Chris McCandless was an adventurer all of his life. In Krakauer's book, the chapter entitled, "Chesapeake Beach" we read about Chris's childhood. Walter McCandless Jr. describes Chris as a boy who was always being "pulled back from the edge." On page 106 Krakauer writes:
"It is impossible to know what murky convergence of chromosomal matter, parent-child dynamics, and alignment of the cosmos was responsible, but Chris came into the world with unusual gifts and a will not easily deflected from its trajectory. At the age of two, he got up in the middle of the night, found his way outside without waking his parents, and entered a house down the street to plunder a neighbor's candy drawer."
Another example of Chris's independent and wandering nature on page 109 Krakauer relates the story of a time when Chris was older and his father took the family on a camping trip to Longs peak in Colorado. They were hiking a mountain with an elevation of 14,256 feet. Walt got tired and decided to turn the family back at 13,000 feet and
"Chris wanted to keep going to the top. I told hin no way. He was only twelve then so all he could do was complain. If he'd been 14 or 15 he would have simply gone on without me. Chris was fearless even when he was little."
There are other examples of Chris's nature and rebellion throughout this section of the book. The time he qualified for advanced classes and tried to convince the teachers that the test scores were a mistake because he didn't want to do the extra work is another indication of his independent spirit.
For those people who wished to look closely they could have seen that this young man was a wanderer and that he had the personality to be influnced by the great adventure writers and take off on his own adventure.
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