Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (12 page)

I knew I’d leave Coldfoot with having learned at least one thing of inestimable value: When we eliminate the high cost of living, we can amaze ourselves with how much we’re capable of saving.

¹
The following "normal living" averages are inexact, based on anecdotal evidence and statistical averages where I could find them. The "Coldfoot living" numbers reflect a "reasonable minimum" that resemble my own expenses.

Best of all, I was in the kitchen less and less. More tourists began visiting around the spring equinox (March 21), when the aurora in Wiseman is most vivid, so I was frequently leading Aurora Tours. I also began helping the maintenance crew with renovation projects. I installed pipes and ripped out old carpeting, and for a week I got to varnish doors at the motel. Much to my delight, I learned that I’d be working alongside James, the seventy-two-year-old recluse of Coldfoot whom I’d yet to speak to.

This was a slow time of year for James at his usual job for the Bureau of Land Management, so the truck stop enlisted his services to refurbish one of their old pipeline dormitories. Despite his age and gaunt features, I was impressed by how fast James moved and how dexterous he was with his hands. It took me twice as long to do the work. I simply couldn’t keep up, though I found that I could slow him down by prodding him with questions.

James, originally from Tennessee, had worked as a state trooper in Indiana. Upon retiring, he moved up to the arctic. There, without a place to stay, he decided to live in his 1980 Chevy Suburban for the next six years.

“How do you stay warm?” I asked

“I put a stove in there,” he said. “You haven’t seen it? The pipe is poking out the roof above the passenger-side door.”

Later, we went over to the Suburban and he gave me a tour. The Suburban was about the size of a large truck. It was well kept, but its banana-yellow body had matured into a venerable manila over the years. And he wasn’t lying: there was a propane stove inside. The propane tank itself was on a small trailer behind the truck—kept outside the vehicle for reasons of safety—but when it got really cold the tank would sometimes freeze, so he’d learned to bring a smaller tank inside.

He had pulled off all the side panels and ceiling upholstery inside the Suburban so he could insert fiberglass insulation. On the windows, he had attached some heavy-duty plastic for further
insulation. He cooked his meals on the propane stove and slept on top of plastic containers in the back.

James’s Suburban left me speechless. It was a mockery of conformity, an affront to conventional wisdom, a symbol of his complete lack of regard for the rules and norms and standards of our age. To me, the Suburban was freedom, unalloyed, unadulterated, unblemished. Here—I thought, looking inside his home—a man could be lord, monarch, ruler of his own tiny, upholstered dominion.

“Do you even need money?” I asked. “I thought you were retired.”

“No, I don’t need the money. I send it all to my grandkids who are going through college. I love work. I’m seventy-two and I’m going to be working till I’m a hundred. That’s my goal,” he said with wide eyes, letting out a boyish high-pitch giggle before coughing out some breathy grandpa-like chortles. “It keeps you healthy. I couldn’t be happier when I’m working.”

“You don’t get lonely here in Coldfoot?”

“No, I don’t need to be around a bunch of people.”

“But I heard you’d lived in Wiseman for a year.”

“I only did that for a year,” to which he added somewhat scornfully: “Too many people.”

“But James, aren’t there only like twelve people up there?”

“No, there was more like twenty then.”

“Do you care what your family thinks of you? Do they think that you’re eccentric?”

“I am an eccentric!” he barked, though without any hostility. “Me and that Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—we got a lot in common. I can see why he’d want to move out in the woods like that. In fact, he had a lot more room out there in that cabin than I have in my Suburban. The only difference between him and me was: He was nuts!”

Most people would have considered James nuts, too, but I thought there was something sagely about his advice. He represented everything I loved about the people in rural Alaska.
Except for the fact that many of them harbored tender feelings for ruthless right-wing politics—probably ruthless enough to make the libertarian, spear-wielding sand people of Tatooine grimace—I revered rural Alaskans for their independence, self-reliance, health, and happiness. And I liked the idea of work as a virtuous undertaking but knew I’d never be able to feel that way at Coldfoot, where I was doing little more than servicing the oil and tourist industries. I was beginning to feel grateful for my experiences, but I knew I needed a big change.

Each afternoon, when it wasn’t completely dark outside, I’d head into an abandoned room at the end of our dormitory where there was a bench press, pull-up bar, and a few barbells. The room was unheated, so the walls were coated in frost like the inside of a freezer. I’d warm myself by using an old mattress as a punching bag, then do three sets of pull-ups, arm curls, and bench presses, all while wearing my facemask and logger’s cap.

I knew I had little chance of getting selected by Bob to be one of his voyageurs, as there were only three spots and probably hundreds of applicants, but I thought I had an okay shot because I could boast in my application that I had a summer’s worth of Alaskan rafting experience, which sounded deceptively badass.

Bob’s website said that we’d have to undergo a fitness test to show him we could do one hundred consecutive ab rolls, squat thrusts, and lunges, among other physical requirements I was getting in shape for. I started going on jogs down winter mining trails every afternoon. At first, I was intimidated by the cold, but I learned that as long as I wore an extra pair of underwear and a facemask, I could stay warm at almost any temperature. I started testing my boundaries, running in temperatures as low as–10°F, then–20°F, and finally–30°F. Every minute, I’d have to take off a glove and pinch my eyelids, which would freeze together with frost, but I’d rarely be troubled by the cold after a couple of minutes of jogging.

The mountains, blanketed with a thick, creamy topping of snow, no longer looked so uncomfortably naked as they had in the summer. The howling of wolves carried across greater distances, and the trees all looked stolid and grave, like a phalanx of impassive Spartans with their spears held upright.

As the weather began to warm, I was beset with the aching need to spend every waking hour outside. With my remaining tip money, I bought a lightweight one-person tent for $125, a backpacking stove for $85, a water filter for $50 over the Internet, and a–20°F-rated sleeping bag from a coworker for $40. On my weekends, I’d go on long hikes, sometimes for several days on mining trails that had been packed down under the tires of heavy vehicles, making the hike manageable.

Things were going well, but every few days I’d get a rejection letter from the graduate schools I’d applied to. I’d applied to some of the best schools in the country, largely because they were among the few that offered free tuition and generous stipends, but also because I had it in my mind that someday I might amount to something more than an indebted line cook. I’d impressed one of my professors—the late Dr. Richard Ellis—with my senior paper on two early U.S. Supreme Court cases, so with his advice, I aimed high.

Within a week, my applications to Columbia and NYU were rejected. Next came letters from Yale and Princeton. And then the Universities of Pittsburgh and Wisconsin-Madison. Then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Notre Dame. Then the Universities of Minnesota and Miami.

I looked at all ten rejection letters on my desk. Goodness…
All ten?
Between these and the twenty-five newspapers that rejected my internship applications, I’d gone 0-for-35 in trying to become a “man of letters.” And while each rejection stung, the one good thing about being continuously rejected is that your pride, over time, begins to callous over into a hard cheese, allowing you to comfortably walk over setbacks, even those that once seemed as harmful as a bed of glowing coals.

Strangely, I also felt an odd sense of relief with each rejection. I began to reexamine my original motivations for applying to school. While it was true that I sincerely wanted to develop my mind and become a better, smarter person, part of my decision had to do with fulfilling social expectations: with going to a big-name school to impress my friends and family; with climbing the socioeconomic ladder in hopes of reaching a comfortable life in a house similar to, but slightly bigger than, the one I grew up in. When I forced myself to think about my decision, I had a hard time imagining myself being happy stuck in a program, in one place, studying just one thing, for years. But none of this mattered. Deep down, I knew that there was only one application that mattered. And one day on Coldfoot’s answering machine I heard a nasally Canadian voice addressed to me. It was Bob the voyageur. I called him back immediately.

“So you still want to join us this summer?” Bob asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Y’know. Do you want to come along with us on the voyage this summer?”

“Are you telling me that I’m going to be a voyageur?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

I screamed and bounced across the room.

“Yes, of course I’ll come!” I yelled.

I could have stayed in Coldfoot, guided for another season, and continued to focus on paying the debt, but this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I wasn’t sure if I could physically handle the voyage, but financially I knew that my debt was in good order. I’d already paid my mother back and I was ahead several months on my government loan payments. I had the summer to myself.

I looked up airfare and was disgusted to learn that a one-way ticket back home was $600. “That’s two whole weeks of work,” I moaned.

In May 2007, on my last day at Coldfoot, I gave most of the stuff I’d accumulated away—some shoes, winter clothes, and books—and I mailed a box of my more valuable clothes and books back to my parents’ home in New York. I crammed my remaining stuff—my tent, sleeping bag, and camping gear—into the large backpack that I’d first used on my Blue Cloud climb. I said good-bye to everybody, hugged Josh (who’d moved back to Coldfoot to take my position as a guide), and wished him luck with the mountains and his mountain of debt.

I looked over the Brooks Range one last time. They were alive, gushing water from melting winter snows that swelled streams and made the gentle Koyukuk River roar. An inquisitive moose watched me from a cluster of green spruce trees. The air felt practically alive. With each inhalation, my cells were charged with cold, eye-popping life. This place, once so new and exotic, had just started to feel like a place where I belonged. And while I’d been itching to get out of town for these past many months, now that I was finally going, I wanted nothing more than to stay. I remembered when I told Jack—the hunter from Wiseman—that this place was growing on me. He told me, “Everyone gets their home.” I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, but now I found myself promising to return.

It was a mild, blue-skies spring afternoon. I was nervous, scared, but brimming (almost shaking) with excitement. I walked onto the Dalton and looked down the gravel road that stretched across a continent that—now at the age of twenty-three—I’d hardly gotten to see.

I heard a truck rumbling. It turned a corner and lumbered toward me, kicking up clouds of dust in its wake.

I thought of my year here in Alaska: Wiseman, Jack, the aurora, the winter cold, Thoreau, James’s Chevy Suburban. Alaska taught me that anything was possible; that there are other ways to live, to work, to shelter oneself; that the cold wasn’t so cold; and that—even in an age of inky oceans and suburban sprawl—there was still wildness. I thought of Blue Cloud
and how, on it, I’d dipped my toe into the unknown. Today, it was time to submerge my whole body.

Up until now, I was never anything but a worker and a student. When I looked up at a dark arctic night sky, I thought I could be something else. I didn’t want a job, a salary, a home. I didn’t want to be a bolt in the consumer-capitalist machine. Or a boring Ph.D. student. When I looked at the stars, I could see my path. I wanted to be a comet hurtling through the sky, governed by no one’s laws or expectations but my own.

I took a deep breath and clenched my fists, trying to gain control of my trembling hands. Where this truck was going didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I didn’t know. I slowly lifted my arm as if to wave. I turned my wrist, flashed a grin, thought of those three whispered words, and extended my thumb.

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

or
My Attempt to Live a Free Life in Spite of Debt

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

May–June 2007—North America

DEBT: $16,000

I
WAS SITTING ON A COUCH
in a one-story home in Teslin, a small Native American village of 450 denizens in the Yukon Territory. The homeowner, Tony—a middle-aged resident with narcoleptic eyes—was slouched in his recliner thumbing the remote control until he got to a show called
Kenny vs. Spenny.