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Dilip D'Souza

The Agitation always stays

There were times, in those days I spent walking across the Masoala Peninsula in Madagascar, when I could not stop the tears welling up in my eyes. The straps on my pack seemed to have cut grooves in my shoulders; my knees ached steadily; my thighs screamed for relief. Worse than those was the feeling from my feet. With each step, my socks felt more like sandpaper, my soles got rawer, the next step loomed with the promise of greater agony. Pain apart, our destination each day managed somehow to remain always just a little bit farther on. Often I'd shy away from asking how far; I was that afraid of the answer.

As I trudged on, the tears would start flowing; tears of anger, frustration and pain. Without a doubt, this was the hardest thing, physically, I had ever set myself to do. The tears were asking me why I was doing it, mocking my grand reasons, my romantic notions of what this trip would be like. And some indeterminate time later, we'd arrive at a tiny village; I'd fall flat on my back and into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

The next day, it would all start again.

And yet, and yet, when the trip was done, when I look back on it today, I know for certain; given the chance to do it again, I would not hesitate for a fraction of a second. I'd be there, sweating, angry, in pain, in tears -- but trudging along. Because I remember, too, the exhilaration. I remember, too, what drove me there.

When I went to Madagascar, it was after some years during which I had been fighting a vague and growing unease. I couldn't help feeling that everything in my life had come to me -- and kept on coming -- just a little too easily. Through school and my university degrees, I had done just enough to get by: which meant that if I had not performed particularly badly, I had not done too well either. I had dropped in and out of five different jobs over 8 years, never finding it hard to either find a new one or leave the old one. If I was recognised for something I did one year, I was asked to quit another year. Again, without a whole lot of effort, I had muddled through all those jobs.

In fact, it was more than just college and my work. My whole life, I began thinking, was much the same. Very little in it really challenged me. I was sailing along comfortably. Easily. Too easily. I had no reason to complain, but the strange thing was, that itself was making me uneasy. As the years rolled on, the unease got increasingly difficult to quell.

I think that's why I found myself in Madagascar, struggling across that remote peninsula and through other tough times too. I should say: tough for me. I imagine regular hikers will not find the Masoala trek difficult. But for me, I knew nothing I had ever done, all my life, had come close to being as difficult.

And that, I know now if I didn't then, was the point. I was there because I wanted, more than anything else, to prove to myself that it didn't always have to be easy. I wanted to find, and overcome, a challenge like I had not ever seen before. I had to exorcise, once and for all, that gnawing unease.

All these thoughts flooded into my mind two weeks ago as I read an intense, remarkable book about an intense, remarkable young man. Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild had me actively wishing, as I turned the pages compulsively, that I would not reach the last one. I didn't want the book to end. And when it did, I was left brooding for days. It has been years since I have been as deeply touched by a book.

Into the Wild traces the story of Christopher McCandless, a 24 year old who vanished days after he graduated from Atlanta's Emory University in 1990. His family heard nothing from or of him for over two years. Until, in September 1992, he turned up -- deep in Denali National Park in Alaska, dead of starvation. From an laconic journal McCandless had kept, from five rolls of film found with him, and by following a trail of lives he had touched in travelling across the American West, Krakauer pieces together what happened to this sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent man in those two years.

Essentially, McCandless gave up his previous life and turned into a tramp; hitchhiking thousands of miles, doing odd jobs, living among the men and women who drift along the margins of society. At one point, apparently on an impulse, he bought himself a used aluminium boat and paddled down the Colorado River, across the border into Mexico and to the sea. He spent a month on a deserted beach, subsisting on no more than five pounds of rice and the fish he was able to catch.

This vagrant life climaxed in April 1992, when McCandless set off for what, to him, was to be his greatest test, his finest moment. He walked into the Alaskan wilderness, intent on surviving there alone. Though he seems to have been aware that the experience might kill him, he also seems to have been exhilarated to be embarking on his great Alaskan odyssey. 'I now walk into the wild,' he wrote to a friend as he left. Sadly, the Odyssey ended less than four months later: in illness, starvation and death.

In writing the book, Krakauer tries to understand McCandless, to ask why he would choose to so spectacularly renounce a comfortable upper-middle-class life. I won't tell you the answers Krakauer comes up with: you should read it.

But Into The Wild is compelling perhaps most of all because of the parallels Krakauer sees, in his own life, to McCandless's tragedy. Seeking an escape from the comfortable existence that might easily -- too easily -- have been his, Krakauer had deliberately sought out dangerous, difficult challenges earlier in his life. In the book, he tells us about one of them in slow, wrenching detail.

'As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards,' Krakauer writes 'I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals ... (But) I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.'

I brooded over those words for a long time, conscious of the chords they were striking within me. Now I was unlike either McCandless or Krakauer in many other important regards. I didn't have the intensity or the heedlessness; not the intellect and ideals either. Hard as I found that trek to complete, it wasn't remotely as difficult or dangerous as the experiences they had had.

For these reasons, I don't want to overdo the comparisons.

But I couldn't help making them. Into The Wild set off faint echoes in my mind, of my travels in Madagascar: enough that the book affected me more than I thought possible. I think I know what Krakauer meant when he wrote of the 'agitation of the soul.' I think I felt some of it too, before Madagascar and Masoala.

I answered a lot of questions for myself in Masoala. But I never did exorcise the unease, that 'agitation of the soul.' Instead, I learned, through the tears, to welcome unease. To know that it should not, cannot, be either quelled or exorcised. I came to understand those feelings, to recognise that they can be a driving force. That lesson, alone, was worth the pain.

I like to think, as I give in to the temptation of comparisons, that Chris McCandless found some answers too. I like to think they were similar to mine. I will never know, of course. Unlike mine, McCandless's 'agitation of the soul' left him dead. Almost certainly at peace with himself, as Krakauer tells us, but dead.

There's another lesson there, I'm sure. I'm trying to decide what it is.

RELATED LINK:
Masoala Men

Dilip D'Souza