Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (20 page)

“Ken, promise me you’ll never hitchhike again.”

This was less a request than a demand. I leaned back on the sofa, my eyes still on the TV. I wanted to submit and say, “Okay, Mom, I never will,” but I couldn’t. It seemed that for my whole life I’d been feeling guilt for doing—or for wanting to do—what my instincts begged that I do.

How could she think I was suicidal? I’d never been happier. I could say for the first time that I loved my life.

“Mom…,” I said, “I don’t have plans to hitchhike again, but I can’t promise you that I’ll never do it again. I plan on living this way for a while. I’m sorry if you disagree with the way I’m living.”

“Ken, I think you may just be depressed—”

“No, Mom,” I interrupted, “I’m not. If anyone’s unhappy it’s you. I love you and Dad, but I strongly disagree with how you guys live.”

She asked what I meant, but I was flustered, so I could only say, “It’s all about work.”

“That’s true,” she conceded. “But, Ken,” she continued, pausing to dab her eyes, “I think I’m going to have to start distancing myself from you before something happens.”

I remained on the couch after she got up and left. There was no conciliatory hug. No words of comfort. No apologies. I was unsettled knowing that my actions would hurt other people, but I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who’d forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure.

Sami took her flight to Alaska so she could start her job cleaning rooms at Coldfoot Camp. I was momentarily unemployed, wallowing in that ghastly stretch of time in between jobs when savings diminish and your debt silently grows with interest like an undiscovered tumor.

Without anything better to do, I thought I’d explore my hometown.

Wheatfield, New York, is a twenty-eight-square-mile rural-turned-suburban community that’s home to eighteen thousand residents (95 percent of whom are white), situated on a plot of flatland between the boneyard industrial cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo, just a couple of miles from where the environmental disaster of Love Canal took place in the mid-twentieth century.

For the most part, the town has kept off the national radar except for a couple of instances, like in the early 1990s when John Wayne Bobbitt, a graduate of my high school, had his penis cut off and thrown into a field by his abused and tortured wife. There was also a brief flare-up in 2007, when PETA got upset with a local who’d mixed antifreeze into a can of tuna to kill a skunk but ended up killing two of his neighbors’ dogs, and, later, a bit of a hubbub when a zany developer proposed a
$788 million theme park called the “Magical Lands of Oz,” complete with a Munchkinland Waterworks, Uncle Henry’s Barnyard Petting Zoo, and the Labyrinth of the Nome King, which—if it hadn’t been struck down by my townsfolk—would have been built a few blocks from my home. (Thank you, townsfolk.)

When my family moved to Wheatfield in 1989, I remember a mostly rural landscape: vast fields of waving weeds, rows of papery corn, spring-green adolescent forests, and long, straight-as-a-ruler country roads. In the undeveloped lot next to my family’s home was a pond where my brother and I would ice-skate in the winter and catch frogs in the summer. We built forts in the woods behind our house and played hockey in the streets.

Over the past couple of decades, though, the town and our neighborhood have changed considerably. The fields have been smothered with asphalt, and the forests have been yanked out to make way for new subdivisions. Between 1990 and 2000, 1,318 housing units were added, and since 2000, the town’s population has increased by 21 percent (or three thousand people). It is one of the fastest-growing towns in all of New York State.

Yet there’s nothing unusual about Wheatfield. Across the United States, between 1982 and 2001, 34 million acres of forests and farms, wilderness and rangeland (the size of Illinois), have been disfigured into “developed” land. Wheatfield, I guess you could say, is capitalism run amok, a libertarian utopia where the golden gods of the Free Market and Private Property have reigned mostly unchecked for years. My subdivision, once a cozy hamlet surrounded by cornfields, is now just one small cell of an uncontrollable cancer. The place began to have a dark, creepy, uninviting feel—sort of how I imagined Disney World after-hours: it might be fun for a weekend, but anything more would be like being stuck in a nightmare you can’t wake up out of.

Most of the houses had been constructed within the last twenty years. They looked fresh and trim and sturdy, placed squarely on simple, smoothly-shaven monocultural lawns.
Almost all the subdivisions I saw were named to evoke some image of pristine natural beauty that existed there before the suburb: Woodstream Landing, Country Meadows, Woodland Estates, Stone Ridge, Wildwing Preserve.

From my home, I could see suburbs in all directions. When I was a boy, at least there were pockets of woods to stoke my imagination. But now all I could see were endless rows of cookie-cutter homes, bland corporate parks, vast retirement complexes, all separated by a grid of loud, fast, angry roads. The suburban landscape, before, had never produced any thoughts in me or incited any ire, but now, having roamed the Brooks Range, the Canadian wilderness, and the Mississippi jungle, I could imagine the terrible genocide of trees and swamps and fields that took place here years before. We got rid of all that? For
this?

Sometimes, we can’t help but assume the nature of the landscape we inhabit. Just as the farm fosters industry; the desert, frugality; the mountains, hardiness; and a rocky coastline, a romantic restlessness; so does the suburb foster boredom, conventionality, and conformity. I was beginning to assume the shape of the land around me. I’d begun to revert back to high school Ken. I was bored and purposeless. I’d literally gone days without having left the house. I wallowed in self-pity, ate five meals a day, watched marathons of
Seinfeld
reruns, and indulged in an endless enjoyment of naps, masturbation, and sleeping in until two in the afternoon. My stomach got so soft and doughy I thought I could twist my fat into balloon animals.

I spent hours playing video games. Not having played a video game in years, I was impressed by how much the graphics had improved. In these Tolkienesque worlds, I could make out the veins in the characters’ muscles; there were elaborate constellations of stars, intricate details of individual plants, and mountains in the distance that weren’t just paper backdrops but geographical features you could explore with your character.

It’s interesting how many games today take place in preindustrialized medieval worlds (
Skyrim, World of Warcraft, The
Legend of Zelda
). It seems these worlds in video games have become our new frontier. These are the places where we go for adventure. They are refuges of virtual wildernesses—protected plots of pixelated land that must exist in fake worlds because we’ve denuded and defanged so much of the wilderness in our real world. No one thinks of wilderness in western New York. Because we have nothing that bears the slightest resemblance to wilderness, we are as unaware of its existence as we are unaware of some undiscovered alien race.

The video games offered mild amusement, as they always had done, but I knew there was something ridiculous about exploring a fake world on the television screen while sitting on a couch in the real one. I needed to get out of my funk. I needed to get out of the house and go to someplace wild. I thought it might do me some good to again view the storied cataracts I’d visited countless times as a boy but never really appreciated.

While Niagara Falls the city may conjure nostalgic images of the idyllic honeymoon capital of the world, today the town is mostly boarded up and deserted—deserted except for a silvery sky-high Native American casino that’s positioned in the middle of town, which delivered a fatal tomahawk chop to the neck of most of the small businesses below.

I looked at the falls and felt nothing. There was an ocean of water hurtling over the cliff, dashing onto the rocks below, creating a cool, hazy vapor that left beads of dew on the tourists’ hair. The scene was impressive, but only in the way a building or a city is impressive. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense that this place had been manhandled. Niagara Falls was damaged goods. In decades previous, the river had been dammed so engineers could alter the rate of erosion. Bolts were put in place to strengthen faults. Retaining walls had been built that removed four hundred feet of the falls. At night, floodlights shone on the falls to turn it different colors, as if the terrifying force of 6 million cubic feet of water per minute needed augmentation to earn people’s appreciation. It was surrounded by wax museums and chocolate shops and the towering casino, not to
mention the curling tendrils of civilization: guard rails, phone lines, street cables—a tangle of technological intrusions that disallowed its spectators from feeling the sublime, the holy, the transcendental.

I watched how the water—a mass of individual droplets, each once wild and unruly and free—was being contained and controlled, channeled into hydroelectric power, gawked at as a gaudy spectacle. This place had been uglified, commoditized, urbanized, civilized. This place, I decided, was my old self. Here, like Niagara Falls, I’d been deformed and disfigured by forces outside of my control. I’d been bent into a consumer by TV, molded into a conformist by schools, and made into a loan drone by a hundred other things. I’d been paved over, polluted, and planned out. I’d been Love Canal–ed. I’d been civilized.

I never understood why I’d wanted to drive to Alaska so badly years before. But I did now. I realized that I’d needed to see some place that was real, some last corner of the world that hadn’t been buried beneath strata of pavement and people, technology and trash. Of course I thought civilization, with its vaccines and bug sprays and its libraries and theaters, was real and had value, too. But part of me knew I needed to escape it for just a bit, to see someplace wild. And maybe, hopefully, if I lost myself in a place like the Alaskan wild—a place where the land might be what it’s supposed to be—I might begin to see how I’m supposed to be, too.

Now that I’d been there and back, Niagara Falls, this place, this home, no longer felt like home.

When I got a call from the Gates of the Arctic National Park telling me that I got the job, I knew I was really going home.

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

Summer 2008—Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Alaska

DEBT: $11,000

W
ILDERNESS IS A WELLSPRING
of wild dreams. Leave the forest on the edge of your suburb unexplored and the place will expand in your imagination. It will assume a mysterious, enchanted nature, growing into something like a wilderness. Even though that forest may actually be half-diseased and carpeted with an understory of used condoms and crumpled beer cans, for all we know it could be a howlingly wild, green-bearded Germanic forest where tree nymphs gather in glades and mythic beasts live out great stories. Perhaps it’s best to leave those few remnants of nature unexplored. Just as it’s good to have nearby fields to supply us with food and aquifers to catch and clean our water, it’s good to have a place nearby to supply us with dreams. If we set foot inside our only meager forest and walk its perimeter in an hour, we’ll see it for what it really is, and the wild dreams it once created will never be dreamed again.

The Brooks Range, though, can neither be known in a day nor a thousand lifetimes. It is a land of such wildness and breadth that when you’re hiking through it, its absolute unknowability will impress itself on you with a force that can steal the air from your lungs. It is a borderless, boundaryless country, an expanding universe whose farthest reaches are always beyond the grasp of your imagination. When hiking through its river valleys or over its mountain passes, you begin to feel that Earth is not limited by spherical contours, but that this planet is the flat-bottomed bedrock of the universe around which all else revolves. Do not come to the Brooks if you wish to receive an education in the finiteness of space. Come to be staggered by a sense of infinity. The Alaskan arctic is impossible to fully explore, to fully know. There’s always another creek to follow, another promontory to gaze from, another dripping-wet cave to climb into.

It’s a shame that there aren’t more places like the Brooks, like a vast midwestern prairie where bison can roam, or a southeastern forest of pine and maple set aside for a thousand years, so, at the very least, the feelings that a vibrant food chain and an ancient forest can conjure could again be enjoyed by man.

Let the intrepid few have wild places where they might be stunned by the extraordinary, and let the sedentary many have such places, too. Though inaccessible for them and the cumbersome, vehicular shells they carry, the forests, mountains, jungles, and prairies will assume grander forms if we give the romantic hand of imagination a chance to color in the blank spots of the map—as it is wont to do—with deeper caves, larger peaks, and secret mountain lakes. Perhaps we’ll imagine such places inhabited with bears and lions, sea monsters and Sasquatches—all of which may not exist in real life, but they, if given a place to dwell, will visit and enliven our dreams.

The quicker we Google Map the earth, the more we restrict our native planet from evoking feelings of wonder and enchantment and love for it within the hearts of its human inhabitants. Earth should always remain partly unknown, partly undiscovered,
partly unclassified. It will be a tragedy if the Brooks Range comes to be covered in tar and tourists like most any other national park. A vast chain of mountain peaks that can only be traveled by foot radiates a rare beauty, one that is there for everyone to feel even when it cannot be seen.

Many do not know that the songbirds we hear singing from branches on the family aspen in Wisconsin or the street-side oak in California are natives of the north, having been born in the exuberance of an arctic summer. And just as we may forget how the arctic is a birthplace of birdsong, we may fail to appreciate how many of our dreams have been born in the north.