You've read the first eight chapters. Think about it: you know the bus. You know the moose. You know the postcards and the abandoned Datsun and the way Krakauer keeps circling back to that magnetic, maddening question: *why?
Then you hit Chapter 9.
And suddenly you're not in Alaska anymore. You're in the Utah desert, 1934. A twenty-year-old artist named Everett Ruess is carving his name into canyon walls, trading watercolors for supplies, writing letters home that sound like poetry and prophecy both. He vanishes. No body. In practice, no bus. Just a mystery that's lasted ninety years Simple as that..
Why does Krakauer drop this story right here, right now?
Because he's not just telling you about Chris McCandless. He's showing you the pattern.
What Is Chapter 9 About
On the surface, it's a biography of Everett Ruess — a young man who walked into the Escalante canyons and never walked out. Krakauer holds Ruess up beside McCandless and says: *look. But in the architecture of Into the Wild, Chapter 9 is a mirror. So naturally, this isn't random. Now, this isn't new. This is a type Worth keeping that in mind..
Ruess was an artist. McCandless wasn't, not really — though he carried Walden and Doctor Zhivago like talismans. Ruess wrote beautiful letters. Plus, mcCandless wrote frantic postcards. Ruess vanished in 1934. But mcCandless died in 1992. On top of that, different eras. Different temperaments. But the same gravity pulled them both.
This changes depending on context. Keep that in mind.
Krakauer didn't invent this comparison. Readers had been making it for years. But he's the one who did the legwork — tracked down Ruess's letters, interviewed the few people who knew him, walked the same canyons. Now, he treats Ruess with the same rigorous empathy he brings to Chris. Also, not hero worship. That said, not condemnation. Just... attention.
The Ruess Basics
Born 1914. By twenty he'd wandered the High Sierra, the California coast, the Utah canyons. California. Watercolors. He fell in love with the Southwest at sixteen — first trip with a Boy Scout troop, then solo. Parents were intellectuals, bohemian-adjacent. He made block prints. He traded art for food, for rides, for a place to sleep. He wrote letters home that read like someone trying to explain a religion he'd invented Surprisingly effective..
His last known letter, November 1934: "I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time."
Then silence. Still, a campsite. Plus, his parents searched for years. Consider this: no body. Theories: fell off a cliff, murdered by cattle rustlers, drowned crossing the Colorado, started a new life among the Navajo. Day to day, a burro found wandering. His brother spent a lifetime chasing ghosts.
Sound familiar?
Why This Chapter Matters
Here's the thing most summaries miss: Chapter 9 isn't just "another dead wanderer story." It's Krakauer's defense against the criticism that McCandless was uniquely foolish, uniquely arrogant, uniquely modern in his self-destruction.
Critics loved to say: This is what happens when you raise a kid on participation trophies and Disney nature movies. He didn't know the real world.
But Ruess? Ruess grew up before antibiotics were common. Before GPS. Before satellite phones. He knew the real world — he lived in it, harder than most of us ever will. And the wilderness still took him And that's really what it comes down to. That's the whole idea..
Krakauer's point: the wilderness doesn't care about your generation. It doesn't care about your upbringing. It cares about physics. Exposure. Calories. Luck That's the part that actually makes a difference..
And there's something else. By placing Ruess here — after we've watched Chris make his mistakes, after we've seen the map errors and the missed river crossing and the poisonous seeds — Krakauer forces us to ask: how much of this was inevitable?
Not the death. The leaving.
The Archetype
Krakauer explicitly names it: the "aesthetic wanderer." Young men (almost always men) who reject civilization not because they hate people, but because they love something else more. Still, beauty. Solitude. The feeling of being small against something vast.
He lists others. In real terms, john Waterman — climbed Denali solo in winter, vanished on a second attempt. Day to day, gene Rosellini — the "mayor of Hippie Cove," tried to live stone-age style in Alaska, eventually hanged himself. Carl McCunn — flew into the Bush with a rifle and camera, forgot to arrange pickup, shot himself rather than starve.
Each story different. Each story the same.
Krakauer writes: "It is easy to dismiss them as foolish, arrogant, and self-absorbed. But that dismissal is too easy."
He's talking to you. To me. To the voice in your head that says *I would never.
How Krakauer Builds the Parallel
He doesn't just say "they're alike." He shows you the texture.
Letters Home
Ruess to his parents: "I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and the star-sprinkled sky to a roof."
McCandless to Westerberg: "I've decided to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up."
Both men wrote like they were trying to translate a vision. Here's the thing — both parents kept every letter. Both parents read them later and wondered: *was it there all along? Did we miss it?
The Names
Ruess signed his block prints "Nemo" — Latin for "no one.Consider this: a trick. " From The Odyssey. Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is Nobody. A shield Most people skip this — try not to..
McCandless became "Alexander Supertramp.Which means " Grand. Even so, theatrical. A character in a story he was writing with his feet.
Krakauer doesn't over-explain this. Two young men shedding their given names like snakeskin. He lets you sit with it. Trying to become the person they saw in the landscape.
The Art
This is where the comparison gets uncomfortable Easy to understand, harder to ignore..
Ruess made things. Block prints of canyons. Watercolors of juniper trees. He was good — galleries showed his work, critics noticed. He had a craft. So a discipline. He traded art for survival.
McCandless... didn't. He read. He walked. Because of that, he photographed. But he didn't create in the same way. His art was the journey itself — or maybe the myth he left behind.
Krakauer notices this. On the flip side, he doesn't flinch. He quotes Ruess's brother: *"Everett was an artist first. Chris was a pilgrim.
That distinction matters. Ruess needed the wilderness for his work. McCandless needed the wilderness for his self The details matter here..
The Endings
Ruess: unknown. The canyon keeps its secrets. His parents died not knowing It's one of those things that adds up..
McCandless: the bus. The note. The body. The certainty And that's really what it comes down to..
In some ways, the McCandless family got something the Ruess family never
Krakauer’s footnote, then, is not merely an academic aside; it is a mirror held up to the reader’s own willingness to romanticize danger. He asks us to consider the thin line between admiration and glorification, between seeing a life lived on the edge as heroic and seeing it as a cautionary tale. In doing so, he forces a confrontation with a cultural habit that persists long after the original footnote fades.
The pattern repeats in contemporary narratives. The climber who abandons a promising career to chase a summit, the ultramarathoner who runs through injury, the backpacker who hitchhikes across continents with only a sketchbook and a dream. So each story is packaged with a familiar refrain: “He was searching for meaning,” “She refused to be ordinary,” “They lived on their own terms. Also, ” The language is the same, the cadence identical, even when the details diverge. Krakauer’s footnote becomes a template, a way to flag the underlying current that runs through all these accounts: the desire to erase the mundane and replace it with an imagined purity.
What makes the comparison resonate is the way Krakauer lets the reader see the mechanics of that erasure. Which means in each case, the narrative is shaped not by objective facts but by the emotional need to make sense of loss. Which means he highlights the way families and friends cling to fragments of communication, hoping to find a clue that will explain an otherwise inexplicable departure. He points out the recurring motifs—letters that double as manifestos, names that become symbols, objects that transform into talismans. The footnote, therefore, is less about Ruess and McCandless themselves and more about the way we, as a culture, construct meaning from the edges of other people’s lives.
Krakauer also uses the footnote to question the role of the storyteller. By inserting his own reflections—“I am not trying to excuse their choices, but to understand them”—he acknowledges his position within the chain of interpretation. He is both chronicler and participant, aware that his voice adds another layer to the myth-making process. This self‑awareness prevents the essay from slipping into a simple moralizing stance; instead, it invites readers to recognize their own complicity in the construction of these myths.
Easier said than done, but still worth knowing.
The ultimate lesson, then, is not that adventure is inherently dangerous or that youthful idealism is naive. So it is that the stories we tell about those who chase the wild, the unknown, or the unattainable are shaped by a collective imagination that often smooths over the messy, uncomfortable details. Krakauer’s footnote serves as a reminder that behind every headline‑making expedition lies a human being whose motivations are layered, contradictory, and sometimes opaque. By laying those layers bare, he asks us to look beyond the surface narrative and consider the full spectrum of human experience—ambition, fear, creativity, and mortality—all tangled together in the pursuit of something larger than oneself It's one of those things that adds up..
In closing, the footnote is a quiet but powerful device that transforms a simple factual aside into a lens through which the broader themes of the essay can be examined. So it connects two disparate lives, exposes the patterns that bind them, and ultimately compels the reader to confront the stories we tell about ourselves when we imagine stepping beyond the familiar. Krakauer’s willingness to linger on this small, seemingly insignificant detail underscores a larger truth: the way we frame the lives of others reflects as much about our own desires and anxieties as it does about the lives we seek to understand. The essay ends not with a definitive verdict but with an invitation—to read, to question, and to recognize that every adventure, no matter how romanticized, is ultimately a human story, fragile and fleeting, that deserves both respect and scrutiny Nothing fancy..
