The River

Content Warning: This section discusses violence and an attempted rape.

Having grown up on a ranch in Colorado, and having experienced the death of his mother as a boy, Jack is hard-nosed and aged beyond his years. Even his facial features demonstrate hardened experience:

[T]he prominent cheekbones were deeply tanned, the straight nose sunburned, the crow’s feet at the corner of his almost black eye a spray of fine wrinkles, paler than the skin around them; his tendoned neck was smattered with small sun spots (26).

As his friend Wynn points out, Jack didn’t earn his toughness by participating in a summer camp or some other simulated experience. Instead, it’s a consequence of the hard life he was brought up living, in which grit, gut, and reality prevailed over ideals, simulations, and abstract concepts.

Jack takes a matter-of-fact view of the world and events: “For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul” (27). In addition, he “held little stigma for bodily functions and no patience for squeamishness” (92). While both he and Wynn are at home in the wilderness, Jack is more attuned to the primal aspects of what it means to be in the wild.