But McCandless’s July 30th journal entry couldn’t have been more explicit: “ EXTREMELY WEAK. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable. Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for analysis. So I sent some Hedysarum alpinum seeds I’d collected near the bus to Dr. It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea.
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In the book, Kari explicitly warns that because wild sweet pea closely resembles wild potato, and “is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food.” And then she explains precisely how to distinguish the two plants from one another. He wrote his diary on blank pages in the back of an exhaustively researched field guide to the region’s edible plants, “Tanaina Plantlore / Dena’ina K’et’una: An Ethnobotany of the Dena’ina Indians of Southcentral Alaska,” by Priscilla Russell Kari. I attributed his death to this blunder.Īs I began expanding my article into a book and had more time to ponder the evidence, however, it struck me as extremely unlikely that he’d failed to tell the two species apart. Because the wild potato was universally believed to be safe to eat, in this article I speculated that McCandless had mistakenly consumed the seeds of the wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii-a plant thought to be toxic, and which is hard to distinguish from Hedysarum alpinum. Working on a tight deadline, I researched and wrote an eighty-four-hundred-word piece, published in January, 1993.
When McCandless’s body was found in the Alaskan bush, Outside magazine asked me to write about the puzzling circumstances of his demise. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he’d run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. GREAT JEOPARDY.” Before this entry, there was nothing in the journal to suggest that he was in dire straits, although his photos show he’d grown alarmingly gaunt. On July 30th, McCandless wrote in his journal, “ EXTREMELY WEAK. As the columnist Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News in 2007, Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death. But I’ve also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation.
I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner’s report, was starvation. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat.
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A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days.
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