Eichenweg Strasse, 1 Metzkausen, Mettmann, it’s the address of my 19 m2 penthouse, where I saw for the first time what would become the most watched film in my life, “Into The Wild”.
I was a pizza chef, a lonely pizza chef, lonely in a foreign country and the only friends I had were my colleagues. That day, the fictional story of Christopher McCandless and the music of Eddie Vedder, triggered something in me, something that was already there, something that had brought me to Germany, the desire for adventure, to test myself, to put at stake something or everything, for the simple pleasure of doing it.
So, day after day, in my mind, this call for adventure grew stronger and stronger, which ideally should have been in the places where Christopher McCandless found his great adventure and his end, I wanted to put myself to the test in an inhospitable place, in contact with nature, alone. To live my great adventure, now had become an obsession, I had to go to all costs to America, the forest called me… And I replied.
More than a year and a half had passed since I left my friends in Germany, to return to Italy and organize my great adventure, fortunately I found a friend gave me a job and I started to save money, 20 months of sacrifice, doing overtime and working on Saturdays a second job, with a group of Indians, to clean and collect buckets of aluminum waste in a large company in Brescia. But I had a goal, the forest, my adventure.
I had to abandon the idea of retracing Christopher’s footsteps since I read that many people were already doing it, creating disappointment among the locals and I could never have shared my dream with some ordinary mortals, it had to be unique and mine. So I started looking for another adventure, my experience was almost nonexistent, sure, I had experience in trekking, I had done a bit of caving and other sports, but nothing of the sort. This limited my research to something accessible to a novice adventurer, but it still had to be difficult and far from civilization, in the forests of the great north.
It was during my research on the internet that I came across some accounts of people that descended the McKenzie River by canoe and kayak, I found information fairly easily, procured myself a kayak from a rental shop, and managed to talk to a person who had descended and it was decided, I would have descended the Deh Cho, or McKenzie river, the longest river in Canada in 1,738 Km of forests, bears and wolves were waiting for me; I hate selfies, but I regret not taking a picture of the smile that was impressed on my face that night…
