Bus 142
I had read about the bus before I ever stood in front of one. On the flights and the long evenings before the trip, I worked my way through Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s account of Christopher McCandless. He was the young man who gave away his savings, walked out of his comfortable life, and travelled across North America until, in 1992, he ventured alone into the Alaskan wilderness and did not come back. He died in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail, a boy of twenty-four, having found the thing he was looking for and been unable to leave it.
So I was not prepared, arriving at 49th State Brewing in Healy, to find the bus sitting right there.
It is the one built for the film, a faithful copy of the green and white Fairbanks transit bus that McCandless called home in his last months. I stopped walking. There were not many people about, and that surprised me more than anything. A thing like this, with a whole book and a film and a young man’s death behind it, sat in the open with hardly a soul giving it a glance.
I climbed the steps and went inside. They had put up photographs along the walls: McCandless, the trail, the bus as it really stood out in the wild. I read each one slowly. The same narrow space, the same small stove, the windows looking out on what was here only a parking lot but there, on the real trail, had been a wilderness with no way back. I wondered why an asset like this, heavy with so much meaning, should be left lying around so quietly, with no one to attend to it.
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That, I think, is the strange weight of it. I had flown here. I had a hotel, a rental car, a return ticket in my bag, a phone with my family one tap away. McCandless came to lose all of that on purpose: to strip his life down to nothing and stand in the wild with no return ticket at all. He went looking for the very thing I had carefully insured myself against.
The mountains I had been calling beautiful all week were the same mountains that had killed him.
I did not go into the restaurant. I sat outside instead, on a wooden bench, and looked up at the rain clouds gathering grey over the hills. The bus stayed where it was, going nowhere, a copy of a place where a real boy had once been entirely, finally alone.
I was glad of my return ticket. I was also, for a moment, a little ashamed of how glad I was.
