Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (16 page)

While Western society never had anything quite like the vision quest, we do have a heritage of journeying laced into our cultural DNA. In the 1930s, Americans hopped trains. In the 1950s, beat poets wrote about road trips. In the 1960s, we hitched rides. Today, however, it seems like the whole “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience, leaving no gap, no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career.

I listened carefully to what Christian had to say of dreams and visions and seeing into people. We’d been paddling for twelve hours straight. It was scorching hot, and for whatever reason I couldn’t think about stomaching another bowl of pea soup that day, which we’d been eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for almost six weeks. Toward the end of the trip, I became transfixed with my shadow to the left of me on the river. My body was colored in with a deep, dark blue and striped with the water’s spiny ridges. I watched the shadows of my arms and paddle moving rhythmically, hypnotically circling my body with each stroke. I thought I could see the eyes of my water-shadow. A scattering of water droplets flew from the paddle’s tip as I brought it forward, the blade lightly, with a surgeon’s precision, skimming the water’s crest. It was as if someone had removed my eyes, then jammed two new balls into the sockets. While I wasn’t having a vision, I was feeling the purifying glow of the ascetic act, experienced when—in the midst of a hurricane of struggle and strain—you come upon the “eye” of your adversity, when, for just a fleeting moment, the storm breaks and you’re afforded a flash of something sublime.

Squirrels ran over my blankets at night. I slept in rain, in blustering winds, and with mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. Underneath
each of my big toenails were dark bruises. The skin on my feet was dry and cracking. On portages, we’d have to carry the canoes, which would grind into our shoulders, making it feel like our muscles were being flipped off the bone. The tendons in my arms felt like they were going to snap like rubber bands, and sometimes I’d have back pains that made it hard to breathe. Yet all variations of pain and strain turned to numbness. No longer a man, I was a paddling machine. I felt like there was no discomfort that could be too discomforting. There was no day too long or load too heavy. I didn’t miss toilets, or showers, or homes, or cars, or anything modern. For two whole months, I could carry just about everything I needed in the canoe or on my back, with relative ease, making a whole houseful of needless stuff seem silly.

My relationship with nature was changing. No longer did I think of it as something to conquer, like a mountain summit. Nor was nature something to be glorified, which we tend to do at scenic road pull-offs. Nature, to me, was no longer beautiful. Nature, I realized, is only beautiful when you’re at a safe distance from it. Watching a setting sun from a windshield can mean romance, serenity, beauty. On the water, though, it was a warning for mosquitoes, storms, and the cold. When I was mesmerized by nature before, I was merely disconnected from it. After more than forty days on the voyage, I no longer saw nature and myself as independent entities; rather, I was nature, living among the roots, insects, animals, and storms. Because nature was indifferent to me, I began to feel indifferent to it.

The voyage was teaching me how unexceptional I was and how exceptional the human mind and body is. What wonders the human mind and body are capable of achieving! How so few know how much we can do! Our limits are merely mirages on the far side of the lake—we can see them ahead, but that’s all they are: mirages. Our real limits are beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the horizon, a boundary worthy of our exploration.

Just as I noticed that I was changing, I saw that Bob was
changing, too. Diane and Christian had left the voyage to go back to work, so they were replaced with an affable, though slightly out of shape, guy named Art, whom Bob had met and recruited at one of his speeches. Now, it was just Jay and me in one canoe, and Bob and Art in the other.

At this point Bob ceased consulting the group about decisions. He became short-fused and barked orders at me while picking on and bullying Jay, swearing at him for minor blunders. He went from being a stern, though reasonable, leader-elect to a hot-tempered monarch.

“Listen—when I say something, you guys listen!” he screamed at us. “We can talk about who’s right and who’s wrong later!”

He began shouting orders about minutiae and easy tasks, like lining the boats around some swift-moving water. I just wanted to scream, “Bob—shut the fuck up! We got it!” But never did. This went on for weeks.

My anger was all-consuming: anger that I directed as much at Bob (for bullying me) as at myself (for doing nothing about it). Instead of feeling like an intrepid voyageur, I felt more like a lowly deckhand, assigned the nightly task of emptying his master’s chamber pot. If one of those eighteenth-century landscape painters had drawn a portrait of our crew, I’d be one of the surly laborers in the background, wearing tattered rags, hunched over from all the carrying, cooking, and paddling, while Bob—the courageous leader—would be posed erect, with a foot on the canoe’s gunwale, a look of gallant determination on his face, and a generously sized bulge in his breeches.

Each time he raised his voice at me, I didn’t think I’d be able to handle one more command, one more insult, one more assertion of his superiority. I relied on my usual tactic of bottling my anger and hoping the problem would blow over—a tactic that had never worked in the past, yet was one that I continued to apply to situations with an irrational faith. And then the rapids incident occurred.

On the French River, Jay’s and my canoe was sucked into
some swift water. Taking a birchbark canoe into swift water was a big no-no because the brittle hulls couldn’t handle the slightest bump against a rock, which would be all the more difficult to avoid in swift water. Bob, from the shore, watched as we got plunged downriver. Jay and I, with ease, navigated around rocks, but that didn’t stop Bob from unloading on me. He screamed and yelled and cursed, selecting his words from a vast array of uninterpretable French expletives. He went on for some time, but I only remember one line in English: “What the fuck did I say?! Real smart move!”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t think about anything but confronting Bob. I stared at him ahead, hoping that by sheer exertion of will I could make his skull combust into a cloud of pink mist. My blood pulsed to the rapid drumbeat of rebellion. I wanted mutiny.

I decided I’d march up to him when he was alone and grab his neck. The sky would blacken, flames would blaze behind me, and I’d command him to never swear at me again.

Bob had started putting these voyages together on his own largely to boost his national profile for future speaking contracts, but also to pay homage to his ancestors, many of whom were voyageurs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The voyageurs back then came entirely from the lower classes. They could have lived reasonably free lives as peasant farmers, but they chose to be voyageurs. They sometimes worked fourteen hours a day, paddling at a rate of forty-five strokes a minute. On portages several miles long, they carried hundreds of pounds of gear using tumplines strapped around their foreheads. Many voyageurs didn’t live past their forties, dying of crippled backs and strangulated hernias.

They chose that life. They favored the winding river over the cobbled road, strain over comfort, adventure over monotony, full lives over long ones. “Voyageur” means “traveler.” They traveled for a living.

What was I traveling for? What was anyone traveling for? In
centuries past, there was always some blank spot on the map that needed to be filled in, terrain that needed to be discovered, goods that needed be shipped across perilous oceans. The voyageurs traded goods, supplied forts, and got paid for it. These people all had very clear reasons for going on journeys. Yet here we were, pretending to be people from a different century.

The twenty-first-century adventurer—because he has no frontiers to settle or wild lands to explore (nor the technology to push the boundaries of outer space)—has to sort of make it up. And that’s what the four of us were doing: creating a journey out of nothing, going back two centuries so we could feel what the twenty-first century wouldn’t let us feel.

Yet, despite the inauthentic nature of our voyage, there was something undeniably “real” about it. Having spent a year in the arctic and a summer on the water, I was presented with a new vantage point from which I could finally see civilization and suburbia for what they were.

In suburbia, except for when we conjure the willpower to go for a walk around the neighborhood, there’s hardly any real purpose in going outdoors. There are no fences to repair, no bean fields to hoe, no water to fetch from the stream. Back at my parents’ home, whenever I was hungry, I’d grab food from the well-stocked pantry or fridge. My water would come from magical sinks and my heat from magical vents. Because I was not really needed for anything, I’d spend my time fulfilling desires: watching TV in the family room, reading books in my bedroom, and playing video games on the computer.

On this voyage, I couldn’t help but think that we
need
need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. We need to be forced to sacrifice, to grow a garden, to fix a roof, to interact with neighbors. Nature had been all around me as a boy. It unleashed terrifying storms, spun circular cycles, inflicted bone-chilling cold, and renewed itself with springy revivifications. Yet I was completely oblivious to it all. I was playing video games.

Even though I’d become livid, frustrated, and demoralized
for being sworn at and ordered around and for not being treated like a grown man on this voyage, I was glad to have back the sensations my century had deprived me of, lust for mutiny and all.

That evening we set up camp on a large, forested island next to the French River. Bob was cutting up the salt pork: his evening ritual. I went up to him, as planned, ready to grab his neck and deliver my jeremiad.

I couldn’t, though. I just stood looking at him, paralyzed by my timid nature that had been holding me back all these years.

We all went to opposite corners of the island to lay out our tarps and wool blankets that we’d sleep on. As I laid out my ground cloth and began erecting my tarp, I thought about how, over the past six weeks, I’d put myself through a never-ending gauntlet of torture and pain but was still standing, still holding up. And I was paying off my own debt, going on my own travels, and living a free and independent—albeit poor—life. I wasn’t sure why it had taken me so long to realize it, but I knew I was no longer the sort of person who should let someone else kick me around.

I left my stuff and found Bob’s spot, where he was getting ready to bed down on a smooth boulder. I walked over sheepishly, head down, going over what I’d say one last time.

I started off weakly. “Bob, do you have a minute? About earlier at the rapids… I wanted to say that it was completely my fault.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right,” he said conciliatorily.

“But, Bob,” I said, looking into his eyes, “I never want to be yelled at or sworn at again.”

We traded a few more words and shook hands. He said, “Good man.”

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

October 2007–March 2008 Gulfport, Mississippi

DEBT: $16,000

A
FTER JOSH SPENT THE SUMMER
as a tour guide in Coldfoot, he moved back in with our friend in Denver. His job search hadn’t worked out the last time he was in Denver, but he still held out hope that he’d find a long-term job there. While the seasonal work afforded him some freedom—to move around, to meet new people, and to work for different employers—the transient life was also extremely inconvenient because the gaps in employment had made it difficult for Josh to pay off his debt at a reasonable pace.

Denver, when he arrived, proved as inauspicious as ever. After several more rejected job applications, he enrolled in bartending school. It was a decision he made not only because he’d lost hope of finding a job relevant to his education, but also because he’d always harbored fantasies of one day becoming some cool and charming Sam Malone–type bartender, telling lewd jokes to a trio of portly regulars, swiping a towel across a polished bar, and flashing a boyish smile at one of the
waitresses. But like almost all of his ideas to date, this one bombed, too.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
October 12, 2007

Subject:
fuck Denver

Where to begin… I guess I should start by saying I’ve applied to approximately 15 bartending jobs, but I couldnt even sell myself for a position a high schooler could nab. I had a 3.83 gpa, a degree with a double major, numerous academic awards, have completely open availability, good references etc., etc., etc., and I can’t get a job that pays under minimum wage. Holy god is this frustrating… all the education I have received at this point (college, graduate and bartending) and all the hard work and effort I’ve put into all three, and within a week I’m going to have to resort to being a waiter—a job someone that never went to school could get? Plus, I have $66,000 in debt.

Running out of options, Josh applied to be a waiter at a Red Lobster and as a clerk at a fitness center. But they didn’t want him, either.

Finally—finally!—a friend of a friend helped him get a job at a for-profit online school called Westwood College (which also has seventeen trade schools nationwide). It paid $16 an hour and it offered the standard benefits like medical, dental, 401(k), and sick days. Josh’s worries—at least for now—were over. It was an occasion for relief, no doubt, but his initial reaction was ambivalence. “Of course I hope I enjoy it,” he wrote, “but I also fear that if I do, I will fall into the ranks of men who compromise their dreams for comfort and security.”

Josh had officially entered Career World.