Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (22 page)

When I arrived in Coldfoot after a patrol, I’d get out of uniform, shave off a week’s worth of stubble, and scrub myself clean in the shower. Sami, who worked as a lodge cleaner at Coldfoot Camp, would come over to my house, which I was renting from the Park Service, where there’d be passionate embraces, kisses, sincere I-missed-yous.

I had an adventurous, well-paying job. A loving girlfriend. And my debt was almost paid off. Years before, I would have thought that these would be the very ingredients for a happy, fulfilled life. Perhaps they’d make me want to settle down. Yet I was troubled now that I had them. I was beginning to feel at ease. Too at ease. The walls were closing in around me. I was being crowded in by sensual pleasures and soft comforts: a warm home (when I wasn’t on a patrol), a steamy romance, a stable job, an adequate salary. My supervisor hinted that I had long-term potential and that I should go to law enforcement school to get certification so I could land a permanent job with
the Park Service. Part of me was enticed by the idea of having a noble job and a steady paycheck, and part of me felt lured by the sultry Jacuzzi of drowsy-eyed, vapid material comfort that I’d be able to indulge in. But I knew I couldn’t settle into a career—not yet at least. I knew I couldn’t allow myself to feast from the buffet of domestic pleasures, either. As much as I was a disciplined voyageur, an intrepid hitchhiker, and a stalwart ranger, dwelling in me also was an unmotivated suburbanite, a lazy couch potato, a pitiful, sometimes alcoholic, loser. If I put myself in a comfortable situation, my lesser self would take over, emerging from his dark, refurbished basement cocoon with disheveled hair, wearing a tattered, loose-fitting pair of sweatpants, and announcing that he’d be instituting a new policy of unambition and sloth.

I realized the journey that I was on wasn’t about getting out of debt or finding my perfect job, or girlfriend, or life. It was about becoming the best man I could be. I knew from experience that the only thing keeping me from turning back into the person I’d left behind in New York was voluntary simplicity.

And I knew I needed to undergo another period of rigorous training. As inspired as I was in the Brooks, and as honorable as I thought the ranger profession to be, I was little more than a paid hiker. I thought of a Saint Francis of Assisi quote. He said, “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” If I was a laborer at the Home Depot, I was a craftsman at the Gates. Now, it was time to learn how to be an artist—someone who used more than his hands and head for work.

When I was on patrol, most of the time a fellow ranger and I would paddle our canoe in silence. I had almost the whole day to let my thoughts meander with us down the river, though they always got caught up into two swirling eddies: 1) I never, ever want to go into debt again; and 2) I want to go to grad school. I want to be a part of a university.

At the end of the summer, on my last day at Coldfoot, in the early hours of the morning, I said good-bye to Sami, who was now working as a waitress in the café. She kept delaying my departure by bringing me food and watching me eat it.

“Sami, I have to go,” I said. We both knew I was more than just leaving. This was good-bye.

Tears welled and her face crinkled.

“I don’t want you to go!” she exclaimed, clasping my torso.

I didn’t want to go, either. Oh, how I wanted to stay and nestle my head in betwixt the tender breasts of love and lust, and keep it there, and stop worrying about goals and journeys and self-improvement. But I was headed to Denver, and she, to California, where she’d enrolled in a community college. It was the season for selfishness, or at least that’s how I justified it.

What had our relationship been? It was about to fall to the ground in a rush of dust like a demolished building. It was a young cottonwood about to be charred and splintered by an errant lightning bolt. It was a wild river doomed to be dammed. But I didn’t feel like anything or anybody was being ruined. Our relationship was kind of like our hitchhike adventure. It wasn’t supposed to last forever. It was simply a means of getting from one point to another, of helping us get from our past selves to our future selves. And like the hitchhike, we’d take from it, learn from it, say good-bye to it, be the better for it, and think back on it fondly.

Devastated, and completely unsure about what I was doing, I kissed her forehead and left the café.

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

Fall 2008—Denver, Colorado

DEBT: $3,500

I
HEARD JOSH WALK INTO
the house. After nearly twelve hours of dressing, commuting to work, working, and commuting back home, his workday was finally over. I was downstairs in his basement, busy comparing the cost of one grad school’s liberal studies program to another. Upstairs, I heard the paws of his greyhound, Lois, click along the wood floor to greet him. Josh took slow, halting steps down the basement stairs and dragged his feet to the couch. His dress shirt was only half tucked into his pants and his tie hung around his neck like a noose. He wore black-rimmed glasses, and his hair still stood hard and crusty from his morning dressing of hair gel. He collapsed onto the sofa like a ball into a catcher’s mitt, unleashing a plaintive sigh before flicking on the TV and typing his favorite euchre website into his laptop.

“Hey, man,” I said.

“Hey.”

“How was work?” I asked.

His attention had already been pulled in too many directions. We had once debated great things over e-mail, but now our conversations were rarely any more substantial than this. It was as if Josh had been pulled down the polished halls of industry, strapped to a bed in some padded, soundproof room, and had his spirit exorcized out of him by Corporate America’s Nurse Ratched. He was a dull, tired, sleepy version of the Josh I once knew. I half-wanted to smother him with a pillow to put him out of his misery.

He was once so passionate, so idealistic,
so borderline violent.
(When John Kerry lost to Bush in 2004, I remember Josh driving his fist through his bedroom wall.) Now, the only time he ever showed any emotion was during the inevitable Buffalo Bills loss or when he was engaged in his weekly dispute with his girlfriend about laundry. He grudgingly spent his weekends doing home maintenance projects: painting the fence, putting drywall in place, manicuring the grass, or remodeling the bathroom. He wanted to do nothing more than sit and rest on his weekends, but he was obligated to maintain the house and attend to an endless series of his girlfriend’s friends’ weddings and baby showers. And he just went along with it all. He couldn’t not go along with it. He needed his job. He needed his girlfriend. He needed his girlfriend’s home. He couldn’t simply get up and skip town like I could.

Weeks before, I’d sold my car in Alaska, road-tripped with a fellow ranger down to Denver, and got a part-time gig handling packages for UPS for $13 an hour. I worked during the busy holiday season alongside a black, homophobic driver named Dwayne, who delivered packages in a trendy, largely gay part of Denver.

With the goal of enrolling in grad school, I knew I had to finish off my debt and line my nest with whatever money I could make. So I worked and saved and dreamed.

I tried to reinvigorate Josh with grand ideas. Earlier, he’d told me he thought about going public with what he believed were evils committed at Westwood. But when I reminded him about his idea, he said, “I don’t know about that anymore,” without taking his eyes off the computer. “I really don’t want to burn any bridges.”

I had sympathy for him. Without his job, his debt would spiral out of control. He wouldn’t be able to meet his payments, and the interest would accrue. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Who is this person?
This wasn’t the Josh I’d known—not my friend who laughed while vomiting at the Yukon River Camp, not the hiking partner who climbed mountains with me bare-chested in the Brooks, not my freshman roommate who wanted to join the Peace Corps and save the world.

What had happened? Did the job do it to him? The debt?

It amazed me how thoughtlessly Josh and I had gone into debt. It amazed me how thoughtlessly we had surrendered our autonomy. It wasn’t just us, though. The whole nation was in debt. Going into debt had become as American as the forty-hour workweek, a stampede of Walmart warriors on Black Friday, or the hillocks of cheap plastic under Christmas trees. As a country, we marched from one unpaid-for purchase to the next in a quest for fulfillment that fades long before the bill arrives. I thought about how similar we were to the Spanish explorers who’d dedicate their lives to finding El Dorado—always around the next bend in the river, yet never there at all.

Why do we do it? Why do we go into debt? Why are we willing to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans?

Looking at Josh on the sofa, I thought that maybe he and I actually
wanted
to go into debt. Maybe a part of us wanted to be constrained and repressed. Maybe we wanted to be stuck in school for four years and, after that, stuck in debt for decades. Maybe we wanted these limitations and walls because they made life simple. We wouldn’t have to be bothered by the great existential questions of our day if we had to spend forty-plus
hours a week “gettin’ ’er done.” If we take gravity away from a man, odds are he’ll fear the novelty of flight so much that the first thing he’ll want is his feet back on the ground. If freedom was our fear, debt was our gravity.

As a country, we take out loans and go to school. We take out loans and buy a car. We take out loans and buy a home. It’s not always that we simply “want” these things. Rather, it’s often the case that we use our obligations as confirmations that “we’re doing something.” If we have things to pay for, we need a job. If we have a job, we need a car. If we have such things, we have a life, albeit an ordinary and monotonous life, but a life no less. If we have debt, we have a goal—we have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo. Debt is sought so we have a game to play, a battle to fight, a mythology to live out. It gives us a script to read, rules to abide by, instructions to follow. And when we see someone who doesn’t play by our rules—someone who’s spurned the comforts of hearth and home—we shift in our chairs and call him or her crazy. We feel a fury for the hobo and the hitchhiker, the hippie and gypsy, the vagrant and nomad—not because we have any reason to believe these people will do us any harm, but because they make us feel uncomfortable. They remind us of the inner longings we’ve squelched, the hero or heroine we’ve buried beneath a houseful of junk, the spirit we’ve exorcised out of ourselves so we could remain with our feet on the ground, stable and secure.

It’s especially telling how young people, today, deal with their debts. So many debtors just seem
okay
about it. No one, of course, likes his or her debt, and everyone, of course, wants it gone, but among many debtors there is a curious lack of urgency. They exhibit an almost brazen indifference about owing tens of thousands of dollars, or going into forbearance, or having hundreds of dollars taken from their monthly incomes. Most are fine with going on the twenty-year repayment plan,
as if nothing was at stake. They thought of their debt as some annoying, inevitable bill like car insurance, not the steel bars that kept them confined to lives of everlasting obligation.

Every weekday afternoon, in my brown slacks, I’d jog to a street corner where Dwayne would pick me up in his UPS truck. He’d drive us through Denver’s business district—largely made up of gay clubs, furniture stores, advertising firms, and mechanic shops. He’d park the truck in front of a building, and I’d scurry into the back of the truck to find the appropriate boxes while he entered in the information on my handheld signature device. Then I’d waddle into the building with a careening stack of boxes as Dwayne pulled up to the next business, into which he’d roll a dolly of packages of his own.

When I got home, I’d tidy up the house, take Lois for a run, or finish painting a fence or some such project, before heading down to the basement to commence my research on schools. I made a list of every graduate liberal studies program in the country. While the quality of the program was of course important, I wouldn’t consider enrolling in a program that was out of my price range, which I decided was more than $1,000 a course. I chose to apply to two that fit my criteria: Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Wake Forest in North Carolina. I no longer harbored dreams of attending some Ivy League–caliber school, and I knew from experience that they had no desire to welcome me into their prestigious ranks, but I thought,
What the hell, why not send out one more?
So I applied to the school that had one of the premier graduate liberal studies program in the country, Duke University.

Meanwhile, some late checks arrived from the Park Service, which I put toward what remained of my debt.

$2,000. $500…

And then the day came when I got the check that would finally kill the debt.

$0.

The debt was gone.

Up until the moment I paid it off, I wasn’t sure what I was going to feel. I’d been waiting for this day for two and a half years. This day had been in the back of my mind for almost a decade. And here I was, out of debt. Debt-free.…

I was, uh, free…

I felt slightly apathetic. Perhaps it was because I’d killed the debt so unceremoniously. There was no check I could sign with a triumphant flourish, no repo man I could tell off, no Sallie Mae I could hang up on. There were no fireworks or foaming bottles of champagne—just a pop-up window on my computer saying the debt had been paid off.

I didn’t feel like I’d been “freed.” Maybe it was because I’d already felt freed. Or maybe it was because, in a strange way, I’d actually felt most alive when I felt most constrained. Something happened that day in my car in the UB parking lot a few years back, when I heard that voice and those three words. Perhaps it had finally dawned on me that I was stuck, restrained, and in debt. Sometimes it’s not until you see your shackles that you see your dreams. The soul must first be caged before it can be set free. For all the trouble it had put me through, I had the debt to thank for that.