On McCandless's landlord's memory of his tenant
>"“Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy,” Charlie reports. “Didn’t like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes—know what I’m saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t know what it was. [...] Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway. Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had ‘em bad. When he left, was around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for lettin’ him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him.” "
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On McCandless working on a ranch
>"At the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself Crazy Ernie and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California; photographs of the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded by goats and chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, old appliances, and mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven days with six other vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had no intention of ever paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutter in the yard, pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot."
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On McCandless paddling a canoe along the coast of Mexico
>"On December 14, weary of paddling, he hauled the canoe far up the beach climbed a sandstone bluff, and set up camp on the edge of a desolate plateau. He stayed there for ten days, until high winds forced him to seek refuge in a cave [...] where he remained for another ten days. He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over the Gran Desierto—the Great Desert: seventeen hundred square miles of shifting dunes, the largest expanse of pure sand desert in North America."
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