Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (13 page)

This was the third night of my hitchhike.

On his cushioned throne, Tony, with his tousled hair, baggy sweats, and Kokanee beer securely balanced atop his gut, looked like a Tlingit chief who’d fallen on hard times. What could have been a great man had become this: a lazy, drunken couch potato of no more consequence than a pile of dirty laundry.

I sat on his sofa, tense and rigid, my arms stiffly angled toward my knees. Charlene, a three-hundred-pound Native American woman in her late twenties, sat directly beside me. When she spoke, her hip rubbed against mine like a ship nudging against another at dock. Charlene had picked me up four hours before in Whitehorse—a city to the north.

“Listen, Tony,” she said. “We need to get you out of here. You’ve been in this house for too long.”

“I’m under house arrest,” he said, while his eyes followed a police car that prowled past his window for the fifth time in an hour. “You know they’re watching me, eh. I can’t leave. I ain’t goin’ back to jail.”

“Tony… We’ll go to Watson Lake. We can party. You know you want to. Think about it,” Charlene said, adding wistfully, “The gang, the booze…”

In midsentence, Charlene had lifted her hand from her thigh and suavely placed it on mine, just centimeters away from my penis, which had fearfully slunk into the folds on the opposite side of my jeans. It seemed that all of Charlene’s inhibitions had been drowned under the life-ending quantities of alcohol she’d guzzled—a quantity so preposterous I would have considered it a cruel and unusual punishment if she hadn’t relished every drop of it. She had started with a six-pack of wine coolers, then doused her throat with a bottle of tequila as if her tonsils were on fire, and now she lustily quaffed can after can of Tony’s Kokanee.

“This is what we’re going to do,” she said, before taking another hearty swig. (Oddly, the alcohol seemed to have had no adverse effect on her speech or acumen; on the contrary, she was getting sharper by the minute.) “Tony, the next time the cops go by, you’re going to leave the house, sneak through the woods, and wait for us on the other side of town.”

Tony listened carefully, suddenly awoken from his evening torpor.

“And then we’re going to pick you up and take you to Watson Lake,” she said. “It’s a good plan, eh?”

“Charlene, I can’t drive,” Tony said matter-of-factly. “They took my license away. And you can’t, neither. You’ve already had six beers since you’ve been here.”

For an ex-con, Tony—I was surprised and pleased to note—was exhibiting more than a good deal of prudence.

As Charlene ignored Tony’s objections and continued to
unroll the blueprints of her plans, I took a moment to wonder:
How did I get myself into this situation?
I was in the middle of the Yukon, in the middle of two raving and possibly psychotic alcoholics, in the middle of the night.

“Tony, I’m not going to drive,” Charlene said.

“Well, then who is?” he asked.

Charlene and Tony looked over at me and into my wide, frantic eyes.

So began our mission to traffic Tony out of Teslin.

I had given myself one month to hitchhike the five thousand miles from Coldfoot to my parents’ home in Niagara Falls before the eighteenth-century voyage began. I decided to put my thumb out on the Dalton that sunny May afternoon, both to have an adventure and to transport myself home as cheaply as I could. Coldfoot had made me into a lot of things: a lover of nature, a competent cook, an able guide, and, most prominently, a cheap son of a bitch. Between the free room and board, the haircuts from friends, and the clothes I took from donation bins—I guess you could say I’d learned how to be a professional freeloader. And this, I figured, was a skill that might come in handy when hitching rides.

Before I left Coldfoot, I commissioned Josh with the duty of calling my mother if I turned up missing, which probably would have gone something like this:

Josh:
Mrs. Ilgunas… uh, I have some news.

Mom:
(silence)

Josh:
Ken… Well, Ken kinda went hitchhiking and…

Mom:
What?!?!

Josh:
… he’s missing in the Yukon.

(My mom causes a supernova, there’s a bright light, an explosion, and the world—as we know it—ends.)

I thought if I brought enough stuff, I’d be okay, even if I did go missing or got lost. So I jammed a week’s worth of food into a
gym bag and squeezed my camping supplies into my backpack, including my newly bought one-person tent, my sleeping bag, three pairs of jeans, three collared shirts, a rain suit, toiletries, a box of crayons,
Robinson Crusoe,
a six-inch hunting knife, my passport, $200 in cash, a black baseball cap that read
COLD FOOT CAMP
in white letters, and three maps: one for Alaska, another for Canada, and a third for the Lower 48. I thought that if I slept on the side of the road and cooked meals on my backpacking stove, then I could travel across the continent practically for free.

But I also wanted to put aside a couple of weeks of my life when anything could happen: when I could mingle with ex-felons, have knife fights with grizzlies, or fall in love on the open road. I wanted to scissor-poke cowardice and reservation in the eyes and finally immerse myself in the unknown. And the road certainly was unknown to me, at least by way of hitchhiking. In my twenty-three years, I’d never even seen a hitchhiker. Not one. I wondered:
Could I—in this day and age—hitchhike all the way home?

Today, the hitchhiker is little more than a dust-collecting cultural relic lodged in the back of the national memory, sitting beside the pioneer, pilgrim, hobo, and cowboy: each a symbol of freer times, but no more real than a child’s action figure. While the hitchhiker can still be spotted on entrance ramps and roadways in Europe, New Zealand, and other places around the globe, in America, traveling with your thumb out is for the most part unheard of. I presumed this had to do with a few things: 1) the law, which prohibits hitchhiking in many states; 2) fear, which—thanks to B-rated horror movies and fear-mongering news media organizations—makes us think that if we hitchhike we’ll be raped, murdered, and mutilated (though not necessarily in that order); and 3) too many young people have jobs they are unwilling to leave, either because of debt or because they didn’t want to lose their health insurance.

Luckily for me, I no longer had a job tying me down, nor
was I going to let reasons one and two stop me from having my adventure. But I was definitely scared of what was out there. Like many members of Generation Y, I’d suckled the milk of paranoia from the teat of fear from the get-go. I grew up not just worrying but
knowing
that I’d one day be molested. As a boy, whenever I exhibited the slightest hint of melancholy my mom would check in on me and ask, “Ken, has someone been…
touching you?
” I was told that if I was approached, offered candy, or simply looked at weirdly by a stranger, it was more than likely that he was hankering to “touch me.” I grew up thinking,
Why do all these people want to touch me?
(Which is a worry that, unfortunately, vanished as soon as I wanted people to.)

Any Halloween candy that looked like it had been tampered with was thrown away for fear that someone had injected AIDS into it. My brother and I weren’t allowed to ride our bikes to the mall. Or the convenience store. Or across any busy streets. We were contained in our suburb the same way the townspeople in the movie
The Village
were contained in their community. Just like them, we had culturally prescribed monsters lurking on the edges of our neighborhood, keeping us in, keeping us safe, keeping us scared, keeping us bored.

As a young adult, I’d heard all the same warnings over and over again. I was reminded constantly that “it ain’t how it used to be,” meaning that the roving bands of rapists, child molesters, and face-masked henchmen out there were a product of the twenty-first century, and that while it might have been okay to do something adventuresome yesterday, it would surely be insane and suicidal to do so today.

After my year in Coldfoot, I was still as paranoid as ever. Yet I had a sneaking suspicion that this was all wrong. It was time to find out for myself, I thought.

On my first day—after I stuck my thumb out on the Dalton—the semitruck coming toward me lumbered past, causing me to turn my face so I could protect my eyes from the gravel and dust
swirling in the truck’s wake. I stood there for another twelve hours and watched seventeen trucks go by. (
Maybe it’s not possible
…) I headed back to Coldfoot to reorganize and rethink my strategy. The next morning, I persuaded one of the truckers at the café, who was heading southbound, to help me get started on my journey home.

Dirk often frequented Coldfoot on his long hauls up and down the Dalton. He was in his late thirties. He wore a dirty ball cap, an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and a pair of oil-spattered jeans. He had a convict’s goatee and a confident demeanor that seemed in sync with his filthy ensemble.

As I kept in stride with his caffeinated gait from the café to his truck, he explained that he needed someone to talk to so he could make it all the way home to the town of North Pole (almost a 270-mile drive) without falling asleep.

On the road, Dirk talked a mile a minute, detailing everything from his family history to his criminal past. (He confessed that he was wanted for “minor” crimes in two states, as well as murder in a third.) He told me about everything: his trucking company, his family, his love for automatic weapons, as well as his distaste for Subarus and the theory of evolution. Everything. He described his wife’s pubic hair in exquisite detail. He told me how much he loved his children and wife (except for issues related to the management of her nether regions), and about a period of his life when he was a self-described “man-whore,” luring strippers into his truck where he’d warn them, “If yur gettin’ in my truck, yur gonna fuck”—a message that he thankfully refrained from relaying upon granting me admittance.

He also, in more sullen tones, told me how—when he was a kid—his father had molested his sister, and how he’d just recently told his father that he’d kill him if he ever caught him alone with his children. I didn’t know what to say, but he chirped, in a more cheerful timbre, “You know what I’m thinking about? Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at!” He sputtered this while miming a 1930s gangster shooting a gun. Allegedly Dirk had bought a tommy gun for $1,300 that had come in the mail while he was
on the road. “When we get home, we can test it out at the gravel pit.”

After seven hours and 270 miles, he brought me home with him, where he introduced me to his beautiful wife, his nine-year-old son, Kevin, and his six-year-old daughter, Kayla. I made friends with their Saint Bernard and played tag with the kids, and they invited me to stay for a cheese and crackers dinner.

Afterward, Dirk assembled the tommy gun, and we took a ride to the gravel pit. The thought of shooting a gun had all my old reservations resurfacing.

Dirk took a few shots and said, “You wanna give it a try?”

I pulled the trigger once. A delightful shockwave spread across my chest.
Okay, that felt pretty good.
Then I held down the trigger, firing what felt like a hundred bullets in a matter of seconds.

This was perhaps the greatest day of my life.

The next day I got a ride with Jim, a hunter who lives in the bush. “You can’t never beat a female in gun shootin’,” he said. “You give a girl a gun the first time and odds are she’ll shoot better than most any guy.” He dropped me off in front of a school in the native village.

As I sat with my cardboard sign to Tok, the next Alaskan town on the road, a couple of girls in their upper teens greeted me with a “Hi there” and coquettish giggles. Despite the pattern of middle-aged men I had had for drivers so far, I harbored fantasies of having a subarctic tryst with a nubile young driver in a tight tank top and jeans—one who’d love me one night and leave me devastated the next. No longer at the mercy of the Sacred Schedule, I meant to strip off order, inhibition, and restraint and fling them into the air, like clothes in a moment of passion.

Lenny, a heavyset, middle-aged native, wasn’t the dark-haired beauty I dreamed of. As I settled into the passenger seat of his battered pickup, I detected something off-putting in his wide smile and slurred pronunciations. I buckled up, swallowed my
fears, and hoped he was merely dazed by a mild hallucinogen.

He was heading to Tok to get his tires changed, as he was giving his truck to his son as a graduation present. A strange gift, I thought, because his son had just “beat the livin’ shit” out of Lenny—as Lenny put it—when they were both under the influence of meth. Perhaps Lenny deserved it. He told me he hadn’t been much of a father figure. In addition to admitting to me that he still dabbled with meth, he mentioned nonchalantly that he “just got out,” which I took to mean “of prison.” I watched him sip from a can of Sierra Mist, and I wondered what squares of the periodic table he might have sprinkled in.

As we headed down the Alcan Highway, lined on each side with dense spruce forest, Lenny recounted stories of his eighteen-month stint in a federal penitentiary for killing a bald eagle. When I questioned him about what seemed like an awfully rigid sentence for killing a bird that was no longer on the endangered species list, he clarified that his sentence was lengthened because of a long list of DWIs, thereby confirming the worst of my fears.

First an ex-convict. Then a hunter. Now I was riding with an ex-convict/hunter with a penchant for nose candy and swerving over yellow lines. We were going about 60 mph, and I estimated that if I opened the door, exited the truck, landed on my shoulder, tucked, and rolled, then I might have a better chance of surviving the fall than I did in the truck with Lenny.

I stayed in, though, and he wished me well after letting me loose in Tok.

That evening, I slept in my one-person ultralight tent on the side of the road. I woke up the next day, cooked a pot of oatmeal with Craisins, and made a giant cardboard sign to Canada with a red maple leaf in the center. To the south, the tide of mountain peaks were frozen white, though everywhere else—the forests, the rolling hills, the tundra plain—was colored with a vivid green, for the land’s white winter covering had just been melted by the warm breath of spring.