were discovered in this practice, they would reap harsh treatment from the other members of the society. Likewise, due to there strict cultural backgrounds, no room was given for those who decided to live a homosexual lifestyle. Chadha portrayed this intolerance humorously by creating the illusion that Jess was a lesbian, at least in the suspicious eyes of her ever-mindful mother. As a result of this cultural taboo, a young man in the movie remained “in the closet” when it came to his sexual orientation. He knew that he would no longer be accepted in his community if her were “found out,” and thought it better to keep quiet.

It can be said that one’s behavior is not one’s own. What a family member does is a direct reflection on the whole family. Thus it is important to note that people of Indian culture hold family respect in high regard. Children, no matter what age, are to adhere to their parents’ instruction. The father is the head of the household; however the wife plays an integral role in the rearing of the children and the decision-making.

For example, in the movie, the father made the ultimate decision to let his daughter play in the soccer championship game. Counselors and psychologists need to be aware that for the good of the family sometimes one has to sacrifice love, friendships, and career in order not to bring shame on the family; familial expectations supersede individual wants and desires. In this case, Jess’s father acted courageously according the pillars of his religion.

In the movie the parents originally wanted their daughter to go off to a university and get a degree in medicine, when what she wanted was to play professional soccer. In this case, it went against the family custom, therefore, traditionally she would have to give up her dream and do what the family required; however because in the end her family approved, she was able to go and pursue her dream. It is very important that family traditions and customs are kept, but sometimes exceptions are made, such as in the case of Jess’s family.

Appearances are very important to the Indian families because they have a caste system. For instance, depending on what caste a family belongs to, it is important to marry within that caste (Ballard, 1990). In the movie when the future in-laws were coming over for a visit, the mother expressed her desire that when they came, they see their family as not poor. It is important to be financially secure or to appear that finances are not a problem. Having money is a value. Traditions can be seen in the way the marriage ceremony is performed, the dress, conduct, gender roles, and careers.

CAREER
In the Indian culture, choice of career is a big issue. Highly respected careers are medicine, engineering, computer technology, business, and to a lesser extent law. While today, parents allow their children to choose careers outside of these preferred tracks, success in whatever career an individual chooses is strongly emphasized.

Traditionally, parents have chosen the child’s career for them. While this still happens today, children do have more flexibility in choosing their own path, though once gender is added to the issue, the waters become murkier. Gender roles in the Indian culture continue to follow a more traditional path. Men are the primary financial support in the family, while women are the primary managers of the domestic sphere.

In the last 10 to 15 years, however, with the growth of the technological industry and out sourcing, women have been entering into the work force in larger numbers. Their responsibilities to family home life, however, remain unchanged. Women in the Indian culture are expected to marry, above all else, and to care for the children and the home. As such, higher education and the pursuit of a career for an Indian woman is typically only embarked upon after the girl is married, or at the very least, is engaged.

This point was openly illustrated in Bend it Like Beckham, when Jess wanted to attend an American university on a soccer scholarship. At first, the expectation was that she marry or get engaged before she left for school, though her father made the ultimate decision in the end to allow her to leave without an engagement. Like men, women pursuing careers of their own are also encouraged to pursue the same highly desired jobs and are encouraged to attend respected universities (Ballard, 1990).

CONCLUSION
Bend it Like Beckham was a challenge to modern Sikhism. It is a criticism of the outdated stereotype of the submissive, subordinate Indian female. Its success in the Asian female world, and for those aspiring to play a typically male-dominated sport, is a breath of fresh air in the lungs of those struggling against these stereotypes. It was a song traditional Sikhism, not a slap in the face. Less a mockery of her parents for their intrusion, Chadha depicted the tension wrote of so eloquently in Kaur’s piece describing the unfortunate status of many women in the Asian world—Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and otherwise.

Counselors must take note of their biases, their own stereotypes and agendas, be they feminist, traditional, or a mixture thereof. A girl such as Jess may present to a counselor the conflict of acting on her personal desires vs. the expectations of her family, religion, or culture. No easy answer exists, but knowing the history of the family’s religion (in this case, Sikhism), and the culture that surrounds it, may help a counselor work with both family and client to aspire to the greater aims of God’s desire. The goal is to bring families together, to compromise when necessary, and to promote the values of service to others and individual liberty. Jess’s father was able to bend a few rules in this film, make both of his daughters happy, an act of courage, sacrifice, and great wisdom. In the end, he bent a rule for his daughter, who just wanted to bend it like Beckham.

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Ballard, R. (1990). Migration and kinship: The differential effect of marriage rules on the process of Punjabi migration. In Clark, C., Peach, C., & Vertovek, S. (eds.), South Asians overseas: Contexts and communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaur, G. (2004). Reflection on Mata Gujri Ji in the context of Sahibzada'a Shaheedi and today's status of Sikh women in contemporary society. UNITED SIKHS 12/18/2004 at Chicago IFCAPS Seminar. Online: http://www.sikhwomen.com/equality/essay_status_of_sikh_women_in_contemporary_society.htm

McGivering, J. (2003). BBC World News: Online Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2668147.stm

Questing Last Frontiers: Community Development through our Drifters' Dreams

I once told my sister that in one of my future lives—should reincarnation prove true—I wish to settle in a little log cabin at the base of Mount McKinley overlooking a vast expanse of Alaskan wilderness in Monastic seclusion. There, I could meditate away my nights, roaming by day like the Desert Fathers, free to search my soul and lay bare its assets and many deficiencies before God (or in my reincarnated case, before the pantheon of Hindu idols.) Such might have been a wish of Chris McCandless, a 22 year-old traveler, the subject of John Krakauer’s masterwork of Frontier philosophique’, Into the Wild, writing of our reborn, self-cast hero’s moniker, Alexander Supertramp, who met his fate in the Alaskan tundra. Some say he met such a fate tragically with a “stupid, inconsiderate ill-preparedness that reeked of mental illness, family cruelty, and suicidality.” Krakauer disagreed, and so do I. Let’s talk about what Chris McCandless really did, what he wanted, and why the world has a problem with his method.

That fateful summer before his disappearance, Chris McCandless’s alter ego wrote a dreamy, albeit blunt letter to a friend,

Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall here from me Wayne….It might be a very long time before I return south. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.”

In my reincarnation, it’s the year 2068. My dreamy eyes survey the misty-laden landscape of this wish, where beyond a river I spot a caricature of myself—Horace Mountainman—smoking a pipe molded from clay sapped from the riverbank from which I gaze. I can smell the ominous scent of the pipe, and it reeks of death. It’s stuffed with smoking mint leaves, clover, and some poison ivy Horace mistook for thyme (silly me…or him). Alone. Our business, our vaporous lives, and our itchy, ulcerating lungs. No excuses, no explanations, no earthly attachments. Death isn’t a reality; it’s a mental possibility as probable as my likelihood of falling off the edge of the earth. My goal: to become one with God. Chris’s goal: one with nature. Two different worships, four identical outcomes: we all die before our time—Chris, Alex, Tim and Horace--and yes reader, you. Some smoke their way to the grave giving up those precious moments with kin for the high of what may be considered transcendence, dragging the searching part of ourselves with them; some spawn a contagion of calamitous carcinoma contrived in a cumulonimbus cloud of unsmokable ivy. No difference…only different paths that all lead back to potential. We cannot judge a man by his last mistake. We have to consider the heart of a man and his dreams…we have to consider what he wanted to be and the integration of the many noble aspects of our selves that make us human, that give us our potential and define our circularity.

Chris McCandless did not want to die. His moniker’s words appear to foreshadow some darker pre-ordained catastrophe, but Alex Supertramp’s letter was less a warning than sheer theatrics. He was the main character in his own drama. Who isn’t? His omen formed a published preface to what would have been his great escape, his triumphe de majestique'. Consider his final plea, posted unequivocally Chris—undoubtedly desperate, absent of Alex-intrigue:

“S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you. Chris McCandless. August ?”

Recluse or Traveler?

Chris was a Monastic, a.k.a Traveler, a.k.a Wanderer. He wasn't revered because he did anything special. There's thousands of him. He is the exemplar in Krakauer's work, and the subject here. Anti-Monastics might as well reveal their prejudices and stop reading here, but I beg your patience because you will see in Chris an aspect of yourself you might have forgotten existed.

Though he died fulfilling his dream of living in…and off the wild…he was not a recluse. He liked people; he probably just liked them about as often as I like turkey—about once or twice a year. That was then. In 2068, I see a man who gives thanks everyday, and another with an insatiable appetite for foul, plucking the feathers of a 22-pound turkey for the third time in a month. Without delusion of grandeur, Chris’s calamity does beg the question: Why up and leave without telling your family? What sort of thanks is that if not a thanks for nothing. It’s at least a gross dismissal of one’s primary connections, at best a cogent omission. I think in Chris’s case it was more the latter, for he had every expectation of returning. That was his pattern, and I am sure it was his intention; if the path of the drifter is the circuitous journey I believe it to be, logic dictates such a reunion—it also dictates renunciation, and that means the death and transformation of the self. It can be argued that this process is achieved most ardently and efficiently when no one, save one’s god and one’s self, has knowledge of the “other.” It is this “otherness” that forms the concept of “I,” and gives us separateness. If Chris was an ascetic in the true sense, the renunciation of not only family, material possessions and earthly identification was necessary, but so too was the elimination of the “I”--at least for a while, thus the emergence of his star character, Alexander Supertramp.

Anti-Map, Anti-Civilization, The Longing for a Last Frontier

Communal Monasticism is not for the faint of heart, for before transcendence can occur, it requires a self-reliance common man has become unfamiliar with. This Monastic bias of ours (Alex’s and Horace Mountainman’s) seems to be at odds with the world—as it must naturally be. If one does not follow the ethos of civilized society, if you dare regress to self-reliance—and dare I say renounce the Canon of accumulated human knowledge hefted by all who came before—if you dare to reinvent, to find your own way as our progenitors once had, you are banished—in person and in spirit—as banished as anyone who left civilization of his own accord. No difference…it is all a matter of perspective. There was a first man to discover the secret of making fire. There was a first woman who considered using a tool to do a task. There was an inventor of the wheel. These firsts occurred in isolation and became a sort of Garden of Eden foundation upon which civilization sprang. Just as some men desire a regression to the womb, some desire a regression to Eden, where first things happen and newness is not measured relative to the past—it is pure. Newsflash to you Alaskan pundits basking proudly in the salty broth of your own rustic, self-adoring ancestor-dependent knowledge—Alaska is not the last Frontier—that territory belongs to the imagination. So, and in true tolerance, let’s take a humble step back and pay our respects to the spirit of Chris McCandless and what it was that he tried to do, and to his subsequent ascetic success.

Alter-Egos

Chris’s world-depictions create at least two false versions of his character. The first has miscast him a dreamy, half-cocked greenhorn who froze and starved to death in post-adolescent angst. Yes he dreamed. He was a greenhorn by choice. Yes he died in the wilderness no doubt wrestling with an array of post-modernist issues, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Neither does the second, less sympathetic version of his trail-naiveté as described in one reader’s response to Krakauer’s original magazine article on Chris’s death:

“Over the last 15 years, I’ve run into several McCandless types in the country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble….Hardly unique, there’s quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike they are almost a collective cliché.”

The reader doesn’t cast McCandless a lone dumbass…he’s part of a collective. How gracious of the pundit to grant Chris this communal attribute, but how myopic! His judgment: Chris suffered the same delusion of grandeur that inevitably leads to a sort of self-imposed greenhorn annihilism. He continues,

“The only difference is that McCandless ended up dead with the story of his dumbassedness splashed across the media….His ignorance, which could have been cured by a…boy scout manual, is what killed him….McCandless’s contrived asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce the fault….His postcards, notes, and journals…read like the work of an above-average, somewhat histrionic high school kid—or am I missing something?”

Let me assist. We all make mistakes. One mistake is to become a sheep that believes itself a judge of the lambs. I heard tell of an Episcopalian who preached something of human interaction, defining one’s humanity by one’s connectedness with others. Is our yearning for periodic solitude somehow at odds with God’s divine intention—or with nature? Is withdrawal (i.e. monasticism, asceticism, wandering, drifting, traveling) a mental illness, or is it what I think it is—a requisite counterpart to the basic need to transcend ourselves and a lonely world and make better communities? I believe it to be what it is: an elixir for community that makes interactional harmony possible. Consider the words of Roger Miller, whose song inspired our hero:

Two years he walks the earth; no phone, no pool no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.

Miller was not singing about an alien or some monster. He was singing about the journey of becoming human, and that journey involves travel and transformation. Should we really make a snapshot judgment of people? Haven’t we learned the lesson of the old mental Institution’s collective moral authority by the folly of arresting a man for “uncontrolled passion” and “disappointed expectations”? These were points along Miller’s Road—the continuum of persons’ lives. Arrest of that nature doesn’t create justice, it destroys lives. One may make the case Chris suffered from a possible naivete while simmering in a stew of stubborn idealism, but that’s not mental illness. I didn’t mean to mistake poison ivy for thyme, but I did. If naiveté is the new uncontrolled passion, if dumbassedness is the new disappointed expectations, if bad luck and idealism, the pull to wander, the overestimation of one’s resilience, and the will to come to grips with basic wilderness is mental illness—then I am as sick as they come.

One might offer an explanation of Chris’s cogent omission of any explanation to his family by offering a generic understanding of renunciation. Renunciation is a means of re-centering one’s self through isolation. Alex Supertramp’s isolation seems a banner of finality, perhaps a sadistic goodbye, but it’s little more than a pronouncement of withdrawal pending awareness. We see this withdrawal in all of the notable ascetics, including the great teachers and the sacred divinities of the major religions. We see asceticism in many of God’s followers. Nature’s ascetics, the backpackers, are perhaps a new breed—a neo-tribe of ascetics, but nonetheless, withdrawn to commune in their own way with nature, to recenter themselves in preparation for some better idea of community.

One backpacker describes the mythos of the traveling subculture, her imagined community,

“There are many ways to choose how you travel around, and that’s the whole point of backpacking, that you aren’t committed, it’s your trip, your decision. The whole point of backpacking is to do whatever you want.”

This anthropological freedom—this lack of social, civilized control, is the draw. It, and the community that shares its ideals, gives space and opportunity for what amounts to hybridizing one’s self, to play with and form one’s own identity—one’s own name, even. It could be said that the ability to name one’s self had been recaptured by McCandless, and others like him, a clean psychosocial break that many boys are never able to make—a break that makes them men, that makes them sane.

The Necessity of the Wanderers

The Traveler Michael Palin speaks of the grander purpose of wandering, in a way cementing Chris’s behavior—not Alex’s—a necessary condition for personal and communal sanity. He writes, “Struggles, peasant pride, redemption through physical pain, the confrontation with nature that strips away sham and compromise. These are what make men sane.” These were necessary for Chris to come to realize what it was that he wanted and re-enter the earth’s inward pull. Chris kept a string tied to his family I have to believe, and it was neither he nor his family who cut that string, but chance itself.

We all understand the drive. We all just don’t approve of it. It rains in adolescence; it snows in marital strife. It is an eerie calm in what Thomas Moore calls the Dark night of the Soul. We understand it. At times, there is a need to be “somewhere else,” somewhere other than home. There is something to be gained by leaving, be it some knowledge or sheer experience. I call it transcendence. Consider the Papar, a group of 6th century Irish monks set sail from the west coast of Ireland, who risked their lives [and loves]—“and lost them in untold droves—not in the pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands in the name of any despot.” Nobel laureate Fridtjof Nansen explained,

“These remarkable voyages were undertaken chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world.”

Hardly indifferent to their own losses, the journey of the Papar simply took precedence. This need for seclusion and apparent foolhardy venture is all but unimaginable to most men, because most men are metropolitan figures. The Papar, Nansen wrote, “…were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.” The Papar sought nothing of the world but its sustenance and offered only what they desired in return, peace. This is not only the definition of a healthy community, but a shining example of what is necessary for communities to co-exist..

Resistless Quest

Beyond the spiritual inclination of the wanderer, there’s also the sheer physical thrill of travel. Krakauer described his own post-adolescent compulsion to ascend the remote mountains of Alaska and Canada in one simple phrase, “Climbing mattered.” Krakauer wanted to feel, physically, what it felt to balance on the bladelike summit of Devils Thumb, “a huge fin of exfoliated stone, dark and smeared with ice.” Krakauer writes of the ascent,

“You learn to trust your self-control. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”

In the words of James Thurber, “All men should try to learn what it is they are running from, or to, and why.” But, sometimes running, like ascending a mountain, is the point.. The reason is tied up in the inherent and often maligned drive of transcendence—that place at the tip of Maslow’s cute pyramid where we are all trying to reach, but sometimes fail—or simply fail to attempt. Reuss, a young man who attempted the ascent, like McCandless, in 1912 never to return, described the lure of the wilderness much as Krakauer described the lure of the climb and McCandless the lure of the Alaskan trail:

“I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is the best….I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”

I think there is something exclusive between what is believed to be a normal social expectation of family obligations, obligations to others needs, and this deeper personal quest that cannot coincide always at the same time. This is what Krakauer called the “unbridgeable gulf” that can develop between people—in his case, between his father and himself—and it was the same for McCandless. Krakauer writes: “I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.” Do these adventurers want people to worry about them, or are they just indifferent? This dismissal of family, the very people who claim to love you, to know you the best, who have been with you the longest and have cried for you the hardest, is perhaps the great enigma of the loner who seeks to shed the skin of his past—a skin not stained, but wet with the imprint of that family’s tears. McCandless wrote,

“Now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution….No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp.”

This self-destruction was part of his spiritual transformation—part of the character, Alexander Supertramp’s, mythos. To say that renouncing his family—or family in general—was Chris McCandless’s aim negates the process he ultimately came to realize. This can best be described as the circular wandering this author and Ken Kleight describe, of the need to become lost and then to return. Regarding Reuss, Sleight, a self-described “desert rat,” surmises an eloquent defense of this circularity,

“[He]…was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A lot of us are like that—I’m like that…and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again….But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”

Near the end of what McCandless believed was his stay in Alaska, he marked a passage from Tolstoy’s Family Happiness that moved him. Perhaps it spoke for Chris. I believe it bespoke his potential. It read,

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet, secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done for them….“[And] then work, which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps—what more can the heart of a man desire?”

Seems an about face, but it’s not.. It is McCandless the Traveler returning to something that he always had, and never lost.. It was the idea of family. It’s Horace the Mountainman recovering from his lung cancer to walk across the river and back to his home and family. Though the idea of family is often tainted and distorted as if it’s a far-away city envisioned from the midst of a hazy, baked desert, the real image is there. When the sandstorm clears and one walks a while, the reality of the concept becomes apparent in true transcendent al fashion. Once clear, the gulf subsides, as well, and the city—as well as its purpose—comes into perfect focus.

Krakauer concludes neither he nor McCandless wanted to die in their ascents, in their journeys home. The driving force to leave was simple, Krakauer writes:

“I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.”

The face of God has always been attractive to man, in all its glorious metaphors, and equally as repulsive. Just as that which drives us compels us to climb, wander, and meditate, it drives one to return to his community and be one with each the other.

I like to think that in Chris’s last days he read Tolstoy and realized the potential of what he could become, and that the smiling picture Chris took of himself in his last days bore the realization that he had come full circle, had realized the importance of family, and held tight to the dream that family would someday realize the importance of the travel. I like to think that his happy expression in that picture was an apology and a gift to his sister.
Carine, upon hearing of her brother’s death, said, “I wanted some answers from God, but I didn’t get any.” Her mother Billie decried, “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances. I just don’t understand it at all.”

Perhaps there is nothing of peace to offer a grieving family but the mythos that drives the travelers. It is a source of happiness beyond simple understanding. Krakauer’s book is extraordinary because he not only placed a spotlight on an otherwise ordinary traveler, he walked in his shoes and laid the groundwork for a deeper understanding, and dare I say appreciation, for those that want to break ground but can only pretend trailblaze. Sadly, sometimes our dreams cost us. But we cannot deny Chris died doing what he loved. His only regret, I am sure he came to realize, was dying alone.

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Utilized and Recommended Readings

Wilson, J. & Richards, G. (2004). Backpacker Icons: Influential Literary Nomads in the Formation of Backpacker Identities. In, The Global Nomad: Backpacker Travel in Theory and in Practice. Channel View Publications: UK, Frankfurt.

Miller, D.E. (1977) The Wing-Footed Wanderer: Conscience and Transcendence. Abingdon Press.

Thoreau, H.D. (2007). Walden, or Life in the Woods. Castle Books.