Into the Wild (part3)

He seems in the whole breadth of his nature to have been possessed of an insatiable hunger to discover some redeeming truth about mankind through him. Nevertheless, his insistence on doing things his way caused him to neglect several basic precautions that would probably have kept an experienced woodsman alive: a good hunting gun with ample ammunition, reliable information about the area he would be venturing into, and a dependable U.S. Geological Survey topographic map. Krakauer has concluded that the actual cause of Chris's death by starvation was a form of poisoning to which he succumbed after eating some wild seeds that even the experts never knew were highly toxic. Ironically, this was a mistake anyone might have made, but McCandless would not have had to eat the seeds if he had not allowed himself to be trapped by runoff from the Teklanika river, if he had possessed a gun adequate for hunting game, or a map to show him that half a mile away from his camp was a way to cross the torrent. As one friend was to observe later, McCandless, given his passion and intensity, sometimes had a problem seeing the forest for the trees.


While he remains an elusive figure, others who are more distinctly represented in Into the Wild include the diverse, ordinary, and not−so−ordinary characters who briefly met and befriended him. These include "rubber tramps," Jan Burres and her boyfriend Bob, who ran into McCandless along the United States Highway 101. Jan felt a maternal impulse toward Chris, and he responded with an almost waiflike affection. At other times, he was given work and a place to stay by Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, a small, hardworking South Dakota town. Ronald Franz, another friend, had lost his own family to a tragic automobile accident long before Mc− Candless was born. Franz was touched by Chris's earnest good nature and actually asked the young man if he would let Franz adopt him as his grandson. McCandless responded with characteristic evasiveness; having renounced his family, it seems as if he is instinctively drawn to parental figures even while he was trying to push them away.