I wonder how dangerous it would be to live in the woods like that now? Would you run into a lot of crazy people (homeless, ex-cons) and so forth...I saw a special on MSNBC about runaway kids hopping freight trains, camping out and so forth and it seemed pretty dangerous and there were some pretty unsavory characters...
shareTrue. That can be dangerous, but it looks amazing. I've meet many people that live on the edge of the frontier like that in Alaska. Most are ok but some are crazy/ questionably dangerous.
shareThe news media makes money by sensationalizing & presenting a distorted picture of things such as freighthopping & homeless persons. From personal experience with both I can say with some confidence that the typical news media representation of them is largely false, taking minor elements of either & making them seem like far greater parts of the reality than they are. In the case of the latter, the truth is far from the perception of the dangerous bum: in fact the homeless face much more peril from the mainstream of society than the other way round.
And for perspective, the car you drive every day is more likely by a huge factor to kill or harm you than any of the things we're made to be afraid of by the pedlars of fear-charged fictions: more Americans die every year in automobile accidents than did in the whole of the Vietnam War, not to speak of the health risks of pollution & the long-range potential for human-influenced global warming.
RQ
Quite. The world is, despite the best efforts of illegal invasion leading presidents, probably safer now than it has ever been.
I seem to recall that in the book, the character of Bando turns up shortly after Sam has seen a couple of police cars parked on the road nearby. It's inferred that the cops MIGHT have been looking for him. I don't have the book handy, but that's how I recall it.
shareSam calls him Bando because he'd seen the police cars and thought he might be a bandit. Bando later tells him his real identity, an English teacher lost in the mountains while on vacation.
share