New movie set to boost vagabond's shrine

Five miles out of Fairbanks, the young hitchhiker was standing frozen in the Alaskan dawn. There was a rifle poking out of his rucksack, but, as the writer Jon Krakauer put it, "a hitchhiker with a Remington semi-automatic isn't the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the 49th state".

Krakauer's book, Into the Wild, told the story of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless, son of a well-to-do family near Washington DC, who walked away from civilisation in 1992 and headed into the frozen backcountry armed with a .22-calibre rifle and a large bag of rice.

On his way he burned all his money and threw away his only map as well as anything that reminded him of civilisation. After failing to hike across Alaska, he camped out for the summer in a 1940s vintage bus he had stumbled upon which hunters had used as a shelter. There he lived completely alone, from April until the end of August 1992, before he finally starved to death.

Alaskans have been arguing about exactly what happened to McCandless ever since. The marooned Fairbanks City Bus in which he died is already an informal shrine for small numbers of pilgrims, intrigued by Krakauer's book. Today it is is littered with messages. "Fulfil your Dreams, Nothing Feels Better" and "Stop Trying to Fool Others as the Truth Lies Within" and "The Best Things in Life are Free" are written alongside empty bottles of Yukon Jack and Jack Daniels whisky.

With the release this weekend of Into the Wild, a movie written, directed and in part filmed by Sean Penn which has garnered rave reviews, it is set to become a full-blown tourist attraction.

"People have been visiting the bus like it's Jim Morrison's grave in Paris," said Sherry Simpson, an Alaska-based novelist who made the journey a few years ago by snowmobile.

Mr Penn, who has taken Hollywood activism to a new level by going on reporting trips to Iraq and travelling around Venezuela with Hugo Chavez, was one of the many smitten by Krakauer's book. Its cover shows a self-portrait photograph of McCandless outside the bus, which he took a few days before he died. "The image grabbed me," said Mr Penn, "so I took the book home and I read it cover to cover twice ... in the morning I saw in essence the movie."

It took him 10 years to persuade the McCandless family to give him the rights to their son's story. His film is a sympathetic account of a well-educated young man walking in the footsteps of solitary explorers like Jack London, author of White Fang and Call of the Wild, who was also smitten by the stark beauty of the Alaskan landscape.

Alaskans familiar with the outback are already expressing their dismay. A common view, Ms Simpson says, is that while many admire McCandless's desire to live alone in the back country, "he made some elemental dumb decisions and he died". Others believe he secretly wanted to die. Not a few believe he was mentally ill and should never have been allowed out in the woods alone.

What his story reveals is how quickly a few simple mistakes in the outback can turn to tragedy. McCandless survived for a while by shooting game, but he was not eating enough and when he decided to return to civilisation he was terribly weak. After attempting to cross a river swollen with rain and melting snow, he turned back, not knowing there was a rope bridge a quarter of a mile away. A day's walk from the bus, the US National Park Service keeps a cabin stocked with food, bedding, and first-aid supplies for rangers on winter patrols. But because McCandless had thrown away his map, he never knew about it.

In heavy rain he stumbled back to the bus where a journal entry reads, "Extremely weak. Fault of pot[ato] seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy."

Within a month, dying from starvation he wrote the following lines: "I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!"

He then slipped into unconsciousness. It would be 19 days before a group of hunters and hikers s happened across the bus and found his body inside the sleeping bag his mother had made for him. He weighed only four stone.