Education

Vocab:

1. Hyperkinetic (adj): frenetic; hyperactive; wildly fast-paced or excited.

“Westerberg, a hyperkinetic man with thick shoulder and a black goatee, owns a grain elevator in Carthage and another a few miles out of town but spends every summer running a custom combine crew…” (16).

2. Plebeian (noun): one of the common people.

“He liked the community’s stasis, its plebian virtues and unassuming mien” (18).

3. Vagabond (adj): characteristic of a wanderer; moving from place to place.

McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound by the scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law, savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way” (29).

4. Hegira (noun): a journey especially when undertaken to escape from a dangerous or undesirable situation.

“McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a week or two at most” (48).

5. Terminal (adj): of or relating to an end, extremity, boundary, or terminus

“And like McCandless, upon embarking on his terminal odyssey, Ruess adopted a new name or, rather, a series of new names” (93).

6. Monomania (noun): excessive concentration on a single object, thought, or idea.

“He could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years” (120).

7. Synthetic (adj): of, or relating to, or produced by chemical or biochemical synthesis.

“…had been erected to collect data from satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar of Walt McCandless’s design” (161).

8. Boggy (adj) wet spongy ground; poorly drained area.

“Moreover, as the ground thawed, his route turned into a gauntlet of boggy muskeg and impenetrable alder, and McCandless belatedly came to appreciate one of the fundamental (if counterintuitive) axioms of the North…” (165).

9. Tableau (noun): graphic description or representation; a depiction is a scene.

“Sitting down on a steel cot across from the stove to mull over this eerie tableau, I encounter evidence of McCandless’s presence wherever my vision rests” (179).

10. Taiga (noun): a moist subarctic forest dominated by conifers that begin where the tundra ends.

 “As the altimeter needle brushes five thousand feet, we crest a mud-colored ridge, the earth drops away, and a breathtaking sweep of taiga fills the Plexiglas windscreen” (200).