| A | B |
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| Who is the author of Into the Wild? | Jon Krakauer |
| Who was Jim Gallien? | He was a union electrician who was on his way to Anchorage, 240 miles beyond Denali on the George Parks Highway |
| How did Jim Gallien try to help Alex? | He offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage, buy him some decent gear, and then drive him back to wherever he wanted to go. |
| What did Alex give Jim before he left the pickup truck? | He gave Jim his watch, his comb, and all his money 85 cents because he did not want to know what time it was or what day it was or where he was. None of that mattered. |
| What was Jim Gallien's impression of Alex? | He though that his scheme was foolhearty and he tried to dissuade him.He was excited and he could not wait to head out there and get started. |
| Who was Alexander Supertramp? | A 24 year old boy from South Dakota who wanted to ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and live off the land for a few months. |
| Where did Alex intend to go? | He would take a route called the Stampede Trail that intersected the road near the coal-mining town of Healy. The route meandered west from Parks Highway for 40 miles before petering out in the middle of trackless wilderness north of Mt. McKinley |
| Describe the Stampeded Trail? | 50 miles of road that are often impassable due to thawing permafrost and seasonal floods. A bus was left about halfway out the trail to serve as backcountry shelter for hunters and trappers. |
| How was Chris found? | These four hunters set out for the bus as they were stalking moose. He had been dead for two and a half weeks in side a blue sleeping bag. |
| How did Wayne Westerberg meet Alex? | He picked him up while he was hitchhiking. McCandless stayed with Wayne for 3 days and rode out with his crew as they piloted their lumbering machines across the ocean of ripe blond grain. |
| How had Alex paid for his college education? | a friend of the family had left a bequest of 40,000 for the final two years of his college education. |
| Describe Alex's relationship with his parents? | Alex thinks that his parents tried to buy his respect as they offered to buy his a new car at graduation and pay for law school if needed. He went out west to become completely separated from his previous life and went as far as to change his name to Alex |
| What did Alex do to his car? | He abandoned it at the edge of the dry riverbed in a thicket of saltbrush not far from where they had parked and concealed it with a large piece of tarpaulin |
| After abandoning his car, what did Alex do? | He resumed his odyssey on foot. He hid the VA plates and burried his Winchester deer-hunting rifle and a few other possessions that he might one day want to recover. He arranged all his paper currency in a pile on the sand and put a match to it, all $123.00 and loaded his few remaining possessions into a backpack and set out on July 10th to hike around Lake Mead |
| Who was Jan Burres and Bob? | A pair of drifters in a old van who drove Alex to Orick beach, just south of Oregon state line. For the next 2 years, Alex sent them a postcard every month or two. |
| What contact happened between Alex and his parents? | The unpaid ticket that Alex got on August 10th for hitchhiking appeared in Walt and Billie's mailbox at the end of August. The parents contacted Peter Kalitka who was a private investigator. |
| Where did Alex go on his canoe? Why did he abandon it? | He paddled down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly 400 miles south, across the border with Mexico. He beached the canoe and headed north due to bad weather. |
| What did Alex do in Las Vegas? | He found a job at an Italian restaurant. He buried his backpack in the desert in 2//27 and entered Las Vegas with no money and no ID. He lived on the streets with bums, tramps, and winos for several weeks. |
| Explain why alex liked Bullhead City? | He liked the lumpen who were well represented in the community trailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats. He fell in love with the starl desert landscape that encircles the town and stopped traveling for 2 months |
| Where did Alex live and work in Bullhead City? | He was holding down a fulltime job flipping Quarter Pounders at a McDonald's on the main drag commuting to work on a bicycle. Outwardly, he was living a surprisingly conventional existence even going as far as to open a savings account at a local bank. |
| Why was Jan willing to help Alex? | She was estranged from her own son that she knew was out there somewhere and she would want somebody to look after him like she tried to look after Alex. |
| How did Alex meet Ron Franz? | His long-term paternal instincts were rekindled by Alex. He was an 80 year old man who met Alex in Jan. 1992 and drove Alex from Salton City, California to Grand Junction,Colorado and left Alex there to hitchhike to South Dakota. He said he would keep in touch. |
| Why didn't Alex want to be the adopted grandson of Ron Franz? | He put it off by telling Ron that they would talk about it when they got back from Alaska. Alex had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He had successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm's length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him and now he slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's life as well. |
| What advice did Alex give Ron in the letter that he sent him in April? What does that reveal about Alex? | To make a radical change in his lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which he may never have though of doing or been hesitant to attempt. He is telling Ron to get out of Salton City and hit the road. He does not need a human relationship to bring a new light of joy. Just get out and do it. |
| Did Ron take that advice? When did he next hear about Alex? | Yes. Franz placed his furniture and possessions in a storage locker, bought a GMC Duravan, outfitted it with bunks and camping gear. Then he moved out of his apartment and set up camp on the bajada. He occupied McCandless' old campsite just past hot springs. He heard about Alex from two hitchhikers who just read about him freezing to death in the outdoor magazine. He denounced god, became an atheist and drank whiskey. |
| Explain why Alex was so much against his family? | both father and son were stubborn and high strung. Walt needed to exert control and Chris had a very independent nature. Chris submitted to Walt's authority through high school and college but raged inwardly. He brooded over his father's shortcomings-the hypocrisy of their lifestyles, the tyranny of their conditional love. |
| What impression did he make upon the people with whom he worked in Carthage? | He was outgoing and extremely personable when the spirit moved him. He charmed many people. He worked hard doing dirty, tedious jobs that nobody else wanted to tackle. |
| What is ominous in the words that he sent to Westerberg and Burres? | This is the last you shall hear from me, Wayne. If this adventure proves fatal, take care, it was great knowing you. He was foreshadowing his death. |
| What was the reaction of the people to the article in the Outside magazine? | Many people concluded McCandless was mentally disturbed. He and the author of the article were criticized for glorifying a foolish, pointless death. Much of the negative mail was sent by the Alaskans because the prevailing Alaska wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead only found mosquitoes and death. |
| Compare Gene Rosselini to Alex? | They both came from wealthy families and were well-educated with college degrees. They were both unconventional and denounced mainstream society. Rosellini never collected a degree and McCandless did. They both purged their lives of all but the most primitive tools. Rossalini exercised compulsively-McCandless did not. Rosselini stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. He left no suicide note-McCandless left notes. |
| Compare John Waterman to Alex? | They both grew up in the same Washington suburbs. John headed to the crags at every opportunity and trained obsessively when he could not climb.He was small, only 5 foot 3 inches. John had a manic depressive personality. Both swam on the swim team and had bad family relationships. Waterman was compulsive and tried to run for president. |
| Compare Carl McCunn to Alex? | Carl was a 35 year old amateur photographer who was friendly, popular, smart but dreamy and out of touch with reality. He told his friends that he was going out to the wilderness to shoot pictures of wildlife but never made arrangements to be picked up. Unlike Alex, he was flamboyant and like to party hard. |
| Was Alex mentally ill? | no. He lacked common sense but he was not incompetent, a nutcase, a sociopath, or an outcast. He was a pilgrim. |
| What was the desire of Everett Ruess? | He had always been unsatisfied with his life as most people live it. He wants to live more intensely and richly. He wanted the freedom and simple beauty of living on the trails. |
| How was Ruess like McCandless? | He was just as romantic as McCandless and heedless of personal safety. Ruess was undeterred by physical discomfort and at times, he seemed to welcome it. He adopted a series of new names or brush names like Nemo which was latin for nobody. He closely identified with the characters in the literature that he read. They were both kind of different but at least they tried to follow their dreams. |
| How was Chris identified in Fairbanks on Sept. 13, 1992? | When Jim Gallien read the newspaper article in the Anchorage Daily News, he called the state troopers and told them that he had given the guy a ride. The troopers had developed a roll of film in the hiker's Minolta which included several self-portraits, and Jim identified Alex. |
| How was his family found? | Westerberg had found two w-4 forms McCandless had filled out and signed with his real name: Chris J McCandless and put his SS number on it which turned out the genuine and placed his permanent residence in Northern Va. His brother, Sam, lived in Annandale and was contacted by a Fairfax homicide detective. Sam drove out to Maryland to tell his dad and Billie. |
| How did his father, Samuel McCandless, Jr. live? | like kings in Chesapeake bay, MD. He was the test director and section head for the Surveyor 1 mission, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon. |
| Who was his father's first wife? second wife? | His first wife was Marcia who left him in 1965. They had 5 kids. Walt started dating his secretary, Billy who gave birth to Chris and later his sister, Carine. |
| Describe his grandfather, Loren. | grandfather was charmed by Chris and hiking up the mountain became a tradition for them because Chris was fearless. |
| When did Chris express gratitude? | On his father's birthday, June 10th, Chris gave his father a very expensive Questar telescope and told his dad that he was grateful for everything that he did. |
| How did Chris change in college? | After his sophomore year, he seemed very introverted, almost cold. It was hard to get him to open up. His studies were the only thing that he was interested in talking about. |
| How did Chris change after his trip to Elsegundo? | He was able to piece together the facts of his father's previous marrigae and subsequent divorce--facts that he was not privy to. Walt had continued his relationship with Marcia in secret after he had Chris and fathered another son called Quinn McCandless. Eventually, walt, billie, chris, and carine moved to the east coast. |
| How is the author similar to Chris? | He was also consumed by a blind rage towards his father when long-held secrets came to light. They had a similar intensity, heedlessness and agitation of the soul. He thought that Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong in his life but it changed almost nothing.. The fact that the author survived his Alaska adventure and McCandless did not was largely a matter of chance. |
| Why did Christ decide to spend the summer on the bus? | It was outfitted with a bunk and a barrel stove and previous visitors had left the improvised shelter stocked with matches, bug dope, and other essentials. Fairbanks bus 142 made a fine base camp for the rest of the summer. |
| After attempting to return to civilization, why did Chris return to the bus? | On July 5th, the Teklanika was at full flood, swollen with rain, and snowmelt from glaciers high in the Alaska range, running cold and fast. It was too deep to wade. |
| How could have Chris saved himself? | There was a basket on a cable on his side of the canyon. |
| Why would a map have helped Chris? | It would have indicated that 1/2 mile downstream, in the throat of the canyon, was a gauging stationthat was built by the US Geological Survey. Because he had no topographic map, he did not know that salvation was at hand. |
| Why did so many condemn Chris and feel he caused his own death? | They thought he was incompetent, ill prepared, and had no business heading into the wilderness, let alone into the big league wilds of the Last Frontier. His misidentification of the caribou was proof that he did not know how to survive the backcountries. He came into the country with insufficent provisions and lacked peices of equipment that were deemed essential such as a large caliber rifle, map and compass, and ax. They saw evidence of arrongance, not only stupidity. |
| How are Chris and Sir John Franklin alike? | Sir John Franklin was a 19th century British naval officer who was hoping to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. He entered the Arctic for the third time and died along with the 128 men under his command. Both were though to lack humility and respect for the land. However, Franklin did not love nature like Chris did and did not try to live off the land like Chris. |
| How was Chris' trip different from Muir's or Thoreau's? | McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature but to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered what muir and thoreau already knew: an extended stay in the wilderness inevitabley directs one's attention outward as well as inward and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding and strong emotional bond with the land. |
| How does Roman compare himself to Chris? | He reminds him of his former self and passionate youth. McCandless just had the misfortune to die. Roman states that he could have been in the same predicament years ago when he first started coming to Alaska. Few of the people who called Chris incompetent had ever tried to live off the land month after month. |
| What evidence is there that Chris might have tried to return to civilization? | He noted that happiness is only real when shared. He seemed ready to abandon the life of a solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy and become a member of the human community. |
| Explain why he failed? | He may have eaten potato seeds which poisoned him. He may have eaten wild sweet pea which is difficulty to distinguish from wild potato and is reported to be poisonous. He may have been poisoned by the toxic seedpods in wild potato. He may have been poisomed by a fungus that grows on the vegetables in the summer in soggy climates. He may have been killed by the mold on the wild potato seed. |
