Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (10 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, if I’m still alive we should do something.”

Avery was merely craving attention, so I gave it to him. For three hours I helped him apply online to be an Alaska state trooper, which was his dream job. Of course, no police department would ever hire Avery; he was the sort of hippie cops
would love to come across at a peace rally so they could club an easy target over the head before flinging him face-first into the back of a riot van. I helped him apply anyway, as I was encouraged that at least someone in town was trying to improve himself.

Everyone else seemed to be decomposing: growing paler, sleeping longer, drinking more, and rarely, if ever, going outside. At first, winter merely brought gloom. Then madness.

The drifters—led by Lenny, Hal, and Casey—would get together each night, blare loud music in the dormitory, and drink hard liquor. Rumors of meth usage started to circulate around camp. At first, their bad habits were only mildly annoying and none of my business, but as winter wore on, things got scary. They started shitting on top of other workers’ cars, pouring water on the huskies, who slept outside, when it was as cold as–20°F, and taking off on drunken nighttime joyrides in the camp’s tour vans. Coldfoot no longer felt like a safe place to live.

“I’m literally worried about getting gang-raped,” said Abbey, one of the servers, who admitted this to me after I told her that I was concerned about getting shot by the suicide bullet of my depressed dorm neighbor because we slept against the same wall.

“The shit we have to worry about…” said Abbey’s boyfriend, Tom, shaking his head morosely.

On one of the drifters’ drunken joyrides to Wiseman, they forgot to turn onto the Dalton and ran the van off a cliff and onto the frozen Koyukuk River. Avery and I thought that this was the end of our troubles because we were sure they’d be fired on the spot, but the camp manager had no choice but to keep them on. Camp would have to be shut down if it lost a fourth of its workforce.

The truckers were hardly any better. They’d strut their beer bellies into the café with a cowboy swagger and settle down in their section of the café where Fox News was on the TV at all hours. A few years back, under different management, the
truckers were said to have coaxed the waitresses to their trucks for more generous tips. The saying went: “The waitresses would service them in the restaurant, then in the cab.”

The café was haunted by the likes of “Big Dan,” the fattest, most intimidating man I’d ever seen, whose arms were barnacled with open wounds; Pablo the Adulterer, whose every order seemed to insinuate something more; and Wesley, one of the highway’s twitchy drug dealers, who’d hurriedly and apologetically cram Avery’s latest stash into waitresses’ aprons.

They were all so fat, and obscene with the waitresses, and picky, whining about “weak coffee” and “runny eggs,” complaining that we didn’t sell chicken-fried steak like other truck stops, and moaning that the food was making them sick, as if their usual fare of biscuits and gravy layered with bacon was supposed to make them feel healthy and chipper. Too lazy to pull over on their long hauls, they’d reputedly urinate into empty pop bottles at the wheel and then hurl the golden grenades onto the unsullied arctic landscape—a flagrantly insolent yet uncharacteristically dexterous skill that both appalled and impressed me. As their cook, I’d purposely hasten the onset of heart disease by slathering an extra coating of mayonnaise on greasy cheeseburgers and overloading their dinner plates with hillocks of golden-brown Tater Tots.

I’d come from a college campus populated with smart, ambitious, and well-meaning students and professors to this: a lawless bazaar of meth heads, alcoholics, and assholes who had me questioning the ideal of universal suffrage and who were compelling me to embark on my first foray into misanthropy.

I found it soothing to wash dishes, a winter duty that typically fell to the waitresses. The waitresses, happy to let me relieve them of their duties, were eager to reward me with a cut of their tips. I now made about $10 a day, raising my tip collection, over time, to $4,000, which I decided I’d keep for myself and not put toward the debt.

Natalia, one of the lodge cleaners who worked at Coldfoot during the summer, e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to visit her at her family’s cow farm in Ecuador. Between the winter doldrums and itchy feet, I bought a plane ticket on a whim, spending half of my tip money on a three-week vacation. It was a pleasant trip: I petted llamas, saw my first-ever jungle, and drove through the Andes, and in honor of my visit, her family named a newborn
vaca
after me, calling it “Keña.” But I felt guilty for spending money on something other than my debt. The plane ticket was a luxury purchase. I felt as if I’d cheated somehow; that I’d cut some corner that I promised myself I wouldn’t cut. Worse, the Ecuador trip made me realize that I couldn’t have “real” adventures so long as I had monthly debt payments to deal with. Instead, I’d have to sandwich my travels into three-week vacation blocks sandwiched in between lifetimes of work, just like the tourists who came up to Coldfoot. I wanted nothing more than to stay in South America. The jungle, the city squalor, the adobe huts—how it all captured my imagination. I wanted to keep moving, hopping from country to country, never stopping, always moving.

When I flew back to Coldfoot it was December 22, the winter solstice—the darkest day of the year. I sat in my room, alone, with a stack of books that I had no desire to read, beset by a constant, nagging, raging restlessness. Lying in my bed, I felt my skin crawl and muscles tingle. My whole body felt like it had been powdered with itchy pink insulation. I wanted motion. I wanted to move, move, move. Yet I was hemmed in. Stuck in Coldfoot. Stuck in this room. Stuck with all these miserable people. I looked out my window, glazed in ice, and all I saw was winter black. The winter blackness would cause the Eskimos to experience something called
perlerorneq,
or “the weight of life.” They’d run out of their dwellings naked into the snow or eat dog feces. While it hadn’t come to that, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything more than lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. From there, I listened to the winds howl against the aluminum siding
for hours, interrupted once by a thud against one of the other dorm walls, a “Yee-haw!,” and a flurry of hillbilly high-fives.

In ways, we Coldfooters were similar to the Coldfooters of a century before. Like the miners, some of us were seeking fresh starts and new beginnings. Some of us came to the arctic for riches, others for glory. Some wanted adventure; others, refuge from an industrialized world. Many hoped to leave their troubles behind so they could reinvent themselves. But more often than not, we, like the miners, brought with us what we’d meant to leave back home. The people around me—some with genuine hopes of personal reformation—brought with them the drugs and alcohol and apathy that had plagued them for years. The town of Coldfoot was named for all the miners who’d come up there with sincere dreams and noble aspirations, but turned back home when it got too tough. They got cold feet.

I told myself that I was different, that I was nothing like these addicts and alcoholics. But in a way, I wasn’t much different. I felt just as weak. I was thousands of miles from home, but I felt as contained as ever. I lived nearly the same sheltered, scheduled life I’d lived back in New York. And without the return of the sun to announce a new day, each twenty-four-hour period melted into the next. My life was an amorphous blob of flipping burgers, mopping floors, and sleeping. I was in a dream that I couldn’t wake up out of. I was lost in a forest whose canopy concealed the sun, wandering in circles. Somehow I’d traveled four thousand miles yet had managed to bring with me the repetitious and ordered and cubicled life that I’d wished to leave behind. While I’d gotten myself out of the suburb, I couldn’t get the suburb out of me.

My life was so monotonous, so goalless, so pathless. What was my purpose? To service truckers who worked for the oil industry? To pay off my debt? To work for years and years at shitty jobs and be thankful that I, unlike other people, had a job, or at least one not quite as shitty as theirs? I wanted more than anything to have something to work toward and strive for.
Something important. I longed to stop muddling around and dedicate my life to some high and noble purpose that would give it clear meaning.

I now understood why my old Home Depot coworkers looked the way they did: bored, tired, zombie-eyed. My life, like theirs, was so uniform, so one-dimensional, so unadventurous. I spent forty hours of my week doing things that didn’t teach me anything new, that provided no variety, that tested no creative faculties. As a burger flipper, I was a specialist, a cog, an insect, hardly the human being that Jack in Wiseman was.

My journal was mostly blank. I wrote only about how I had nothing to write about. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt any emotion in its extreme. How can you feel anything when every day is the same? I felt nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried or laughed or got steaming mad. It almost got to the point where I’d forgotten what these felt like. Give me anger and give me tears, but never this blank nothingness, this gnawing neutrality.

As expected, kitchen work was kitchen work, but occasionally, when the rare group of winter tourists made it up to Coldfoot, I had the good fortune of getting to lead an “Aurora Tour.” On the tour, I’d drive them in the van to Jack’s house in Wiseman, where we’d view the aurora borealis—the northern lights.

On my first Aurora tour, which I led in early January, I put on every heavy article of clothing I owned: a parka and a logger’s hat that a departing coworker had sold to me for $20, a set of thermal underwear my mother had mailed to me, as well as gloves, wool socks, and bunny boots, which are large white boots made for polar excursions that Josh had found abandoned when we’d worked at the Yukon River Camp.

Coldfoot is one of the best places on earth to view the aurora. The camp sits directly under the auroral oval, which is where solar winds collide with and excite atmospheric atoms and molecules that cause a display not to the north—where most people see them—but directly overhead. Tourists, many from
Japan, would come up to Coldfoot during the winter months to see them.

I drove the tourists twelve miles up the road to Wiseman, where there were no outdoor lights to obstruct the views. Because the aurora would sometimes show itself for only a couple of minutes, the tourists would wait in Jack’s cabin, where they stayed warm and drank hot cocoa while I stood outside waiting for it to appear. When it finally appeared, I’d run to the cabin, open the door, and yell for everyone to get out as quick as they could.

In all my winter gear, I managed to stay fairly comfortable in temperatures as cold as–40°F. I’d lie in the snow, looking up at the sky, waiting for the aurora to unfurl.

Nowhere had I ever seen a sky so full of stars. From my suburb in Niagara Falls—for the first twenty-three years of my life—I could make out only a few faint twinklings in the smoggy, light-polluted skies. But here, the stars gushed across the clear, clean arctic sky, a Gulf Stream of light that illuminated the rounded snowcaps on the Wiseman cabin roofs, making them look like squat mushrooms.

I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?

We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this.
But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

A pale green band appeared. It inched across the sky, a luminescent caterpillar slowly nibbling its way to the eastern horizon. Then several bands of light materialized—all parallel to one another—making it look as if the firmament wore a celestial comb-over. Those pale bands began to pulse. One ball after another would move down the green bands like a family of rabbits being digested by a python. And suddenly the aurora bloomed into full color. The sky lit up with spumes of reds, pinks, purples, and blues that swooped, twisted, and curled into each other. There was no sense, no order, no logic to the aurora’s movement. It moved wildly and swiftly, changing into a different shape from one moment to the next. It was a glowing, throbbing, sashaying curtain of color, a Rorschach test that looked like whatever you wanted it to look like: a heavyset grizzly, a woman’s hips, a highway climbing hills. The aurora was a powwow of ancestral spirits—writhing apparitions, conjured from the depths of a village bonfire. It was a desert storm, a million individual particles of light whipping over dunes in patterns that no human mind could comprehend or computer-generate. The aurora is alien and unworldly, but it does not frighten or flabbergast; it is a tranquilizer that sprinkles down onto its onlookers an opiate from the heavens. It puts you at ease. After a few oohs and aahs, Jack, the tourists, and I all turned still and silent, our heads tilted upward to space.

I was bearing witness to an ancient ritual that I felt I’d seen in a previous lifetime. I was being reacquainted with the images processed by a million eyes before me, reveling in the privileges of the great human experience. Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log? The statues, the paintings, the
epic poems, the things we buy, the homes we strive to attain, the great cities and timeless monuments. In time, they’ll all be gone. And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the world will be forgotten, carried away like crumpled leaves from autumn limbs. Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.