Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (14 page)

After another ride, I made it across the Canadian border into the Yukon, where I found myself sitting on a curb outside Whitehorse, a quaint subarctic metropolis in the middle of nowhere. It was there that Charlene pulled over for me in her sedan.

She was headed to a baby shower in Teslin, one hundred miles to the south. Because she was hankering to start “pregaming,” she handed me the keys so she could drink. I thought there was something more than odd about giving a complete stranger the keys to one’s car, but I was happy to keep heading south and fine with her drinking so long as I was doing the driving. And it would have been a pleasant ride if not for the fact that Charlene insisted we keep the windows rolled down.

“Are you sure you’re not getting cold?” I asked, shivering feverishly.

“I’m fine.” She giggled. “I’m a Yukon girl.”

She was in the middle of telling me about her job as a social worker when she exclaimed, “Wait, wait, wait. Turn here at this campground. I got some friends I want to meet.”

This is it, I thought. This was her plan all along. I pulled into the campground resignedly, knowing that this was when she and her cronies would toss me out of the car, steal my gear, rip off my clothes, and jam some noncylindrical object into me while laughing and giving each other high-fives.

But after a trade of hellos, that was it.

We arrived in Teslin around midnight. Lanky men were strutting through dimly lit streets openly drinking cans of beer and screaming obscenities. Because I was in a foreign place around people I didn’t know, I wanted to get away from Teslin and Charlene, though I felt obligated to chauffeur her around town.

Later, when we visited Tony, and when Charlene proposed that we traffic Tony out of Teslin, I thought I’d tested my luck enough for one day. When we went back to the car I grabbed my backpack and said, “This has been wonderful, Charlene, and I really appreciate the ride, but I really should go my own way at this point. I’m sorry I can’t help you out with Tony.” She begged
me to stay, but I found myself backing away step by step, until I finally turned around and briskly walked down a dark road lined on each side with the bone-white skeletons of birch trees. I came to a river and set up my tent on its shore.

As I shivered into my sleeping bag, I thought about calling it quits. In just a couple of days, I’d been in cars and trucks with ex-convicts and killers, alcoholics and addicts. All my drivers had devastating stories to tell. They had shared tales of poverty and pain, rape and child abuse. Maybe this place really is full of bad guys. Maybe everything I’d heard was true. Maybe I was better off heading back to Whitehorse and taking a flight home.

But then I thought about how I’d yet to see evil. In fact, despite all the horrific stories, I’d seen nothing but kindness. I needed to continue on.

It didn’t take long for me to get good at hitchhiking. With a box of Crayola crayons, I’d draw big family-friendly signs on giant rectangles of cardboard that I’d get from gas stations and restaurants. I’d pick the best places to stand: entrances ramps, rest stops, and highways where vehicles would have plenty of room to pull over. I made sure to stand in areas where the traffic moved slowly enough so that drivers could inspect me and see my sign. On my backpacking stove, I cooked oatmeal in the morning and a Mountain House meal at night (freeze-dried food that just needs boiling water added). I slept soundly in my tent in forests or alongside highways. I kept my appearance neat and trim, showering at truck stops and shaving in gas station restrooms. I wore jeans, a collared shirt, and a baseball cap, and I flashed a meek half-smile at all passing cars. Most times, I’d wait an hour before getting a lift, sometimes two. Other times it took a lot longer. But I never got stuck.

After my night with Tony and Charlene, I sat next to Dennis, an uncomplicated, plainspoken trucker who took me the nine hundred miles from Teslin to Prince George, British Columbia. George, a Catholic priest with a frosty, neatly trimmed beard heading to Ashcroft, BC, told me about his hitchhiking exploits
when he was a lad my age. Four teens on their way to Vancouver spoke of pot and sex the whole ride. I was stuffed in the back of their crammed car between two blondes; the one with milky skin asked me if I’d pretend to be her boyfriend.

Keith, a retired machinist heading to the U.S.-Canada border, told me, “You’re not worth a dime until you make your boss a dollar.” Kevin, employed by the nuclear power industry, told me the world was going to end in 2012.

In Washington State, when I asked Bob and Esther, an eighty-year-old couple, why they picked me up, they told me they were “some of the few left who still like to trust people.”

John, a shirtless nineteen-year-old, pulled up in a rundown 1980s sports car in the town of Omak, Washington. He was thin and muscular, just out of basic training and on his way to Iraq, where he’d serve as a scout. He joined the army because he’d blown $10,000 on pot and had to pay it back quick.

“I told my recruiting officer that I want to get in shape, fuck up and kill a lot of people, and come home.”

“Is that exactly how you put it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly.

I made signs for Wenatchee, Rock Island, Kittitas, Yakima, Richland, Kennewick, Pendleton, and La Grande.

My
SOUTH
sign stopped working on an entrance ramp in a sleepy farm town called Kittitas in the state of Washington. A man who introduced himself as Juan Hernandez—a Mexican immigrant with a contracting business in Yakima—saw me and decided to pull over, even though he wasn’t heading in my direction. He took me to a Wendy’s and, despite my objections, bought me a hamburger and fries, which he watched me eat. He spoke in broken, hard-to-understand English, but his passion for his god and his America was palpable. He spoke with no hint of cynicism, of sarcasm, of guile. He only spoke of how happy he was to raise his baby girl, Genesis, here in America and to be able to buy nice clothes for his family.

When he dropped me off, I sat down on my pack and covered my eyes with my hands to hide the tears streaming down my
cheeks. This was neither the first nor the last time I had difficulty bearing other people’s generosity. Even though I had liked to think I was a solo adventurer, I realized that I was never really alone. I walked a tightwire above a net of compassion, stretched out by the hands of strangers. My dear countrymen…

A week before, when I’d stuck my thumb out on that blue-skies May afternoon, I had, for the first time, surrendered control. I’d dropped the clock, abandoned the plan, and severed the puppet strings. It was no longer I, nor my family, nor my local school board, deciding my destiny. My life was now in the hands of something else. And now that no one—not even I—was at the wheel, I felt an odd sense of empowerment. Sometimes, to cede control to fate, I realized, is to assume more control than ever before. I wasn’t just traveling anymore. I was traveling outside the formula. I might as well have been floating through space, trailing my hand in stardust.

I read lefty magazines in Boise, Idaho, almost got run over on the interstate outside of Salt Lake City, and slept in a Mormon church in Park City, Utah. In Wyoming, a blonde wearing a cabdriver’s cap asked if I wanted to spend the night at her place. In Denver, I met up with a friend. Across all the states, I listened to the purr of rolling wheels atop prairie-flat interstate song lines. I sped beneath sparkling constellations in a chrome-blue Wyoming sky, alongside a conveyor belt of yellow dashes.

In Nebraska, there were cornfields. My driver, Tom, a twenty-nine-year-old cook who had been born in South Korea and adopted by American parents, was on a road trip from Oregon to the East Coast. He picked me up in Colorado and would take me all the way home to Niagara Falls. Around the time we drove through Lincoln, Nebraska, it was getting dark, so we decided to get off the I-80 in hopes of finding a quiet place to park and set up camp for the night.

On a sleepy country road, we happened upon an abandoned school next to what looked like a thousand-mile-long forest of corn illuminated by the moon. A safe place to camp, we thought.
The stars glimmered, and the crickets strung a steady electric hum. We cracked open a few PBRs and boiled ramen noodles on our stoves for dinner.

It was a fairly idyllic scene until we were interrupted by a figure in the dark who advanced toward us with a flashlight. We called out, “Hi there!” but he turned off his light and shuffled away in the opposite direction. Tom and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and continued enjoying our meals. Fifteen minutes later, another man, also bearing a flashlight, emerged from the cornfield.

“Keep your hands where I can see them!” he screeched. “Put them on the hood of your van!”

Tom and I stood beside each other with our palms flat against the hood of his massive white Chevy. I’d seen scenes like this played out in movies hundreds of times, so I spread my legs as wide as I could, as if struggling to do a split.

“How many of you are there?” the man growled.

“Just us,” Tom said casually.

“How many of you are there?” he repeated. He came close enough so that we could see he was a cop.

“Two.”

“Is there anybody else?”

“No, just us,” we both said, each now with voices quavering.

“What are you guys doing?” he said, oscillating his light from side to side.

“Camping, I guess,” I said.

“Do you have anything… you know… illegal?”

“No.”

“Can I see your IDs?”

“My wallet is inside in the center console in the van,” Tom said.

“Can I go in and search your van?”

“Yeah, sure, I don’t care,” Tom said.

“YES OR NO!?” the cop roared.

“Sure, I don’t care. I mean, yes!” Tom sputtered nervously.

The cop scoured the van for anything, you know, illegal. I
was still pressed against the hood, my groin beginning to feel the strain. After he was done looking in the van, he dipped his hand deep into my back pocket, giving my rear what felt like a deep-tissue massage as he struggled to fish out my wallet.

“This is private property,” the cop said. “You can’t be here. Why do you think it’s okay to be here?”

“We didn’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Well, you can’t be here. People get pretty heated in these parts. You guys just wait here. I’m going to see if anything was stolen.” He marched over to the abandoned school that, from what we could tell, only contained a scattering of wooden chairs draped in spiderwebs.

As I watched the cop wave his flashlight back and forth in the school, I thought there was something strangely tragic about the scene. I can’t say when it happened, but at some point in the last forty years, it seemed as if something like a giant crop duster flew over our once wild and free country, sowing fear into the belly of America. People now are afraid to take walks at night. Parents won’t let their kids wander through the woods. And young men and women are reluctant to hitchhike or embark on adventures for fear of all the terribleness out there that we’ve been daily reminded of.

The cop came back from the abandoned school clearly more at ease. He told us the name of a campground where we could spend the night. Before we went our ways, he said, “You know, you shouldn’t be hitchhiking in this day and age. Times are different now.” He looked wistfully at the cornfields, perhaps imagining a different time—some time long ago when the world was supposedly a safer, kinder, nicer place.

“It ain’t how it used to be,” he said.

On my hitchhike, I’d seen a different country, a different sort of people.

“I know, sir. Thank you,” I said, smiling to myself, like I knew something he didn’t.

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

July–August 2007—Ontario, Canada

DEBT: $16,000

A
FTER FOURTEEN DAYS OF HITCHHIKING
, I made it to my boyhood home in Wheatfield, New York. I spent a few days reconnecting with friends and sorting through all the voyageur gear I’d purchased from online reenactment stores with my leftover tip money. (Long story short: My mother was
not
pleased with how I had decided to travel home.) From there, my parents drove me five hours to Ottawa, Ontario, where Bob lived and where we’d set off on our voyage.

Because I’d worked almost a full year in Coldfoot and was ahead of schedule on my debt payments, I had a few months before I had to worry about finding another job. And because I’d almost cut the debt in half and realized that I’d been blowing the debt’s oppressiveness out of proportion, I no longer saw the it as some mortal foe worthy of the attention I’d been giving it. The debt was more like some distant cousin I didn’t like but still had to interact with at periodic family gatherings. It was a canker sore on the roof of my mouth or effluent from a nearby chemical factory: the debt was something I was
constantly aware of but was nothing more than a mild disturbance. Between my delightful spring in Coldfoot, the hitchhike, and now this voyage, it seemed that I really could
live
when in debt. And it seemed that I might have found some sweet spot between fulfilling financial obligations and satisfying adventurous longings.

We would be a crew of five. Together, we’d paddle for two months and 1,500 kilometers along the rivers and across the lakes of Ontario, Canada, taking a route similar to the one that Samuel de Champlain had explored four centuries before. After descending south down the Rideau Canal, we’d skirt west along the northern rim of Lake Ontario, paddle up the Trent-Severn Waterway, and zigzag around the islands in Georgian Bay, which is the watery goiter bubbling out the east side of Lake Huron. From there, we’d paddle east along the French River, across Lake Nipissing to the Mattawa River, and down the Ottawa River to complete a full loop back to Ottawa.

The voyageurs would follow a similar route on summerlong expeditions, hauling supplies in birchbark canoes to western forts where they’d collect fur pelts to bring back to the cities in the east. The voyageurs were a rugged, raggedy, reveling fraternity of outdoorsmen renowned for their impertinence, their bravado, and their unequaled tolerance for the rigors of the wild. They lived a grueling life, paddling and portaging from dawn to dusk, but finding comfort in the songs and rum and camaraderie of working alongside men a safe distance from the restrictions of village life back home.