Families

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme" ( Krakauer 182).

In my family we have a strict no drinking or drug usage until you're 21 which is the law, but in some case(other families)  they don't mind if their kids go out and drink on Halloween night or after the senior football game. if I were to come home with alcohol on my breath I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be here today.  My mother grew up the same way but in her case her mother was an alcoholic so she saw firsthand what alcohol does to you.  She used to tell me stories of how her mom would get so drunk they had to cancel her birthday parties, or in some cases she would come home and find her lying on the kitchen floor passed out but her dad would say " it's OK mommy's taking a nap" and everything will be okay.  So in my family the extremities only go to having hot sauce on your burrito. 

Fight of Flight

“A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand"(Krakauer 142-143). Even though this is Krakauer’s point of view it juxtaposes how Chris would feel in the same situation. Chris McCandless’s trek through the wild, becomes more of an escape for him. He pushes away all of his family, and friends he used to know and leaves it all behind him. This is one of his coping abilities to how he was treated as a kid. His family was not the most supportive to say the least. The intense focus required to survive such riveting activities, needs complete focus and so Krakauer can reach a kind of meditative state.

Coincidence, I Think Not!

“Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild"(Krakauer 69). Chris is giving his travel advise a bit too early on don't' cha think? It is a bit odd how he is giving this letter to his loved ones, some could call it a suicide letter, other could call it a cry of hope. But what I am saying is that he could never know where Alaska may take him. His story just gets a bit fishy towards the end. Chris is all about survival mode and that’s proven through his adventures up and down the river, down to Mexico and the sea, so it’s a bit ironic how he fought so hard to make it to sea, and then right before he leaves for Alaska to hike Mt. McKinley he leaves this note...