The Wild Truth: The secrets that drove Chris McCandless into the wild

“I’ve been to see an attorney,” Mom continued. “I’m going to leave your father.”

Warm cookies in hand, we climbed into the Suburban and drove around town, eager to spot FOR RENT signs in front of smaller houses on streets that were just far enough away. Chris sat in the front, wrote down the phone numbers, and talked about his friends who lived near one place or the other.

“Look, Mom, that one has a swing set!” I pointed.

“That one has a basketball hoop!” Chris said when we passed another.

“Look at that flower bed,” Mom said, shaking her head. “What a travesty. I could put some petunias in there and brighten it right up.” In front of the next house, she said, “I know this one doesn’t look like much, but imagine the potential! All it needs is a fresh coat of paint on the windows, doors, maybe the shutters. It’ll come to life and we’ll have gotten it for a bargain.”

She looked stronger with every mile we traveled. Her eyes and shoulders lifted and her voice had an exhilaration to it as she told us about her meeting with her attorney, Doreen Jones.

When we got home, Chris organized his army men so they’d be easy to pack up, and I organized my stuffed animals. The notepad of rental phone numbers sat next to the phone, with Mom’s notations about whom she’d left a message for. When Dad returned, Mom told him she was divorcing him, that the three of us were moving out. A massive fight ensued, one in which Dad beat Mom down even more with his words than with his hands: “You’re stupid, Billie! You don’t even have a college degree. I can see to it that you can’t get a good job, and there’s no way you can take care of those kids on your own!” He peeled away her strengths until all her insecurities were exposed. Then came the salt in the sugar jar. He gave Mom an expensive token from his trip, and all was forgotten.

The next time Dad left, we went house hunting again. And the time after that. Doreen says this and Doreen says that—Mom would chirp about her most recent meeting with the attorney. With each trip, Chris took less interest in writing down the phone numbers of rentals, until he stopped bringing a notepad altogether.

Occasionally I lost patience with my mom’s unwillingness to leave Dad. I’d pack my little red vinyl suitcase with essentials, like my favorite pajamas and stuffed animals, throw in a couple of Pop-Tarts, and announce I was leaving. I’d get as far as the end of the street before realizing that no one was coming after me. I’d return to the house, but instead of going inside, I would climb into the Suburban and lie down until someone came out to retrieve me. “If I could drive,” I contended, “I’d be out of here.”

Sometimes Mom kept her resolve to divorce Dad longer, and Chris and I were summoned for a sit-down with both parents to discuss important matters. “You each need to say who you want to live with. And we need to know that right now,” they’d say. To answer correctly was impossible. The chosen parent would look smugly at the other in victory, while the odd one out would scream at Chris and me for being so cruel and unappreciative of all that they had sacrificed on our behalf. This summons to appear and decide came frequently, always with the same outcome.

But when we were older and the divorce bomb was launched into the air, we caught it and kept it alive, tossing it around and examining aloud with our parents what a great idea we thought it was, daring them to finally follow through with it and bring the relief of an explosion. All the while, the house hunting continued. In time, Chris and I viewed the drives around town as just that: drives. And when we were old enough to stay home alone, we declined to get in the Suburban at all.

“Okay, kids, I’ll be back soon. I’ve seen some great options over in Mantua. You’ll see!” Mom enthused, though we didn’t really listen.

MY OLDEST SISTER, STACY, always said her life began the day Marcia took her and her siblings away from Walt. They didn’t have much money, and Walt’s child support payments were sometimes inconsistent; with the distance Marcia had gained for herself and her children, Walt could no longer control them, and money was the one weapon he had left against his ex-wife. Marcia contacted authorities three separate times to collect back pay from Walt.

In addition to income from Marcia’s jobs, they relied on church friends and family to help them get by. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt, and the quote inspired Marcia through the most difficult years. Walt’s parents sent birthday and Christmas presents and back-to-school clothes. Walt and his siblings had come from a volatile home, but with Walt’s musical and academic talents he was regarded as flawless, especially by his mother, Margaret, who reportedly doted on him. But as loyal as she remained to Walt, even she could see that her son had not done right by his first wife.

Marcia’s parents were immensely reliable with their support, helping their daughter and grandchildren both monetarily and beyond. They watched the kids when they weren’t in school while Marcia worked, and they helped care for them when they were sick. It wasn’t an especially easy life, but it was peaceful and loving.

It was sometimes a little uncomfortable when Marcia’s kids would visit us in Virginia, because Chris and I had a lot more material things than they did. We had new skis, new bikes, the latest styles in clothes and shoes, newer models of everything electronic that Marcia’s kids didn’t even have older versions of. We were the ones Dad always provided for. Yet they never complained when it was time to go back home.

Our siblings came in different groups, usually, for several weeks at a time, but then Shelly came to live with us for her last two years of high school. I was ten and Chris was thirteen.

Soon after arriving, Shelly realized she’d underestimated how bad things were. For much of her life she’d witnessed Dad beating her mom, but now she was witness to Dad and Billie violently assaulting each other—sometimes physically, always verbally. Mom often ignored Shelly, and Dad traveled so much he was barely around. When Mom did acknowledge Shelly’s existence, it was usually to bark an order at her or chastise her for some wrongdoing. But Shelly was committed to staying in Virginia. Hardened from past experience, she proved to be even tougher than Chris was. We learned from her what it looked like to stand up for yourself.

When Dad next traveled to Europe, he took all three of us kids with him, as well as Mom. When Chris ducked into nudie magazine stores in Amsterdam, Shelly told Mom he was checking out tennis shoes a block over. Though she had his back, Shelly and Chris bickered like crazy on that trip, once even to the point that Chris screamed that Shelly was going to kill him after he’d teased her too much. When we were all in the car one afternoon, Dad reached his limit with them. “I’m going to pull this car over and spank both of you!” he said. Shelly laughed at him. She was seventeen, much too old to be spanked, plus she had our father’s number: he’d never laid a hand on her before.

Perhaps because they were so similar, Dad had a soft spot for Shelly. When he’d spent time with Marcia’s kids in California, he’d made them all line up outside his office door, to come in and be smacked one by one for whatever the baseless infraction of the day was, his sturdy frat-house paddle firmly in hand. When it was Shelly’s turn, though, he told her he wasn’t going to hit her. She should scream out loud anyway, he explained, so the others wouldn’t know. She felt the special treatment was because she saw him for what he was, and he knew it.

One night while Shelly was living with us, I was taking care of my daily chores in the basement—organizing some office files; Windexing the glass-fronted cabinets and tabletops; ensuring that Dad had one pen in each color of blue, black, red, and green, in soldier formation, awaiting him on his desk alongside one yellow and one white lined pad of paper stacked beneath one green steno notepad. Upstairs, Mom was making dinner. I could smell the ground beef and cumin as they sizzled together on the stovetop—taco night. Dad was working on his own creation on the piano, concocting a rendition of a Bill Evans song. Evans was just one of the many jazz greats Dad taught Chris and me to appreciate; Miles, Ella, and Duke were also favorites. The soft thump of the piano pedals began to form a repetitive pattern on the wood floor above me as he delicately worked a decrescendo into a specific chord progression again and again.

“Jesus Christ, Walt!” I heard Mom implore from the kitchen. “Do you have to keep playing that same line over and over like that?”

“Yes, Billie!” he yelled back to her. “And if you knew anything about music, you would understand why!”

I had already finished all my less-than-challenging sixth-grade homework and knew Chris was doing his in his bedroom. I trotted up the steps from the basement and saw Shelly lying back on an array of pillows on the family room couch, studying for a world history test. Her long red curls fell softly around the headphones that covered her ears. She had her bare feet and polished toes up on the coffee table, textbook on her knees. Her Walkman was turned up so loudly I could hear every word of Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home.”

She turned off the music when she saw me.

“Now, Carine,” she mimicked, “you’d better make sure that I have one blue pen, one black, one red, and one green all lined up next to my notepads. And they better be set up parallel to the lines of the wood grain on the desk. Do you understand me?”

“It’s impossible to line up a straight edge with walnut wood grains,” I mused. “The grain isn’t straight.”

“Oh, whatever, little Miss Smarty Pants!” she teased back.

“What are you reading about?” I asked.

“Wars,” she answered flatly. “As if I don’t know enough about that already.”

“Totally,” I answered, trying to sound like a high schooler. It didn’t work; Shelly gave me a small smile and reached for the buttons on her Walkman. Desperate not to lose her attention, I thought quickly of another subject. “So,” I began.

“So?”

“So . . . we’re doing a sex ed unit in school.”

“Okaaayyyy.” Shelly looked at me quizzically. She probably thought I wanted her to explain the birds and the bees or something, which I didn’t. Not really. Mainly I wanted to ask her—had wanted to ask her for a while, actually—to explain what the deal was with Quinn. When Quinn and Shannon had last visited, I’d heard them whispering with Chris about something, and I had a pretty good idea what it was. But the boys shut down as soon as they saw me. Maybe my big sister would answer, girl to girl.

“So . . . how is it that Quinn’s older than me and younger than Chris?” I ventured. “I mean, how is that even possible?” The pieces of my parents’ history were starting to become clearer, but the edges were still blurred and I had yet to grasp how they all fit together.

“You’re just figuring that out now?” Shelly’s eyes widened as she paused and waited for me to solve the puzzle. After a minute, she looked at me intently. “What about Shannon?” she pressed. “Haven’t you ever noticed that Shannon’s birthday is only three months before Chris’s? They’re the same age, Carine. Did you ever think about that one?” She waited again as I tried to comprehend how the multiple explanations I had heard could still make any sense. “Never mind,” she finally sighed. “Tell you what. We’ll talk about it when you’re older.”

Feeling thwarted by my youth, I sniped at her, “Don’t you think you might do better in school if you didn’t study with that music blaring in your ears?” I’d gone for a sore point, and I’d hit it. Shelly was undoubtedly smart, but she struggled to meet expectations, while I easily brought home the mandatory straight As.

Shelly’s striking green eyes flared, then narrowed. Then her freckles melded as her nose crinkled up and her lips curled. “Shut up, you little shit!” I successfully dodged the large white pillow she threw toward my head. But as I walked up to my room, I was only mad at myself. I really wished I’d pressed harder instead of teasing her. I still wanted to know the truth.

SHELLY WAS A GOOD STUDENT but not a great one. As long as she brought home Bs and Cs, my parents would not allow her to join any extra-curricular activities or student-organized outings. When the senior ski trip plans began and again they told her she couldn’t go, she decided she’d had enough and went on the trip anyway. But she had an accident on the mountain and had to return to our house with injured pride and a blown-out knee, wearing a full cast up to her hip. Dad was doing extended work in Germany and Mom grudgingly helped her recover.

On the night Dad got back, a vicious fight started up between Mom and Dad. Shelly immediately took Chris and me out to dinner to keep us all out of the way. By the time we returned, the house was silent. When Shelly got home from school the next day, Mom greeted her. “You need to leave tonight,” she said. “And you are not welcome back in this house.” Mom then left for the evening.

Though Dad might have favored Shelly, he did not stand up for her against the woman he’d begun an affair with before Shelly had even been born. When he got home that evening, he helped Shelly pack.

Shelly moved in with her friend Kathy’s family for a short while before finding an apartment to share with some college kids, where she slept on the floor of their walk-in closet. She worked nights as a cocktail waitress to get by until she would graduate. I didn’t see Shelly again until she was invited by Mom and Dad to stop by to say hello and take pictures on her way to prom. When I asked Shelly why she had come back for such a farce, she replied, “I guess I was just wanting to feel some sense of normalcy.” She’d see Chris in the hallways at Woodson High, and he’d tell her that Mom sometimes checked with the high school to make sure Shelly was there and not cutting. He let her know he had her back.

Although my father did nothing to stop Mom from kicking Shelly out, late on that evening Shelly left I heard him cry for the first and only time. I was upstairs and heard a howl like an animal caught in a trap. I followed the wailing down to the basement and was shocked to see my father sitting at his desk, his face completely covered by his hands, his fingers stretched from ear to ear. It looked like he was trying to disappear.

CHRIS AND I, INSPIRED BY SHELLY’S DEFIANCE, took on the role of detectives when it came to the reasons for our mom and dad’s arguments. We stayed aware, listened carefully, gathered evidence, and met to discuss whatever was the case at hand. Our investigative skills improved with age and experience.

In school, we were both learning about the negative effects of drugs and alcohol and the signs of substance abuse. Our parents reinforced the lessons with their own threats of what would happen to us if we were ever caught using. We were conscious of the Jekyll and Hyde effect we witnessed on a regular basis within our own parents, relative to the daily intake of his gin or her wine. Then one day we found a questionable plastic bag in one of Dad’s coat pockets. We took it down to the basement office in search of a confession.

“What is this?” Chris inquired with eyebrows raised, his right hand holding the evidence in the air, the other resting confidently on his belt, feet at the ready.

“What?” Dad looked up, annoyed with the interruption. The surprise in his eyes turned into a scowl. “That’s tobacco.”

“Doesn’t look like tobacco” was Chris’s retort.

“It just looks different. Give it to me!”

“Why does it look different?” Chris didn’t back down as Dad snatched the proof out of his hand.