Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (23 page)

Still, though, now that I was out of debt, I couldn’t stop dreaming about what I could finally do. This sense of hope and anticipation that I felt made living a delight.
This was freedom,
I thought. Freedom didn’t have to be about tramping around or having adventures; freedom was simply being able to entertain the prospect of changing your circumstances.

Several more checks came in from the Park Service and UPS. I now had $3,500 in the bank. It was mine. All mine. It was the first time I had had a true surplus of money since I was a thirteen-year-old paperboy.

And now that I was finally debt-free, more than anything in the world I wanted to go to grad school. Yet, having just paid off my debt, the very last thing I wanted was to go back into debt
again. And while it seemed like it might make sense to just keep working and saving so I could afford to pay for my education someday, I knew I couldn’t do that; if I’d learned anything these past couple of years, it was that a postponed dream was just a dream. If I didn’t do it now, I might never.

Yet I wondered if it was possible to pay for a graduate education without taking out loans. Was my original $32,000 student debt inevitable, or could I have avoided it if I’d known then what I knew now?

I saw how much Josh had to pay for the house we were living in: the plumbing, the electricity, the mortgage, the gym membership, the dog food, the NFL Game Rewind subscription. He had to pay for it with his time and his freedom.

Might there be a better way?

In
Walden,
I remembered how Thoreau said something about a six-by-three-foot box by a railroad. At night, laborers would lock their tools in it. A man could live comfortably in one of these boxes, Thoreau declared. Nor would he have to borrow money and surrender freedom to afford a “larger and more luxurious box.”

(“I am far from jesting,” he clarified.)

If I wanted to go to school without incurring debt and losing freedom, I had to think outside the box, too—or, as Thoreau might suggest, inside one.

I wondered:
What if I built and lived in a box of my own?
Perhaps I could slap together a small shack in the woods somewhere close to campus. But then I remembered that I had no carpentry skills whatsoever, and that my ungainly hammer swing in the past had provoked friends to ridicule me with a flagrance that my other deficiencies had failed to arouse.

Okay, no shack.

What about a tent? I could take my one-person tent out into the woods, or, better yet, I could buy a big five-person tent that would give me plenty of space. I fantasized about being a student by day and wild man of the woods by night. I’d let my shoulder hairs grow out, whittle spears, and hunt squirrels
barefoot. During full moons, I’d unleash forlorn howls, always draped in a cloak of patched-together rabbit furs. But then I thought:
What if someone raided my tent when I was in class?

Okay, no tent.

What if I just lurked in libraries, stairwells, and the student union? I’d hide my stuff above ceiling tiles and embrace the role of some wall-dwelling, pale-faced specter, affrighting students in libraries with spine-chilling cackles that I’d transmit through my intimately-known labyrinth of air vents.

But it was more than clear to me that none of these ideas would have worked. I needed something that was safe. Something that would provide security. Something cheap. Some form of housing that wouldn’t make campus security suspect me. Something that…

I’ve got it!

James’s Chevy Suburban. No, wait, I could do better than that. A van! I’d buy a van. I’d find some cheap piece of junk, buy a parking permit, and convert it into a mini dorm room. I’d take showers at the gym, get electricity in the library, and cook meals on my camping stove. And to ensure I wouldn’t be caught and thrown off campus, I wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be my secret.

Now, I just needed to find my piece of junk.

I opened Josh’s mailbox to see two letters. One was from Wesleyan and the other from Wake Forest. Just as happy events can sometimes make one cry, and traumatic events can make one laugh, I opened the envelopes and looked aghast at the messages. They didn’t start off with an “Unfortunately.” They didn’t say, “We regret to inform you.” My god, someone—
two
someones—had actually accepted me.

I was also preparing for a phone interview with Duke, during which the program director and one of the department’s founders would ask me about myself and my intellectual interests. I spent two days writing out every conceivable question they could ask and then typed out my responses. I read the responses
aloud into a recorder and listened to the recording so I could emphasize the proper words during the actual conversation.

The day of the interview, I drank a cup of coffee, leafed through my papers, and took the call. During the conversation with my two interviewers, I came across as something other than a bumbling idiot. “We’ll let you know,” they said.

A week later, the letter from Duke came. I took it down to the basement and sat on the couch, imagining what terrible revelations of woe were sealed inside. I opened it up and sighed.

It read:

Your application for admission to the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program has been carefully reviewed by the Liberal Studies Admissions Committee and by the Graduate School. I am happy to inform you that you are granted admission to the Graduate School for the 2009 Spring Term.

I leaped in the air and ran over to tackle Lois. I’m going to Duke! I’m going back to school!

Change was in the air. Bush was gone and Obama was in office. Fall was chilling into winter, and I was moving to North Carolina.

In late December, Josh drove me to the airport. We hadn’t e-mailed each other in months. And now that we communicated face-to-face, it had been a while since we’d had a real conversation. But I wasn’t sure if we’d resume our correspondence. We were heading in such different directions. I’d never felt more idealistic, while Josh had resigned himself to his circumstances. I hugged him and wished him luck on the debt. He handed me a package and said, “This might come in handy.”

It was a power inverter that could be plugged into a vehicle’s cigarette lighter if I wanted to create electricity in the van.

When I told other people about my plan, some rolled their eyes and others told me I’d get caught. I couldn’t even tell my
parents for fear of what they might think. But Josh was always supportive of everything I ever did.

Despite the shirt and tie, the loafers, the gelled hair, the boring car, the boring home, the boring life—underneath this landfill of professionalism—I could still see something wild and pure in Josh. There was still some beast in there that would eventually bend the bars that held him inside. I wished I could have taken him with me.

As I got on the plane, I felt poor but free. I had a little over $3,500 in the bank, a backpack of camping gear, and some theories that I needed to test out.

I made it my goal to do whatever it would take to graduate from Duke debt-free.

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

or
My Attempt to Afford Grad School by Moving into a Creepy Red Van

— Day One of Vandwelling Experiment —

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

January 2009—Duke University

SAVINGS: $3,517

I
FLEW FROM DENVER TO
Wheatfield to spend a couple of days with my family during the holidays. My mother, beside herself that her son got into a good school, called up her friends and proudly boasted to neighbors. She bought me a $350 laptop and refused my offers to pay her back. She also was kind enough to provide me with a full inventory of all of Greater Durham’s student housing options. I was gracious, but I told her—looking her straight in the eye—that I was “going to buy a van and live in it.” That was the sort of news that normally would have evoked a terrified “Oh please, Jesus, no” response from my mother—the sort of response that I surely would have gotten if I’d have, say, started off a sentence with “Me and my new boyfriend, Ron…” But my mother, who’d been so traumatized by my outlandish plans in the past, appeared to have had recently created some temporarily effective, though faulty, defense mechanism that afforded her a few moments to bask in
a serene state of denial before finally accepting the truth later on. Without blinking, she proceeded to tell me about condo and apartment options.

Meanwhile, I scoured Craigslist ads for used vans in the Raleigh-Durham area. I was amazed with not only how many vans were for sale, but also how reasonably priced they all were.

I figured people were trying to sell their excess vehicles because just a few months before, in September 2008, several megabanks collapsed, causing a historic financial meltdown. As a result, there were massive layoffs, home foreclosures, and an unprecedented number of bankruptcies.

America was in a state of panic, and while I worried that my parents might get laid off, I couldn’t have cared less about this “Great Recession.” I was out of debt, I didn’t have any valuable possessions that could be repossessed, and I couldn’t go bankrupt because I pretty much already was. I had no assets, no health insurance, nothing. As the rest of the country ran around flailing their arms and screaming in their underwear, I watched half sympathetic, half amused. When you’ve got nothing, I guess you’ve got nothing to lose.

Among my options were a red 1989 Chevrolet G20 NASCAR-edition Sportvan for $1,400, a 1994 Chevrolet Astro work van for $750, and a 1997 Dodge Conversion van for $1,700, which was—the ad promised—“an unbeatable road trip machine” that, unfortunately, “needs some repairs.”

My needs were few. I wanted a van that was big, under $2,000, in reasonably decent condition, and had never been smoked in (because of all the things I was bound to smell of, I didn’t want cigarette smoke to be one of them). And then I found a 1994 Ford E-150 Econoline, a low-top conversion van, listed for $1,500. The ad read:

1994 Ford Van, Runs and Drives Great. Color is Burg. over Black. It has Reclining rear seat T.V and VCR. It has a AM/FM/CD Changer. The van has appx 119k miles. Everything works. It has
the 5.0 V8, so the gas milage is pretty good for a van. Call with any questions. The price is firm!

Firm.
I liked the sound of that. This guy sounded like a straight shooter who didn’t mess around with haggling and all that funny business. I e-mailed him, asked if anyone had smoked in the van, and when he responded that no one had, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d be behind the wheel of my new home.

I knew I needed a temporary “base” in Durham to shop for a van and get situated, so I put up an ad on Craigslist seeking some kind soul to lend me his or her couch for a couple of nights.

My first response was from a local named Kenneth. “hello,” said Kenneth. “iam 10 min from your school you sleep on my couch i only have a couch sleep on or sleep in my water bed with me and my wife lol.”

I didn’t know whether to be more disturbed by the grammatical sacrilege of the English language or the invitation to what could have been an Appalachian-style ménage à trois. I declined the offer after I got another response from Marietta, a Jamaican home health care provider. She picked me up from the airport, and on the drive to her place, I told her about Kenneth’s response. She laughed heartily, the laugh starting in her belly and exploding out of her mouth. She said I could stay at her place until I found “proper housing.” For whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my actual plans. I let her believe that I was in the market for an apartment near campus, hiding the whole van experiment thing, half because I was embarrassed and half because I thought she might think I was insane. Nor did I want Marietta channeling the spirit of my mother, saying (except with a Jamaican accent), “No, mister. You’re going to get yourself an apartment.”

The day after I arrived in Durham, I took a bus from Marietta’s home to a used car dealership called John’s Motors south
of Raleigh, where the Econoline was for sale. Once at John’s, I looked over the lot, scanning the rows of sedans, trucks, and SUVs in search of the Ford Econoline I’d found advertised on Craigslist.

And there it was. A gleaming giant coated with a burgundy sheen, the sun turning its black-tinted windows a blinding white. It looked out of place among the shiny, spotless SUVs, whose bumpers were proudly faced away, as if exhibiting a juvenile disdain for their ponderous, premillennial elder. It was bigger than I thought it would be: a man among boys, a van among toys, a venerable circus elephant whose distended underbelly hung vulnerably low—so low that I wondered if it would scrape its undercarriage when climbing up and over speed bumps.

I approached it with slow, cautious steps, extended my hand, and pressed my palm against its hood as if to feel for a pulse, feeling instead something akin to the voltage exchanged between lovers upon first brushing shoulders. I circled it, lovingly rolled fingertips over dents and chipped paint, took a step back, and admired its burgundy to black “fade”—a color scheme that had fallen out of fashion long ago but was more popular (though still considered tasteless and vulgar) in previous decades.

The Econoline, upon first view, was everything I hoped it would be. It was big, it was beautiful, and best of all, it was $1,500. I was mesmerized.

John was your typical used car salesman. He was a large Italian man who wore dark pants and a black silk dress shirt with gold jewelry cinched around his meaty fingers and wrists. His deceit was poorly hidden behind a thin coating of charm. I knew what I was getting into when he brandished his folksy grin and placed his paw on my shoulder as we shook hands.

I was actually buying the van from a guy named Dennis, who put the ad up, but for whatever reason Dennis wanted me to pick it up at John’s used lot. Making things even weirder was their insistence that I pay in cash.

“Looks like ya got a good deal here, buddy,” John said, patting
the dash on our test drive. “I fixed it up real nice for ya. I even put on a new pair of wipers.”