Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (28 page)

“You vant anudder blanket?” she asked.

“Oh, no thanks. This one is fine,” I said, before she proceeded to tightly bundle me in a second.

“Comfortable?”

“Very.”

“Don’t fall asleep.”

“I’ll do my best not to.”

“You better not. You don’t vant me to come get you.”

She rolled me headfirst into the cocoon-tight cylinder. I could feel my arms (which were already tightly pressed against the sides of my torso) rub against the walls of the machine. After being slid in, I began to feel the first tremors of panic. In an instant, my world had gotten a lot smaller and darker and weirder. It seemed inevitable that in moments I’d be squealing for someone to get me the hell out of there and flailing my limbs (though to little effect, because one can only move so much in an MRI scanner only fifty-five centimeters wide). But just as quickly as the panic came, it vanished upon being lulled into
boredom by the groan of the scanner. After two hours, the technologist pulled me out pink-faced and squinty-eyed. I sat on the scanner bed for a moment, trying to reorient myself to real life.
That was awful.

I told myself that I’d never do another MRI session, but after she handed me $50, I found myself asking how to sign up for more.

I also interviewed to become a tutor at an inner-city elementary school for a work-study program called America Reads. I showed up in my least-wrinkled dress shirt and a pair of slacks that I’d worn only at my ninth grade homecoming dance. It paid $16 an hour, and if I worked the maximum twenty hours a week, I thought I might just make my tuition payments. The interviewer gave me the job right away, but I wouldn’t get my first paycheck until the end of February. New sources of income aside, my economic troubles were far from over.

When the first check finally arrived, I decided that the occasion called for a celebratory feast, even if my situation was still precarious.

After my night class, I walked to a Whole Foods supermarket and bought a head of broccoli, two carrots, a clove of garlic, and three red potatoes.

I carried the groceries to my parking lot, made sure no one was looking, and snuck into the van, which was parked underneath a lamppost. The light of the lamppost faintly lit up a section of my van’s floor, allowing me to see the vegetables I was about to slice up into my frying pan.

I stuffed the vegetables I didn’t plan on eating into one of the plastic compartments of my storage container. (In January and February, the North Carolina temperature was still a cool and consistent 40°F, so I presumed that most of my food would keep without a real refrigerator.) I took out one carrot, half of a potato, and some sprouts from the broccoli, and cut them up into tiny pieces with my knife. I grabbed my water bottle, which I’d filled up on campus, and poured the water into my
pot, which I set to boil on my isobutane backpacking stove on top of my storage container. When the water started boiling, I tossed in some spaghetti noodles. And then I mixed in the diced vegetables, a packet of spaghetti seasoning, and a healthy glob of peanut butter, which gave the sauce a thick, almost sweet consistency. I stirred carefully, making sure not to splatter the walls of the van or my dress clothes that hung on hangers on my hook.

The pot was filled almost to the top. It was a steaming, sumptuous feast. I twirled my fork into the thick sauce, lifted the noodles with a few vegetables stuck to the peanut butter to my mouth, and gloried in the tastes. Oh, how I feasted. I feasted until I could feast no more.

In the weeks ahead, I’d tire of spaghetti stew, so some nights I’d eat just cereal. On others, I’d concoct something more sophisticated, like rice and bean burritos. I’d let the red beans soak in the van when I was on campus and then cook them with rice at night, wrapping it all in a tortilla with some tomato and onion.

For breakfast, I’d have either cheap Kroger-brand cereal with powdered milk or a hot bowl of oatmeal (again, with peanut butter). Most of these meals cost me less than $2, and I thought they were healthier, tastier, and more generously portioned than what I could get for $15 at a restaurant. According to my calculations, I paid, on average, $4.34 for food a day.

I couldn’t think of an easy way to wash dishes, so I’d scrape as much food from the bottom of the bowl as I could with a piece of bread or a tortilla. I thought of whatever was left in the bowl—each crumb of oatmeal and speck of dried spaghetti sauce—as reminders of my meals’ ancestral past, forever seasoning each subsequent dish with its chromosomes like a father passing on genes to his progeny. It was gross, but it wasn’t making me sick. And that’s all that mattered.

After a week of vandwelling, I could say that I was beginning to figure things out.

I took showers at the gym where I’d also brush my teeth, floss, and shave. At the library, I’d charge my laptop, phone, and camera, and take naps on a couch in the Thomas Reading Room (aka the Chinese Reading Room) on the second floor.

The library would close early on weekends, so I wandered around campus like an ant, sniffing around for anything useful, for any place I could stay, for any extra food I could scrounge. With my Duke ID card, I learned that I could swipe my way into most any building. Now, I could study privately in a warm classroom. Sometimes, when I needed a break, I’d watch streaming TV shows or listen to music on my laptop.

Wherever I went, I kept an eye open for pens or pencils on the ground. I’d reuse old bread and tortilla bags so I didn’t have to buy Ziplocs. When I filled up my wastebasket with garbage, I’d simply drop it off in a public trash bin on my walk to campus. At the pace I was using up my clean clothes, I’d only have to go to a Laundromat once a month.

But I had no shortage of discomforts. New, strange, unidentifiable smells greeted me each evening. Upon opening the side doors, a covey of odors would escape from the van like spirits unleashed from a cursed ark. I could never tell exactly what the smell was. It wasn’t always bad, but it was never good, and a fourth of the time it was downright foul. This was especially disquieting because I have a particularly weak sense of smell. If I can smell something unpleasant, someone in the next county might be wearing a puzzled expression, wondering,
Someone passed gas here, but I don’t know who.
If things got any worse, it was conceivable that the van’s smells would absorb into my skin, causing campus administration to assign a team of janitors to follow me wherever I went, pressure-washing the walls behind me.

To deal with the smell, I made my front passenger seat the “laundry area” in order to segregate my rancid workout clothes from infecting my clean, neutral-smelling clothes in the back. I hung my wet towel (after showering at the gym) on the passenger seat so it was in the sun during the day where it would dry.
I bought an air freshener and a broom, twisted off the broom head, and swept out the van.

Sleeping in cold temperatures also took some getting used to. Even though January and February are North Carolina’s coldest months, the nighttime low is generally a fairly reasonable 30–35°F. One night, though, it got down to 10°F. I didn’t have a heavy coat, so I delayed leaving the library as long as I could. I finally got to the van at 3
A.M.
It was about as cold inside as it was outside, though the van did offer protection from the wind. I stripped off my school clothes so I could shiver into my sleepwear. Nearly naked, my knees clanged against each other, my muscles tensed up, and my penis turtled into my body. I put on my hat, gloves, an extra pair of wool socks, thermal underwear, and my pajamas. With chattering teeth and fingers as hard and stiff as icicles, I struggled to get a grip on my sleeping bag zipper. Within moments, though—now burritoed in my own body heat—a warmth radiated across my arms and legs and torso, as if my bag were stuffed with sunrays. The cold on my face and the warmth of my sleeping bag make for prime sleeping conditions—it was a natural tranquilizer that, within moments, turned my eyes heavy and caused me to drift away into dreamland.

Oh, how I loved sleeping in the cold. I’ll deal with frostbitten black bananas, frozen jugs of water, and the windshield coated in icy exhalations in the morning, so long as I get to revel in this warmth in the midst of cold. Sometimes I wished for the temperature to be warmer, but why live in a chronic state of want, constantly hoping for heat in winter and cold in summer?

The next morning, though, I wouldn’t have minded a heater of some sort. It still felt like it was 10°F in the van, and the prospect of getting out of my sleeping bag and thermals and into my school clothes was a duty that required a level of willpower that I found difficult to rouse. I was going to be late for work, so I feverishly stripped off my pajamas, shivered into my clothes, and lit up the stove for my morning oatmeal. While I was daunted by the prospect of being exposed to the cold in this
manner every morning, there was no question about it: I’d take this over debt any day of the week.

While I was dealing with the cold and smells and hunger well enough, and while I had a job with a steady paycheck, I was still always one accident, one injury, one overlooked expense from going bankrupt. I thought constantly about my goal.

— Day Fifty of Vandwelling Experiment —

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

SAVINGS: $1,160

W
HAT WOULD HAPPEN IF
they caught me? Would they pity me, laugh it off, and let me go? Or would they get all bureaucratic and corporate on me and say that living in a van was against the rules?

It wasn’t just my experiment that was at stake. My freedom, independence, and comfort were, too. If I got caught, I’d have two options: I could find some other radically cheap dwelling, or I could drop out of school. What wasn’t an option was breaking the promise I made to myself months before: I was not going to go back into debt. No matter what.

I knew from my Brooks Range mountain climbs that to get to the top of a mountain, you have to be half-insane. The climber must approach his goal with a zealotry that may be inappropriate for normal, mundane things but is essential for the grandiose. If I was going to stay out of debt, I knew that I would need to take a similar approach.

So every time I saw the light of a car’s headlight splash into the van at night, or heard someone—perhaps a security guard—
walk around my van, I was terrified—terrified not just of getting caught, but of having to actually “walk the walk” and do what I promised myself I’d do. I knew that, if it came down to it, I’d live in the woods or get my food from Dumpsters, which, though frugal styles of living, were things that I by no means wished to experiment with, as I’d begun to embrace the many comforts and conveniences the van offered. I certainly didn’t want to suffer needlessly in a less-pleasant dwelling if I didn’t have to. I felt paranoid constantly. I needed the van. And I needed to keep it a secret.

The Mill lot, unbelievably, turned out to be well suited for my experiment. While it was next to a busy street, it was also really far from campus, making it one of the least visited lots at Duke, offering me some precious privacy.

Still, though, I had to be careful. When I walked to the van at night under the bright streetlamps of Ninth Street, I felt like I was starring in a film noir. If I saw anyone in my parking lot—either in their car or on foot—I’d walk past the van and wouldn’t return until I was sure nobody was around. Sometimes I’d stand in the dark with my back against the shadowed brick walls of the adjacent apartment complex while waiting for students to walk past me so I could scurry to the van when the coast was clear. Or I’d sit on the porch steps of the apartments pretending to read a book, surveying the scene from underneath my jacket hood, eyeing anyone and everyone who might catch sight of me. And when the students had gone inside their apartments or to the bar, I’d casually saunter up to the van, quickly unlock the front passenger door, reach inside to gingerly unlock the side door, and gracefully hop into the van and slam the door shut in one practiced, elegant motion. Once inside, I moved furtively, placing my steps in spots where I knew the floor wouldn’t squeak. In the morning, I was just as careful, lifting the blinds before exiting to make sure no one would see me leave. I did this every morning and night.

Early on in my experiment, I knew I had to develop a strategy to keep the van a secret. Hence, the seven rules of vandwelling:

1. Do not talk about vandwelling.
   
2. Do not talk about vandwelling.
   
3. Never leave the ignition running for light or heat or any purpose.
   
4. Don’t make any unnecessary noises inside.
   
5. Close all windows when cooking so no one hears the patter of pots or the tinkling of silverware.
   
6. Never, ever let anyone see you enter the van.
   
7. And never, ever let anyone see you leave it.
   

For the first two months, I hadn’t told a single soul in Durham about the van—not because I didn’t want to (I was
dying
to tell someone), but because I couldn’t. Or at least I thought I couldn’t.

I wondered if I was being a little
too
obsessive. Maybe a little
too
secretive. Maybe fellow students wouldn’t care about sharing a parking lot with a vandweller. Maybe Duke administration wouldn’t care. Maybe they’d even support one of their students exploring a new way of living. But my every instinct told me my experiment would not be so well received.

“You’re going to get in so much trouble when they find out, you know!” my mother would remind me, adding, “
It just isn’t normal!
”

At first, I was fine with the idea of social isolation. I figured the van would give me a chance to write, think, read, reflect, and grow, just like Thoreau’s woodland cabin did for him. My solitude—I hoped—would trigger a personal renaissance. But after two months of being around people and not connecting with any of them, I became surfeit with solitude. I hadn’t had a single real, genuine conversation with anybody. And whenever I got close to having one, the topic of where I lived would come up and I’d have to sour the conversation with preposterous lies.
Soon, it just became easier to avoid conversations altogether.