Surfing a Wave of Consequence
The closest I ever came to meeting a rock star was the time I stood in front of Eddie Vedder at a U2 show. To be fair, I’d “met” Adam and Larry from U2 a few months before as they came down the line signing autographs at the back door of the Meadowlands Arena in Jersey. I said hello and watched other people with cameras take photos, 2001 being well before the iPhone era and also still early enough I didn’t have my own digital camera.
No Doubt opened for U2 in Las Vegas, my home in November 2001, and as we stood inside the “heart,” a small general-admission area inside these rounded runways, waiting for Gwen and her boys to hit the stage, I happened to survey the crowd around me. I was on the floor of the Thomas and Mack Center, the home of UNLV’s basketball programs. Back in 1997, I watched Syracuse beat UNLV there and thanks to my friend, I was able to visit the postgame lockerrooms and meet a bunch of Rebels as well as Jim Boeheim, head coach of my beloved Orangemen. Now, four years later, I was about to see my favorite band in the same space.
As I spun around, taking in the sold-out crowd, my back only feet from the stage, I noticed that the man standing directly behind me looked familiar. This was a common occurrence for me as a Vegas transplant, a city filled with people from everywhere, so I didn’t think twice until the man caught my eye. I looked more directly at him and it took me way too long to recognize Eddie Vedder, lead singer of one of my other favorite bands, Pearl Jam.
Living in Vegas meant I had occasional celebrity sightings, and as much as I would’ve liked to freak out and be a fanboy, that part just wasn’t me. Eddie must have been bracing himself for the effusive fan to come out, but when it didn’t, he gave me an appreciative smile and we shared the dude head nod. I turned back around, and the two girls beside me had spotted him and were debating whether it was Eddie or not. I’d spent all day standing in the GA line with them, they’d flown to Vegas from Seattle to see U2, and so I leaned over and said “Yes, it’s him.” I asked them to wait a moment to freak out, because I didn’t want Eddie to think I’d blabbed to them, but they did freak out because EDDIE VEDDER! and Eddie was gracious, posing for photos with them. When No Doubt finished their opening set, I noticed that Eddie had moved behind a barricade to my left. My chance for another encounter was gone.
I came to Pearl Jam like everyone else outside Seattle, through the “Alive” video on Mtv. If Nirvana had rolled into my life like a crazy one-night stand, smashing me with “Teen Spirit,” it was Pearl Jam that has been beside me through thick and thin since.
In May 1992 I went to Alaska for the summer with Pearl Jam’s Ten on one side of a TDK-SA90, always in the car cassette player and in my Walkman. I liked to describe them as Bad Company fronted by Jim Morrison, a pure rock expression with the poet’s depth. After Alaska, I moved to Seattle, and as the bands in that scene were exploding across the globe, I felt a slight kinship as I walked some of the same streets they had.
But, it was Alaska that connected me with Pearl Jam in 1992, and listening to Howard Stern interview Eddie the day before Election Day in 2020, it is Alaska that makes me remember the continual spirals that Pearl Jam and Alaska have been drawing through my life because of my trip.
Driving 5,000 miles across the continent from Buffalo to the Kenai Peninsula with two of my best friends and my youngest brother was a highlight of my life. Listening to Pearl Jam blast from a boombox with a campfire roaring in the Alaskan woods was part of that. During that summer, I must have listened to Ten two or three times every day. But it was an article in the Anchorage paper on Sunday, September 13 that would come to affect my summer almost as deeply as Pearl Jam.
Chris McCandless was just a year younger than I when he set out in 1992 to travel across America. He ended up near Denali National Park, Alaska in April, hiking into the wilderness on the Stampede Trail just north of the park’s entrance. On the weekend of June 12, I went to Denali with three friends I’d met in Alaska. We drove the several hundred miles north from Kenai, arriving at the Park Entrance close to midnight. We drove into the park to the Savage River, which was as far as we could go, and explored that area for a few hours. Little did I know then that just 10 miles to the northwest, Chris McCandless was slowly starving to death on an old schoolbus.
I sat there on the side of an Alaskan mountain in the near-solstice twilight contemplating my life; and I decided that day I would always try to choose to be happy in my life, no matter what. I thought about returning to college to become a teacher. My life seemed newly-opened and possibilities were there, no matter what happened. I could always return to Denali in my mind and remember that moment, when I made myself the most important promise.
When I read Chris McCandless’s story that September, I felt like I was staring into the empty abyss of my own soul. His journey, the desire to lose himself in the wild, resonated with me in some deeply disturbing ways. By the time I read that story, I was one week from flying “home” to the Lower 48, having booked a flight to Seattle.
That September Sunday I realized I had spent that time in Denali and searched my own soul in that same Alaska landscape; and while Chris was always more on the edge than I was, in so many ways there wasn’t a lot of difference between my thoughts and actions and his. Where he was drawn to that solitary Kerouacian myth, I traveled to Alaska with friends, and even my spur-of-the-moment trip to Denali was done with new friends. But even as I spent a lot of time with my friends and brother, I spent just as much time alone with headphones, listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young, U2 and Pearl Jam.
Listening to Eddie Vedder being interviewed by Howard Stern, he mentions the Into the Wild music, which started off being just a song or two and grew into a whole soundtrack. By 2007, when the Sean Penn-directed movie was released, I’d gone from a fan of Pearl Jam’s first album to a longtime fan. I had even attended the band’s 10th Anniversary show in Las Vegas on October 22, 2000 with the same brother who went to Alaska with me. Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder had been my musical companions for over a decade-and-a-half at that point and I spent time re-reading Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book before watching the movie. I bought the soundtrack and listened to Eddie’s songs while thinking about Chris McCandless. One inescapable thought haunted me — that we’d both been in that spot at similar times in our lives and I had walked out alive while Chris had not. His death didn’t haunt me as much as the idea that he had approached his journey with an authenticity that I lacked, that I played at visiting Alaska and returned to a normal middle-class existence while he sought the gritty reality of an authentic life and was willing to pay with his life.
Almost immediately after moving back to Buffalo in 1993, I met the woman who would become my wife, the mother of my children. I fulfilled the promise I had made to myself and became a teacher. This led me to Las Vegas, where I taught high school for eight years, and within a year after seeing Eddie Vedder at the U2 show, I’d become a father for the first time.
My daughter has grown into a thinking, caring person and when she read Into the Wild in one of her high school classes, she complained to me of her dislike for Krakauer’s masculine writing. I told her the story of Chris McCandless from my perspective, that I considered his story to be some sort of yang to my yin, that we both ended up at the same place on Earth at the exact same time with the same questions in our souls.
That it would be two months after that June weekend until I would first hear his story was the cruel twist in his story and the object lesson in mine. I made a promise to myself, as I’m sure Chris had to himself, and in the last week of my time in Alaska, Chris’s decisions weighed heavily upon my mind.
No matter what I did in the future, no matter how bleak my ensuing homelessness and unemployment would be, I had to push forward into my life because Chris could not. His alternative, which may have been the result of stubbornness, stupidity, or sheer inexperience, seemed to always loom over the next decade of my life. Chris became a kind of shadow, so much so that I had to stop and wonder why I wouldn’t let him go. The best I could come up with then was that I didn’t have many friends who had died at that stage of my life, so it was always Chris who became my measure of mortality, of getting things done before the inevitable end.
We live in an extraordinary time, this Age of COVID-19 and Donald Trump, when our usual ways of living, our normal lives are completely out of balance. In many ways, this is a replaying of my 1992, when the fate of the world seemed to hinge on a Presidential Election. From the riots after the Rodney King verdict to my personal disconnection from television and the media, I feel like 2020 has been a horrible remake of 1992. Except that today I have my children to worry about.
One of the themes of U2’s 2001 Elevation tour was the idea of music uplifting one’s soul, a deeply spiritual inspiration. I saw them three times on the first part of their North American tour, in April and June 2001. By the time they resumed their tour that October, the world had changed. Seeing Eddie Vedder standing behind me was completely surreal but in a strange way it anchored me in the changed world. I thought about Alaska, of course, and Chris McCandless. While Krakauer’s book was five years old at the time, the movie, and Eddie’s involvement, was still six years in the future. Pearl Jam was 11 years old then, and last month they just hit 30.
Howard Stern asked Eddie about losing Chris Cornell, but the conversation had also touched upon Kurt Cobain and Andrew Wood. Eddie spoke with incredible emotional honesty about these losses and his own childhood, along with the death of his youngest brother. Howard asked him if, in his darkest days, he had contemplated suicide. Eddie vehemently rejected that choice, not in any judgmental way, but as a man who had already lived through enough of the darkness to know that this was no solution for him, especially as a parent. Chris McCandless was not a father, and now that my own children are on the verge of their own adulthood, it is as a father that I write this reflection.
None of us are having an easy time these days, and no matter what happens today, we will remain a long way from normal for quite some time. Listening to Eddie Vedder talk and reflecting on the place his music has occupied in my life allows me to step back and look at today in a much-needed perspective. I have listened to the Into the Wild soundtrack while writing this and I have cast my vote in the 2020 Elections. I have thought once again about Chris McCandless and about my children, and the children of those who I care about. What I wonder the most is how any of us can achieve the kind of joy I decided to pursue in the crepuscular early morning of June 13, 1992. All I know is I have to continue to push forward, as I have every day since then.
