Through the end of the twentieth century, the romance of the outsider remained a compelling tool of white middle-class self-invention, especially for men. Alienated young middle-class whites continued to fall in love with fantasies of black difference and black culture. For white young people of privilege, hip-hop in the 1980s and early 1990s worked much as rock and roll had in the 1950s. Other alienated middle-class whites followed the path of the Jesus People in rejecting secular popular culture and liberalized religious practices and turning to conservative faiths. Some became Christian evangelicals, but others converted to Orthodox Judaism or fundamentalist forms of Islam. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, these acts of opposition had grown so common that people who performed them barely registered as outsiders at all. White youth who loved black music and white adults who became more religious than their parents ceased to surprise or shock other Americans. What had been forms of rebellion turned into new norms.
A relationship rather than a fixed set of characteristics, the outsider was never an easy persona to live. By the end of the twentieth century, the popularity of outsiders and rebels among white middle-class Americans made finding the edge, the boundary where outside began and inside ceased, increasingly difficult. Christopher McCandless and Timothy Treadwell both went looking for that line, that far-out and always moving place where a white middle-class man could still be an outsider. Both men pushed the rebel romance as far as the fantasy could go, to its logical extreme. In death, they became famous for their rebellion, their lives as outsiders the subjects of books and films and fan Web sites. Like the fictional Holden Caulfield long before them, they ran away from society and ended up as compelling symbols of what they had been avoiding and yet also somehow seeking. At the individual level, McCandless’s and Treadwell’s stories reveal the dangers inherent in the refusal to recognize the contradictions between the desire for individual autonomy and for grounding and connection.
In August 1992, Christopher McCandless died alone in a 1940s Fairbanks city bus on the edge of Denali National Park. No one who knew his real name had heard from him in over two years. McCandless wanted it that way. He had destroyed his identification and told people who met him that his name was just “Alex.” And yet he also wanted to be known. The rigid rules of anonymity and self-reliance he had developed in his years of tramping did not stop himfrom keeping a record of his adventures. Among the few things he carried into the Alaskan wilderness were a camera, film, and Walden. Like Thoreau, McCandless anticipated an audience for his solitary experiment in self-reliance.1
Sometime that spring, on a piece of plywood covering a broken window, McCandless scrawled a description of how and why he had come to live in the bus where his body would later be found: “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.” There, in Alaska, he was living “the final and greatest adventure,” “the climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.” “No longer to be poisoned by the civilization he flees,” he “walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.” The possessions his siblings later recovered from Alaskan authorities included the documents in which he recorded his experiences: five rolls of exposed film containing many self-portraits and a diary of 113 short entries written across the last two pages of a book on the region’s edible plants.
Before hitching to Alaska, McCandless left with a friend and former employer, Wayne Westerberg, a journal filled with descriptions and photographs of his earlier adventures in South Dakota. In it, for example, he described what happened after his car broke down in the Arizona desert in July 1990. He took photos as he buried most of his belongings and burned all his money. And he described his feelings of exhilaration and freedom. That fall, he sent a postcard to Westerberg praising his wandering life and complaining about the money he had earned working for his friend: “My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage for my next meal. I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it are too good to pass up.” Journal entries describe how that winter, McCandless paddled a used aluminum canoe down the Colorado River all the way to the Gulf of California, living on five pounds of rice and whatever he could catch.
By the time McCandless left home in 1990, the simple act of seeking salvation outside human society no longer registered as very oppositional. It too had become a new norm. McCandless used more radical actions, like burning his money and refusing to carry adequate supplies, to challenge himself and secure his rebel status. Postcards and journals revealed McCandless carefully and consciously cultivating a rebel persona. They provided the context that enabled journalists, filmmakers, and the fans who posted bus pilgrimage videos online to fit the smart and resilient young man who starved to death within a few miles of a well-stocked ranger station into the long history of the rebel romance.
The same summer McCandless died in Alaska, another alienated white man spent the first of what would become thirteen consecutive summers living with the wildlife in Katmai National Park in the southwestern part of the state. Timothy Treadwell, too, traveled to what he imagined as the edge to heal and reinvent himself. While McCandless refused to plan for the basic necessities of human survival, Treadwell rejected the boundary between humans and wild animals. Both men craft ed rebel personas by ignoring the basic rules of wilderness survival.2
Treadwell did not share McCandless’s rigid code of anonymity. He paid for his “expeditions,” as he called his adventures, with the money from his 1997 memoir, Among the Grizzlies, and public appearances. Like McCandless, he changed his name—he was born Timothy Dexter—and did not seem to need much contact with people. He spent the majority of his time in Alaska alone with the bears. He also recorded his experiences and his carefully constructed rebel persona in journals and, for his last five years, on a digital video camera. He too anticipated an audience for the story of a life lived beyond human society.3
His transformation began, in his telling, on his first trip to Alaska, when he had a life-changing encounter with a bear. In one version, he fell into a river and got caught in some rapids, and a bear, also trapped, showed him the path to shore. In another version, a nearby bear unexpectedly charged him from the brush. They locked eyes. “The encounter was like looking into a mirror,” Treadwell remembered. “I gazed into the face of a kindred soul, a being that was potentially lethal, but in reality was just as frightened as I was.” Whatever actually happened, for Treadwell it was a kind of conversion experience. In one of his last few summers, he filmed himself describing this transformation. He had been a “big drinker,” but his encounter with the bears set him on a different path: “I promised the bears. If I would look after them, would they please help me be a better person. They’ve become so inspirational, and the foxes too.” The bears saved him, he claimed, by giving him a life.
Treadwell carried his empathy for the bears to the extreme. He refused to use electric bear fences around his camp or carry pepper spray because he believed these precautions were not “fair to the bears.” He practiced bear moves and sounds and ate raw fresh fish like a bear. Some of the people he encountered in the park claim he acted like a bear, snorting and growling at them. Closely following the bears through two habitats he called “Big Green” and the “Grizzly Maze,” Treadwell filmed himself singing to them, dancing for them, and even petting some of them. He gave the giant predators the kind of names kids would give their teddy bears: Cupcake, Booble, and Ms. Goodbear. He even choked up over a pile of “poop” still warm from the body of Wendy, the mother of his favorite bear, Downey. “Everything about them is perfect,” he tells his camera, as he cups his hands lovingly around the steaming pile of excrement. In response to a friend who repeatedly warned him about his reckless behavior, he replied, “God forbid, if a bear takes me, let him go.” Leaving for the bush every year, he always grinned as he told another friend, “If I don’t come back, this is what I love doing.” 4
Alternately goofy, childlike, and vain, Treadwell in his videos speaks in a singsong, little-boy voice and shift s between reportage and confession. Sometimes he appears melodramatic and sentimental. He cries on camera, seemingly overcome by what he calls his “love” for these animals. “Downey is seven years old, and I’ve known her since she was a spring pup, like she was my own sister,” he says, narrating as he shoots footage of a bear walking around in the grass behind him. “And we’ve been here together.” He looks at the bear and continues, “You are the most beautiful thing.” Then he turns back to face the camera and says, crying, “And I will care for her. I will live for her. I will die for her.” In another shot, he pets one of the foxes that he encourages to share his campsite. “I love you. I love you so much,” he says. “Th ank you for being my friend.” Then he turns his face away from his camera, overcome with emotion. Treadwell claimed to know “the language of the bear.” He repeatedly said, “I am one of them.” In his rants against the National Park Service, he chants, “Animals rule.” In Treadwell’s footage, the bears keep their side of the bargain, though he never actually has to protect them since he never meets any poachers, at least when he has his camera. He in turn is reborn: “I am so wild, so free, so like a child with these animals.”
Over his summers in Alaska, Treadwell came to identify with bears so completely that he transformed the grizzlies into fantastical hybrid creatures, made up mostly out of his projections and wildly anthropomorphic interpretations of their behavior. He understood his bears’ thoughts and behavior, which he explained frequently in his film footage. He could live with them, he argued, because he alone loved them enough to understand them and to become them. In his last letter to ecologist Marnie Gaede, he wrote, “I have to mutually mutate into a wild animal to handle the life I live out here.” The grizzlies played these fantasy bear roles. Connecting with these bear fictions, Treadwell could play his dream roles too. He could forget he was human.
The bears did not forget. As Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, a girlfriend who had spent parts of the last three summers with him and the bears, were breaking down their camp—the pilot was scheduled to pick them up midday— an older male bear attacked Treadwell just outside the tent. Amazingly, either Treadwell or Huguenard somehow turned on the already capped and packed video camera. It recorded audio for six minutes as the bear mauled and killed them both. Helicopter pilot Sam Egli, hired to help clean up the pillaged campsite and transport the bodies and gear, still had trouble describing the scene long after the event. Park rangers had to kill the bear to get into the camp. In its stomach, they found human remains: “We hauled four garbage bags of people out of that bear.” Treadwell, in his view, “was acting like he was working with people wearing bear costumes out there, instead of wild animals.”
Like McCandless, Treadwell made the choice to try to live on the margins. He carried the romance of the outsider as far as it would go.
At these extremes, the romance of the outsider fails to work as a way of life. While psychological issues—depression, personality disorders, and addictions—clearly play a role in fueling the oppositional behaviors of individuals, rebellion has a social and cultural dimension as well. McCandless and Treadwell did not invent the personas in which they acted out their alienation. They did not invent the lens through which journalists and filmmakers interpreted their lives. And they did not invent the context in which many readers and viewers continue to be fascinated by their stories.
The romance of the outsider fails here too, at the level of collective fantasy. It fails, paradoxically, because for some people it works only too well. The lure of the outsider romance is that it enables white middle-class Americans to experience at the imaginary level the social and historical connections that contemporary life erodes at the material level. Fantasies about the “authenticity” of blacks—whether a white middle-class American identifies with civil rights workers, folk singers, or hip-hop stars—derail the hard task of working with actual African Americans to build equality. Fantasies about the corruption of money and the morality of the poor deflect attention from the hard work of creating a system of economic justice. Fantasies about the purity and morality of religious codes and practices at odds with the modern world and particularly with more equitable gender relations block serious discussion of the issues facing contemporary families.5
The romance of the outsider works because it denies at the imaginary level the contradictions between the human fantasy of absolute individual autonomy and the human need for grounding in historical and contemporary social connections. It works because it enables Americans with political and economic power to disavow that power. The time has come to make a new romance.