I've been thinking lately about just what it is that readers want in a hero. Part of this is a knee jerk reaction to Into the Wild, and the affection (dare I say devotion) so many people have to doomed heroes but also I'm writing about dead guys, lots and lots of dead guys, and I wonder why I'm doing this sometimes; what it is that I think their stories have to share that could matter so much to anyone who never met them. I'm not creating these guys as heroes and yet Jon Krakauer didn't do that with Chris McCandless either. He wrote the story of what McCandless did and the guy just became some sort of wilderness hero. (The fact that he committed suicide by wilderness seems lost on most readers but whatever...) When you are writing someone else's story, do you decide while writing that you will make that person heroic or does it just happen without you; does the reader make it happen on their own? I'm not entirely sold on that idea as I think that in Krakauer's case he did want McCandless to be a hero - he was a personal hero - and Krakauer wanted the world to feel the same way about him that he did. Mission accomplished in that regard, but what does it mean about us for falling for his story?

Do we make our own heroes, or do we just take the ones that others give us to worship?

I had to write a paper about heroes for one of my classes in grad school and I carefully showed how the bush pilot, who went out in horrible weather to help the people in Town or the village and then returned to make the flight another day, was pretty much the classic heroic type. In a metaphorical sense, Joseph Campbell would agree that pilots slayed the dragons and saved the world on daily basis. I got an A and dumped a lot of my findings into my thesis where they went a long way toward explaining why pilots were so willing to continuously accept insane challenges in Alaska. They were heroes, and heroes do great things like flying overloaded in crap weather. We just face our dragons wherever we find them, even when they aren't really there, even when we make them up ourselves.

Even when we should just say enough is enough and let the damn dragons die on their own.

Chris McCandless was so desperate to find a challenge that he went into the woods on a hunt he had no chance of seeing to the end. The really odd thing there is that Krakauer went into the same woods and found McCandless. Can you be so desperate for heroics that you'll take anything or anyone that even comes close - that comes any kind of close? Do we settle now for everything, even our heroes?

It's odd, but I didn't set out to write about dead pilots. I never realized how much a part of my life they were, or how I just couldn't quite forget them. It's not that I think of faces and names everyday or miss and mourn them all the time, but I still can't shake the fact that I know so many dead guys. And what's odder still, pretty much all of them are remembered by their families and friends as someone who died for something; as men who were doing a great thing and death took them away too early. There was one guy in particular whose wife swore was killed by sudden and mysterious bad weather; snow and clouds that came out of nowhere and surrounded him before he had a chance to escape. He didn't die in an accident and he didn't die from foolishness; he was killed by a dragon in the air. And the reporters agreed with her, and gave her all the sympathy a heroes wife deserves.

Perhaps someday someone will make a movie about him too.

I don't want to speak ill of the dead because I don't think that is kind to those they left behind but I don't want to create a new set of false heroes either. I never found McCandless anyone other than a man who could have lived and I feel the same way about every dead pilot I've written about as well. But once I tell their stories I can't make you see them the way I do; I can only give you a sad and sorry truth. What you do with it has more to do with your dragons then theirs. Which makes me wonder all over again just why so many people still love Chris McCandless.