Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (5 page)

The cool mountaintop gusts ruffled my sweaty hair and momentarily dispersed the mosquitoes that pursued me, affording me a brief respite from discomfort. I thought about what I’d probably be doing at home in New York right now: maybe pushing carts or playing video games. Yet here I was now: a cart-pusher in Alaska, a suburbanite in the wilderness, a stranger in this wild north country.

I didn’t feel my chi. Nor did I feel like I’d won or conquered anything. Instead, I felt nothing but awe and deference and humility. I was
nothing
compared to all of this.

When Paul had left me, we’d agreed to rendezvous at our starting point: an abandoned mining camp called Nolan. When I’d told him to give me twelve hours to get up the mountain and back to Nolan, I’d seriously underestimated how far away the mountain was and how much time it would take me to do all that hiking. So when he drove my dad’s SUV back to Nolan and didn’t see me waiting for him, it dawned on him that it was possible that I might not ever make it back. He slept in the SUV, hoping that he’d wake up to me opening the passenger-side door, signaling my safe return. But I never did. He returned to Coldfoot and would head back to Nolan twice more. And each time that he didn’t see me, he felt overcome with a guilt that brought him to his knees, where he’d pray for the first time in years. Soon, concerned coworkers began conjecturing what wild animal I was inside of. A local ranger caught wind of my hike, so he interviewed Paul to gauge my likelihood for survival and find out if I had any “suicidal tendencies.”

“You mean to tell me you guys went out there with no map, no survival gear, hardly any food, and in jeans?” the ranger said to Paul, before shaking his head incredulously. “And what’s this about not knowing how to set up a tent?”

The ranger clambered aboard his bush plane so he could search for me from above.

I began my descent. I knew I’d been hiking for a while, but I didn’t know exactly how long because the sun hovers confusingly above the horizon at all hours of the day during arctic summers. The mountain was so steep that I had to keep my back against the mountain, carefully lowering each foot into piles of gushing scree. When a large rock fell out from beneath me, I slid twenty feet down the mountain, the rocks tearing a hole into the bottom of my pack and ripping open the seat of my jeans.

I yelled at a big brown rock that I thought was a bear, startled a group of nine snow-white Dall sheep ewes standing on a ledge, and walked beneath a lone gray storm cloud that followed me
cartoonishly, soaking my sleeping bag and adding another ten pounds to my pack.

The pains in my feet began moving up into my calves, knees, and groin, then finally into my lower back. My legs were two heaving, sap-heavy tree trunks that I had little control over. I flung one in front of the other, hoping that my strides would resemble something close to walking. I didn’t walk; I staggered. If there had been anyone out there to see me, they might have guessed that I was an intrepid member of the undead who’d set out to spread the infection to remote pockets of Alaska, or a courageous convalescent who set out to prove that he could, in fact, travel in the backcountry despite having previously suffered a crippling spinal injury.

I had been hiking, without pause, for what I think had been twenty hours. My mouth was parched, my shoulders sore from the backpack straps, and my feet felt like tenderized hamburger meat. I sat amid a buzzing galaxy of mosquitoes that plunged their proboscises through clothes and into flesh. I slapped body parts—arms, shoulders, neck, and buttocks—furiously and indiscriminately, performing a sort of demented dance, a madman’s Macarena. I felt the eyes of the grizzly following me everywhere. But each time I looked behind me, it was never there.

I had never experienced such misery. Now I could walk only for a few minutes at a time before collapsing. I began to wonder—with no shortage of trepidation—not
when
but
if
I’d make it back.

After one such collapse, I slept for half an hour on a pile of rocks, turtling my head into my sweatshirt to hide from the mosquitoes. When I awoke, I scanned the terrain. Something seemed different. I reached into my torn back pocket to retrieve my map; said, “Oh no!” because it wasn’t there; and sat down to scan the landscape once more.

I was maybe ten miles from where I began, except I had no idea where I was or where I was supposed to go. And because the sun never set, I couldn’t tell east from west, or north from
south. I had no food, no map, no matches, and no way to call Paul in Coldfoot or signal for help.

I thought of my mom and dad back home. They had no idea why I wanted to go to Alaska, yet they had been so supportive. How could I have been so irresponsible?! How could I bring so much pain to such sweet people?! I was alone in the wild, on the first hike of my life, and I was lost.

I had only one option: I looked toward the horizon, found a point that most looked like where I’d come from, and told myself that that was where I was going to go.

Because Coldfoot became enveloped in a blinding forest fire haze, the ranger decided to postpone his flight, and Paul started to talk to coworkers about organizing search parties.

But he didn’t need to. After twenty-eight hours of almost nonstop hiking, I’d find a plastic wrapper, then a footprint, then the Caterpillar tracks, and then Paul in the SUV waiting for me.

When I was on the hike, I told myself that I’d never hike again. Yet as the days went by and the pains in my feet subsided, I began to look back on my little adventure with a hint of fondness. When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories. My editor would make Blue Cloud a chapter, a turning point, the happy pinnacle of my life—that time I discovered in myself a sense of determination that I didn’t know I had in me. I went back to climb mountains in the Brooks again and again that summer.

Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have. At the end of the summer, Paul and I drove back to New York as fast as possible so Paul could enroll in community college and so I could finish up my last year as a fifth-year “super senior” at
UB and get my degree. (I signed up for a fifth year because not all my freshman-year credits from Alfred transferred over and also because I wasn’t in a hurry to leave school.) I came back confident and calm. My hair stopped falling out. The Tourette’s and baggy eyes and voices had vanished. Yet, with every passing day, I began to feel the pressure of all the debt weighing me down.

Halfway through the fall semester, my mother called me down to the kitchen table. In front of her was a scattering of old bills and manila envelopes. When I walked in, she stared at me for a moment and said, “Ken, we need to talk,” which usually meant that she needed to talk, and that the conversation would quickly become a theatrical dispute that would end with one of us storming out of the room and issuing the standard family rhetoric of accusing the other person of being insane, usually in the form of: “Are you insane?!” “You’re insane!” or “Oh my god, you’re insane!”

“We need to have a discussion about your loans,” she said gravely. “Do you realize how much money you’re going to have to pay back?”

“Mom, geez, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I told you. I’ll deal with it when I have to.”

My mom being in a fevered state of worry was nothing new to me. Because of her training as a nurse, throughout my adolescence I’d been subjected to one outrageous medical evaluation after another. I tried not to clear my throat in front of her because I knew she’d worry that I had whooping cough. I’d always wear a shirt around the house for fear that she’d diagnose one of my back pimples as a case of impetigo again. If I showed her an unusual lump on my scalp from a spider bite, she’d silently appraise my deformity, her skin would turn gray, her eyes would water, and she’d think,
Oh my god, my son has three months to live.
After so many misdiagnoses, I couldn’t help but become skeptical about all her misgivings. It became my instinct to counter her seriousness with playfulness, her pessimism with optimism, her insanity with inanity.

Unlike my mom, I’d hardly thought about the debt. I’d known that I had debt, of course, and that I’d one day have to pay it off, but that day always seemed so far away, as if it would take place in a second lifetime or a far-fetched futuristic world with flying cars, robots, and universal health care. I’d been putting off dealing with it from the moment I took out the loans. Debt, to me, was like death: I thought it was silly to worry about gloomy inevitabilities until I had to. My mother, though, couldn’t get my loans out of her head. And each time she’d bring them up, I’d shrug off her warnings and shove worries to the back of my mind, where I’d keep them until the day I really had to start dealing with them.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do!” she said. “Ken, you’re going to be $32,000 in debt. What are you going to do?”

“I told you what I’m going to do about my loans,” I said. “I’m going to fake my death. You already knew that.”

I was joking, but I really did—if just for a moment—consider the idea. I thought if I yanked out a few teeth, scattered them in my car, and burned it to a crisp before shoving it into Lake Ontario, then maybe the loan collectors would take me for dead. Without an identity, I’d have no choice but to melt into undocumented, under-the-table America—perhaps landscaping alongside Mexican itinerants or living on the second floor of a dingy pizzeria. Or maybe I could just skip the country and leave my debt behind. I’d go to some exotic archipelago, some lawless corner of Southeast Asia where I could embrace a life of crime. I’d start small, but over time I’d become kingpin of the region’s drug trade. I’d develop a paunch, wear silk shirts, and maintain a tan. I’d be merciful, yet ruthless—a benevolent dictator of sorts, keeping obedient villages safe but crushing those late to pay their tributes with an iron fist.

Unfortunately, my mother had cosigned the loans with me, which meant the burden of paying them off would fall on her if I disappeared.

“Do you realize how much $32,000 is?” my mom asked. “You have two loans. The interest rates are 4.75 percent. If you don’t
make your payments, the interest will keep rising and rising, and so will your debt. Do you know what that means?”

“God, Mom, I’ll be all right!” I said. “You’re acting crazy again. I told you not to worry about it.”

“I can’t help but worry about it!” she cried. “What are you going to do?! Really, Ken… What are you going to do?” Suddenly, she put her head down on the table and wept. It was one of the few times I’d seen my mother cry. I looked on in disbelief.

What
was
I going to do?

“Really, Mom… Please don’t worry. I’ll pay them off.”

Today, I realized, was the day I’d have to start dealing with my loans.

My debt, I decided, would be the next mountain I’d try to climb. It would be my Blue Cloud. It would be an adventure.

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

August 2005–May 2006 University at Buffalo

DEBT: $32,000

I
SPENT MY LAST YEAR
of college trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Throughout my education, despite becoming ever more aware of an unforgiving job market and my impending financial crisis, I thought that I’d be okay. More than okay, actually. I imagined that Fortune would take pity and bequeath to me, and only me, a wonderful job and modest salary. Maybe it would all go down at the Home Depot, when I’d be loading drywall onto the bed of a customer’s truck, and the customer—who happened to be a philanthropic billionaire (who, for whatever reason, did his home improvement shopping in the sketchy part of Niagara Falls)—would see in me some quality that no one else could, eagerly hooking me up with connections in Washington to become a congressman’s trusty aide or inviting me to rehabilitate distressed seals in his secret underwater dome.

But I didn’t know anyone with connections: no philanthropic
billionaires, no seedy uncles, no former employers. Maybe I didn’t know anyone, but I reassured myself that I was, in fact, an alluring job candidate. I could boast of a B.A. in history and English from a respectable college, a couple of internships under my belt, not to mention a long history of employment.
Who wouldn’t want to hire me?
I’d failed to realize, though, that my credentials were identical to those of thousands of other job-seeking grads. Not only that, but my résumé indicated to prospective employers that I was capable of little more than low-skill, low-responsibility work that no one else wanted. Before I was a lodge cleaner in Coldfoot and a cart-pusher at Home Depot, I’d been a paperboy, a supermarket cashier, a public skating rink guard, a fast-food cook, and a landscaper. Between my liberal arts degree and my history of crappy jobs, I’d somehow made it through the first twenty-two years of my life without learning a useful skill.

I could, however, write reasonably well. I was a film reviewer for UB’s student-run newspaper and, later, its Arts editor. Because of my experience with newspapers, I figured the print industry might be a good place for me to find my ideal job. So I applied to twenty-five paid internships (at $10 an hour) at newspapers across the country with dreams of becoming the next Bob Woodward, picturing myself as some investigative journalist working in a sweltering newsroom, bringing down corrupt politicians, and exposing the squalid working conditions of the city’s immigrant community.

In due time, though, all twenty-five of my applications were rejected. And when the last rejection letter came in, I was only a couple of months away from graduating. I had no other job prospects except for mending the rip in my orange apron and heading back to the Home Depot, where, at best, I might someday be promoted to a department managerial position.