Part 7
As the snow melts and spring returns, so do people — and Sam’s carefully hidden world begins to open up. Rumors have been spreading in the valley of a mysterious ‘wild boy’ living somewhere in the Catskills, and newspaper stories fan the tale until half the region is curious. A boy named Matt, hungry to be a reporter, sets out to find the wild boy and get the story — and he tracks Sam down. Sam, who has guarded his secret for so long, must decide whether to trust him. He does, at least partway, and Matt becomes a friend and a regular visitor, drawn back again and again by the wonder of Sam’s life. But the discovery is a turning point. Once one person has found him, Sam’s perfect solitude is over: more visitors come, more attention follows, and the wild, hidden freedom he built is quietly slipping away. Sam is of two minds about it. Part of him treasures the returning human company — after the lonely winter, friends are a joy. But part of him mourns the loss of the secret, self-made world that was his alone. The mountain that once belonged only to Sam and his animals is becoming, once again, a place shared with people — and Sam senses that his year of glorious independence is drawing toward some kind of end.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Discovery words: rumor, reporter, publicity, trust, reluctant… |
| Literary Elements | The turning point, mixed feelings, and a private world opening |
| Cross-Curricular | Living off the grid — self-sufficiency then and now |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapter 19 | The Wild Boy Story — newspaper rumors of a ‘wild boy’ spread; a would-be reporter named Matt tracks Sam down, and Sam decides to trust him partway. |
| Chapter 20 | The World Comes In — Matt becomes a regular visitor and more people follow; Sam’s perfect solitude ends, and he feels torn between welcome company and lost privacy. |
Journalists sort possible stories using a checklist scholars call news values: how unusual an event is, how close to the audience, how many people it affects, whether it involves conflict, and whether there is a single person the audience can picture. A lone figure living in a forest scores high on almost all of them, which is why such stories reliably attract attention out of proportion to their importance. Editors also prize the human interest angle, a story carried by one person rather than by statistics, because readers engage with individuals. The consequence is worth understanding before anyone becomes a subject. Coverage tends to simplify: complicated motives compress into a headline, and once a story circulates, other outlets copy it rather than re-report it, so an early error can harden into the accepted account.
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
Sociologists describe privacy less as secrecy than as control over what others know about you. On that definition, being found by strangers is a loss even when nobody is unkind, because the choice of what to disclose has moved to somebody else. Researchers who follow people after sudden public attention report a consistent pattern: an early rush of interest and offers, a period in which the person feels reduced to one fact about themselves, and then a fast decline in attention that can itself be disorienting. Erving Goffman argued that everyone maintains a backstage, a region where they are not performing, and that stress rises sharply when that region disappears. This is why people who become briefly famous so often describe wanting the ordinary right to be uninteresting, which is a privilege that is invisible until it is gone.
- Rumors of a ‘wild boy’ spread in newspapers.
- More visitors come, ending Sam’s solitude.
- Sam decides to trust Matt partway; Matt returns often.
- Matt the reporter tracks Sam down.
- Snow melts and spring returns.
Some books work by letting the reader adopt a position and then quietly undermining it. Critics call the mechanism irony when the gap is between what a character believes and what the text shows, and they distinguish it from a plot twist, which changes the facts rather than the judgment. Nature writing often uses the gentler version. A narrator who begins convinced that people are the problem is gradually shown, through his own reported experience, that he misses them, and the book never has to say so. The technique depends on the narrator being honest rather than reliable in the usual sense: he records what happens accurately while interpreting it incompletely, and the reader assembles the rest. Look for the sentences where the narrator explains why something does not matter to him. Those are usually the places where the book is arguing the opposite.
The ideal of the self-made person runs into an awkward inventory. Even a determined solitary carries knowledge someone taught, tools someone forged, seeds someone bred and a language someone else built. Philosophers use the term interdependence for this, and feminist ethicists in particular argue that Western thought has overrated independence by treating the adult who needs nobody as the model human, when in fact every person begins and usually ends in a state of dependence. The point is not that self-reliance is worthless. It is that self-reliance is a skill practised inside a web, and that pretending otherwise makes it harder to ask for help and easier to undervalue the people who provide it. Judging any independent life honestly therefore means counting what it quietly borrowed, and noticing that the web was holding it up the whole time.
Think back over these chapters. The snow melts, the valley wakes, and a story begins to travel from mouth to mouth: somewhere up in these hills, they say, a boy is living wild and alone. A newspaper prints it; a young would-be reporter reads it and cannot resist; and one day he pushes through the trees and finds the wild boy, real and startled, guarding a life he thought no one would ever see. Sam lets him in — a little — and the reporter comes back, and back, and brings others, and the secret world Sam built with his own hands begins, quietly, to fill with people. And Sam stands in the middle of it, glad and grieving at once, feeling his perfect, lonely, glorious independence start to slip through his fingers.
Sam’s year — feeding, clothing, and sheltering himself with no help from stores, money, or electricity — is an extreme version of what we now call ‘living off the grid.’ The phrase means life apart from the systems that supply almost everyone else. It is worth remembering that, for nearly all of human history, most people lived something like this out of necessity. They wrung their survival straight from the land, as farmers, hunters, and gatherers, making or growing nearly everything they used.
Modern life is utterly different, though we rarely notice: most of us depend every hour on vast, invisible networks — power grids, water and sewer systems, supermarkets, money, roads, the internet — that quietly deliver food, warmth, and comfort we never have to make ourselves. Sam has stepped entirely outside these networks, and the book is honest about both sides of that choice: living off the grid costs a great deal — endless labor, real danger, and deep loneliness. But it also gives real gifts: freedom, hard skills, and an intimate knowledge of the natural world that few people ever gain. Interest in this kind of self-sufficiency has never died; homesteaders, survivalists, and back-to-the-land movements still choose pieces of Sam’s path, seeking independence and a simpler bond with nature. Yet Sam’s story also carries a quiet caution, one underlined by the arrival of Matt and the visitors who follow. Total self-sufficiency is thrillingly free — but human beings are woven into one another’s lives, and very few people can, or truly want to, live entirely off the grid of other people forever.
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 7 “Off the Grid”
Sam lives entirely off the grid — making everything himself, apart from stores, money, and electricity. Write about which modern conveniences you rely on most, and imagine living without them. What would be hardest to give up, what might you gain, and could you do it? 6–10 sentences. End with your honest view of living off the grid.
No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 7 Complete!
You finished Chapters 19–20 of My Side of the Mountain.
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Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Jean Craighead George. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Jean Craighead George’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.