“Into the Wild” and out to the concession stand
Let’s pause, shall we, for a bracing autumnal plunge into the Big Gore-Tex Northwest Mailbag. No cannonballs allowed. Remember to hold your nose.
Q: Have you seen the film “Into the Wild,” and if so, what did you think of it?
A: Well, this is going to sound really bad - in a Seinfeld-making-out-during-”Schindler’s List” sort of way. But the truth is, when Emjay and I went to see it last weekend, we both discovered that, during the scenes in which the chief protagonist, young Chris McCandless, is starving to death in this (long, long, long) movie, we each inexplicably began craving a large, juicy cheeseburger.
Maybe it’s because we saw it at a matinee. (I’m fairly sure Sean Penn never set out to make a flick that proved to be a boon for concession sales, but it might be an inevitable side effect. Someone clearly should conduct a government study on this.)
On a more serious note: I’d say it’s worth seeing. But I was left with the same sort of hollow feeling after reading Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name many years ago: The story of McCandless is compelling, but the more you explore the young man’s life, the more he seems deeply disturbed, rather than imbued with some ethereal wisdom beyond his years.
And you thus are left with the somewhat icky feeling of wondering whether the storyteller, be it Krakauer or Penn, is trying to use the young man’s too-short life and painful death to insist that there’s really something in all of this that should be insightful or revelatory or life-changing to the audience member. To me, no matter how much I wanted it to be, there really isn’t.
This is mostly a story of cherry-picking philosophy to prop up one’s own naive idealism - and, perhaps, emotional dysfunction. All with tragic consequences. If that alone makes the tale worth telling, then consider it well-told by both the book and the movie. I guess I hoped for something more.
But that’s the beauty of all art; it’s subjective.
Bottom line: If you were intrigued enough to ask, you should go see it. Just be sure to take some extra Milk Duds.
Q: What’s the most jaw-dropping thing you’ve seen in the news lately?
A: We thought no one would ever ask!
It has to be the recent congressional kibitzing on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park.
First, a strong disclaimer: I’m not an anti-snowmobile kind of guy. I like them, in fact. I think they’re a fine piece of outdoor-recreation equipment - in the proper place and time.
Sorry, but Yellowstone National Park in the dead of winter is neither the place nor the time.
You sort of have to go there to get it: Yellowstone in winter is an ethereal, truly otherworldly kind of place, with extreme low temperatures (we’re talking 20 below at times) making life a struggle for the ample wildlife that roams the park. It’s a beautiful, fragile environment, and snowmobiles, no matter how much cleaner and quieter the manufacturers say the four-stroke machines are, simply don’t fit into it. You see it, you know it and you feel it.
Years of studying the future for the snow sleds - which have created their own winter economy of sorts in gateway towns such as West Yellowstone, Mont. - have suggested the inevitable: Their use should be curtailed, or banned. The Park Service agreed - sort of - drafting a new plan that cut their numbers down to about a third of the daily snowmobile traffic during a 1990s heyday.
We accept that that’s a true bummer for snowmobilers who enjoy the park. But we have to ask: Is there not enough other, snow-covered, wide-open land in the West available to ride? C’mon.
In spite of this, Your National Park Service continues to leave the door open to snowmobilers - to the point that 86 members of Congress last week took the unusual step of signing on to a plea to the NPS director to finally boot them out.
Questions:
• When was the last time 86 members of Congress agreed on anything? (Other than to hastily approve the Patriot Act that none of them bothered to read, that is.)
• We realize the NPS already lost one attempt to ban snowmobiles outright via a court decision. But is the federal agency in charge of one of our nation’s most precious natural treasures really so fearful, blindingly stupid and/or beholden to a particularly loud interest group that Congress has to tell it to stop poisoning the very lands it is charged to protect?
• And finally: What does it say about conviction and political guts that none of the 86 congressional reps who signed the letter hailed from Yellowstone’s border states, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Ron Judd’s Trail Mix column appears here every Thursday.
To contact him: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.