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BULLHEAD CITY
When his camera was ruined and McCandless stopped taking photographs, he
also stopped keeping a journal, a practice he didn’t resume until he went to
Alaska the next year. Not a great deal is known, therefore, about where he
traveled after departing Las Vegas in May 1991.
From a letter McCandless sent to Jan Burres, we know he spent July and
August on the Oregon coast, probably in the vicinity of Astoria, where he
complained that “the fog and rain was often intolerable.” In September he
hitched down U.S. Highway 101 into California, then headed east into the desert
again. And by early October he had landed in Bullhead City, Arizona.
Bullhead City is a community in the oxymoronic, late-twentieth-century
idiom. Lacking a discernible center, the town exists as a haphazard sprawl of
subdivisions and strip malls stretching for eight or nine miles along the banks of
the Colorado, directly across the river from the high-rise hotels and casinos of
Laughlin, Nevada. Bullheads distinguishing civic feature is the Mohave Valley
Highway, four lanes of asphalt lined with gas stations and fast-food franchises,
chiropractors and video shops, auto-parts outlets and tourist traps.
On the face of it, Bullhead City doesn’t seem like the kind of place that
would appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstoy, an ideologue who
expressed nothing but contempt for the bourgeois trappings of mainstream
America. McCandless, nevertheless, took a strong…