54 pages • 1 hour read
Matt RichtelA Deadly Wandering
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPrologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
A nervous 26-year-old Reggie Shaw lies on a medical bed, ready to enter an MRI machine.
Reggie grew up in a Mormon household, dreaming of his future Mormon mission and of playing college basketball. But his life’s trajectory changed on a rainy morning in September 2006, when he got into a car accident on a mountain pass, leaving James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell dead and a number of questions unanswered.
The case attracted the attention of one determined Utah State trooper who was convinced that Reggie had been distracted by his cell phone. Another person who became interested in the case was Terryl Warner, a victims’ advocate with a past that gave her a sense of empathy for trauma victims.
The case also stirred up a flurry of scientific studies and opinions, at the heart of which was the relationship between technology and the human brain.
Attention scientists have discovered that while technology can serve “deep social cravings and needs” (3), the way it presents information can overload our attention. Ever more powerful computers and ever more populated networks place such demands on human attention that we’ve grown attached to the idea that we can successfully multitask, focusing well on several different stimuli. Researchers have learned that this belief is erroneous.
Reggie becomes the lightning rod for questions about divided attention. In the hospital, a technician hands him joysticks that he will use to test his focus.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Reggie”
19-year old Reggie Shaw drives to Tremonton, Utah, the town where he grew up with his parents crying in the front seat. He was preparing to go on his Mormon mission to Winnipeg but since he had just confessed to the president at the training center that he’d had sex with his girlfriend, Cammi, he can no longer go on the mission. That summer, Reggie takes a painting job. After things fall through with Cammi, he wants to do spiritually clear his past of sin by painting, going to church, and shooting hoops.
On the last day of summer, Reggie drives his large SUV to work. John Kaiserman, a farrier (a certified maker of horseshoes), is driving his truck hauling a trailer behind Reggie. Kaiserman sees Reggie’s SUV wander several times over the yellow dividing line.
15 miles away, in a sedan headed in the opposite direction, two rocket scientists, James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell, are commuting to work. When Reggie’s SUV and the scientists’ sedan reach each other, Kaiserman watches as Reggie drifts over the line again and clips the side of the sedan. The sedan fishtails into Kaiserman’s truck, which ends up T-boning the sedan. Once he determines he’s all right, Kaiserman calls an ambulance.
Utah State Trooper Bart Rindlisbacher, a tenacious ex-soldier just back from a tour in Iraq, arrives on the scene, where he meets Kaiserman, Reggie, and Reggie’s mom, Mary Jane. Reggie has already given a statement to another officer that his SUV had hydroplaned into the sedan. Rindlisbacher drives Reggie to the hospital and asks him questions. It seems strange to Rindlisbacher that such a heavy car would hydroplane. He notices that even on their way to the hospital, Reggie pulls out his phone several times and texting in exactly the manner someone trying to drive and text simultaneously would: “He was a one-hander,” the trooper later said (20).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Toll”
Leila and Keith O’Dell had a happy marriage, if a quiet one. Keith was handy around the house and was nicknamed by colleagues “The Genius.” Leila answers the door at 9:40 A.M. and gets news of the crash. She can’t believe that her husband is dead. At Utah State University, Jackie, Jim Furfaro’s wife also can’t believe the news.
Trooper Rindlisbacher asks Reggie several questions about the accident, and gets monosyllabic answers. Rindlisbacher asks whether Reggie was texting. Reggie replies no, and again says that he hydroplaned. Reggie’s evasiveness is the result of his mom’s conversation with Reggie’s older brother Phil, a lawyer in California. Phil advised Reggie to say as little as possible.
Rindlisbacher gives up for now, though he has a reputation for being thorough. He once was investigated (and exonerated) for overzealously trying to ferret out whether a guy he’d pulled over twice really lived in Idaho.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Neuroscientists”
Adam Gazzaley has a PhD in neuroscience and runs the lab at the University of California at San Francisco. He’s been working on a pop-science project involving showing what the brain of Mickey Hart (the drummer for the Grateful Dead) looks like while he’s drumming. An expert in the field of attention, Gazzaley explores the relationship between the more primitive, reptilian parts of the brain and the more evolved parts of the brain.
Richtel asks Gazzaley about attention and how it relates to what happened in the accident. Gazzaley points out that attention: “allows us to interact with the world through our goals and not be led by or be a slave to our environment” (35). He goes on to say that modern life often overwhelms human attention systems, which evolved to handle a much less input-heavy world.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
Reggie Shaw is a study in contradictions. On the one hand, he is a deeply religious young man, so committed to truth that he confesses to having a sexual relationship with his girlfriend even though this will torpedo his chance to go on a Mormon mission. On the other hand, when faced with his role in causing the deaths of James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell, Reggie refuses to own up to texting even though the practice has not yet been outlawed in Utah. Instead, supported in his lie by his mother and brother, Reggie insists that his heavy SUV hydroplaned into the scientists’ sedan. It is clear that the book will follow Reggie as he comes to terms with his guilt and responsibility.
Though he himself is an investigative journalist, Richtel chooses to have another figure in the role of detective in his narrative: Trooper Rindlisbacher. Portrayed as a kind of bulldog Columbo who refuses to let go any loose threads from a case, Rindlisbacher picks up on subtle clues like Reggie’s one-handed texting and the fact that his SUV is too heavy to hydroplane easily. By giving such a prominent role to the man collecting evidence, Richtel injects suspense into his narrative—rather than simply telling his readers that Reggie is guilty, Richtel will allow us to follow along as the investigation unfolds.
Richtel interrupts the true-crime feel of his narration with information he’s learned from neuroscientist Gazzaley—this research provides commentary on the details about the accident we’ve learned about so far. Richtel does his best to ground Gazzaley, highlighting his research into the brain of a Grateful Dead drummer to humanize him. Since part of Richtel’s project is to convince his readers that distracted driving really is deeply unsafe, he must overcome reader resistance to this idea—most likely, they themselves drive and text often. For this reason, it is important for the scientist who will disabuse readers of their preconceptions to seem friendly, down to earth, and believable.
The frame of reference is wide enough to include not only Reggie, the trooper, and the neuroscientist, but also Reggie’s family, the two victims and their families, and another man involved in the accident. The Prologue hints at where we are headed: all of these individual narratives are in service of a scientific exploration of the nature of the relationship between our technology and our attention.
