Into the Wild

His big dream, originally, was to go off and live in the woods with some beautiful woman. He was hot for at least a couple of different girls who worked with us, and he spent a lot of time and energy trying to talk Sue or Barbara or whoever into accompanying him, which in itself was pretty much pure fantasyland.

Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity.

He'd sing numbers like 'Tender Is the Night' while I accompanied him on piano.

I'd learned by then that a direct approach, 'By God, you better not try a stunt like that again!', didn't work with Chris.

One of their neighbors was the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approached this man, an army general, for advice.

From all the available evidence, there seemed to be little doubt that McCandless, rash and incautious by nature, had committed a careless blunder, confusing one plant for another, and died as a consequence.

It was an uncharacteristic break from his cover that might easily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts, although the lapse proved to be of no consequence because the private investigator hired by Walt and Billie never caught the slip.

Everett Ruess's correspondence reveals uncanny parallels between Ruess and Chris McCandless.

"Personally I see nothing positive at all about Chris McCandless's lifestyle or wilderness doctrine," scolded another correspondent.

Contrary to common belief, however, the bus doesn't lie beneath any established flight path, and very few planes fly over it.

Evidence unearthed by the forty-odd expeditions sent to search for them eventually established that all had perished, the victims of scurvy, starvation, and unspeakable suffering.

Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless's distinctive hand.

And now he'd slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's life as well. Painlessly, that is, from McCandless's perspective, although not from the old man's.

Although he castigated himself severely for this waste of a life he'd taken, a day later McCandless appeared to regain some perspective, for his journal notes, "henceforth will learn to accept my errors, however great they be."

This, I figured, could sustain me for three or four more days if need be, but then what would I do?

He sustained a perfect 4.0 grade-point average through high school and college.

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.

I aimed for another spot, and once again it glanced off unyielding diorite with a dull clank.