Activities
Week of Jan 9,
Grammar 4
1. While living on the streets in Las Vegas, McCandless wrote
in his journal, “It is the experiences, the memories, the great
triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real
meaning is found” (37).
2. “What Everett Reuss was after was beauty, and he conceived of
beauty in pretty romantic terms” (77).
3. “I have not tired of the wilderness. Rather, I enjoy its beauty and
the vagrant life I lead more keenly all the time” (87).
4. “Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents,
disinclined to grant clemency . . .” (122).
5. “If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued
it with a zeal bordering on obsession” (134).
6. “No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks
alone upon the land to become lost in the wild” (163).
7. “He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying,
‘that mattered’” (182).
8. “. . . his essence remains slippery, v
Activity 15
Chapt 8
• Was McCandless admirable for his courage and noble ideas?
• Was he a reckless idiot?
• Was he crazy?
• Was he a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and
stupidity—and was he undeserving of the considerable media
attention he received?
Week of Dec 12
Activity 6
Vocab
Activity 6 - Vocab
Chapter 1
unsullied + or = or -
sonorous
meandered
Chapter 2
trough
permafrost
derelict
anomaly
environs
enigmatic
Chapter 3
itinerant
estranged
nomadic
unencumbered
emancipated
Chapters 4–7
Grammar - Paraphrase
McCandless didn’t conform particularly well to the bush-casualty stereotype.
Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious
to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn’t incompetent—he wouldn’t have lasted
113 days if he were. And he wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t
an outcast. McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to
say. A pilgrim, perhaps.
Some insight into the tragedy of Chris McCandless can be gained by studying
predecessors cut from the same exotic cloth. And in order to do that, one must
look beyond Alaska, to the bald-rock canyons of southern Utah. There, in 1934, a
peculiar twenty-year-old boy walked into the desert and never came out. His
name was Everett Ruess.
My paraphrase: rewording of the above
McCandless wasn't your typical Alaskan wilderness type-of-person.
Week of Dec 7
Activity 1 - Quickwrite: