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: