For family night last night, Jared and I left the third member of our family with my mother who is visiting and went to see Into the Wild at Brewvies (which is pretty much a movie theatre where you order food and drinks from a restaurant/bar and take it into the movie with you). The last time we had gone to see a movie together was in July, in Hoboken. We had been wanting to see this movie for a long time. I really enjoyed it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today.
Pretty much this privileged kid from Virginia graduates from Emory and then disappears, leaving his $24,000 to charity and taking little provisions with him. He travels around America for a while meeting people that try to adopt him (one quite literally) into their lives but he has bigger plans to live in the wilderness of Alaska. I love how it embraces the American outdoors with such enthusiasm- reminds me of someone I know well who has always had a similar craving for solitude in nature especially when he was about the same age as this guy. I had to remind Jared after the movie that he has a wife and son now and if he wanted to pick up and live off of the land in Alaska he’ll have to at least take us with him. He agreed he wouldn’t want to leave us behind if an adventure beckoned him. This ends up being the realization Chris makes in the movie, writing “Happiness is only real when shared” between lines in a book.

This is a picture Christopher McCandles, the guy that the movie’s story is based on, took of himself shortly before he died of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness

FYI Today and tomorrow is the Banff Mountain Film Festival at the U of U. We’re probably going tomorrow night. This will be the third or fourth year we’ve gone in a row (times before have been in Manhattan) and it’s always awesome.