The Devils Thumb By Jon Krakauer Personal Response

When I lived in bakersfield, my family was faced with a choice. We could either continue to stay in bakersfield or move to Fresno to buy and manage a gas station. It would mean leaving our big house and living in an apartment for a few months. It would mean leaving my high school for a brand new high school. It would mean leaving my friends for new friends. It would mean leaving our comfortable lives for the chance at a better one. My parents thought about it. And thought about it. And thought about it until they started discussing. And they discussed it. And discussed it. And discussed it until I was convinced that it would never happen. Then one day, my dad told me that we were going to move. I didn’t think that we would actually follow

By the end of the story, Krakauer informs the reader that climbing the mountain had allowed him to grow as a person. He states “Climbing the Devils Thumb, however, had nudged me from the innocence of childhood. It taught me something about what mountains can and can’t do, about the limits of dreams” (page 141). This reveals how the risk Krakauer takes changes him. It pushes him away from the childish innocence that had convinced him to climb the mountain in the first place. Even though he was ecstatic when he reached the top of the Devils Thumb, he realized that nothing had changed. He would still have to go back to Boulder and have everything be the same. He states, “Less than a month after sitting on the summit of the Thumb I was back in Boulder, nailing up siding on the Spruce Street Townhouses, the same condos I’d been framing when I left for Alaska. I got a raise, to four dollars an hour, and at the end of the summer moved out of the jobsite trailer to a studio apartment on West Pearl, but little else in my life seemed to change. Somehow, it didn’t add up to the glorious transformation I’d imagined in April.” Realizing that he was in the same place doing the same thing he was doing before he left revealed to him that his childish thought that things would change was wrong. This realization pushed him to grow up and change as a