Into the Wild Chapter 18 Summary
Vložit
- čas přidán 27. 01. 2021
- Here is chapter 18! The rest of the script is in the comments.
Chapter 18
This chapter begins with two passages, rather than one. The second passage is from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. McCandless marked “…love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy.” And that there are two ideals for modern man: “free personality” and “life as sacrifice.”
When he returned to the bus, hunting game was super plentiful. He went back to hunting and gathering, and read several books. It rained for a week straight. He hunted 35 squirrels, 4 geese, five jays, woodpeckers, and two frogs. He also ate tons of plants. Unfortunately, the meat he was eating was lean, and he was burning way more calories than he was eating. In late July, he made a mistake that really hurt him.
He had just finished reading Dr. Zhivago, and wrote a bunch of notes. In one section, it reads: “…unshared happiness is not happiness…”; McCandless wrote next to it “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” Dr. Zhivago was the last book he read.
Two days after he finished the book, on July 30, his journal reads: “EXTREMELY WEAK, FAULT OF POT. SEED. MUCH TROUBLE TO STAND UP. STARVING GREAT JEOPARDY.” By August 19, he was dead.
Wayne Westerberg remembered McCandless buying potatoe seed to plant a garden. One theory is that he never planted the garden and wound up eating the seeds once he was hungry. However, he would have had to eat pounds of seeds in a short time period to have become sick off of them. The size of his backpack that Gallien saw was no way large enough to carry enough seeds to get poisoned over.
What is more likely, however, was that, in the book he got at the university, it talks about the wild potatoe that grows in the area. This potatoe is edible in spring and summer. As the weather warmed, he dug up and ate a lot of this potatoe and by July he was even eating the seeds from the seed pod. The flowers of the potatoe plant look a lot like the flowers of the sweet pea plant. The only difference is the veins in the leaves. The sweet pea plant, according to natives, is toxic.
Krakauer has a hard time finding modern evidence of the plant being poisonous; he had to go back to the Franklin expedition in the 19th century to find a case. Krakauer at first writes that it was this plant in his magazine article; but as time passed, he realized that’s not likely. He now thinks it was actually the wild potatoe plant. Though the roots are okay to eat, eating the seeds in large quantities can be dangerous, especially at certain times of year when the plant produces alkaloids so that animals don’t eat the seeds.
Krakauer collected a bunch of seeds and sent them to the University of Alaska. A test turned up a bit of alkaloid, but nothing that would be toxic. After turning this dead end, Krakauer spent a lot of time researching, and came across a mold. The mold grows on plant seeds in moist conditions. Reading this, Krakauer came to the realization that it wasn’t the seeds that made McCandless sick, but the mold on the seeds.
The mold can give an animal swainsonine poisoning. What this does is make it so your body can’t break down glucose. Essentially, making it so your body can’t produce energy from food, so no matter how much you eat, you still starve. It’s possible to recover from swainsonine poisoning, but you have to have enough glucose and other nutrients in your body. McCandless, having already been lean and having lost so much weight, didn’t have enough in him to get rid of the poison.
After getting sick, he was too weak to hunt or hike out of the area, which made the situation worse. He got sick on July 30th; he didn’t write anything for two days, and on August 2nd only wrote “TERRIBLE WIND.” Fall was coming, and within a week the day shrunk by an hour. On August 5th he wrote “DAY 100! MADE IT! BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD - NO GAME.”
If McCandless had a map, he would have seen a Park Services cabin six miles south. Even closer, at four miles, there were two private cabins all with food. However, it may not have helped him. Sometime that spring all three cabins were trashed and the food destroyed. It wasn’t a bear, but a human who ransacked them. The owners of all three cabins think that McCandless did it - that he was mad that there was civilization in the wild. But the rangers don’t think so. Also, Krakauer points out that there’s little evidence. Nowhere in his diary does he mention it and the only time he left the bus for a while was in the other direction.
His diary stayed blank for a few days outside of listing a bear he shot and missed on August 9th, he saw a caribou and caught 5 squirrels on August 10th. And on August 11 he shot a ptarmigan and ate it. Even this though, wouldn’t be enough if he was poisoned. Finally, on August 12th, he left the bus to forage for berries and left his SOS note and signed with his real name.
Some ask why he didn’t start a forest fire when he was so desperate. Also, it woudn’t have helped much as almost no planes fly over the area. Carine points out that Chris would never intentionally burn down a forest.
Starvation is a terrible thing. The body consumes itself, hallucinations and convulsions can occur as well as skin discoloration. But on the brink of death, all the pain dissolves and calm takes over. Krakauer says it would be nice to think that McCandless had calm. On August 12, he wrote “BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES.” He then tallied the days the 13th - 18th. On the back of a page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, he wrote “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!” He crawled into his sleeping bag his mom sewed for him and probably died on August 18, 1992. He spent 112 days in the wild.
One of his last acts was to take a picture of himself holding the note. He looks skeletal, but is smiling. McCandless was at peace.
okay r
Bro you’re a lifesaver!🙏🏾
My man
thankuou 🙏
God speed
s
My man
God send
My man