Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (3 page)

I spent much of my boyhood playing video games and watching epic adventure movies for hours on end—movies like
Braveheart,
in which mud-spattered warriors got to do manly, gallant things. While delivering the
Buffalo News
as a paperboy, I’d imagine myself cleaving off the arm of an enemy; telling a woman, “You and no other”; and screaming, “Freedom!!!” before being disemboweled for some righteous cause. Like almost any boy, I wished to live in a world where there was real adventure, real glory, and real sacrifice—just as it was on-screen.

My mom was a nurse and my father was a factory worker who took the night shift. He put in, typically, ten hours of overtime a week. Every day, after work, they’d come home and watch TV. They did the same thing day after day, week after week, year after year. My mom would watch
Oprah
and
Judge Judy,
and my father would watch
Coronation Street
—a British drama series
that aired on the local Canadian station. My parents were comfortably domestic, bearing few desires to travel, try new things, or take adventurous detours off old, rutted paths.

I grew up thinking it was normal for a married couple to never sit on the same couch, hug each other, or demonstrate even the vaguest expression of intimacy. Because I wanted proof that things like romance and passion and desire existed in real life, I may have been the only child in history to have actually wanted to see his parents doing it.

Before every Christmas, I’d ask my mom to buy me a claymore sword—the sort that Mel Gibson carried in
Braveheart.
After years of patiently waiting, I came downstairs one December morning to see a long rectangular package. I unwrapped it excitedly with full knowledge of what was inside. The sword, though, lost some of its luster when I learned from the receipt my mom had left in the box that she hadn’t hunted down the fabled claymore that once crossed the Ilgunas family shield, but that she’d bought a cheap Pakistani version for $30 on eBay. Still, I had my sword, and when no one was home, I’d carry it into the backyard and swing it around behind our aboveground swimming pool. It’s always adorable to watch a little boy play make-believe, but it gets a touch desperate and disturbing when he’s eighteen.

Now, after four years of college and a good deal of personal growth, I was twenty-one but still living in my parents’ home, still bedding under the same revolving Super Mario fan that had whirred me to sleep as a six-year-old, and still pushing carts. I’d never done a drug, broken a law, or diverted from the path prescribed to me by social and parental expectation. I’d hardly left home, except for my internship in Virginia and a very rushed road trip to California the summer before. And while I yearned for new experiences, I recognized that every year I was getting more and more into debt and becoming less and less free.

I became afflicted with a burning restlessness that stirred up irrational, impractical dreams and coaxed out strange, subconscious
voices. At home, I’d slap the globe on the computer desk and skim fingertips over spinning topographies. At the campus library, I’d wander over to the atlas shelves, always ending up on the page with the map of Alaska. I’d picture myself driving up the Alcan Highway across northern Canada and west to Alaska. I’d be driving on a gravel road that meandered around pristine mountain lakes, endless spruce forests, and snow-topped mountains. I wanted to stand on one of these peaks and take in the frozen white sea of undulating summits and know—if just for a fleeting second, maybe upon viewing a herd of caribou, or gazing, teary-eyed, at the northern lights—what it felt like to feel free.

I wanted to drive to Alaska more than anything in the goddamned world. And getting there, as far as I was concerned, was my life’s purpose, my dream of dreams, my ultimate adventure.

And every spring I told myself that this was the summer I was really going to do it. Yet it always seemed to make more sense to spend the summer pushing carts to pay tuition or to work at unpaid internships to fill out my résumé. It made sense to blaze a path toward a secure, stable, comfortable life. It made sense…

Alaska didn’t make
any
sense. I had no idea why I wanted to go so badly. I knew nothing about the state. Yet I was drawn to it as if by some unbending law of physics, lured with the same intensity of passion I felt for the fairer sex, beckoned as if it were a pair of moonlit thighs. Alaska pulled me by my shirt collar north toward a land far different from the suburbs I’d grown up in.

On my commute to college, I’d sometimes fantasize about driving past my school, hopping on the thruway, and heading north. I wouldn’t look back, and I wouldn’t stop until I’d escaped the sprawling suburbs, the car dealerships, the parking lots, and the starless, smoggy night skies. I’d leave behind my family and friends, the papers, the orange apron—my stale suburban life.

It was one of the last days of the 2005 spring semester. I drove my red 1996 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera to college as I did every morning. (Because I was one of thousands of students who commuted to UB, I had to arrive an hour before class in order to wait for a parking spot to open up.) With everyone still in class, the campus seemed like a set suitable for a postapocalyptic zombie movie. It was a bleak, lifeless, white-lined landscape where the cars were abandoned in the eerily quiet daylight hours. Apart from the swarm of gray storm clouds inching across the sky like ghost-driven blimps, and a plastic shopping bag that performed parabolas in the wind, the campus was deathly still. In the background, on my stereo, was Canadian alt-rock musician Matthew Good playing his dreamy “Near Fantastica.”

This is when I heard the voice.

It was a whisper: raspy yet distinct, quiet yet audible—a voice that I could clearly identify as my own, except that I hadn’t spoken aloud. It shared with me four simple words—each just one syllable long—the first of which was my name, “
Ken,
” followed by a three-word message.

I swiveled around to the backseat to see if anyone was in my car. No one. Frantically, I opened the door and pressed the side of my face against the asphalt to locate the feet of the unseen speaker.

There wasn’t a soul in the parking lot.

With gravel stuck to my cheek, I pulled myself back in the car, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw, looking back at me, a young man with a pale face and a purple bag under each eye. I looked pitiful, wearing a shamefaced “I just got my ass kicked in front of my friends” expression.
Look at what you’ve become,
I thought. I was a loan drone: existing, yet hardly living.

A
voice?
In
my
head?

I felt like I was losing it. I’d never heard a voice before. I’d never had any “spiritual” or “paranormal” experiences. I hadn’t been drinking, and I’d never done any drugs, so I certainly wasn’t on anything.

It seemed like the voice was issuing a command or a directive.
But the message was so vague. What did those three words mean?

I sat there, scared, panicky, and vaguely diarrheic, watching my fellow students pour out of the buildings and make their ways toward their cars.

A week later, the semester ended and it was time to go back to work for the summer. I’d been promoted to the position of delivery coordinator, which would be a high-stress, high-responsibility, high-labor job that, curiously, came with no raise.

I put on my standard Home Depot outfit—a pair of jeans and a green polo shirt—got in my car, put the key into the ignition, and buckled my seat belt. But I just sat there staring at the wheel. I sat there as I had a week before in the UB parking lot. I couldn’t bring myself to turn the ignition. I felt like I was about to enter into some inhospitable environment. Going into the Home Depot would be like walking into a burning building, or swimming to the bottom of a sea, or freezing solid, floating aimlessly through outer space. Thrashing my forearm against the rim of the wheel as hard as I could, I screamed. It was an angry, throaty, “my child was just eaten by lions” scream.

This was my last summer before I had to begin paying off my debt. If I spent it working at the Home Depot, I’d be declining some rare gift. I’d be a kid at fat camp turning down a Milky Way trafficked in by a softhearted counselor. I’d be a prisoner spending his yearly conjugal visit session alone in his cell. I’d be a bum tossing the winning lottery ticket into a flaming barrel.

I felt like a character in a story, but a sorry, cowardly, timid, unassertive character. Shouldn’t this be a turning point? Shouldn’t this be the moment when I get my shit together? The moment when I change and grow? When I get the hell out of here? If I didn’t go now, would I ever?

I thought of those three words and felt a terrible sense of urgency sweep over me, like the encroaching shadow of a UFO that darkens the landscape over which it passes. Things in my parents’ driveway were serene. I was parked next to a basketball
hoop propped up on a crisply mown lawn. The trees were a lush spring green and the sky a healthy cloud-pocked blue. Yet I felt the presence of this dark premonition—one that would give me one chance, one moment, one “now or never” opportunity to either give in to my insanity or forever accept my role as loan drone and cart boy.
Time is running out,
I felt anxiously. Tomorrow, I’d have a real job. Tomorrow, I’d be forty. Tomorrow, I’d be dead.

I’d once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They’re not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative. We are the events and people and places to which we’ve assigned symbolic meaning. And it’s when we step outside our stories that we feel most lost. If we take the wrong path at the classic fork in the road—and fail to act in a literary sort of way—our story falls apart. Words run off the page. Paragraphs are cluttered with red markups. Pages fall out of the binding. And we lose a grip on our identity.

Despite outward appearances, I knew I wasn’t just a loan drone, or a cart-pusher, or some beer-drinking college student. So while it might have seemed expected of me to drive to the Home Depot that day and accept my station, along with the dull comforts of the status quo, it would also feel, strangely, out of character.

So I got out of the car, went back into my house, and took a pair of scissors and cut up my orange apron. And then I began packing a suitcase full of clothes, books, and camping gear.

A week later, I turned out of my parents’ driveway and drove down the road. I passed my friends’ homes, the Home Depot, and the sprawling suburbs of western New York. As I came to UB—that mammoth campus that had both freed and shackled me—I decided that this time, I’d keep going. This time, I wouldn’t look back.

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

May 2005—Coldfoot, Alaska

DEBT: $27,500 AND GROWING

A
FTER I QUIT THE HOME DEPOT
, I made a list of every Alaskan lodge, campground, and tourist operation that I could find on the Internet and called each to find out if any of them were still hiring for the summer. But no one was. I was making these calls in May and all the business owners I spoke with said they’d done their summer hiring months earlier. One lady, though, who sounded like she was still looking for workers, asked me what my “trade” was.

It was a question that hit me like a hockey puck to the back of the knee—the one body part my equipment didn’t cover—because it reminded me of the one thing I’d neglected to prepare for throughout my college education, which was learning an actual skill. Her polite rejection to my honest answer (“I’m afraid I don’t have a skill”), I hoped, wasn’t an augury of things to come.

Unmarketable or not, I was determined to get up to Alaska that summer because I’d figured it might be the last summer in my life to do something adventurous. I’d be graduating from
college next year, and to pay my debt, I knew I’d have to soon stagger around in office hallways and conference rooms as one of the lobotomized undead, a “young professional.”

Near the bottom of my list of Alaskan work sites was a camp in a town called Coldfoot (population 35), whose website proudly advertised its status as the “Farthest North Truck Stop.” It was in the middle of the Brooks Range, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 250 miles from the nearest stoplight in Fairbanks. Along with servicing the truckers who haul equipment up the Dalton Highway to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, the truck stop also runs a small tourism operation.

During the summer months, the Slate Creek Inn, a one-story, fifty-two-room motel, was often full of tourists who traveled on Holland America and Princess Cruises bus lines up from Anchorage. Even though their trips were several weeks long and even though they’d spent nights in innumerable hotels and lodges along the way, Coldfoot still left such an impression on them that several tourists felt inspired to leave pithy comments on hotel review websites.

“This motel was nasty,” one guest said.

“One step better than a tent.”

“Truly dreadful,” bemoaned a third.

Because Coldfoot’s remote location made it difficult for the camp manager to attract seasonal employees, he was still seeking a pair of lodge cleaners. I interviewed, got the job, leaped in the air jubilantly, and asked my freshman year roommate, Josh, if he wanted to join me. Josh, though, balked at the last minute, so I persuaded my other good friend Paul to take a leave of absence at his job at a UPS distribution center, promising the adventure of a lifetime.

I was going to Alaska.

Because my car wasn’t suited for a long cross-continent road trip, I asked my father if I could borrow his SUV. He agreed. I lent him my car, and to make sure I felt some semblance of freedom and self-reliance (as any self-respecting adventurer ought
to feel), I promised that I’d pay his monthly car payments for the whole summer.

It took us seven days and 4,500 miles to get from New York to Coldfoot. The memory of our road trip is bordered with a dreamy blur, perhaps because we traveled in an almost chronic state of sleeplessness. It was more or less a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation: while one slept, the other drove. We lived on peanuts, beef jerky, and Dr. Bob—a cheaper supermarket brand of Dr Pepper. We sang Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway” in the Alberta prairie, came to a halt in front of a herd of bison in the Yukon, and, upon running out of conversation topics, had long discussions about which animal we’d most want to be and, later, “do.”