Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession.

Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession.

I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.

This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected sharply divergent points of view: some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity—and was undeserving of the considerable media attention he received.

In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.

Though just barely substantial enough to support body weight, the rime was plastered over the rock to a thickness of two or three feet, so I kept plugging upward.

Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly, but I wasn’t suicidal.

We constructed our tents in the dark, fumbling with the ropes with our frozen hands and finishing just as a stiffness like rigor mortis set in.

Although he did manage to make the school’s golf team, he promptly lost the only important match of the season. There was a consolation match; he lost that, too.

Otherwise he would content himself with what appeared to be his inevitable mediocrity.