Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (26 page)

But I wasn’t your ordinary vandweller. Unlike famous vandweller Bob Wells and his vandwelling acolytes, I couldn’t just pack up and skip town whenever I wanted. I, rather, would have to live a moored existence on campus. And I knew that if I was going to get through college debt-free, I’d have to keep the van and my experiment a secret.

While I’d been living in remote and rural places for the previous couple of years, and had been, during that time, completely cut off from college culture, I still knew the student mind well
enough to know that if one of them discovered my secret, a story of a dude living in his van on campus would probably become the sort of mindless gossip that would give students something to procrastinate with for a day or two. Perhaps it would begin when a fellow student—in the wrong place at the wrong time—took a blurred picture of me exiting the van. He’d put it up on Facebook and it would go viral over the Internet, spreading via e-mail and Twitter at terrifying, lightning-quick, real-time speeds. And as soon as campus administration caught wind of it, some frantic pantsuited woman would be sprinting down an office hallway, waving a sheaf of papers over her head, worried that a story of a cash-strapped grad living in his van would become a PR nightmare.

In order to graduate debt-free, I’d have to lie. There was no way around it. This was all very troublesome because the art of lying is an art I know nothing about. If I were in a heist movie, I’d be the guy on the team who—during the opening scene’s first certain-to-fail robbery, buckles under pressure at the last minute, fucking everything up, leading to some doomed car chase where I—to the audience’s relief—am brutally murdered by cops as the team’s only victim, allowing the gang to hire better, more competent men for future jobs.

On my first day at Duke, I went to the parking and transportation services office to buy a parking permit. I walked in with sweaty palms and shifty eyes, worried that the place would be crawling with campus security guards keeping an eye out for students up to no good. When I asked an administrator for a form, beads of sweat gathered on my forehead and, when they reached the appropriate size, streamed down the curves of my face like luges down hill slopes. Part of me wanted—right then and there—to fall to my knees, confess my plans, and beg for mercy.

The whole time, I thought,
Ken, you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.
It was true. I’d never been to Duke, and I hardly knew anything about the school. And I certainly didn’t know anything about whatever parking lot they’d assign me
to. Beforehand, just to make sure, I read over Duke’s parking regulations and was pleased to discover that there were no anti-vehicle-dwelling laws. I presumed that the absence of such a law had nothing to do with their lenient policy of allowing students to save money and experiment with housing. Rather, I figured such a problem simply had never come up. They probably had no reason to have a regulation banning vandwellers.

My biggest worry was the lot they’d assign me to. I learned on their parking website that as a first-year grad student I could be assigned to any number of lots. And I had absolutely no say about which one I’d get. As far as I knew, I could be sent to a busy, packed lot within eyeshot of an office window where men and women in business attire—if they learned of me—would make smart remarks about my sanity, love life, and living conditions. (“Cheryl, look! He’s peeing in the sewer drain!”)

Despite all my misgivings, I was blindly confident and stubbornly determined. I’d make whatever parking lot they gave me work, I told myself. And I’d greet each tribulation as a noble challenge and never as an unwanted adversity.

Registration was easy enough, except that to get a parking permit I had to put down a local address (which I of course didn’t have). I had my laptop with me, so I flipped it open, checked out Google Maps, looked up Marietta’s address, filled it in on my application, and hoped that no one ever double-checked that sort of stuff.

When Thoreau first saw Walden Pond as a young boy, he was tantalized. To him, it was a “recess among the pines where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants.” It became, as he described it, “one of the most ancient scenes stamped on the tablets of my memory.”

When I first cast eyes on the parking lot Duke gave me—the Mill lot—I had none of the flowery thoughts Thoreau had upon seeing his future home.

I wasn’t sure if I should even bother with my experiment. The lot looked terrible. I had hoped for some quiet, rarely visited
lot that would give me some semblance of privacy. This… this was the exact opposite.

The Mill lot, for starters, isn’t even located on Duke property. Nor is it anywhere near the main campus. (While it is only a quarter mile away from Duke’s East Campus, the East Campus, unfortunately, is a mere island colony of Duke’s much larger, busier, more happening West Campus.) I didn’t mind a little walk to campus, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the Mill lot is located on Ninth Street, a busy, bustling mini metropolis of bars, cafés, restaurants, and new age shops where bums, bikers, students, and yuppies commingle.

I was surrounded by buildings and people. How could I keep myself a secret
here?

In front of my parking spot, about twenty yards away, was an old three-story redbrick tobacco mill that had been refurbished into a stylish apartment complex where mostly upperclassmen at Duke lived. Behind me was a student bar called George’s Garage. To one side of me was Ninth Street and on the other was a large, empty grass field where apartment dwellers walked their dogs.

Because my permit allowed me to park in whatever Duke parking lot I wanted after 5
P.M.
, I wondered if I should just drive the van to a new lot each night. But to get through the semester debt-free, I knew I needed to save gas money and avoid wear and tear on the van. With that in mind, I decided that I ought to try to adapt to life in the Mill lot. Plus, I figured that campus security would get suspicious if they saw my van in a new lot each night. This way, by staying in the Mill lot, I hoped campus security would presume that I was a student living in the adjacent apartment complex.

I parked the van in a section of the parking lot that was relatively empty, pulled down my shades, hung up my black sheet behind the two front seats, and set out to walk the quarter mile to Duke. This would be the first time I’d lay eyes on my new school.

Duke University, originally called Trinity College, was founded by Methodists and Quakers in 1838. It expanded when the Dukes, a wealthy family in the tobacco industry, gave generous donations to the school with stipulations that women be put on equal footing with men. What was once a tiny, inconsequential college is now home to 13,500 students on 8,610 acres of campus.

I walked from East Campus to West Campus, zigzagging around bronze statues of the Dukes, strolling under stone archways, and wandering through a labyrinth of hallways in the medical center.

To say the least, I was impressed.

Duke looks every bit like a college on a university brochure: it is a leafy green village of redbrick mansions and Gothic stone monasteries, populated with an unreasonable plentitude of good-looking young people. Beneath towering hundred-year-old oaks are crisply shaven lawns that in warmer weather would be spotted with sunbathing girls and Frisbee-flinging guys. In the middle of campus is a tranquil fifty-five-acre garden that attracts visitors from across the region. The university features a thirty-four-thousand-seat football stadium, a forest of 7,000 acres, and Duke Chapel—the centerpiece of campus—that stands more than 200 feet high and houses a bell weighing 11,200 pounds, three organs with 12,633 pipes, and a crypt with the remains of three Duke presidents. Amid the smell of refinement and riches, though, was a delightfully plebeian stench hovering above a tent village called Krzyzewskiville (or “K-ville”), set up on the lawn near the basketball stadium. There, hundreds of students wait in line for months on end with hopes of being awarded the coveted tickets to the Duke men’s basketball team’s match against their archrivals, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.

When I arrived, Duke was ranked as the tenth-best school in the nation by
U.S. News & World Report
and fourteenth in the world by
Times Higher Education–QS World University.
With a $5.7 billion endowment, Duke is the fifteenth-wealthiest university
in the United States. And it’s one of the most difficult schools to get into, accepting only 16 percent of the students who applied in 2011.

While there are various ethnicities at Duke, a significant portion of the student body hails from the wealthy. It’s the sort of place where, in the glass-ceilinged Von der Heyden Pavilion coffeehouse, you could expect to overhear frat brothers Brant and Chaz talking about how they’d spent their winter break at their fathers’ châteaus in the Pyrenees. This was all so different from Buffalo—my depressed industrial hometown, where the people are blue-collar and the sports teams, perennial (though lovable) losers. While Buffalo had been made rusty by raw deals, Duke scintillated with success.

Given my modest academic record, I assumed Duke’s admissions department had made some flabbergasting, “someone oughta get fired” error in welcoming me into their elite ranks. I did well in college, but not so well to think I’d ever end up in a place like Duke. I got in, though, presumably because I was a perfect fit for their liberal studies program (which, conveniently, was the least selective of all of Duke’s grad school programs). The selection committee, according to their website, is less interested in grades and more interested in applicants with “postgraduate experiences and recent accomplishments,” who have “broad intellectual interests,” and who possess “the capacity and energy for learning, writing, and discussing ideas.” I didn’t have the grades and accolades, but I had all that other stuff.

The liberal studies program appealed to me because I had no single academic interest. I loved all the disciplines: literature, history, science, and even a little bit of math, so it would have seemed unusually restrictive to be forced to narrow my studies to one field. I didn’t want to study anything I wasn’t curious or passionate about. And the last thing I wanted was to become a “specialist”—an expert at one thing but useless at everything else. (I preferred to remain useless at everything.) While specialized
study often makes new scholarly discoveries possible, I wasn’t so interested in writing academic papers that only half a dozen fellow experts would sleepily read, using big, boring words like “empirical,” “paradigm,” and “ontological.” I wanted to focus on bigger-picture stuff. I wanted—with the help of professors and classmates and the great texts—to learn how to live the best life possible. I wanted to be an “artist of life”: someone who knows how to live, how to die, how to be happy and valued and necessary and good. I didn’t want a degree or a career. I didn’t want a “marketable skill”—I could learn one later if I wished. It seemed like now—before amassing things and obligations and a career—was the time to figure the important stuff out.

The liberal studies program offered courses that were designed to be interdisciplinary, meaning that the course might contain elements of, say, biology, history, and philosophy all nicely wrapped into one. Plus, I was free to enroll in courses from any other graduate or undergraduate department I wished. If something in the English undergraduate department struck my fancy, I could enroll. If I wanted to learn about natural resources law at the Nicholas School of the Environment, I could. This was true academic freedom. And while I wasn’t getting paid to go to school by doing research or teaching undergraduate classes like many grads were, I was most definitely free to study whatever I wished—and that, I figured, would be worth the tuition I paid.

As I walked around campus, there was electricity in the air. Students had been recharged by their winter breaks. All the baggy eyes had been smoothed, all the stubbled faces shaven. I was as excited as ever. I couldn’t wait to recapture the sensations from my undergrad years: the invigorating classwork, the stimulating conversations, the provoking lectures. I figured I’d make friends with a trio of like-minded classmates, join a few clubs, find a part-time job, and maybe even write for the school newspaper, as I did in Buffalo. Except now, as I walked around the
campus, I felt old and out of place. It was as if I had awakened from a slumber in a cryogenic chamber and walked out to a very different and slightly unsettling futuristic world. Almost all the girls wore skintight black leggings for pants, freely advertising what in previous years would have been top secret topographies of their lower halves. Even weirder was their fondness for a hideous style of fur (or fur-like) boots—commonly referred to as “Uggs”—that made the girls look like Oompa-Loompas when paired with the skintight leggings. The men also were curiously attired, donning large black plastic shades and pastel-pink polos tucked into their pants. Half the student body walked around with cell phones held inches from their faces, busily thumbing buttons in midstride.

The two courses that I’d enrolled in were called “The Self in the World” and “Biodiversity in North Carolina.” In Self, we would read texts from the seventeenth century to the present—texts like
Moll Flanders, Their Eyes Were Watching God,
and
Mrs. Dalloway
—which we’d use to examine how ideas of individual identity, subjectivity, authenticity, and autonomy have changed. In Biodiversity, we would learn how to identify flora with microscopes and magnifying glasses. And we’d also look at the environment from a broader vantage point: studying land-use history, the conservation movement, and the ecology of natural ecosystems. The course would culminate with a weeklong field trip to a biology research lab in the Appalachian Mountains.

Depending on your tastes, these courses may seem boring or unusual or a waste of time. But I couldn’t have been more anxious to delve into my assigned books and stay up late writing papers that would force me to think about stuff I never had cause to think about before. I browsed over the list of books on the syllabi like they were succulent entrées on a menu.