Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (21 page)

In the Brooks—in each distant copse of trees, in each faraway pond, on each unscalable peak that we’ll never see or smell or climb atop of—is someone’s dream, for we are enchanted most by the places we can never go. While the Brooks may never provide us with resources for energy or grounds for settlement, so long as they remain wild, they’ll forever serve humanity as a factory of dreams.

I was glaring out the window of a three-seated Cessna 185, flying above the Gates of the Arctic National Park. Kurt, the pilot, tilted the yoke and tightly circled a pair of lounging gray wolves that would have been running for their lives before this was a national park.

Kurt dropped the plane just feet above the rocky gravel bar next to the North Fork of the Koyukuk. At the last second—just before it seemed we were going to miss the bar and belly flop into the icy, clear river—he flicked up his wings, increased speed, and tilted the plane up into the air to seek a better landing site. My stomach’s contents tumbled like clothes in a dryer. I squirmed to retrieve the plastic bag from my back pocket, nervously chanting, “Happy, happy, happy,” wishful for ground under my feet and an outhouse I could high-step to. This was how I got to my job every week.

I was one of five backcountry rangers at the Gates of the Arctic National Park, the northernmost and, at 8.5 million acres,
second-largest national park in the country, as well as, arguably, the wildest left in the park system. About the size of Maryland, the “Gates” is situated on the same latitude as Coldfoot, just above the Arctic Circle. (Add in the abutting Kobuk Valley National Park and Noatak National Preserve, and the acreage of the contiguous parkland is slightly larger than West Virginia.) Because there are no roads, trails, or facilities within the park, we had to be flown in on bush and float planes.

Before the season started, we had two weeks of training: bear encounter training, bear spray training, shotgun training, canoe maneuvers training, and dunker training—the last of which required that we escape from a simulated cockpit overturned in a swimming pool.

Our job duties were simple. We’d go on eight-day wilderness patrols with a fellow ranger, either by foot or canoe. Basically, we were to follow a route determined by our supervisor, talk to visitors about leave-no-trace ethics and educate them about bear safety, including ensuring they stored their food in bear-proof “bear barrels” (though it would be rare to come across more than one group on a given patrol), and clean up any trash or “human impact” that we might find. It was our job to be the eyes and ears for the law enforcement rangers whom we’d call on a satellite phone if we ever happened upon poachers or people fishing illegally.

To some, backcountry ranger may sound like a dream profession (and in most cases it was), but it bears mentioning that we did have to work in conditions that other Americans would deem inhumane at worst and masochistic at best. When shouldering a sixty-pound pack, being acupunctured by the needles of a thousand mosquitoes, stumbling over never-ending fields of tussocks, and always worrying about the possibility of getting run over by a moose or mauled by a bear, you sometimes think that such conditions might get you sympathy from Sherpas, pyramid slave laborers, and third-world textile workers. But, for the most part, it was a job we were all grateful to have.

We were all male, in our mid-twenties (except for one middle-aged ranger),
and paying off our student debts. Each of us had his own method: While I was determined to get rid of mine quickly, Adam, twenty-eight, decided to make the lowest payment possible and stretch his debt out over decades so he was encumbered with only a small monthly payment, allowing him to be, as he put it, “pre-tired.” Dick, twenty-three, had just graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks with $70,000 in debt and decided that he’d take out another loan to buy a plane so he could land a better-paying job with the Park Service. Tomas, the volunteer, was still accumulating debt.

At the beginning of the season, we rangers excitedly talked about the places we might get to see on patrol. Perhaps the ostentatious Mount Doonerak, a 7,457-foot spire thrusting itself up and over the nearby hills like a solitary hand raised in a classroom. Or the Arrigetch Peaks, a ring of jagged, thorny, pointy, sheer-walled granite cliffs, whose bony fingers and vampire nails reach upward, clawing the sky. The Valley of the Precipices. Oolah Pass. Rivers and lakes pronounced with a click of the tongue and hushed respect: Itkillik. Takahula. Itikmalak. Tinayguk. Alatna. Noatak. Agiak. Unakserak. Kurupa. Nigu.

After I got dropped off on the edge of the North Fork of the Koyukuk River for my first patrol, my first thought was:
This is too good to be true.
My second:
Why did they hire
me? I didn’t want to already question the integrity of my new employer, but I mean, hell, just three years before I did sorta get lost in this very park.

I looked at the river. The Koyukuk writhed down the valley, gushing between two of the Gates’s grandest peaks: Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain—the very “gates” to the arctic that explorer Bob Marshall named in the 1930s. My ranger-friend Ted and I were to float down the Koyukuk and explore the surrounding country as we pleased. We overturned our inflatable canoe on the riverbank, tied it up to some heavy logs, and set up camp next to the river. We filled our water bottles with river water and set out to climb a mountain from which we’d hoped
to spot a poacher or a group of hikers or something that would make us feel purposeful. But all we’d see was a never-ending chain of mountains of a Jurassic landscape that bore a beauty that repulsed as much as it allured. The distance from the security of civilization evoked in us a sense of urgency for the comforts and safety of home, yet the terrifying grandeur of an endless wilderness invited us to embrace the wild and unruly sensations of the uncertain now.

While on the mountain, a freak gale swept down the valley that caused us to teeter on the ridge and—unbeknownst to me—my tent, below, to fly off the ground and into the air like a beach ball. Hours later, when Ted and I descended the mountain and got back to our camp, I frantically scanned the terrain for my missing tent. I hardly even thought about the very scary possibility of being helpless and without shelter in the middle of the wilderness. All I could think about was that I’d forever be remembered as the “guy who lost his tent on his first patrol” and having my lost item report greeted with raucous laughter when it was shown on slideshow presentations at staff Christmas parties. I walked down the riverbank hopelessly.
Please, please, please, let me find my tent!
And there it was, half-submerged in an eddy downriver. Thankfully, it hadn’t gone any farther because my copy of Ayn Rand’s corpulent opus
The Fountainhead
got soaked, sinking the tent to the bottom of the river floor as if it were a treasure chest in the hull of a mighty ship. (Perhaps the only good the book has ever done.)

That night, I stepped out of the soggy tent to use the bathroom. I was squatting in between two spindly rough-barked spruce trees. That evening, everything—the trees, the mountains, the air—was coated in an august gold. The hue of the atmosphere portended a vicious storm that would strike in a matter of minutes, but for that moment it was nothing but serene beauty; it was as if the sun had exploded into a trillion radiant particles. A large bull caribou loped out of the bush and trotted past me, unaware of my presence. There was a moment
like this on every patrol, when I, overwhelmed, could only shake my head and think:
What an incredible world.

On subsequent patrols I’d saunter around the narrow-as-a-rifle-barrel Walker Lake, whose only island was populated by an abandoned caribou calf and a frenzy of swallows that were building mud nests under the roof of a deserted cabin. I’d float through the narrow red canyons of the deliciously clear Kobuk River, populated with grazing grayling and prowling sheefish. I hiked seven days north of the tree line from the Inuit village of Anaktuvuk Pass to the Dalton Highway through a corridor of treeless, pyramid-shaped mountains.

Every day there was a new animal sighting: inquiring beavers, waddling porcupines, stoic wolves, a tribe of Dall sheep that looked like specks of snow on green mountain peaks, a sow and two grizzly cubs sprinting away upon catching our scent, intrepid harlequin ducks, monstrous trumpeter swans, ghostly snowy owls.

After my fifth patrol, I’d begun to figure out how to travel in the arctic. I’d made enough mistakes to be leery of again falling victim to the vices of hubris and machismo. I knew that if I wanted to make it out of the arctic alive, then I’d have to remain smart and humble and flexible, always open to learn new lessons that the land could teach me. I could now “read” the mountains better, so I knew where I could find the hardest ground and the most tussock-free path. When I crossed rivers, I knew to face into the water’s surge. I stored food in bear barrels downwind so bears wouldn’t be led into camp, and I became familiar with the tracks of all the large mammals, as well as many species of birds and varieties of plants.

Not only was I becoming intimately acquainted with the Brooks, but I was getting paid to do it. And my god was I getting paid. I’d never seen so much money. I was getting paid $16 an hour, plus a 25 percent cost-of-living adjustment (which we received because we lived in a remote, expensive area), boosting
my pay to $20 an hour. This was an unbelievable amount of money. It was an
absurd
amount of money. Part of me wanted to give half of it back. Before this, I’d never gotten paid more than $9 an hour.

I had more debts to pay, though. I’d borrowed $5,000 from my mother so I could buy a flight up to Alaska and a summer’s worth of food, which had to be bought in Fairbanks and driven up to Coldfoot. I also had to get a car so I could travel between my new home (situated five miles north of Coldfoot) to the ranger station in town. I spent about $600 for the flight, $600 on food, and $3,000 for a 1999 Dodge Stratus. Working at the Gates was a large financial investment, but I knew it would be worth it by summer’s end.

I’d still be making my standard $114 monthly payments on my government student loan, but my main priority was to pay my mother back, if just to simplify things for my psychological well-being. (Better to have one debt than two. Simplify, simplify, simplify.) So every two weeks I sent my checks home, always keeping close tabs on my online bank account to be sure my money was going where it was supposed to go.

By the end of June, I’d paid my mother back. The car, the food, and the flight were mine, paid by me. And then I put my full effort into what was left of my undergraduate debt. Every two weeks, I’d missile another check at it, gleefully watching the debt disintegrate.

$11,000. $9,500. $8,000. $6,500. $5,000. $3,500…

Josh, meanwhile, who was still more than $50,000 in debt, continued to do “admissions advising” for Westwood College. On a normal day, he’d make 150 calls to prospective students who had made the grave mistake of typing their phone number into some online questionnaire, hoping to receive information about college options. Within days, that phone number would be sent out to a handful of for-profit colleges whose admissions representatives—like Josh—would call every day for the next couple of weeks.

On his commute to work, Josh would often be brought to a halt by the rush hour traffic. He’d glance at the Rocky Mountains to the west, remembering how he’d just been in the Brooks Range climbing mountains and living some semblance of a free life a year before. Once inside his building, he sat on a swiveled chair in a cubicle, wearing a headset in front of a computer, which was faced toward the aisle so his superiors could make sure he was working.

Westwood reps were taught about a variety of the school’s programs, the career center, and the supposed value of the education, but a few crucial details were left out. The reps, for instance, knew little about the graduation rate or about how many graduates were getting jobs in their academic fields. The reps were, however, given a thorough education in sales. They were trained in the “the seven-step sales process,” the “cookie close,” the “sandwich technique,” and the “takeaway”: emotional mind games, as Josh described them, that he was supposed to use on the students he’d talk to. It was his job to get as many kids to sign up as possible.

The most successful admissions reps would get huge bonuses, paid time off, and even trips to Cancun. It began to dawn on Josh that something wasn’t quite right with the place when, at an office party, a Best Liar award was given by an assistant director to a rep who was notorious for using the most ruthless methods to persuade kids to enroll. The office smiled and laughed and clapped for the winner.

He tried to do his job as ethically as possible, but because he wasn’t signing up enough students, he’d been put on probation, kicked off his sales team, and warned that he might lose his job. Because of his debt obligations, he had to begin to think about himself. Now, when he pitched the school to students, he avoided telling certain details. He began pushing the right emotional “pressure points.” His supervisor, impressed, told Josh that he was beginning to meet his potential.

Josh could have given Westwood a black eye if he went public with what he knew, but he felt powerless. He needed the job.
He couldn’t go back to being unemployed. This was, after all, the first time he was paying off his debt at a reasonable pace. Josh thought about quitting and issuing some sort of Jerry Maguire–like mission statement to all his coworkers to redeem his soul and undermine Westwood, but the debt was getting the best of him.

I could see that Josh was “becoming” his job. The job was making him into a tool, a machine, a piece of equipment. He convinced young kids to go to school so that they could be tools and equipment and machines, too. He was a debtor, in the business of putting other students into debt. The job spread over him, like a suburb over wild land.

My job was seasonal. It started in May and ended in October. I spent half of my season in the backcountry and the other half in Coldfoot at the ranger station, where I worked behind the counter greeting visitors, performing backcountry orientations to would-be hikers, and occasionally giving a slideshow presentation on “Literature of the Arctic.”