Into The Wild???

SimplyRaw

Queenfluff -

So happy to see you. I was wondering where you were. :)

Gear Shifter

I’ve always wanted to do this. Reading that book in high school only confirmed that I wasn’t crazy or alone. I would do things a bit smarter and differently, though. =]

omshanti

gearshifter, i had to comment as you read this book in HIGHSCHOOL?...cant believe it, you are another generation heard from…I graduated high school in 86… now that i think about it Kris was cheering me on just seats away( my last name was logsdon then) when i stood on my chair with a banner thanking my parents…. I think he did everything the way he would, anything less would have been glorified camping for him! im genuinely curious, if you undertook this how would you do it? ;0)

queeny, whens the big move?

ungrateful

Another great book along the same line is My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George about a boy who runs away to live in the wilderness. A classic, 1950s, but still very good.

Quiora

I love Into the Wild! I think it helped fuel my passion for living simply and my desire to achieve it. BY CHOICE, in the last 7 months I have gone from renting a very nice 3 bedroom duplex, to living in a 3 bedroom trailer house (shared with my boyfriend and a roommate), to renting a 250 sq. foot studio apartment (that I share with my boyfriend). The simplicity of it and the lack of “stuff” is so freeing!! I have an apartment sized fridge with no freezer, 2 cupboards and one tiny sink in the kitchen, a normal sized bathroom, and a room that’s about 8×15 with a bed, a small table, and two chairs. That’s all we need, and we’re more than happy! A year ago, though, I couldn’t have imagined living like this!

j-unit

For any of you who have only seen the movie you must read the book, it delves much deeper in to the reasons he had for doing what he did and in to other stories of people who have decided that the restraints of Civilization were too much for them, including the authors own journey to Alaska and near death that in the end gave him a very strong emotional tie to Chris’s story.

There are a lot of other stores in Alaska that are very similar and there have been numerous books written on the subject that can be picked up in grocery stores in Alaska but are hard to find in other parts of the world, one of a the stories that is often shown on public television in the states is the story of a man who i knew personally when i was younger named Dick Proenneke. He died in 2003 but he lived in total freedom and away from any civilization for 30 years after his retirement. My father was about as close to him as anyone toward the end of his life (as a matter of fact he spread dicks ashes in the wilderness he so loved). His out look on life had huge influence in shaping mine. His book was One Mans Wilderness and his movie is called One Mans Alaska, there is also an new book out called More Readings From One Man’s Wilderness: The Journals of Richard L. Proenneke. If any of you are interested in the idea simplification of your life this man had it about as paired down as you could.

, When my father came to Alaska freedom and simplicity are what he wanted and he got it. He managed to live now going on 30 years in a place that is about as far from his suburban new england home he could get, i don’t doubt his and my mothers reasons for coming to Alaska were all that different from Chris’s or from most people that come to Alaska. There are hundreds of other stories of Alaska which, at there core, are stories of men and women seeking simplicity, sadly many of them end in very similar was to that which Chris’s story did, the moral of all these stories seems to be that the simplest lives are often those with no safe way out, nothing to fall back on. In a strange way it seems that part of the appeal is the gamble of it all.