"Dark spruce
forst frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a
recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other,
black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land
itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of
it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter
more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx,
a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the
masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the
effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland
Wild."
In many ways, Chris
McCandless was a romantic. He saw the wilderness not only as a challenge but as an
ideal... a way to live purely and on one's own, at one with nature. It was this idealism
that made him myopic... blind to the wild in the word wilderness. Wilderness sounds
amorphous, generalized. But wild is wild: unpredictable, unknown, uncharted and
unkind.... brutally indifferent and unkind, laughing coldly and without emotion at the
folly of the individual who is starry-eyed and unprepared.
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