BENEATH THE SKYLINE

I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP

Deborah Good

A truck pulled to the side of the road four miles outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, and a young hitchhiker got in, requesting a ride to the edge of Denali National Park. There he planned to fend for himself in the wilderness for several months.

The concerned driver, an experienced outdoorsman, tried to convince the young man that he was not prepared for the ravages of the Alaskan wild, but to no avail. "I’m absolutely positive," the young man assured the older, "I won’t run into anything I can’t deal with on my own."

Thus begins Jon Krakauer’s telling of a remarkable and true story, a book which inspired Sean Penn’s recently released movie by the same title—"Into the Wild," directed by Sean Penn.

Perhaps it grows from the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps from our head-over-heels love affair with capitalism. I do not know for sure where it began, but most people would likely agree with me on this point: By and large, United States society—and particularly middle- and upper-class society—is enamored with personal independence.

It could be a national mantra: I don’t need your help. I won’t run into anything I can’t deal with on my own.

We think we ought to rely on our families and friends as little as possible. We do our best to own everything we need. We hate asking for help from people we know, much less from the state welfare office, and far too many of us look down on those who do. We revere independence; we strive for it like the early conquistadors for gold.

Yet the fact that, just now, I drank a glass of grape juice in the warmth of my own home was far from an independent act. It required help from dozens of people, most of whom I have never met: the growers, the transporters, the factory workers, the folks at the grocery store, and my housemate who went shopping last week and placed the carton of juice on the refrigerator’s top shelf, just to name a few.

The question, then, is not whether I am dependent or independent, but rather who I depend on and who depends on me. Our lives, whether we recognize it or not, are vast webs of needing one another, stretching out from us in sticky and interwoven strands. What does your web look like?

My web involves more than California grape-pickers. I’ve got some crazy-good friends in that web, people who have taught me, listened to me, stood up for me, fed me, lived with me, given me rides, and sometimes literally held me in their arms while I broke apart.

I could not have made it through two of the hardest years of my life—the one in which my dad died, and the one after it—on my own. It’s as though I was being pulled forward by a hundred invisible strings grasped tightly on the other end by all the people who cared about me and my family. I am grateful for my web.

Christopher J. McCandless’s solo journey did not begin at the edge of Denali National Park. Two years earlier, the 22-year-old college graduate gave away all his money, ditched his car, and set off on a sojourn around the country without telling a single person where he was going. Chris soon abandoned his birth name and started going by Alex. His was a process of detaching—from a conventional life that seemed meaningless, and from everything and everyone that belonged to it.

This quest for un-attachment carries an almost romantic appeal for me—and apparently for millions of others (Krakauer’s book is a national bestseller, and the movie has scored big at the box office). A sense of relationship to larger society brings with it responsibilities and, all too often, a long list of "shoulds" and "oughts," media saturation and god-awful materialism. There is wisdom in McCandless’s retreat from mainstream expectations to define his own life.

But Alex’s desire for independence went beyond his questioning of societal values; he tried to pull out of his web altogether, detaching from friends, family, and interdependence in general. "You are wrong," Alex wrote to an elderly man he met in his travels, "if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships." His point was, in part, that happiness also lies in the natural world, all around us, and that it takes an unconventional eye to see it there. Thoreau must have understood this too.

I question, however, the presumption that a meaningful life is possible without human relationships. Alex met several people in his travels who grew to love him, but he slipped very easily into and out of their lives. He was not willing to need others or be needed by them. He was captain of his own ship. According to Krakauer, McCandless was always relieved when he "evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it."

During his months alone in the Alaskan wilderness, however, it seems that something deep inside Alex began to shift. By month three, he was reading Doctor Zhvago and scrawling in the margins with bold, capital letters, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."

There is a private investigator who lives inside me. She quietly searches Society—in the most official and capitalized sense of the word—for the ideas that rule us, the myths that keep us striving after certain things while ignoring many of those we pass along the way.

How is it possible that in the richest country in the world, people die every day from lack of food and home and love? This is a question with many answers, some wrapped in complicated two-party politics and laissez-faire economics, but one answer is quite simple: We do not care enough about one another; we are far too busy looking after ourselves.

Those of us with money have a habit of separating ourselves—even physically—from one another. We live in homes separated by walls, yards, barking dogs, even paid security guards. In Guatemala, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, I remember seeing the sharp edges of broken bottles sticking from the tops of cement walls built to keep others out.

Meanwhile, the poor live nearly on top of each other, but know—because they have no choice—that they must help one another out to survive. Poverty is dreadful, and I would never wish it on anyone, but I do think theirs is a good lesson for all of us.

In his 1985 Nobel Lecture, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu pleaded with us, exasperated that we do not take better care of one another, especially the world’s destitute, and instead pour our resources into defense. "God created us for fellowship," he said. "God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril." (emphasis added)

In reality, we are all interconnected in countless ways—whether through grape juice or through friendship. The idea that any of us is—or should be—independent is based in a myth coveted unflinchingly by the very society Christopher McCandless was trying to escape.

In such a society, community-making becomes an act of revolution. Don’t be fooled: We all know that relationships are hard work. But if McCandless is right and happiness is only real when shared, then it is well worth the effort.

So, while the media advertises every material goods to satisfy every possible individual need, while our government proclaims values of freedom and independence, let us reach out to one another and form circles of interdependence. Let us need and be needed. Let us join the revolution.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a Master of Social Work student at Temple University. She recommends Into the Wild—both book and movie. She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.