It is sometimes said that nothing in life that is worth
having comes easily. I have noticed that what often
separates those who attain their hopes and dreams from
those who do not is that they possess a certain drive
and determination to stop at nothing to achieve those
dreams. Although the two individuals Chris McCandless
and Frederick Douglass lived in different time periods,
and grew up in totally different environments, they
possessed the will to overcome whatever obstacles life
presented them and achieved the goals that they set for
themselves. Chris McCandless was determined to live an
unconventional, nomadic lifestyle like those of his
idols Henry David Thoreau, Boris Pasternak, and the
Jules Verne character Captain Nemo. Growing up, he
waited until the time was right to begin his journey
across the country and into the wilderness. John
Krakauer wrote: Five weeks earlier he'd loaded his
belongings into his car and headed west without an
Frederick Douglass
English: Portrait of Frederick Douglass as a young...
The gravestone of Frederick Douglass located at Mo...itinerary. The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest
sense of the word, an epic journey that would change
everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he
saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty:
to graduate from college. At long last he was
unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his
parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security
and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously
cut off from the raw throb of existence. (22) Later in
the book we were again given a glimpse of Chris's gritty
determination to achieve a goal that he had set for
himself.
During his travels Chris stopped in the small dusty
town of Tapock, Arizona. It was there that he noticed an
old secondhand canoe which he purchased in an attempt to
float from Lake Havasu...