Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (6 page)

Somehow my brilliant friend Josh (my freshman roommate at Alfred) found himself in a similar situation. We’d kept in close contact over the years, sending e-mails to each other on an almost daily basis.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
April 30, 2006

Subject:
FUCKING JOB SITUATION

At the moment, my job search is the inescapable kismet of my existence. I heard back from both my interviews—both the predicted response. I probably sent out 5–7 apps in the past week, and have a total of 10 out right now. I wouldnt be surprised if I heard back from none of them. My ideal coaching/teaching job in Connecticut filled without even a word back from them. On my knees with my lips puckered, I sent another email asking to be reconsidered for the position. I’ve considered doing AmeriCorps, which after a term includes an educational award, but unfortunately I’d be unable to live on that sort of money due to my debt. Thats fucking pathetic. But I’ll manage to pay my student debt one way or another.

Josh and I had known each other since we were six. We became best friends in the eighth grade for no better reason than our mutual interest in street hockey and video games. Our friendship began to develop at the age of seventeen, when we started e-mailing each other practically every day, using the recently discovered Internet to trade pictures of nude women. But over time, our e-mails became more intimate and substantive. Our subject matter expanded to politics, religion, worries, dreams, anything and everything. We didn’t hold back. The more embarrassing, the more personal, the more self-admonishing—the stuff that a person feels most inclined to bottle up—was the very stuff we were most eager to share. Our e-mail correspondence was an interactive diary of sorts, a free therapy session, a cleanly scrubbed window through which we could view another human’s soul.

Except for Josh’s sometimes volatile temper and my tendency to revel in delusions of grandeur, we were incredibly similar, even more so now because the e-mails had a conforming effect. We were both liberals, shamelessly self-deprecating, and disdainful of school. In high school, we were losers, but because
we were such boring losers, we were unworthy of the ridicule with which our betters honored our fellow, but more colorful, social outcasts. On weekend nights, we’d play computer games on the Internet together, commanding bit-sized armies till dawn while the rest of our classmates got high, drunk, and laid.

While we wanted girlfriends throughout our adolescence, we were both held back by several debilitating flaws. I was so awkward with girls you’d think I had spent my childhood locked in a damp basement; so unassertive that, on my high school football team, I let another player take my starting position as a defensive end merely because he wanted it; and so timid that our government and politics teacher once pulled me aside before class to ask me to speak, just so he could hear what my voice sounded like. Josh’s drawbacks were more physical. He was unnaturally hirsute, shaving off a unibrow daily, coming to terms with random patches of back hair that escaped the reach of his razor, and contending with ass hair so long that its length—as he despairingly put it in one of his e-mails—could be curled “2–3 times around my finger.”

Josh, though, had more than his fair share of redeeming qualities. He hated high school as much as I did but got high grades effortlessly. He had a gift for logical thinking that would make him, years later, the champion of the World Series of Euchre (a strategic card game popular in the Midwest and western New York). In college, Josh excelled, graduating with a 3.83 GPA and Phi Beta Kappa honors. He was the top runner-up for his senior class’s Most Outstanding Student award, and his professors would cite his work in their own papers, one of them calling Josh the “most impressive student I’ve had the pleasure to teach.” He was an idealist, fascinated as he was with the history of oppressed peoples in the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, African American civil rights movement, and today’s gay rights movement. He was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
as Arendt’s words had shown him how corrupt governments are empowered by a complacent citizenry. He had
dreams of joining the Peace Corps so he could help the poor and sick. It seemed he was destined for greatness.

Yet despite all the honors, accolades, and good intentions, Josh was in the same situation as I was. And even though Alfred gave him scholarships, his education still ended up costing him. He left Alfred with a B.A. in history and political science along with $55,000 in student loans.

After four years of school, he had no better idea about what he should do with his life than I did. So he did what many clueless young people do: He went back to graduate school to be part of a fully funded history Ph.D. program at the University of Delaware. But after one year—between second thoughts about grad school and worries about the interest that was stealthily accruing on his loans (which had leaped to $58,000)—he dropped out of school to find work.

Josh and I were nothing out of the ordinary. Like us, many students had spent their years in college thinking they’d get that well-paying, planet-saving job, even if they’d heard horror stories from recent underemployed grads. Those jobs, of course, no longer exist (if they ever did). By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn’t even require a degree. There are 365,000 cashiers and 318,000 waiters and waitresses in America who have bachelor’s degrees, as do one-fifth of those working in the retail industry. More than 100,000 college graduates are janitors and 18,000 push carts. (There are 5,057 janitors in the United States who have doctorates and professional degrees!)

I’d heard of people who’d spent years, decades, their whole lives (!) paying off their debts, working eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, decades, lifetimes, epochs!

Before Alaska, I’d figured that I, too, was destined to be one of them. As I approached midlife, I’d begin to crave a red sports car or an affair to compensate for the youthful longings that I’d put on hold in my twenties. My life would be so monotonous and one-dimensional that I’d resort to aberrant role-playing sexual fantasies, delving into monthly feasts of feet, fetters, and fetishes behind my wife’s back at “insurance conventions.”
While hunched over reports, memos, and files, or in attendance at a grueling series of training sessions on diversity, sexual harassment, and office injury prevention, I’d remind myself that it will all be worth it when the mortgage is paid off and I can cash in and retire, finally taking to the life of the road, except now with an RV the size of an aircraft hangar and a prostate the size of a peach.

When I pictured my future self, I thought about my old coworkers and friends at the Home Depot: sad, tired, saggy-eyed souls who’d spend forty hours a week doing things they hated at a place they all wanted to burn down. Some were stuck because they had debts of their own, because they needed the health insurance, or because they needed the money to feed their kids. But it seemed they weren’t all bound by these external constraints. Most were just too scared to leave. They tolerated the daily drudgery of work because dealing with daily drudgery was easier than quitting and doing something truly scary: sailing into unknown waters in pursuit of a dream.

I was different from them, I thought. Maybe I wasn’t a year ago, but something in me had changed last summer in Alaska. I remembered my drive with Paul across Canada and how we felt like we could live our whole lives that way. The wandering life wasn’t a ladder leading up an office hierarchy; it was a web of intersections that presented its wayfarers with U-turns, entrance ramps, and highway exits: chances to change the direction of their lives whenever they so pleased.

I thought I was made to live such a life—a free life: hopping trains, hitching rides, climbing mountains, traveling, wandering… I’d always felt uncomfortable when someone asked me what I wanted to be. But now I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted the sensations I felt atop Blue Cloud and in the Brooks and on that drive to Alaska. I wanted to be a tramp.

I’d toil in Career World as long as I had to, but the minute my debt was paid off, I’d be gone. I’d tunnel my way under the businesses and institutions and corporations of the “real world” and
come out, on the other side, with my body unshackled and soul unspoiled.

My goal was simple and straightforward: get the fuck out of debt as fast as humanly possible.

With graduation approaching and having no better idea about what to do for a job, I gave Coldfoot Camp a phone call. I’d heard a rumor that one of the tour guides wasn’t coming back next summer, so I asked the camp manager if I could have the guide’s job and let out a deep, thankful sigh when he said I could.

While the decision to go back to Alaska was made more out of desperation than desire, I justified that Coldfoot might be an ideal situation for paying off the debt. The nearest shopping center, after all, was 250 miles away (eliminating all temptations to buy stuff), there was no cell phone reception (making a phone plan unnecessary), workers got free room and board (thus eliminating food, rent, and utility costs), and my boss told me I now had the opportunity to make tips. If I stayed in Coldfoot for longer than a couple of months and flew up there rather than wasting lots of money on vehicle and transportation costs, then maybe—just maybe—I could take a chunk out of my debt, even though I’d only be making $9 an hour.

Despite the remote setting and low pay, I thought that getting rejected from newspaper internships and being forced to go back up to Coldfoot was serendipitous, a happy accident of sorts.

Tour guide.
I liked the ring of it.

“I’m going to be a tour guide,” I told my parents with a hint of pride.

“Oh, no you’re not,” they said, unimpressed. “You’re going to get a real job.”

But there were no real jobs, and it was too late anyway. Besides, I was excited about Coldfoot. There’d be no office cubicle for me. I’d be giving tourists van tours along the Dalton Highway and rafting trips down the Koyukuk River. I imagined
myself leading intrepid guests through rigorous terrain, navigating through rapids, and dodging rock avalanches in the tour van on treacherous mountain passes. The remote setting, the adventurous nature of the job, and the small business that I’d work for—I hoped—would allow me to enjoy some semblance of freedom, despite being hamstrung by debt. Or that was the plan, at least.

I graduated on a May afternoon. When the director of ceremonies ended her speech, I had no desire to triumphantly fling my graduation cap into the air as a gesture of my newfound freedom. There was nothing liberating about leaving college: I’d ended one series of obligations only to enter into another. I looked with fear and uncertainty at the long road ahead.

The very next day, I hopped on a plane headed to Alaska.

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

Summer 2006—Coldfoot, Alaska

DEBT: $32,000

I
F YOU WERE TO SMOOTH
your hand over the arctic’s contours, your palm would roll over smooth green hills, your nails would claw into moist fields of moss and sedge, and your fingers would run through bristly spruce groves. But you’d likely pause for thought when your fingertip landed on Coldfoot—a grotesque, relationship-ending mole, a protuberance that seems out of place on the arctic’s otherwise unblemished body.

Today, Coldfoot is little more than a tire shop, a truckers’ café, a small post office, a family-run bush plane air service, a ranger station, and, of course, the fifty-two-room motel that Paul and I cleaned the previous summer. Upon opening the doors to their rooms, the tourists—depending on their disposition—will either laugh good-naturedly or mutter obscenities about the austere accommodations: the sarcophagus-sized showers, the cigarette-burned carpets, the paper-thin wood-paneled walls, and the Nixon-era psychedelic-orange bedspreads.

The buildings, spread out and sprawled at strange angles, look like they’ve been haphazardly dropped from the sky. Surrounding
them are the rusted relics of the town’s industrial past: ramshackle mining equipment, abandoned trailers, derelict trucks. The motel and café are separated by a large, muddied, potholed parking lot where the semis—when parked parallel to one another—look like packages of frankfurters. The café, built in the 1980s by truckers who dropped off their empty packing crates, has a certain degree of charm, but doesn’t exactly cancel out the camp’s other industrial eyesores.

Indian and Eskimo tribes had roamed across the Brooks Range for thousands of years, but never were there permanent towns in the arctic until the Alaskan gold rush. In 1898, Coldfoot became one of many boomtowns where gold miners—too late to be among those who gathered the gleaming bounties of the Klondike—set out from to find mines in remote pockets of Alaska.

At its height, Coldfoot was home to seven saloons, a gambling hall, two roadhouses, a post office, and ten prostitutes. But by 1912—after all the gold had been mined—the miners had disassembled the cabins and transported the logs 17 miles upriver to a new town called Wiseman, which is still standing today.

Coldfoot remained deserted until the mid-1970s, when the oil industry built a camp there to house workers who’d piece together the Alaskan pipeline, which stretches 800 miles from the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s northern coast to Valdez on Alaska’s southern coast. To build the pipeline, the oil industry also built a 416-mile dirt road called the Dalton Highway that connected the city of Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. Coldfoot, situated halfway in between, was an ideal spot for a truck stop and is, today, one of the very few places where there are people year-round in the Alaskan arctic.

During the busy summer tourism season, Coldfoot’s population triples to thirty-five. Typically, the crew is made up of college students and recent grads who work to pay tuition or their debts, but there are also a few middle-aged, carny-like drifters
who make a life out of seasonal work, jumping from camp to camp every few months.