Into the Wild Blog #1

Well, I have actually read a little more than three chapters at this point. I'm no good at reading slowly. I'm about 80 or so pages in.
Anyway, from what I have read so far, I would surmise that he is not exactly crazy, he is just more ambitious and free thinking; independent, you could say, than most people you may meet on the street. Christopher McCandless was not clinically insane. He was not mental. He did not have some mental disease that impaired his thinking. As a matter of fact, he was probably much brighter than the average person. He obtained a college degree and probably could have gone far in the world. Instead, he does the complete opposite. He gives away all his savings, gave up most of his mortal possessions, and began trekking west, while telling no one where he was going, for how long, or why he was doing it. After a while he even ended up abandoning his car, and seemed perfectly content to do so. He was happy hitchhiking. And yet, with all the distance he covered, all the people he interacted with and impacted their lives, no one actually know why he was doing any of it. Many people hypothesized, but no one actually knows for certain.
I think he had some sort of hidden motive, somewhere. I believe he just wanted to get away from it all, experience things before he died. Motives? Well, there was the fact that he was a very independent young man, and his father was very oppressive. He despised his parents and couldn't wait to get away from them, which he did as soon as he finished college. From there, he just traveled the country, living lightly and freely, and happily.
So, I do not think he's crazy. Not in the strictest sense, anyway. I do think he may have had a few screws loose, for somehow rationalizing that final fatal trek into the wilderness of Alaska, but he was not crazy. He wasn't noble either, though. He wasn't doing this for any higher cause, he was just doing it for himself, to try to get away, live free.
I suppose he does deserve some amount of respect for having the guts to try it in the first place. He does not deserve admiration, exactly, but some small shred of respect. I would never be caught dead doing something as foolish as this, but if he felt that he was strong enough of mind and body to pull the stunt off, then he had all the freedom in the world to do so. After all, Alaska is part of America, even if he has to traipse through Canada to get there.