Into the Wild: Halfway Point

Our English class is now halfway through Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. These are the responses to questions that we have been answering as we read, along with the page numbers in which we found the answers.

Chapter 1

1. Chris McCandless came from a well-to-do family from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He was an excellent student and athlete, and in fact graduated with honors from Emory University. (Author’s Note)
2.  Jon Krakauer introduces three themes in the Author’s Note. These are, “…the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, [and] the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons (Author’s Note).”
3. The purpose of the quoted material at the beginning of Chapter One is to give some background information on McCandless. It also foreshadows his death in Alaska and tells the reader that McCandless did realize that he could die on his journey. (pg. 3)
4. Alex is the alias of Chris McCandless. He used this name while he was traveling. (pg. 4)
5. Jim Gallien is a union electrician and outdoorsman who happened to be driving along the George Parks Highway when “Alex” was hitchhiking. Jim was the man who gave McCandless a ride to the beginning of the Stampede Trail. (pg. 4)
6. Gallien judged Chris McCandless to be young, unprepared, and completely set on going into the Alaskan wilderness. (pg. 5)
7. Gallien advised McCandless not to go into the wilderness because he is very unprepared. However, “Alex” refuses to listen to this advice. (p. 6)
8. Alex turned down Gallien’s offer to buy him better gear, saying that he wouldn’t come across anything that he couldn’t handle on his own. Gallien then gave him old rubber work boots to keep his feet warmer and dry, even though the shoes were too big for McCandless. (pg. 6-7_
9. Gallien decided not to alert the authorities about “Alex’s” journey into the wild because he thought that the boy would get hungry and give up. (pg. 7)
10. This statement is ironic because McCandless did not due what a normal person would do, in fact he did exactly the opposite of what Gallien thought he would do. This ended up being a fatal decision. (pg. 7)

Chapter 2

1. Krakauer included a quote from Jack London as the heading of this chapter because Jack London wrote many books about the wilderness and living in the wilderness. This quote specifically involves the Wild laughing at humans who try to come out alive, which fits the story because McCandless does not come out of the Alaskan Wild. (pg. 9)
2. These detailed descriptions give an idea and a picture in the reader’s mind of the terrain and territory that McCandless was facing as he trekked into the wild. (pg 9-11)
3. Though the body of McCandless was very decomposed when it was discovered, there was so little body fat and muscle that starvation was thought to be the cause. (pg. 13-14)

Chapter 3

1. Wayne Westerberg is an owner of two grain elevators and the director of a custom combine crew in South Dakota. He and Chris got along very well after Westerberg picked McCandless up as a hitchhiker. In fact, “Alex” stayed with Westerberg for three days and later came back to work for him. (pgs. 16-18)
2. A “rubber tramp” is a rover or wanderer who owns a vehicle, while “leather tramps” are travelers who do not. These terms both describe the culture of “vagabonds” who travel or wander constantly. (pg. 17)
3. Krakauer says that McCandless found a “surrogate family” in these men because, though he felt somewhat estranged from his own family, Westerberg and his employees lived like a family and acted like a family. He therefore created strong bonds to Westerberg, his employees, and really the entire town. (pgs. 18-19)
4. McCandless left Carthage because Westerberg was arrested for building “black boxes.” This meant that there was no more work at the grain elevator for Chris, and so he left South Dakota.
5. The reader knows that McCandless’ copy of War and Peace was special to him, because on page 19, Krakauer says, “Before departing, he gave Westerberg a treasured edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. McCandless also writes inside the book to “Listen to Pierre.” (pg. 19)
6. McCandless grew up in the upper-middle-class of a town in Virginia. His father, Walt, was an aerospace engineer, who later launched a small but prosperous consulting firm in which Chris’s mother, Billie, was his partner. McCandless had six half-brothers and sisters from his father’s first marriage and one younger sister, whom he was extremely close to. (pg.19-20)
7. McCandless showed that he was out of step with current society because he didn’t want new cars, his parents to pay for a new car, or all the honors and medals that he could have earned. (pg. 20-21)
8. McCandless adopted a new name when he left, which was a symbol that he was starting a whole new life. (pg. 23)

Chapters 4 and 5

1. This statement applies to Chris because he went into the desert, and on his entire journey, in order to get away from the chaos of life where he felt so far away from what was actually important. (pg. 25)
2. Jan Burres was a “rubber tramp” who traveled around selling trinkets at flea markets and swap meets. Burres and her boyfriend were driving near the town of Orick when they saw McCandless picking berries by the side of the road. They took pity and pulled over and picked him up. He stayed with Jan and her boyfriend for a week and after he left, he took care to stay in touch. (pg. 30-31)
3. After buying the metal canoe in Topock, McCandless paddled down the Colorado River for several days, with one side trip down the Bill Williams river and a day tracking wild horses OnDecember 2, McCandless snuck through open flood gates in order to cross the border. After crossing the border, however, Chris got lost in the maze of canals until some canal officials gave him a scribbled map to the ocean, which in fact led him to a dead end in the desert. After Chris walked to find another river and caught a ride from some duck hunters, McCandless reached the Gulf of California, paddled south along the eastern edge of the gulf, and later abandoned his canoe to travel on foot once again. (pg. 32-36)
4. Chris’ writing in his journal is all in third person and he refers to himself as Alex rather than Chris. (pg. 34-35)
5. Chris decides that, “It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found.” (pg. 37)
6. Chris McCandless lived a pretty normal life in Bullhead City, and in fact thought that he might settle down and stay there. (pg. 39)
7. The conditions of the Slabs are definitely not upscale, but they provide some amount of cover and solidarity for the itinerant inhabitants. The people who live there are a mix of people from the retired, to the perpetually unemployed who have come to live cheaply under the sun while it is cold in most other places. One thing that was interesting is the flea market/swap meet that was being held when Chris arrived at the Slabs. (pg. 43-44)
8. Jan recounts that Chris did a lot of socializing at the Slabs, though he needed his solitude sometimes. She also says that he was playful like a little kid and that he had a way with dogs, especially the puppies that Jan had. (pg. 44-45)
9. Burres says that she thought McCandless was slightly crazy to want to go out into the Alaskan wilderness, but that she thought he was smart enough to figure out Alaska, just like he had figured out how to paddle to the Gulf of California, and come through in one piece.

Chapters 6 and 7 

1. Ron Franz was an elderly man who picked up McCandless as a hitchhiker and took him under his wing. Krakauer thinks that Franz was deeply affected by his brief contact with McCandless. (pg. 48)
2. Anza-Borrego is the desert state park in which McCandless set up his camp. (pg. 48)
3. The tragedy of Ron Franz’s life took place on New Year’s Eve of 1957 when Franz’s wife and son, his only child, were killed while Franz was overseas. (pg. 50)
4. Franz thought that Chris was too intelligent and too nice of a kid to be living in the midst fo the nudists, drunks, and dope smokers around the springs. He requested that McCandless get off the road, get an education and a job, and make something of his life. (pg. 51)
5. Franz was a skilled leathermaker who taught “Alex” his skills. McCandless created a leather belt carved with pictures of his journey under Franz’s tutelage. (pg. 51-52)
6. McCandless tried to avoid lasting friendship and the emotional baggage that came along with it. He kept others at arm’s length, though he may be friendly with them, and then flitted out of their lives before they could come to expect anything of him. (pg. 55)
7. Chris told Franz that he should, “…make a radical change in your [Franz’s] lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been to hesitant to attempt.” He says that, essentially, Franz should get out of Salton City and hit the road to live a nomadic life. Franz responds to this by placing most of his possesions in a storage locker, outfitting a van with bunks and camping gear and going out to occupy Chris’s old campsite. (pg. 56-58)
8. Ron Franz learned the McCandless had died when he was giving a ride to a hitchhiker that had recently read the article about Chris in Outside magazine. After hearing about his friend’s death, Franz renounced God and became an atheist, saying that he could not believe in a God that let boys like “Alex” die. (pg. 60)
9. Westerberg was annoyed because it was late in the harvesting season and they were shorthanded on the grain farm, and so had been working eighteen-hour days. Part of the reason he was shorthanded was that they had expected “Alex” to be back at work by then. (pg. 62)
10. Krakauer says that McCandless may have submitted to his father Walt through high school and college, but all the while he brooded about, “…his father’s moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parent’s lifestyle, [and] the tyranny of their conditional love.” However, though McCandless may have disagreed with his parents, he was very close to his sister Carine. (pg. 63-64)

Chapters 8 and 9

1. Krakauer probably included the story of Gene Rossellini because his story and ideas are fairly similar to Chris McCandless’s. Rossellini was obviously a very intelligent man, who studied extensively, but like Chris, did not see a reason to collect honors and degrees. After studying for many years, Rossellini then went out to live in the wild, because, also like Chris, he wanted to, “…return to a natural state.” Though Gene took his goal to more extremes than Chris, for instance, shunning absolutely all technology, and ended his own life where Chris was killed by starvation, their stories are very similar. (pg. 73-75)
2. The story of John Waterman is also similar to the story of Chris McCandless. Many people think that, like Waterman, Chris McCandless had next to no common sense and an almost unhealthy fascination with the harshness of nature. However, Chris was not mentally ill. Like McCandless, Waterman embarked on his last journey completely aware that he may not come back, alone, and underprepared, and, like Chris, these factors and some carelessness on his part were most likely the causes of his death. (pg. 75-79)
3. Carl McCunn’s story and bush expedition also draws many paralells to the story of Chris McCandless. McCunn was also lacking in some common sense, though more so, it seems, than McCandless. Though he was unprepared and may have underestimated the harshness of the Alaskan wilderness, McCandless was not the type to forget to arrange transportation out of the wilderness if he had wanted it. Chris was completely aware that he may not make it out of the harsh, cold wild and did not expect someone to magically appear and save him before he died. (pg. 81-85)
4. Everett Ruess was born in California in 1914. When he was a child, his close-knit family lived at least seven different cities before they settled in southern California when Everett was fourteen. At sixteen, he spent a summer hitchhiking and walking until he wound up in Carmel. There, he convinced Edward Weston to tutor him in painting and block printing, as well as let him hang around the studio with Weston’s sons. Ruess then returned home to receive his high school diploma, but hit the road less than a month after his graduation. He traveled through Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, attended UCLA for exactly one semester, visited his parents twice, and spent a winter in San Francisco. After this, he spent the rest of his life on the road, straining his body, searching for beauty, and writing many letters along the way. He changed his name many times, from Everett Ruess to Lan Rameau, to Evert Rulan, and finally to Nemo. In November 1934, however, Ruess disappeared into the wilderness. His two burros and some graffiti with the name “Nemo” was found along Davis Gulch and the canyons beyond and there are still many theories on how he died. (pg. 89-95)
5. Ken Sleight concludes that, even though many people think that both Everett and Chris were strange, they tried to follow their dream of finding beauty and living in the wild. Sleight says, “That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.” (pg. 96)