Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (29 page)

It was fitting, I thought, how my first want wasn’t a product or a luxury; it was companionship. I was doing without just fine. I didn’t need stuff, I didn’t need fancy foods. I’d given up TV and beer and going out. But, oh, what I would have given to be drinking with my high school buddies back in New York. Oh, what I would have given to talk with just one of the pretty girls in the library. I thought of Sami constantly.

But my solitude was self-inflicted. I was the one who chose to live in a van. I was the one who chose to end our relationship so I could go back to school. I was the one who was selfish.

What was this terrible urgency to always be alone? Most of my day was spent sitting in the corner of the library on my laptop. You broke it off for
this?
Why did I have to always be going somewhere else, leaving someone behind? I always heard “the road” calling me, but why did I listen? The road was always so lonely and miserable.

Yet I couldn’t stay with Sami, or any girl for that matter. Maybe it was because I’d once felt restrained by debt, so now I’d get antsy whenever I felt restrained by anything else. I’d become obsessed with freedom. I could sense the slightest abridgment of my freedom like a princess who can feel the impression of a pea under forty featherbeds. I felt it when I was in romantic relationships. I felt it when I was given a gift. I felt it when someone held even the faintest influence over me. And when I felt it, I felt rage—a heart-thumping, roiling rage in the pit of my chest that was so overpowering I had to talk myself out of rashly fleeing and separating myself from that which was infringing on my freedom. When is it going to end? When can I be a normal human being?

It was a curse, this always needing to be alone. I used to think the urge would go away after some big trip or adventure, and that a mountain climb or hitchhike might somehow scratch my itches, calm my nerves, lull my wanderlust, and grant me, finally, a peace of mind that would permit me to settle down and be content. But this was never the case. I was like a soldier who,
upon completing his tour of duty, wanted nothing more than to go back to the front lines.

In the library, I popped a DVD into my laptop that Sami had made for me when we were together. It was a series of pictures of us together in Mississippi, on our hitchhike, and in Alaska with Jack Johnson’s song “Better Together” playing in the background. (
Yeah, it’s always better when we’re together… Yeah, we’ll look at the stars when we’re together
…) Having nowhere else to watch it, I turned it on in the corner of the library, wearing a pair of the library’s borrowed headphones. As I watched images of us holding hands in Vermont, I had to hide my face behind the screen to make sure that no one saw the tears coursing down my cheeks.

As much as I may have desired a companion—particularly a romantic companion—I knew I had to stay away from girls. I
could not
fall in love again. That would have defeated the whole purpose of going back to school. Yet my decision was beginning to take its toll. By the eighth week, I began to sing and talk to myself with unprecedented frequency. By the tenth, I began to actually
converse
with myself. One such conversation:

Me:
It smells in here. You should clean up after yourself.

Myself:
But, baby…

Me:
Don’t you “but, baby” me!

Because it was only a matter of time before I’d buy a volleyball and paint a face on it with the blood of my palm, I knew I had to start reaching out to other people. I had to tell
someone
my secret.

“Hey, man, you from Durham?” he asked. He had scraggly blond hair and a feral beard, and was wearing enough denim to exceed what I thought was fashionably appropriate.

Normally, I recoil from contact with the homeless with the same sense of urgency that I hide from a pair of well-attired and determined door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I greeted
this guy—who was in front of the Whole Foods grocery store on my walk to school—as if he were a long-lost high school acquaintance.

“Uh, no, I’m not really from around here,” I said. “But what’s up?”

He told me he was new in town, couldn’t find work, and was on his way out. He assured me that he wasn’t a “wino like the rest of them” and that he just needed some money for food. I didn’t know what to believe, but I felt sympathetic, and I thought this was my chance to finally have a real conversation with someone who wouldn’t rat me out.

“It’s hard in this economy, y’know?” he said. “A guy can’t get a job. So… would you mind lending me a couple bucks?”

“Yeah, I know how it is, man,” I said, trying to establish a common bond. “In fact…”—I paused with deliberate graveness—“I’m living out of my van.”

I hoped that we’d then trade declarations of sympathy and swap tales of poverty, but I was surprised with how indifferently he passed over my admission and continued to prod me for money.

As much as I prided myself for living “on the edge,” I had to admit that I wasn’t homeless in the way that he was homeless. The voluntary nature of my experiment prevented me from experiencing poverty in its most extreme and authentic form. I wasn’t poor, of course. Real poverty is having no way out. Real poverty is what one-fifth of the world lives in. No matter what, I had food to eat and a warm place to sleep every night. If I needed to, I could go back home to my parents, stay with close friends, or get a job in Coldfoot again. I had an education, connections, a good upbringing. Real poverty has little to do with being broke. Real poverty is not being able to change your circumstances. I was playing with poverty; he was living it.

I gave him $3. He thanked me and said he was leaving town to find work.

The next day, I heard the same voice yelling in my direction.

“Hey, man, you from Durham?!” he said, now with a slur.

I’d been had. This was the prologue to his standard routine, I realized. I ignored him this time, but I couldn’t help but notice that he was warming his hands around a flaming barrel, huddled together with his council of homeless comrades.

I had no sympathy this time around, just disdain, maybe even a strange hint of envy. Whenever I’d see him again, he’d ask me for money, and I’d want to throw my fist into his jaw and kick him when he was down, sending his teeth scattering across the asphalt.

I felt like I was some leprous pariah, some low-caste untouchable. While I identified with Thoreau on many levels, his stance on sex was more than foreign to me, and he was far from a source of guidance. Thoreau, who had the libido of a turnip, was assumed to have died a virgin. I, however, had to contend with the insatiable desires of a raging twenty-five-year-old male’s “I will do anything that moves” libido. I thought of women constantly. Being around so many pretty ones, and feeling that I had no chance with them, felt like some cruel Dantean punishment, as if I was paying for the sins of a tragic life of lust, destined as I was to be eternally tormented by their charms. Feeling incapable of wooing one of these girls made me crave them all the more; it was as if I needed a woman to like me to validate my presence on this earth as a living, breathing, existing human being.

I couldn’t tell anybody about the van, but would it make any difference if I could? Why bother trying to meet somebody? What girl here would want to be with a guy who lives in his
vehicle?
While such a home might seem novel, or cool, or just plain ordinary in Alaska or at a hippie college out west, living in a van at a place like Duke was just plain
weird.
Confessing such a thing would be like revealing that my privates were pocked with some hideously contagious and suppurating STD.

But it wasn’t just the van holding me back. While I thought I’d experienced enough of the world to no longer be vulnerable to inferiority complexes, I couldn’t help but be intimidated by
how all these young people were just so
accomplished.
Many spent their adolescences getting refined Victorianesque educations at private schools: playing instruments, excelling at various artistic media, and spending a suspiciously large amount of their hours volunteering. (I met one freshman who had published a book of poetry when she was nine!) As an adolescent, apart from three weeks of trombone lessons in the fourth grade, I didn’t do anything to “cultivate” myself. While Duke students might have spent their childhood summers touring Europe or mastering the art of jumping at equestrian camp (I’m exaggerating, but go along with me), as a boy I spent mine watching the USA channel’s weekday afternoon lineup, highlighted by reruns of
Quantum Leap
and
American Gladiators.

Everyone was just so wealthy, too. At Duke, the average white student’s family income was $230,000, and those of other ethnic backgrounds weren’t far behind. My parents had blue-collar jobs and modest salaries for which I felt no shame, but one can’t help but feel out of place when many students have brand-new SUVs of their own.

I was dying for human contact. I was willing to share my secret with someone, but everyone I met at Duke just seemed so radically unlike me. While I still hadn’t had any real conversations, I was able to—through a few superficial exchanges and some borderline stalker-ish eavesdropping—get to know a few of my fellow students.

Alicia was an ambitious, overachieving undergraduate political science major and a president of three clubs who set multiple alarms on her watch so she’d know when to commence doing homework for different courses. Per her father’s expectations, she was applying to thirty-five law schools—yes, thirty-five!—for the next fall semester. Despite her law school ambitions, I heard her confess to another classmate that her real dream was to kayak the Amazon and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. When I happened upon her at a coffee shop, I went out of my way to bring up her dream trips and how “awesome” they sounded. She seemed happy to receive support, but she
mentioned, regretfully, that she was also trying to get into law school. It seemed like an easy call for me. The law school path would surely pile on top of her shoulders a decade’s worth of debt that would prohibit her from going on the long journeys she wanted to go on. The adventurous path, on the other hand, could allow her to embrace a freedom she may never otherwise get to acquaint herself with.

Kim was a thin, toned, gym-obsessed Ph.D. grad in the neurobiology department. Her program demanded a five-year commitment, summers and most holidays included. While she received free tuition and a generous stipend, she also had to work countless hours a week on top of her rigorous study schedule. When I asked why she chose neurobiology, she told me she had “no idea,” adding, “Sometimes I don’t even feel like my life is mine.” She said she was good at neurobiology as an undergrad, so she chose to apply to a Ph.D. program for lack of any better ideas. I was taken aback by how indifferently she decided to enroll in a Ph.D. program. How could someone make such a life-altering decision with so little conviction and forethought? I met students everywhere who had similarly devoted half their twenties to something they had little passion for. Eventually, they’d be hyperspecialized and would only be qualified for work that didn’t at all fit their true interests or character.

While Sami had no college education, it was clear to me now that, in ways, she was smarter than a lot of these Duke students. At least she knew to follow her passions and live the precious now instead of preparing, preparing, preparing—constantly preparing—for something that may actually turn out to be not that great tomorrow.

I met Scott, a pot-smoking, Adderall-popping undergrad at a coffee shop. Scott loved rock climbing, and when I told him that I’d gone on a really long hitchhike, he was clearly envious and hungry to go on such an adventure of his own. Yet he’d already landed a prestigious internship with Morgan Stanley (or one of those companies in the financial services industry), which he
wasn’t at all enthusiastic about. I asked him why he was about to take a job he didn’t want, and he responded, “I got to live, right?”

While my life was far from perfect, the van was making it quite clear to me that a human being can live on very little. I spent half my day in a home where I had no air-conditioning, no heat, no plumbing, no electricity, no magazine subscriptions, and no Netflix account, yet I was still breathing and standing and living just fine.

Most disconcerting of all were the whispers I’d constantly hear of Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Wall Street—where many Duke students go to work after graduation. Duke takes pains to sell itself as a traditional liberal arts school, but like a lot of schools nowadays, it has strayed far from its liberal arts roots. While they don’t offer an undergraduate business major like most schools, economics, a close cousin to business, is the most popular major year after year.

Without any better ideas, I thought that I might have some luck finding friends in the student outdoors club. I spent money on my first nonnecessity: a $50 membership fee, which would grant me access to their climbing wall in the gym, as well as a few subsidized trips to the woods and mountains of North Carolina.

The club was heavily populated with grad students from the Nicholas School of the Environment, a department that, I figured, would be a surefire hotbed of liberal-minded do-gooders. Together, I imagined us practicing eco-terrorism in the late hours of the night, perhaps sawing down billboards and blowing up dams. On weekends we’d attend wild parties populated with dread-headed, tie-dyed classmates who loved scrubbing oil off sea turtles and fornicating in body-painted orgies. But instead, I quickly learned that about half of the environmental majors were getting their degrees in order to obtain jobs in the oil and gas industry.

Goldman Sachs?
The oil and gas industry?!
What the hell was going on? What’s the point of schools like Duke if they’re
merely funneling grads into careers that—excuse the colloquialism—fuck shit up?

Whenever I came across a student who was headed to Wall Street, I wanted to ask: “You actually want to work for one of
those
companies?! Aren’t they kinda evil?
Wall Street?
You messin’ with me?”