The Wild Truth (19 page)

The wake played out as programmed. Friends and neighbors filed into my parents’ home to make the rounds and give their condolences. They ate fine finger foods and lingered on the decks overlooking Chesapeake Bay. Unasked questions floated in with the breeze off the water and circulated amongst careful discussion.

I was up in the loft at one point during the gathering and heard my mother’s voice rise with a lift I had not heard in days. She wanted me to come down to see Chris’s friend Brian Paskowitz. Brian had been a neighbor on Willet Drive, a kindhearted but tough kid with a bulky football player’s build, noticeable especially next to Chris’s slim runner’s physique. While I was still in grade school, Chris and Brian went to Frost junior high together. On every fair-weather day, after the bus dropped them off at the corner of Braeburn and Willet, right in front of Brian’s house, the boys would sit in his front yard and practice their French horns, waiting for me to come walking home from Canterbury Woods Elementary. I would sit and listen for a while, and when it was time to go home, Chris would carry anything heavy I was lugging along with his horn.

Though my memories of Brian were vivid, I hadn’t seen him in several years. I ran down the stairs, eager to greet him. When I walked into the kitchen, he was on his knees, weeping hysterically. I tried to calm him with rehearsed words of reassurance that felt hollow on my breath, but his keening was inexorable. At that moment, seeing his raw emotion break out in the midst of my family’s performance, I was forced to acknowledge that my brother really was dead. He was dead and never coming back.

Not long after, several of Chris’s college friends arrived, including a couple of guys I remembered hearing him mention: Josh Marshall and Lloyd McBean. Lloyd had been Chris’s roommate and closest friend during his sophomore and junior years at Emory. Having them there was a welcome diversion. I brought them to the dining room to view the photographic display of Chris’s life. I smiled and pointed to different pictures and shared anecdotes, giving a varnished account of their friend’s life before they knew him. Lloyd followed directly beside me with an air of circumspection, listening to everything I had to say. He studied the photographs carefully. Then he raised his eyes, looked directly into mine, and with an expression that appeared to be wrestling sadness and anger, said to me slowly, “Chris would hate this.”

Compliant Carine crumbled. Of course Lloyd was right. Chris wouldn’t have wanted to be memorialized this way, or perhaps at all. If he had, it likely would have looked much different.

But, for the day, I was an automaton, submitting Chris’s very private persona for examination by many who had never even met him, on assignment from those who didn’t even understand him. I noticed how many of my parents’ neighbors and friends were there compared to people who really knew and loved Chris. I understood exactly what Lloyd was saying to me, and I envied his freedom to express it.

THE NEXT MORNING
the poster boards were replaced with fine china and fresh linens. My siblings and their spouses remained at the town house with Fish and me. We passed the scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon in silence. Fresh fruit and pastries were piled up on silver trays. It felt wrong to have this abundance of food traveling across the same surface that twelve hours earlier had displayed images of my brother slowly starving to death.

Mom didn’t eat much. She stared at the plate in front of her and scattered the food around the edges.

“I think the reception went very well,” she said softly.

“Absolutely, Billie,” Dad concurred.

“Everyone was so kind and forgiving of Chris for what he’s done to this family,” she continued.

“Excuse me?” I about choked on my eggs. “What did you just say?”

My mother’s eyes, wide and hurt, met mine. She was expecting pity. The compassion I felt the day before evaporated.

I looked straight back at her and sternly asked, “Do you want to talk about why he left?” Then I turned to my dad. “Do you?”

I knew my siblings were willing to have the conversation. That didn’t mean we
wanted
to. We felt weakened, exhausted—sad for Billie and Walt, and for ourselves—but we all sat up to attention, ready to defend our fallen comrade if necessary.

Mom didn’t say anything. She just looked down and continued moving her food around on the plate. Dad acted as if he hadn’t heard. There would be no battle today. The table fell silent again.

I RETURNED TO VIRGINIA BEACH
with Chris’s paperback books and a few other items that Mom and Dad had decided Chris would want me to have. Although I did not feel the need to have his things with me to feel close to him, they were precious cargo. I would look through his books from time to time, paying close attention to the passages that he had underlined and his notes in the margins. In the back of
Tanaina Plantlore,
a field guide to edible plants, he kept a brief, abridged journal of his days.
He was planning to stay a long time,
I thought, noting how carefully he’d conserved space; typically, there was nothing brief about Chris’s writing once he got going. He spoke about wanting to write a book someday, and so documenting important specifics from his experiences made complete sense.

On Day 43, his entry read: “MOOSE!” He’d successfully taken one down, and with only a .22, but over the following days, he recorded his difficulty preserving the meat. On Day 48, he wrote, “Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life.” The following day he was clearly still chastising himself, because he wrote, “Must revamp my soul and regain deliberate consciousness. Trying to salvage what can of moose, but henceforth will learn to accept my errors, however great they be.” I thought about Mom telling us how Grandpa Loren, an experienced hunter, had cried every time he had to shoot a deer to feed his family. I wondered if Chris had thought about this, too, as he agonized over the disrespect of killing the animal without purpose.

One of the entries that affected me the most was on Day 69: “Rained in. River looks impossible. Lonely, scared.” He had tried to leave. On Day 67, he recorded that he’d departed the bus. He’d planned to return the same way he’d come. But after a two-day trek back to the Teklanika River, he found that the waters he had simply waded through ten weeks prior were now wide and raging with the snowmelt brought by summer. It haunted me. He had tried to come back. It would have happened around the beginning of July, as I was anticipating my trip to New York for Shelly’s wedding.

I also noticed how celebratory his entry was when he reached a particular milestone. “Day 100! Made it!” he wrote. That had been a goal, clearly. But it was accompanied by several entries about how weakened he was. Those were the hardest for me to look at.

In his tattered copy of Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago,
Chris had highlighted a paragraph that read, in part:

Chris had written, in the same block-letter format he always used when he felt something was of principal importance:

HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED

Given my awareness and understanding of Chris’s deep beliefs in self-reliance, his warning that I was the only one who could make myself truly happy, and the great comfort I knew he took in the purity of nature rather than from human relationships, these words from him surprised me. Was he actually missing the communal feel of the society he had shrugged aside for its conformity? Had he felt regret for leaving home the way he did? Could he possibly have been thinking about our parents and trying again to find some resolution with them? My reflections were in total discord with the finality of the statements Chris had proclaimed in his last letters to me. Up to this point it had never occurred to me that he felt regret over anything he’d done.

Then, as I turned the page, I saw there was more, and any discrepancies between Chris’s jotting about shared happiness and his final letters to me fell away. He’d written, also in block letters:

RELATIONSHIPS
: THOSE
REAL
/ THOSE FALSE

No one but Chris could know why he wrote these specific things. But I saw these powerful notes, when put together, as both hopeful and cautionary.

DURING THE FIRST PEW MONTHS
after Chris’s death, I witnessed some changes within my parents that I was confident were reconnecting us in a positive way. Though I had questioned their motivations in looking for Chris when he’d disappeared, their grief now was unmistakably real. My mother was losing weight while my father gained. Their eyes were gaunt and tired. Whether or not they actually took responsibility for the loss of Chris, they were suffering. I was suffering, too, so I felt closer to them than ever before.

At home one day I received a call from a writer who identified himself as Jon Krakauer. He was working on an article about Chris for
Outside
magazine, and wanted to know if I would talk to him. I was conflicted about the idea.

I wanted to know what Chris’s life was like after he left Emory, where he had been, what all he had done, and here was a journalist willing to find some answers. But Chris had had a very private nature, and I feared him being exploited, which I was quick to inform Jon during our short interview. The cause of my trepidation, however, I did not explain to him on the phone that day.

The article Jon wrote for
Outside
received an extraordinary amount of attention and generated more mail to their offices than any other article in the magazine’s history. This was as much a surprise to Jon as it was to my family, which increased his already strong desire to explore Chris’s story further. The next time I heard from Jon was in May of 1993. He had just made a formal agreement with my parents to expand his efforts into a book, and asked if he could come to Virginia Beach to interview me at greater length. I was cautious.

Since it was my parents who had granted him permission to tell Chris’s story, I doubted that much of the truth would be told. I was also unsure how much
should
be shared. I still held out hope that my parents would see the error of their ways and regret the course of events that had led to a story at all. In the end, I agreed to at least meet with Jon in person. He was not very well known, and I didn’t understand why he felt that there would be enough public interest in Chris’s life and death to write an entire book about it, much less sell many of them. I doubted that anyone beyond our own family or the occasional reader of
Outside
would even pick it up.

Jon Krakauer flew to Virginia to interview me at the new house Fish and I had recently finished building. Upon meeting him, I was struck with an unexpected sense of trust of the kind that only comes from having years of history with someone. He seemed much like I would have expected Chris to be in his late thirties. He wasn’t particularly tall, and he had a wiry yet quite muscular build that he did not make any effort, visual or otherwise, to boast about. His hair was dark, like Chris’s, though his eyes were lighter. Overall, though, his similarities to Chris were more internal. He had an inquisitive nature that seemed to be in constant conflict with skepticism.

There was not much public information on Jon to be found. I had learned only that he was a literary, journalistic-style writer and an active outdoorsman, highly respected within the obscure world of first-rate climbers.

Although Jon had a reserved demeanor, I could almost see the current of fervent energy flowing behind his eyes. The mystery surrounding my brother’s story was one that seemed to intrigue him to a point of obsession, but in a very private way.

He never asked me directly, but I could discern from Jon’s questions that he believed there was much more to Chris’s story than he had previously been told. He wanted to know about our family dynamics from my perspective. I recognized his intense quest for truth. At first, I spoke vaguely around the issues he was attempting to dissect, but this strategy did not last long. Not because I was unable to speak in soft circles around the specifics of our childhood—I had been doing that for years—but because, for the first time, I felt obligated to tell the truth. I had kept so much private, and even the notion of coming clean about our family history offered me a sense of relief.

I trusted that Jon wanted honest answers for the right reasons. I told him about Walt’s coinciding “marriages.” I told him about the awful fights, the manipulations, the violence. As I treaded into the unexplored territory of exposing the reality of our past, I became more and more comfortable with Jon. Resolute, I explained that truth was of paramount importance to Chris—and why that was. In Chris’s own words, there was “nothing more crucial to a pure and happy existence.” I wanted to honor and do justice to Chris, and I felt I could only do that by describing everything in the most finite detail, telling Jon the whole story so he could represent Chris fully, even if not explicitly.

Jon was grateful to my parents for allowing him to delve into the mystery of Chris’s journey, and he was also sensitive to their pain. But I perceived an even stronger obligation within him to understand Chris and be fair to him. He was clearly not party to what I feared might be my parents’ agenda.

While I told him almost everything, I asked that he keep much of it private. I still wanted to protect my parents from full exposure in case they could change for the better. I wanted to spare my siblings from having to deal with the painful mess of our family history in a public way. We spoke about the delicate line we would need to define and walk together. He would quote me describing my relationship with my parents as “extremely good,” and at the time, I hadn’t stopped believing that it could be.

Just as Jon was preparing to head back to the airport, I felt an overwhelming reassurance come over me. I decided to let him read Chris’s letters, which I had never shared with anyone else—not my parents, not Fish, not my closest friend, not even my siblings. I would not let Jon make copies or take any photographs of the letters. He was restricted to handwritten notes only.