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. I filled a one-gallon bag with more than a pound of seeds in less than thirty minutes. When I visited the bus in July, 1993, wild-potato plants were growing everywhere I looked in the surrounding taiga. One of his photos depicts a one-gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with these seeds. On July 14th, he started harvesting and eating Hedysarum alpinum seeds as well. The diary and photographs recovered with McCandless’s body indicated that, beginning on June 24, 1992, the roots of the Hedysarum alpinum plant became a staple of his daily diet. To appreciate the brilliance of Hamilton’s investigative work, some backstory is helpful. 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. 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. If you feel you have been unfairly banned, message the moderators to discuss it.From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days.
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