Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

The other day I was flipping through a notebook from college, seeing how many pages I had used up taking notes (not very many). But then I got to reading what notes there were, and inspired by what I read (yeah, I know: by my own class notes) I pulled this book off the shelf and read it over again.

I have read all three of Krakauer's full length books, and this is, without qualification, my favourite. The journey of Chris McCandless fascinated me from the moment I read the book's cover, and he has never entirely left my thoughts since.

For those of you who have not read the book, you should. At the risk of courting a charge of pretension (not that it would be a first) I would say that Into the Wild is an important book. Certainly it was important for me when I first read it, and it held up very well through a second reading.

The book opens with the discovery of a young man's body by moose hunters in Alaska. Krakauer, initially commissioned by Outside magazine and then driven further by his own fascination with the story, traces the journey of this Chris McCandless from his privileged life in suburban Virginia to his lonely death in the Alaskan bush, with as much detail as he can discover of the in-between. It is not a journey you will easily forget.

In the years since I first read it, this book has continued to be active in my mind, and the questions it raised are still there as I search for the answers in my own soul.

Son calls father

My son called me at work today.

Now, given that he is 16 months old, I should probably note that he did technically call me, not by himself. I answered the phone in my cubicle, and my wife said simply: "Your son wants to talk to you."

Apparently what he actually wanted to do was listen to me, and I obliged him, chatting brightly to the expectant silence at the other end of the line. I asked him about his day, what new things he had learned or discovered, whether he had eaten anything. After a few minutes of this my wife came on the other extension. She explained that stretched as tall as he could, reached the phone cord and pull it off the hook onto the floor. This feat accomplished, he held the handset in both hands, looked at my wife eagerly and said "Da?" repeatedly until she dialled me up and put him on the line.

It is hard being away from family all day as I am. It is suddenly that much harder now that he actually misses me when I am absent. It is both touching and devastating, depending on which end of the day I am on.