Season Epilogues

I. Into The Wild

INDIANAPOLIS, Crowne Plaza Indianapolis Airport, March 25 -- One of my favorite books of the past 15 years is Into The Wild. It was a national New York Times bestseller that was made into a major motion picture (Emile Hirsch was great in it). It's the non-fictional story of a young student-athlete named Chris McCandless whom, after graduation from college in 1990, renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, gave his savings to charity and hitchhiked around North America. He ended up dead in a remote region of Alaska, where his decomposed body was discovered by hunters.

The book is so powerful, and contains such immediate language, that it's pretty much made Catcher in the Rye obsolete as a meditation on young American male restlessness and wanderlust. And it hits quite close to home, too: that was same era during which I was thumbing my way around the United States, separated from my family with a new name, aloof to the dangers of the road. In the summer of 1989, between my junior and senior years of prep school, I hitchhiked from New Hampshire to California and back, looking for something pure that I never found. In Indiana, on my way west, the driver of an El Dorado stabbed me with a hunting knife while trying to take my backpack. I still have the scar, a two-inch permanent sunburn above my right hip.

But perceived simpatico is not why I love Into The Wild. Two-thirds of the way through the book, author Jon Krakauer slides into the narrative all Kilgore Trout-like, and tells his own adventure story in two cutaway chapters. In 1979, a young Krakauer made a solo 20-day expedition to Alaska and successfully reached the summit of the Devils Thumb -- a 9,000-foot unclimbable peak in the state's Boundary Range. It was a difficult ascent up a diorite wall covered in feathery ice, a climb that repeatedly came close to costing him his life.

Upon his return to civilization, however, Krakauer learned a sobering lesson: it didn't matter.

The euphoria, the overwhelming sense of relief, that had initially accompanied my return to Petersburg faded, and an unexpected melancholy took its place. The people I chatted with in Kito's didn't seem to doubt that I'd been to the top of the Thumb; they just didn't much care.

...Less than a month after sitting on the summit of the Thumb, I was back in Boulder, nailing up siding on the Spruce Street Townhouses, the same condos I'd been framing when I left for Alaska. I got a raise, to four bucks an hour, and at the end of the summer moved out of the job-site trailer to a cheap studio apartment west of the downtown mall.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to a obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

This was not a popular section of the book with most readers, and I've heard it described as grandstanding, unnecessary filler, narcissistic even. Hollywood had little use for Krakauer's tale -- the film version edited him out altogether, and opted to make Chris' sister the primary narrator instead. But for me, this threw the entire book into a five-dimensional perspective, give the work ballast and true weight. Without the inclusion of the two chapters on the Stikine Ice Cap, Into The Wild is a third-hand, third-rate version of Catcher -- a point proven, perhaps, by the massive story exaggerations contained in the movie script.

The author never had to announce it in so many words, but he was detailing exactly why he felt so compelled to give this particular ghost a new life and a new voice, why he cared enough to spend three years and hundreds of pages writing this biography. Without a chronicler, nobody would give a crap about Chris McCandless. Without Jon Krakauer to tell the story, this great adventure of Alexander Supertramp is worthless -- like so many million other great adventures. Without Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless is a human dead end, an uncelebrated thrill-seeker who brought back no lessons for anyone else.

A dead end, just like I would have been if I hadn't twisted out of the way awkwardly that day on the flat blue leather seat, if that knife had found its intended mark. My life might have ended meaninglessly, with no curious biographer to document it. Roads, after all, make poor receptacles for dreams too.

Seriously, what's the big deal about fearlessness? It's made out to be this incredible and rare trait that only a select few possess. People forget that it's our natural, default state of being. We enter the world too naive to fear anything; over time, we develop a profile of all that scares us. Some spend their lives figuring out what's on their own checklists.

Some play twisted games with fear. They put themselves in uncomfortable, disruptive situations that press that fear button, set their bloodstream awash in life-affirming adrenaline and cortisol. Throughout history, entire nations have been manipulated into fearful submission with laws and religions. In modern times, there's an entire fear industry, countless chairs facing countless couches. The hired friend leans in close, asks countless variations of the question, "What, exactly, are you afraid of?"

Fear is often triggered by something outside that activates the mechanism inside. Sometimes we fear that something inside will betray us. There is fear of the invisible and unknown, fear of the physically present, dangerous and looming. There is the panic that engulfs and immobilizes, as well as the phobia that propels into performance.

But all fears have one thing in common. Nobody's afraid of things that have already occurred. If one is running from the past, it's only because of a fear of repetition -- worse, bigger, more damaging this time. The object of fear is always somewhere in the future.

Fear is of the end.

PAWTUCKET, R.I., Mar. 28 -- All animate organisms, from the globbiest amoeba to the most intricate human machine, share one thing in common: life. Life is what keeps you going, it's the light before the beginning of the tunnel. The meaning of life is simply this: it means so much that nobody can survive without it.

Every season, the 337 college basketball teams, in many certain ways, constitute living and breathing organisms -- each is a unique collection of blood and muscles and brains all working towards a common goal, each with an expected lifespan of six months (the same period of time that your average worker ant lives for, by the way). Some of these teeming teams just aren't cut out for this world and cut out early, others are snuffed out before their respective times, and still others -- like, say, the third place-cum-NCAA participant 2006-07 Miami (Oh.) RedHawks -- get to live far beyond their expected span.

But only one team gets to end its season with a meaningful victory, and live forever. (We're not counting the survivor in Myles Brand's Purgatorio -- er, the NIT.) For every other team, death comes swiftly.

I have to apologize for the stark and gloomy terms, but I'm trying to illustrate why I prefer the wide-eyed hopefulness of Midnight Madness or the mundane rhythms of late January's conference games to college basketball's final month, why it takes me at least until June to be able to even look a basketball in the eye after the final mid-major is eliminated from the NCAA Tournament. For all the brief glimpses of overwhelming joy, for every One Shining Moment, there are a hundred final, tearful, bitter press conferences as losers' seasons are killed off in March's annual slaughter of the innocents.

When you go to as many games as I do, it can seem like walking through a graveyard.

INDIANAPOLIS, Apr. 2 -- There are huge signs all over town -- on airport walls, strung over streetlights, over the main gate to the RCA Dome. They all read, "The Road Ends Here."

There's also a giant logo on the side of the 45,000-seat venue, a green and gold star with zag-zigging trailers that has never been reproduced in this size in the two years of its use, much less the nearly four decades the school it represents has existed. It's the mark of George Mason University, the surprise mid-major school among the humdrum Other Three.

Epilogue

With the notable exception of our friends in the Ivy League, very few choose to be mid-major people.