Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (7 page)

The day the summer crew arrived, we gathered by the river, built a huge fire from empty pallets and driftwood, and drank cheap whiskey straight from the bottle. Many of the workers from the previous summer had returned. There was Jordan, a thickset, dark-skinned thirty-year-old maintenance grunt who was born in India and raised in Alaska. He had twenty-two brothers and sisters (fifteen of whom were adopted) who’d all grown up in a tiny village to the south called Joy.

Ray, a dishwasher in his early thirties, was a Laotian American schizophrenic and alcoholic from Texas who lived in the room next to mine in the dormitory. At any hour of the day, I could hear him talking to himself through the walls in between swigs of Canadian Club. Every evening, in a drunken stupor, he’d kick open the hallway doors and sputter fake bullets that sprayed from a pair of invisible machine guns that he carried on each arm.

On the other side of my dorm wall was Avery, an eighteen-year-old waiter from the suburbs of Utah who spent the whole summer in the hazy daze of a marijuana high. Between him and Ray, Avery was the kinder, gentler mind-altered neighbor, whose guitar strums and bong bubbles canceled out the unnerving voices I’d hear coming from Ray’s head.

Then there was Kerno the carpenter—a spitting image of Popeye’s bearded, muscle-bound archnemesis, Bluto. Kerno brought with him his arsenal of automatic weapons, which he’d fire into a dirt mound behind camp.

Chad, a red-bearded thirty-three-year-old tour guide, was the much-loved, quick-witted Fonzie of camp and one of the few year-round Coldfoot residents. Behind the motel was the “dog lot,” which was home to his thirty Alaskan huskies that he’d mush in the winter.

Natalia, one of the few girls in camp, was a twenty-one-year-old
Ecuadorean student who worked as a lodge cleaner to make money for tuition. One day she knocked on my door in a white dress, asking if I wanted to practice my Spanish.

There were others in Coldfoot, but no one intrigued me more than an old man in his seventies. His name was James. He lived nearby and worked for the Bureau of Land Management, cleaning the outhouses on the highway. I’d spotted him walking across the camp in the early hours of the morning. He had a long, curly, white-as-death beard; a gaunt, wiry frame; and a spry, stilted gait. It amazed me that, for such a small town, I couldn’t find anyone who’d spoken with him. I’d only heard strange rumors that he ate nothing but bizarre organic substitutes and lived in a copse of spruce trees on the edge of camp in his 1980 Chevy Suburban.

It was my job to drive the tourists up the Dalton Highway on a six-hour van tour through the Brooks Range. The tourists had signed up for an “Arctic Mountain Safari,” but the name of the tour was more than misleading, considering that we didn’t get out of the van except to use two outhouses on the drive north. I’d worried that the tourists would be disappointed with the extent of their “safari”—perhaps they’d imagined their tour led by a knowledgeable outdoorsman in a wide-brimmed explorer hat who’d ward off fanged mammals and identify different species of moss on daring hiking expeditions. But, much to my surprise, no one was ever upset with the tour. By the time the tourists got to Coldfoot, they’d been herded around so much on cruise ships, buses, planes, and trains that being herded around in a van was nothing new.

When they arrived on Holland America or Princess Cruises tours, they would stagger off the bus, seldom knowing where they were or who’d brought them. Once, a frosty-haired lady in her eighties pursued me threateningly with her cane, screeching, “Where am I?!
They never tell me where I am!
” Many were, as another guide put it, “forklift fat”—the sort of obesity that might require heavy machinery in funeral plans. On more than
one occasion, I was asked to place my hands on a large Australian lady’s bottom so she could be pushed into the van.

On the van tour, I’d tell them about the history of Coldfoot, the habits of the arctic’s animals, and the geology of the mountains, which I’d read up on. We’d scan the hills and sometimes spot a caribou, but I’d always wonder:
Is this their idea of travel?
I thought real travel was about spontaneity and adventure. That sort of travel, though, was the last thing they wanted.

Yet I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them. Many only had a couple of weeks of vacation each year, and this tour was all they could afford or had time for. The retirees had worked hard their whole lives and no longer had the energy or strength to do more than this.

Two weeks after my first tour, I got a paycheck in the mail. I took a deep breath and opened it. It was for $300.

“Okay, not bad,” I said to myself. “Just $31,700 more to go.”

The season started slowly. In May, I was putting in a solid forty hours a week—mainly getting trained on how to guide a tour and oar a big blue raft. By June, I was off on my own, driving a fourteen-passenger white tour van up the Dalton, oaring a raft down the Koyukuk, and working a respectable fifty hours a week, which provided me with some much-desired overtime wages. By July, my workweek was up to sixty hours, and while I was happy to be bringing in the big bucks, I also began to mourn the loss of my free time, but I accepted it as a necessary sacrifice. By August, it was up to seventy. I wasn’t just guiding anymore; several workers had deserted camp, so I was now making meals in the kitchen, hastily assembling extra coworker tent cabins for the next season, and helping the cleaners catch up on turning rooms. Some days work started as early as 5
A.M.
and didn’t end till 11
P.M.
Alaska, which I’d once imagined as a refuge from the nine-to-five working world, turned out to be just as bad.

It feels almost blasphemous to admit hating work. It’s true that people often complain about working twelve-hour days, balancing two jobs, or suffering through double shifts, but it
seems our complaints are often just thinly veiled boasts about how busy our lives are, as if having no time for leisure, for a good night’s sleep, or to do the things we actually want to do is some virtuous sacrifice we should all strive to make.

I may not have admitted it to anyone else—for fear of sounding entitled, or ungrateful, or whiny—but I hated work. I hated waking up early, hated taking orders, hated spending the great bulk of my time doing something for somebody else, hated how the hours would go by, hated how the days would melt into one another.

I didn’t consider myself “above” work, but it just seemed so silly to have to work, perhaps for the next decade, and put all my earnings toward something as intangible, and clearly unprofitable, as my college education. And while I did think there was something crooked about the system—a system that charged unreasonable amounts of tuition to teenagers who only wished to better themselves and their society—I knew that I was responsible for taking out the loans and paying them back.

I despised having to work, now, more than ever, because my situation was so pathetic. After five years of college, two unpaid internships, and $32,000 of debt, I was just as unmarketable as I was as a teenager, doing the same sort of low-skill, low-responsibility, low-income work I’d been doing for years.

Although I was working for a wonderful company, with a wonderful group of people, my actual work didn’t appear to have any of the positive qualities of good employment: It wasn’t a way for me to climb the ladder to a better career; it wasn’t helping me grow or develop; I wasn’t spending my working hours basking in the warmth of job satisfaction by having spent my day making a useful product or providing a necessary service. I was in the tourism industry, so I was little more than a provider of luxuries and satisfier of desires. Ultimately, I was pointless.

I didn’t see work—at least my line of work—as a virtuous undertaking. Rather, I saw it as nothing but a penance for my sins, for the profligate decisions I had made as a clueless eighteen-year-old.
I thought of my job as nothing but frivolous toil—the only thing keeping me from living the free life I now dreamed of: of mountains and books and adventures and independence. I was ungrateful to have a job, yes, but I was grateful to have a life with which I might do better things.

I could have easily justified that I was lucky to even have a job unlike millions of other grads, or that I was better off than the twentysomethings who were starving, had AIDS, and were fighting a war somewhere in Africa, but I didn’t want to make “the best of a bad situation.” To make the best out of a bad situation seemed like an act of resignation. Instead, I embraced my bitterness and hatred and ungratefulness. Ungratefulness, I thought, was my only ticket out of debt and jobs like this.

And so, without time to visit the mountains or savor the books and lectures and higher things that kept me mostly sane in college, I relied on the blackout quantities of alcohol I’d lustily drink at weekly riverside extravaganzas—when we’d drink until we couldn’t think of work or debts or troubles anymore. In June, for my twenty-third birthday, one of the chefs, Karla, who’d given all the males in camp stripper nicknames (mine being “Kenny G String”), awarded me with a G-string she’d made out of velvet and muskrat fur that she’d acquired from a local trapper. After my eighth Miller Lite, egged on by a cheering crowd, I donned my present, wearing my G-string over my jeans like a washed-up arctic superhero. I can say from experience that when you wake up on a weekly basis with cottonmouth, a throbbing hangover, and a dead muskrat on your crotch, you can’t help but question the direction your life is headed in.

I became obsessed with destroying what I thought was most constraining me. The debt wasn’t a mere dollar amount; it was a villain that needed to be vanquished, a dragon that needed to be slain, a windmill that needed to be toppled. I thought of the debt as if it was the only thing keeping me from
really
living. It was the only thing on my mind. Nearly every dollar I made went toward my loans. I bought nothing and kept nothing in
the bank. I squealed with pleasure when I tortured it with payments, like a sadist plucking legs from a captured mosquito.

On the drive back to Coldfoot on the van tours, we would stop at Wiseman, the historic mining village just thirteen miles north of Coldfoot. In the 1930s, Wiseman was home to 375 Eskimos and white settlers, but today there are only 15 people there, living largely subsistence lifestyles: hunting moose, caribou, grizzlies, and Dall sheep; growing vegetable gardens; foraging for blueberries and cranberries; and creating their own electricity with solar panels, as well as with wind and diesel generators.

Many of the cabins—made of stacked birch logs—are still standing from Wiseman’s boomtown days. They are crowded by raspberry bushes or giant clusters of blue delphiniums. Rooftops are made of sod or shingled with old rusted tin oil containers or hidden under large solar panels. There are moose antlers hanging above doors; hunting caches, which looked like mini cabins on stilts; and vegetable gardens bursting with heads of lettuce and the greens of potatoes and carrots that would feed the townspeople for the long winter. My company paid one of the Wiseman locals to show the tourists his subsistence lifestyle.

Jack Reakoff was in his late forties, yet he didn’t look a day older than thirty-five. He had a sturdy, frontiersman’s carriage, and wore a necklace made of wolf teeth and a belt buckle made of Dall sheep horn. He’d lived in Wiseman ever since he was a boy and had grown up hunting, trapping, and fishing in the arctic’s woods and rivers. As a young man, he attended the University of Alaska at Anchorage for a semester to study biology but quickly realized that there was no better classroom or teacher than that which he’d just deserted: the great outdoors. He came back to Wiseman and raised a family, embracing the arctic and the subsistence lifestyle that he’d never desire to desert again.

Jack would lead the tourists around town and invite them into his two-room cabin. Inside were mounted heads of Dall sheep and a grizzly. The walls and ceiling were covered with
pictures of his family and maps of Alaska. The room smelled of soot, fried caribou, and body odor. Every day I’d listen to Jack tell the guests about his lifestyle. I was his secret pupil, learning everything there was to know about subsistence living in the arctic. His was the most northern garden in America. In it he grew hundreds of pounds of potatoes, cabbages, turnips, beets, kale, and carrots, which he’d cover with clear plastic during the cold summer nights. Underneath makeshift tarpaulin greenhouses, he grew zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers. He preserved his winter vegetables in his refrigerator, which was a hole in the floor of his cabin that remains 40°F year-round. He “killed” trees that had reached full maturity, and then harvested the wood on his snow machine years later when the logs were dry enough for the stove. He ran traplines and sold furs. He hunted and fished, and repaired his own machinery. To supplement his subsistence lifestyle with money, he did these tours with Coldfoot guests for an hour or two every day during the summer.

I was having my first man-crush.

I envied Jack’s lifestyle. It was the sort of lifestyle that makes a man self-reliant, intelligent, strong; a lifestyle in which no one ever had to think of the Dow Jones, the unemployment rate, punch cards, or bosses. Jack’s work and leisure, his toil and enjoyment, were one and the same thing. His work was his life, and his life was his work. Every day was a workday; every day was a vacation. And he wasn’t working in abstractions or pulling levers for some morally ambiguous corporation; his hands were in the dirt, occupied as he was with the duties of feeding his family and warming his home.

I could see that Coldfoot and Wiseman, as well as myself and Jack, were polar opposites. One town relied on trucks to bring food and fuel in from Fairbanks; the other created its own. One town had wage slaves; the other, people as free as people can conceivably be. Each town represented two types of living, two types of working. They represented the life I currently had to live and the life I wanted to live.

While I was getting paid plenty of overtime, $9 an hour was still my base wage, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake coming to Coldfoot. Perhaps if I’d looked harder, I could have found something that paid better and didn’t demand so much of my time. I was, however, able to pay the debt off quicker than I originally thought, partly because my mother had offered to put my high-interest bank loan ($17,000) on her interest-free credit card. (My mother had perfect credit, allowing her such a card.) This meant that, for this loan, I’d no longer be paying back a bank—just my mom. This arrangement was advantageous to me because the interest on this loan would no longer accrue, and it wouldn’t cost my mother a thing.