Chris graduated from High School in 1986. After giving his father the gift of a fine telescope and expressing his thankfulness for all he had done for him, he left on the first of a series of extended trips. With no definite itinerary, Chris journeyed to the Pacific Coast, making a startling discovery in California. While visiting family friends in the neighborhood where he had grown up, Chris learned that, long after falling in love with his mother Billie and fathering Chris, his father Walt McCandless had had a son with his first wife and had essentially led a double life. Although he never confronted his father, the discovery irrevocably soured the way he viewed Walt, and filled him with rage.
Chris returned, scruffy and lean, just in time to start his freshman year at Emory in Atlanta. He did well at the University, but grew increasingly eccentric and distant as the years went by. He was uncharacteristically courteous to his parents at first, but by the end of his sophomore year, their relationship, such as it was, deteriorated significantly, and, correspondingly, he developed "a sense of outrage over injustice in the world at large". At the end of his junior year, he made his first visit to Alaska, and after graduation in the spring of 1990, "he donated the balance of his bank account (to charity), loaded up his car, and vanished from (his family's) lives" (Chapter 12).
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