HOME : A JOURNEY
A general defined concept for home is where one stays.
A person would describe his home as a place where he goes back after a hard days work.
if we enlarge this canvas, home can be a place where one spends a large deal of time. As a kid I was taught that schools are our second homes. In a way it was true. Going to school was enjoyable, it was a place where I learned, a place where I had a family, a family I made for myself, often termed as friends. Though this was the case with a dual home for me, subconsciously I had a very clichéd idea for home. A physical space where I lived. A place where I was with my parents and siblings. A place where I kept all my belongings. But a part of always kept on wondering as to how does a gypsy describe his home.
A home is a construction of memories which one will cherish all through his life. Memories have a very deep impact on our behavior and thoughts. The memories of home may be happy or sad but remembering home when we are away from it is what makes us feel happy about it. If this memory of home is nothing but grief and sorrow. A memory that is a trauma to his childhood. This memory is might not be the best one to be remembered. This is not the home that one would choose willingly.
The life of Christopher Johnson Mccandless narrates a similar story. As a child Chris had to suffer from tremendous trauma of his parents fighting. Eventually it came to the point where staying together was not an option for his parents. Chris and his sister had to choose who they had to live with. No twelve year old can answer that question. The two cried their eyes out. The divorce never happened but it led Chris to shut out from the lives of his parents. He stopped giving any importance as to what the fights were about or if his parents were splitting up.
This was one of the many reasons that led him to live his, so called “home”. Christopher had a very strong moral code which he would follow and relate people with it. He was free of possession. He eventually got rid of the things that hold a materialistic value. He donated all his life’s savings to an orphanage and burnt all the cash he had. He explains that Money makes people cautious. It makes feel a if the have power. Home is one the prime institutions that hold a materialistic value which we confuse with emotional attachment. This feeling is nothing but possessiveness.
The constant fights gave rise to hypocrisy. His parents started hiding things from each other. They started to pretend that they were happy together. Chris hated this phony attitude more than anything in the world.
On his graduation day Chris quotes to his sister a few lines by Sharon Olds from the book “ The gold cell” which is highly relevant to their lives and the lives of their parents.
“I see hem standing at the former gates of their college. I see my father standing under the ocher sandstone arch. The red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head. I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the rot iron gates still open behind her, with its soar-tips black in the may air. They’re about to graduate. They’re about to get married. They are kid. They are dumb. All they know is that they are innocent. They would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say ‘STOP!, Don’t do it. She is the wrong women, he is the wrong man. You are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do. You are going to do bad things to children. You are going to suffer in the ways you’ve never heard of. You are going to want to die.’ I want to go upto them in the late may sunlight and say it. But I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them like male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hip like chips of flint as if it would draw sparks from them, and I say do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”
Christopher Mccandless was so drifted apart from the notion of home, That he had to find its true meaning on his own. After graduating he left all the comforts of a shelter, disowned his parents and set out on his own on a voyage to discover the true meaning of life. He didn’t keep any money as I might lead him to still be materialistic in some way. He wondered across USA and his final aim was to be there in the wild in Alaska.
The first chapter of his diary is titled ‘Birth’. For each one of us birth is not something that we had an option for. It was just a process of coming into existence. We aren’t mature enough to witness its true essence. He went by the name Alexander Supertarmp and left Chris behind. In the initial days he spent his time understanding the world afresh with a completely non partial view.
His journey leads him to no direction in particular but it doesn’t mean that he is lost. As writer J.R.R. Tolkien writes ‘Not all who wonder are lost’. He learnt from this voyage . Faced his fears. Home for him was not a physical space. He had plenty of it earlier. Home was his the satisfaction he received by his existence in that moment.
After his New birth, in his adolescence, he worked at a farm. There was something in the city that he couldn’t breath. There was something in the country that he could never leave.
Living his life in peace without any payment and thriving on the food that his collogues offered him, he found the most simplistic way of leaving. Although, he never forgot his Alaskan dream. The voyage into the wild. The life of isolation in which the true human nature could be found.
He wanted to just be out there in it. In that moment. Where he would feel alive. Where he would be home.
Alexander Supertramp did all the thing he wanted to do. He went in whichever direction the waves of the ocean of his journey took him. He kayaked down the Colorado river to Mexico and freeloaded trains to get up north. His life was a journey. And that journey was his home. He experienced his own birth. Had an opportunity to choose his own family, i.e the fellow traveller and the employers, or the people who gave him a lift or the ones which helped him go a drift , into the wild.
He found his way to Alaska and went where he wanted to. He found an old and abandoned bus which he referred to as ‘The magic bus’. He spent 6 weeks in that bus and spent months in there during winter. This bus was his shelter but his home was the road.
“ Two years he watched the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An esthetic voyager who’s home is the road. Now after two years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revelation. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees and walks upon the land to become lost in the wild.”
–Alexander Supertramp
Fairbanks, Alaska. May.1992
Christopher Mccandless or as he liked to call himself "Alexander Supertamp" spent his last days alone in the wild. his family was a the expereiene he had gathered. his shelter was his memory.
This diaspora of home was where he wanted to be.
Sources:
"Into the wild" by Jon Krakauer