Whats a word that would describe Chris?

Fearless / Adventurer

“Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.” (pg 69)

In all this attention given to this guy (and would it have gotten as much focus had he been a poor migrant of small means rather than the son of a well to do East Coast Anglo family?) a lot is missed with regard to the potential aspects of late stage (normative stage even) mental illness. This seems especially affirmed when those who had contact with him prior to his death speak to an oddness which does not square with the romanticized notion of a "man seeking pure adventure" and therefore the product of the Hollywood machine which loves to eat up and puke this "stuff of heroes" for breakfast daily, but rather the machinations of early stage schizo-affective disorders which can be as debilitating as blindness. Of course these subjects weren't included in the tidy existing narrative. They speak of a strange man who had all the hallmarks of early schizophrenia. Shame that this story wasn't viewed through the prism of that context - as it not only would have shed light on the stigma of mental illness in this country (or probably many others) but probably prevented many saner copycats from risking their own lives in chasing of a foolish Hollywood narrative. Penn's further glossy take of the book in making the movie was tragic.

Oh sorry: a more economical answer: troubled, mentally unstable anti-social early stage schizophrenic, caught in the grey area of sanity and idealism and illness. This is every bit a disabling illness as blindness.