Walt is accustomed to calling the shots. Taking control is something he does unconsciously, reflexively. Although he speaks softly in the unhurried cadence of the American West, his voice has an edge, and the set of his jaw betrays an undercurrent of nervous energy. Even from across the room it is apparent that some very high voltage is crackling through his wires. There is no mistaking whence Chris’s intensity came.
When Walt talks, people listen. If something or someone displeases him, his eyes narrow and his speech becomes clipped. According to members of the extended family, his moods can be dark and mercurial, although they say his famous temper has lost much of its volatility in recent years. After Chris gave everybody the slip in 1990, something changed in Walt. His son’s disappearance scared and chastened him. A softer, more tolerant side of his personality came to the fore.
Walt grew up poor in Greeley, Colorado, an agricultural town on the high, windswept plains up near the Wyoming line. His family, he declares matter-of-factly, “was from the wrong side of the tracks.” A bright child, and driven, he won an academic scholarship to Colorado State University in nearby Fort Collins. To make ends meet, he held down an assortment of part-time jobs through college, including one in a mortuary, but his steadiest paycheck came from playing with Charlie Novak, the leader of a popular jazz quartet. Novak’s band, with Walt sitting in on piano, worked the regional lounge circuit, covering dance numbers and old standards in smoky honky-tonks up and down the Front Range. An inspired musician with considerable natural talent, Walt still plays professionally from time to time.
In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik I, casting a shadow of fear across America. In the ensuing national hysteria Congress funneled millions upon millions of dollars into the California-based aerospace industry, and the boom was on. For young Walt McCandless-just out of college, married, and with a baby on the way-Sputnik opened the door to opportunity. After receiving his undergraduate diploma, Walt took a job with Hughes Aircraft, which sent him to Tucson for three years, where he earned a master’s degree in antenna theory at the University of Arizona. As soon as he completed his thesis-”An Analysis of Conical Helices”-he transferred to Hughes’s big California operation, where the real action was, eager to make his mark in the race for space.
He bought a little bungalow in Torrance, worked hard, moved quickly up the ladder. Sam was born in 1959, and four other children-Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, and Shannon-followed in quick succession. Walt was appointed test director and section head for the Surveyor 1 mission, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon. His star was bright and rising.
By 1965, however, his marriage was in trouble. He and his wife, Marcia, separated. Walt started dating a secretary at Hughes named Wilhelmina Johnson-everyone called her Bil-lie-who was twenty-two years old and had dark, striking eyes. They fell in love and moved in together. Billie got pregnant. Very petite to begin with, in nine months she gained only eight pounds and never even wore maternity clothes. On February 12, 1968, Billie gave birth to a son. He was underweight, but healthy and animated. Walt bought Billie a Gianini guitar, on which she strummed lullabies to soothe the fussy newborn. Twenty-two years later, rangers from the National Park Service would find that same guitar on the backseat of a yellow Datsun abandoned near the shore of Lake Mead.
It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Christopher Johnson McCandless came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor’s candy drawer.
In the third grade, after receiving a high score on a standardized achievement test, Chris was placed in an accelerated program for gifted students. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Billie remembers, “because it meant he had to do extra schoolwork. So he spent a week trying to get himself out of the program. This little boy attempted to convince the teacher, the principal-anybody who would listen-that the test results were in error, that he really didn’t belong there. We learned about it at the first PTA meeting. His teacher pulled us aside and told us that ‘Chris marches to a different drummer.’ She just shook her head.”
“Even when we were little,” says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, “he was very to himself. He wasn’t antisocial- he always had friends, and everybody liked him-but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn’t seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely.”
When Chris was six, Walt was offered a position at NASA, prompting a move to the nation’s capital. They bought a split-level house on Willet Drive in suburban Annandale. It had green shutters, a bay window, a nice yard. Four years after arriving in Virginia, Walt quit working for NASA to start a consulting firm- User Systems, Incorporated-which he and Billie ran out of their home.
Money was tight. In addition to the financial strain of exchanging a steady paycheck for the vagaries of self-employment, Walt’s separation from his first wife left him with two families to support. To make a go of it, says Carine, “Mom and Dad put in incredibly long hours. When Chris and I woke up in the morning to go to school, they’d be in the office working. When we came home in the afternoon, they’d be in the office working. When we went to bed at night, they’d be in the office working. They ran a real good business together and eventually started making bunches of money, but they worked all the time.”
It was a stressful existence. Both Walt and Billie are tightly wound, emotional, loath to give ground. Now and then the tension erupted in verbal sparring. In moments of anger, one or the other often threatened divorce. The rancor was more smoke than fire, says Carine, but “I think it was one of the reasons Chris and I were so close. We learned to count on each other when Mom and Dad weren’t getting along.”
But there were good times, too. On weekends and when school was out, the family took to the road: They drove to Virginia Beach and the Carolina shore, to Colorado to visit Walt’s kids from his first marriage, to the Great Lakes, to the Blue Ridge Mountains. “We camped out of the back of the truck, the Chevy Suburban,” Walt explains. “Later we bought an Airstream trailer and traveled with that. Chris loved those trips, the longer the better. There was always a little wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it.”
In the course of their travels, the family visited Iron Mountain, Michigan, a small mining town in the forests of the Upper Peninsula that was Billies childhood home. She was one of six kids. Loren Johnson, Billies father, ostensibly worked as a truck driver, “but he never held any job for long,” she says.
“Billies dad didn’t quite fit into society,” Walt explains. “In many ways he and Chris were a lot alike.”
Loren Johnson was proud and stubborn and dreamy, a woodsman, a self-taught musician, a writer of poetry. Around Iron Mountain his rapport with the creatures of the forest was legendary. “He was always raising wildlife,” says Billie. “He’d find some animal in a trap, take it home, amputate the injured limb, heal it, and then let it go again. Once my dad hit a mother deer with his truck, making an orphan of its fawn. He was crushed. But he brought the baby deer home and raised it inside the house, behind the woodstove, just like it was one of his kids.”