Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (11 page)

It never failed: When I’d gaze at the stars and the aurora, I’d see my problems for what they were. I always told myself that I’d been under the control of other forces: parents, school, work. And I’d convinced myself that my debt was to blame for everything, and me, for nothing (as if I had nothing to do with contracting the debt in the first place). I hated my job even though I worked for a wonderful company. And I told myself that, because of the debt, I couldn’t travel, couldn’t go back to school, and now couldn’t even leave my room.

Part of me liked being in debt. Part of me even wanted to stay in debt, to keep going on random and expensive three-week trips to places like Ecuador so I could spend my hard-earned dollars on halfhearted adventures, instead of staying focused on what should have remained my true goal: busting out of the great American debtors’ prison, steadily chipping away at its walls with each paycheck.

Part of me liked being in that position of submission, tied up in leather, willfully cowering beneath a ruthless whip-wielding Sallie Mae. Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.

I’d gotten too comfortable with my predicament. I was doing what the tourists and my Home Depot coworkers had done: I was placing the blame on my obligations and not on myself. If I
was going to become the free person I wanted to be, I’d have to do more than pay off this debt.

When I got back to camp that night, I didn’t know what to do with all this ambition. I needed some lofty goal to commit to.

I turned on the camp computer and did two things. First, I found ten graduate schools (six history Ph.D. programs and four creative writing programs) that I’d apply to. I did this on a whim, completely disregarding my goal of getting out of debt. I knew I needed to get away from Coldfoot and surround myself again with people who could help me elevate myself. I could justify that my year in Coldfoot was a gap year between undergraduate and graduate school.

Grad school was the logical, well-worn path I could take. But I also found the website of Bob the voyageur—the motivational speaker I met in Valdez—and learned that he really was going on a two-month-long canoe voyage across Ontario that summer. I remembered how I’d approached him after his speech, yet I’d forgotten about it soon after. I sent him an e-mail, saying, in so many words, “I’m still your man.”

.............

Spring 2007—Coldfoot, Alaska

DEBT: $16,000

I
SPENT THE REST OF THE
winter focused on accomplishing one of my two new endeavors: getting selected for the voyage or getting into grad school. For the voyage, I started a rigorous exercise regimen. Every afternoon, during the few hours of twilight, I forced myself to leave the toasty confines of my room to endure the cold outside. For grad school, I stayed up late, filling out applications and memorizing a stack of 1,500 flash cards with a vocabulary word on one side and its definition on the other. I was preparing for the GRE—a test required for students who wish to enroll in most graduate programs.

My social life all but vanished when Avery was asked by camp management to leave because he’d decided to start inhaling marijuana as if it were oxygen again. Because most of my other Coldfoot coworkers did nothing but drink and fight and shit on each other’s cars, I kept to myself and took to my books. I read Barry Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams,
Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe,
and Russell Banks’s
Cloudsplitter,
as well as many of the
works of Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, and Jack London. And then I picked up
Walden.

When I read
Walden,
I found myself nodding to each paragraph, jotting notes in the margins, underlining whole pages. Thoreau gave me the words to describe what I’d felt for so long.

When he was in his late twenties, Thoreau moved out of Concord, Massachusetts, and into the woods next to Walden Pond, where he and a couple of friends had built a small ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin in which he’d live by himself for a little over two years. In his cabin, he embraced the simple life. He made his own furniture, hoed beans, and chopped wood to heat his home. Years later, he wrote
Walden,
a book about his experiences in which he championed the virtues of simplicity and damned the dangling carrots of civilization: the materialism, riches, and prestige that too commonly led men astray.

Some other notable achievements: Thoreau was an active participant in the Underground Railroad, using his cabin as a station to shelter escaped slaves; he went to jail for a night after refusing to pay his poll tax—an act of “civil disobedience” he committed to protest how taxpayer money was being used to support the institution of slavery and the crimes of the ongoing Mexican-American War; and he was an all-around renaissance man—a pencil maker, surveyor, naturalist, poet, carpenter, mason, farmer, gardener, and schoolteacher. He played the flute, held wildly popular melon parties each fall, and enjoyed dancing, ice-skating, and going on walks for four hours a day through the woods and fields of his native Concord. Historians claim he never had a sexual relationship, dying a virgin at the age of forty-four.

I was having my second man-crush.

Thoreau—coming from a family of pencil makers—went to college at Harvard in the 1830s. His financial situation, one biographer notes, was “perennially precarious.” Like many students, he had to take off a semester to work so he could pay tuition. After he’d graduated and moved into his Walden cabin, he realized just how much he’d squandered as a student. “The
student who wishes for a shelter,” he said in retrospect, “can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.” It made perfect sense. I started to wonder why students—like myself—had put up with expensive food and housing when we could have devised more affordable, though rustic, living situations of our own. And I wondered why it seemed to be a prerequisite of life to have to work fifty weeks a year when Thoreau fed himself working only six.

Walden
was published in 1854, but his iconic observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” seemed as apt an insight for today as it was then. He described how his fellow citizens (“serfs of the soil”) would toil away at desks or on huge farms, hating every minute of it, just so they could live in large homes and wear fashionable clothes in order to impress their neighbors, who were also unhappily employed.

Thoreau made me feel like I’d been a sane man wrongly assigned to live in a madhouse. He became my guide, whispering wisdom to me through the walls of my cell, confiding to me that he’s “convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.”

It all made perfect sense. For nearly a year now, I’d been living in a small room with a lamp, a TV, and a single bed in the Coldfoot dormitory. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have a collection of electronic gizmos at my disposal. Between the free room and board at Coldfoot, as well as the absence of movie theaters, shopping malls, and other places where I’d usually spent my money, I had no choice but to save. And I had to be frugal. When I needed a haircut, a coworker cut it. When I needed an extra pair of pants, I grabbed some out of the cardboard box in which previous coworkers had thrown out their old clothes before leaving town. By having had to “do without,” I discovered that I was, in many ways, better off.

While I began to feel rejuvenated by the longer days and warmer weather, Josh was in worse shape than ever. After working with
me at Coldfoot and the Yukon River Camp the previous fall, he flew back home to western New York and found a series of seasonal odd jobs like delivering phone books door to door and helping as a UPS package handler.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
February 23, 2007

Subject:
Re:

Quick rundown on my current job… I’m working in the ghetto (emphasize ghetto) of Niagara Falls delivering UPS packages with a black driver named Leon. Leon is a character… almost a stereotype of a black man with money. He likes pimpin his car and overly large women. He is “workin” several women at a time—mostly overweight white whales. He showed me pictures on his phone of several of them exposing their breasts to him… He also showed me a video on his phone which appeared to be one of these girls sucking his dick.

When the holiday season ended, Josh was unemployed once again. This was nothing new, but things took a turn for the worse after he got a letter from his lender, stating that they’d miscalculated his debt. They said he owed $8,000 more, boosting his staggering $58,000 debt to a now crippling $66,000.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
March 15, 2007

Subject:
Josh loses it

There’s only one human being who could possibly understand what I just went through and that is you. Directly after writing you my last email I opened a letter sitting next to me. Its contents sent me into a state of emotions that is hard to analogize to anything… At this moment you should be wondering what this letter possibly could have been about. My friend, there is only one element of society that could make me scream, yell, swear at customer service representatives, and spend 40 minutes jogging throughout the local neighborhood, cursing loudly as people gawked at me
from cars and porches who surely pondered what would make a young man jog through a blizzard. Yes, my friend, the letter was about my debt.

Even though Josh had consolidated his loans, he’d learn from this letter that he owed two financial institutions money. When Josh read through the letter sent by one of these institutions, he crumpled the paper in his fist and unleashed a horrifying, Schwarzenegger-esque “
Nooooooooo!
” It was the sort of “
Nooooooooo!
” that’d be appropriate to unleash only if: 1) You’ve walked into your kitchen to find your wife and child murdered by some evil cabal whose members gratuitously smeared semen into your mop-headed son’s baseball mitt before placing it over his lifeless face; or 2) you’ve just found out you owe $8,000 more on your already-humongous student debt.

Josh would have to pay an extra $100 a month on his loans for the next twelve years, upping his payments to $700 a month. He didn’t know what to do, so he busted open his front door and began sprinting through our old neighborhood in a blinding, eye-stinging Buffalo blizzard.

“I passed two cars,” Josh continued in the e-mail. “Both of them slowed down and were looking at me with their mouths open. I passed some kids playing in the snow with their money [
sic?
]. The kids cheerily observed someone out in the snow, but their mother seemed shocked. I ran through the Meadows and through the development across Ferchen, backtracking at times to sustain the catharsis as long as possible. Eventually I came back, covered head to toe in snow, breathing heavily and thinking 10x clearer. $8,000. That is between three or four times the amount of money I earned shoveling burnt garbage and scrubbing toilets in Alaska for two months. I’ve paid about $1,500 of my debt so far, which felt like a satisfying start, yet as of today I owe more than I thought I did before I paid that much off. Another $8,000… thats a summer in Alaska. All of the thoughts of how much $8,000 is make the larger number of $66,000 seem all the more dreadful.”

He was able to land a three-month gig building homes for a low-wage AmeriCorps program in Mississippi, but that was the last of his adventures. Josh knew he had to find a permanent job, so he left our neighborhood in New York for Denver, where a close friend of ours offered him free rent until he got a job and his feet on the ground.

That spring in Coldfoot, new, younger, excited workers were coming in, and the older drifters were headed out. Hal the liar was fired. Casey the punk rocker was long gone. And slack-jawed Lenny got arrested by the local trooper after he beat up his girlfriend, Lucy, leaving strangling marks around her neck and blood oozing from one of her ears.

I took the new crew on long van rides to introduce them to the Brooks and organized weekly football games in the snow in front of the inn, and a few of the more book-loving workers and I even had a tea party on a frozen pond.

I was falling deeply, madly, “it hurts me in the gut” in love with Coldfoot and the arctic. And I was still knocking off $300 with each weekly paycheck. After a full year in Coldfoot, I’d made $22,000, which, except for my $4,000 in tip money, all went toward my debt. I had just $16,000 more to go.

When I calculated these numbers, I was in shock. While I only made $22,000 in a year, I saved 82 percent of it and could have saved nearly 100 percent if I hadn’t spent it on my trip to Ecuador and other tiny luxury costs. Most would agree that $22,000 isn’t a lot of money for a year’s work, yet when you have no living expenses, it’s a substantial sum. The key was room and board. Room and board was everything.

I punched a few numbers to see just how much money I’d saved because of the free room and board. I determined that if I were your average consumer, living your conventional home-dwelling, car-driving, supermarket-shopping lifestyle, I would have had to pay, over the course of a year, $27,540 of my income on living expenses (food, insurance, car payment, rent, etc.). That means I’d have to make $49,540 for the whole year if I
wanted to be able to save $22,000. So working in Coldfoot for a year was
sort of
like getting paid $49,540 in any normal place. I didn’t own a car, a phone, or a home, but I was saving the sort of money that a person of moderate wealth could.