American Dream (Part 1)

Stamped deep in the character of the American sense of identity is the idea of the rugged individualist. Put another way, a deep feature of the American Dream is the idea of going one's own way, against all odds. Oddly, though, it's these very individualists who draw the most criticism for being the very thing that is so very deeply American.

The American Dream is on my mind because of two books I've read and two movies I've watched over the last week. On the face of it, the two movies are eerily similar.

Timothy Treadwell, the man featured in Werner Herzog's documentary"Grizzly Man", struck out on his own for thirteen consecutive summers, with occasional company, to commune with the brown bears at Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula, south of Anchorage.

He lives among the bears, talks to them, even gets close enough to touch them. In the end, he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, are mauled and eaten by a bear. This incident was not filmed, but recorded in audio. The audio is not played in the movie.

Herzog crafted the movie by selecting scenes from the one hundred hours of video tape Treadwell took of himself and the bears, interspersing these scenes with interviews of people who knew Treadwell and with Alaska officials who try to figure Treadwell out.

In the spirit of the American Dream, Treadwell had a vision of what he wanted his life to be and went after it. It was not a dream of material gain. Far from it. It was a dream of finding his own true soul by being in communion with the brown bears and their habitat, a dream of striking out in the wilderness and being free of all societal constraints. It was a dream fashioned around protecting the bears, of living out a connection with a life force deeper and more powerful than any found in civilized society.

In the end, Treadwell's dream was the source of his own demise. The dream had a dark side. That dark side was hubris. Treadwell believed he had become so at one with the bears that he could tell them what to do, could protect himself with out electric fencing, without pepper spray, without a rifle.

It takes a certain amount of hubris to enter unknown territory, whether charting unknown waters or launching astronauts into space. It's the American way to hunger for exploring the unknown, but that hunger has to be tempered with caution and respect for the unknown.

Egotistical, immature, self-aggrandizing, Treadwell scoffed at caution and disguised his disrespect for the brown bears behind his rhetoric of doing what was best for the bears, and it killled him.

The American Dream can be fatal.

Chris McCandless found this out in his death.

Similar to Timothy Treadwell, Chris McCandless had become entirely disillusion with the hypocrsies and lies of civilized society. He dreamed of stripping his life down to the barest of essentials as a way of living truth, truth uncluttered by any material things or societal constructs that would come between him and the purity of his soul.

Chris' dream was to live absolute authenticity.

Chris struck out on his own, drove west, abandoned his car in Arizona, and hitchhiked, hopped freights, and kayaked his way through much of the west before heading north to Alaska to venture into the wild and live off the land with a bag of rice, a rifle, some ammo, a machete, a fish net, and his books, including one on the flora and fauna of Alaska.

Chris strove to be as close to being an individualist as he could. He believed, in the depths of his American soul, that a person can determine what he wants and will himself to have it. He believed a person could do this on his own.

Chris was driven by his dream of going west, of living beyond all the limits that money and family and society tried to impose on him, to grow into as fully human a person as he could, to throw himself headlong and recklessly into every new experience that came his way.

Chris sought no publicity. Quite the opposite. He sought pure anonymity and autonomy, as best he could. His desire was not driven by a self-aggrandized dream, but was a spiritual quest for that most fundamental of American dreams: he wanted to be absolutely free.

Tragically, Chris' three months and several days in the Alaska wild left him little room for error. He underestimated and was ignorant of the cycles of nature, when game would be available, when rivers swell from glacial runoffs, and how fatal it is to eat the wrong root plucked from the land.

Chris died. He died soon after he realized, through his reading of Tolstoy, that true happiness is not found in isolation, but in communion with others. Learning this moved him to surrender his isolation and return to the society of others.

But he never got out. Chris lived as authentically as he could, but, in the end, he was no match for the rigors of nature.

He died as a young man as fully committed to the American Dream of asserting one's individual will and searching unfettered freedom as any American I have ever read about, let alone known.
Chris saw the light of a truth larger than he imagined. We need each other. Nothing spoke as clearly on behalf of this truth than his death.