Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (19 page)

On our second night with them, Paula confided that she hadn’t spoken with her son, who was my age, in years. Upon dropping us off at Jockey’s Ridge on the Outer Banks the following day, Paula struggled to hide her tears. Sami and I said good-bye and walked along the Outer Banks, ambled through the Wright Brothers National Memorial, rolled down the sand dunes at Jockey’s Ridge—our packs always a safe distance away—and strolled along an endless line of beachfront homes until dusk when we set up our tent behind a dune.

As Sami slept, I listened to the waves curl and crash into the beach. I thought of the last six months in Mississippi and my last week hitching rides with the burned out, beat up, fed up,
but always kind and generous sector of society I’d never gotten to know until now. It was strange, I thought, how it was always the poor who picked us up. Our drivers weren’t the type who had happy families and middle-class upbringings like Sami and I had. The shiny SUVs or giant, bus-sized RVs would ride on past, but the worse the rattletrap, the more likely it was to pull over for us. Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. They lived lives with two feet planted in reality. Perhaps they didn’t hesitate to pick us up because they knew what it was like to be cold and hungry and away from home. They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were—in the ways that mattered most—far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.

While I’d been intrigued with the idea of voluntary poverty and was living some semblance of the tramp life, I could see that there was nothing glamorous about the sort of poverty they lived in. There was so much squalor, so much destitution, so much pain. I saw it in Gulfport, in the crew members, in the drivers.

I couldn’t wait to get away from the likes of Terry and Rusty and Harry. I couldn’t wait to get away from their terrible stories of drugs and divorce, alcohol and addictions. It seemed like everyone we rode with had some tragic past. I thought:
Is this the real America? Have I just been quarantined in my happy little college and suburban bubble my whole life? And is this my real generation: poorly educated, overmedicated, abused, addicted, indebted?

Yet amid the garbage of Katrina, and when walking through the ruins of the many people I’d met, I saw that flowers still bloomed, lives still went on, the earth rehabilitated, and people reformed. I began to believe that in America, if you give something the right soil, the right nurturing, and, most of all, the room to grow, revival, transformation, revolution—anything is possible.

The following day was the first of April—the eighth day of our journey. We were headed to Winston-Salem to see Wake Forest, a college that had a liberal studies program I’d read about and thought I might someday apply to.

Sami had become uncharacteristically quiet. I kissed and hugged and joked with her as we waited for rides, trying to snap her out of her sullenness as much for me as for her. It was unsettling to see her so taciturn. Every time I’d ask, “What’s wrong?” she’d look off pensively and remark, “Oh, nothing…”

We were on Highway 64 holding a sign that read
RALEIGH
. We got a ride. Then another and another. But we were still far from Wake Forest, so we spent the last moments of daylight setting up camp under a thorny, pink-flowered tree in the woods by a farm that we had snuck onto.

On our backpacking stove, we made one of our standard nightly feasts: macaroni and cheese with ramen noodles. Normally our spirits would be lifted after finding a safe camping spot and eating a warm meal, but Sami was unmoved. We squirmed into our one-person tent, and I lovingly draped an arm around her belly, nestling my nose in the soft curls by her ear.

She took a deep breath and asked plaintively, “So do you want to hear what’s been upsetting me?”

There was something mysterious in her voice. Uninterpretable. For the first time, I felt I had no control at all in the relationship. What she was about to say would rattle me to my core.

She began slowly and whispered into my ear: “I haven’t been to a doctor but… I know. I’m pregnant.”

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

Spring 2008—Niagara Falls, New York

DEBT: $11,000

T
HOUGHTS OF FATHERING A CHILD
had yet to enter my head. It was just unthinkable. It was one of those things that I knew would never happen to me, like dying, growing skin tags, or wearing a diaper again.

So, on the eighth night of our hitchhiking adventure, when Sami told me she was pregnant, I was shocked. Not “static on the doorknob” shocked, but “dark angels are swooping down from the sky and the world is coming to an end” shocked. I had so many dreams: dreams to go back to school, dreams to travel the world, dreams to become a mountain recluse. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or be, but I was sure I didn’t want to be a father. Not yet at least.

Things had been going so well. Because of my frugal, buy-nothing, save-everything lifestyle, I was—despite the low wages—paying off the debt faster than I ever would have imagined. I’d found some balance between work and adventure. Every day I was learning something new about myself and my country, about frugality, poverty, and wealth. And I knew that if I got
the right job, by summer’s end I might finally be free and out of debt. Really free this time.

But just like that, with Sami’s admission, all my dreams were crushed under the heavy belly of pregnancy. I was going to be a father.

In just a few years, I’d be walking around a two-story suburban house wearing saggy, faded briefs. I’d have to work long hours to pay for Xbox video games and Spider-Man Halloween costumes so my progeny wouldn’t be ostracized at school. I’d spend my Saturday afternoons—exhausted from my week’s toil—in a comatose state, slouched in front of the tube, balancing a can of Michelob on my gut, oblivious to the diapered litter of squealing Ken Juniors bouncing all around me.

Perhaps I had a slightly skewed vision of family life, and I suppose, deep down, I kind of wanted some of the trappings of the American dream: a wife, kids, a home, a car, a basketball hoop in the driveway. But not now. Not when I was so close to paying off my debt.

So when Sami told me she was pregnant, I’d never been so startled, so devastated in my life. It was as if she had told me that someone close to me had died or that I had a terminal disease. My breathing became loud and deep and heavy. I lost control of my exhalations. I started to feel dizzy. The walls of my tent blurred. I thought I was going to pass out.

Sami, concerned, put her hand on my chest and said, “Kenny… Kenny… Calm down. Calm down. It’s just a joke. It’s April Fools’ Day.”

April Fools’ Day? Is this her idea of a joke?

I couldn’t talk or move. She apologized over and over again above my dead, lifeless body, until she broke out into tears. It was the first time I wondered:
What am I doing with this girl?

Deep down, I knew our relationship was unsustainable. As well as being kind and sweet and loving and free and wise beyond her years in her own weird way, Sami was also part crazy, part oblivious, part absentminded. She would say and do
this sort of stuff all the time, sending me into states of anger and jealousy and frustration.

Because she’d spent so much of her youth on prescription drugs and in hospitals, she’d missed out on a lot of the social lessons we normally get from places like school and at home. This was a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that she got through her teens without being homogenized by sprawling social institutions—as places like high school are wont to do—but a curse in that she missed out on the many lessons that would have helped her navigate through the treacherous norms and customs and rules of society. She’d just woken up from a long and disturbing sleep to a bright and cheery, though uncertain and unknown, world. She was an alien dropped off on planet Earth with no real notions of modern norms and etiquette and convention.

She was still recovering from bulimia, suicide attempts, and the trauma of depression. Whenever she got a stomachache, she needed to be spoken to in soothing tones so she didn’t have a panic attack and have to be taken to a hospital. She accepted her problems as if they were hardships she’d have to carry for the rest of her life, oblivious to the fact that self-reformation could be achieved through the process of becoming self-aware. Suddenly, I’d found myself in a situation where I was no longer focused on my development but on someone else’s. I took it upon myself to get her up to New York alive, but also to help equip her with the tools so she could begin to self-repair.

For better or worse, she daily reminded me of my lust and love and jealousy and bliss and anger. She reminded me that I wasn’t simply a goal-obsessed, debt-crazed workaholic, but that I was warm-blooded and alive. And I loved her with an agonizing fierceness because of it. I was as drawn to her as I was repulsed. Sami, to me, was a wounded bird. And while I partly resented the new responsibility of caring for her, I couldn’t help but embrace the sensations of actually having a meaningful role to play in someone else’s life. I knew that despite our glaring
incompatibility, we couldn’t part ways until she was ready for flight.

The next day, I did my best to forget about her joke, and we continued on to New York. We thumbed our way through Virginia, D.C., and Baltimore. We took a train from New York City to New Haven, Connecticut. We ate cider donuts in Vermont, rode a ferry across Lake Champlain, snuck into the hockey rink in Lake Placid where the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviets, and watched an Amishman plow his field behind a team of horses in central New York. After twenty-five days of exploring the East Coast, we made it home.

When I was just a couple of hours away from my parents’ house in Niagara Falls, I called them up to confess that I’d been hitchhiking and that I was bringing my girlfriend home with me: a pairing of news that would put my poor mother in a state of shock similar to what I’d just felt.

“WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GROW UP AND START ACTING LIKE A HUMAN BEING?!” my mother screeched, causing me to pull my head away from the phone like a pitcher dodging a line drive.

By now, the poor woman had had it with me going to Alaska and ghettos, on hitchhikes and voyages. She wanted an ordinary life for her son, for her benefit and mine.

Every once in a while over the past couple of years, when we’d talk on the phone, she’d remind me that the border patrol for the U.S.-Canadian border was still hiring and that I could easily get a job back home if I wanted. My dad, too, would call me up and ask, in a half-serious, half-facetious tone, “So when are you going to get a real job?” Sometime in between “real” and “job,” I’d picture myself as Charlie Chaplin helplessly transported from one end of a factory to the other over a series of conveyor belts and gears. I used to take the question seriously, but after traveling the country and being with Sami, I no longer thought about careers, or starting a family, or buying a home.

And now that I was back home, I was reminded of the consequences of my parents’ relentless toil, which certainly didn’t change my impression of “real jobs” or the “real world.” My dad, a factory worker, had little to no feeling in his left hand, which resulted from carpal tunnel syndrome from handling factory machinery all his life and from a spinal injury he sustained when he got hit by a drunk driver on his commute to work. He wore a winter glove when driving because the car’s vibrations caused him excruciating pain. My mom limped from an ankle injury caused by thirty-five years of standing as a nurse. When she walked up the stairs, she gripped both handrails, gliding her hands along them before picking up her leg and placing it on the next step. I looked on in agony.

My mom would complain about her ankle, and when I’d ask her why she didn’t quit her job or reduce her hours, she’d tell me about all the bills that needed paying and how she couldn’t afford to lose her health insurance.

God, I was so happy to have them as parents. My father showed up at every hockey game I ever played. My mom was constantly nervous and worried and meddlesome, but only because she cared.

I couldn’t take this lifestyle anymore. I was disgusted with the demands of this “real world.”
This isn’t for me,
I thought, looking around me. I couldn’t live the lifestyle they want me to live or work at the sort of job they hoped I’d work at. It wasn’t that I had anything against work. After my time in Mississippi, I knew that I could love work. I loved it even though the pay was poor. And I loved it despite the sore backs, the long hours, and the responsibilities of looking over a crew. It was the first time I did something undeniably good: I helped young people and cleaned up the environment. I learned that when work is meaningful and when the worker provides some useful service or produces some useful product, work is no longer “work” but an enriching component of one’s day. I had no problem with the idea of a sixteen-hour workday; it was just that I couldn’t stomach the idea of someone else deciding everything from my salary
to my time off to whether I had health insurance to when I could retire. I wanted to work. But I wanted to be free, too.

On my second day back home, my mom sat down next to me when I was watching TV in the family room. She’d been upset ever since I got home, and I could tell by her rigid demeanor that she’d planned out the forthcoming conversation, perhaps hoping to address serious issues with subtlety and grace. But now that it was time to have the conversation, the deluge of emotions made her leap straight to the point, blurting out, “Ken, is there something wrong?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

“Do you want to die, Ken? Do you think about killing yourself?”

“What? No! Of course not,” I said, confused. “What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.”

“Then why do you keep doing what you’re doing?! You’re going to get yourself killed, you know.”

“I’m sorry that I hitchhiked again, Mom. And I’m sorry you’re upset. But it’s safer than you think.”