Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (17 page)

Meanwhile, I’d been struggling to find a job of my own. After the voyage, I spent a month at my parents’ home filling out job applications so I could re-declare war on my debt after our summerlong cease-fire. I wrote a couple of freelance articles for
an alternative weekly newspaper in Buffalo that I had interned with in college, but after sixty hours of writing, and $120 for my services, it was clear to me that I’d have to find some other way to make money.

I found temporary work in Gulfport, Mississippi, as a corps member on an AmeriCorps trail crew called the Gulf Coast Conservation Corps (GCCC). For two and a half months, I’d get paid $250 a week to blaze trails, remove invasive species, plant trees, and clean up the mess Hurricane Katrina left two years earlier. While the pay was meager, room and board were provided, plus I could expect a $1,000 “education award” at the end of my term that could be put toward my loan.

Twenty of us lived in two gender-designated barracks that had been set up between two Little League baseball diamonds in the middle of a gang-ridden and mostly black ghetto in the city of Gulfport. The baseball diamonds and barracks were neat and austere, but the surrounding community was graffitied with a third-world grime and littered with a war zone’s squalor. Homes were falling over, lawns were covered with garbage, and ditches were brimming with beer cans and bottles of malt liquor. I’d figured the place was going to be a mess because of Katrina, but it was evident that the town had been in ruins long before the hurricane swept through. Upon viewing the devastation, I could hardly believe I was still in America.

When I met my fellow crew members, I felt like a camp counselor wrongly assigned to the role of camper. Except for the four team leaders, I was—at the age of twenty-four and with my bachelor’s degree—the oldest and most educated on the half white, half black crew. The rest of the crew was mostly in their late teens. Many had yet to receive their GEDs, several had kids whom they’d abandoned or were raising on their own, and others had dealt with or were dealing with alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression.

Lyle, eighteen, was a 350-pound white kid from the swamps who, despite his massive size, had been bullied all his life. He’d
never kissed a girl or driven a car, and he didn’t even know how to use a washing machine.

Grant, twenty-one, from a well-to-do family in Maine, was souped up on antidepressants that his father, also his psychiatrist, had prescribed to him.

Owen, twenty-two, thin and gangly, had been addicted to meth and had already done time. He was so poorly educated he didn’t even know who our president was.

Robert, nineteen, was a lean, vivacious black kid who had eighteen brothers and sisters, plus a child of his own.

Jacey, nineteen, was studying to get her GED and would be one of the many girls who’d get impregnated while at camp. She’d call Melinda, one of the crew’s single moms, a “muthafuckin’ bitch-ass hoe,” which—with the right tone—can be, and in this case was, a term of endearment.

I was the crew’s ascetic. After Coldfoot and the voyage, I was accustomed to an austere, rigorous, nearly possessionless lifestyle. I brought nothing with me except three sets of clothes, my tent, a sleeping bag, and a few books.

After we got back to camp from the trails, I’d do push-ups and run laps around the baseball fence. Most everyone else on the team chain-smoked cigarettes, smoked pot when the leaders weren’t looking, and squandered their paychecks on alcohol. At night, a new combination of corps members would get together in the concession stand to fornicate.

I fantasized about being back at college and around students who wanted to change the world and blaze happy, healthy futures for themselves. If I didn’t get out of Mississippi before long, I worried I’d be swallowed whole by my surrounding culture: I’d buy some property in the bayou, put up nineteen
NO TRESPASSING
signs, draw out one-syllable curse words into raspy haikus, and inseminate everything that moved. For too long I’d felt like a seed blowing through a desert. Unlike Coldfoot or Gulfport, a leafy green campus seemed like good soil in which I could plant myself and grow.

On weekends, I’d fill up my backpack with camping gear and walk across a log that had fallen over the murky brown Turkey Creek. There, I’d set up my tent on a bed of pine needles, surrounded by mammoth live oak trees that bore hundreds of thick, snarled, muscled arms, and listen to the creek gurgle onward to the Gulf.

Even in the winter months, Mississippi teems with life, located as it is along sweltering southern latitudes and beneath a nonstop succession of ocean-borne storms. One cannot leave the Gulf Coast region without an impression of the terrifying fecundity of the place or the unrestrained concupiscence of its inhabitants.

When in a Mississippi jungle, you feel as if you’re at the mercy of dark desires and ancient impulses. Despite unprecedented levels of pollution, cancerous suburban sprawl, and devastating natural disasters, the animals and insects still thrive in Mississippi. But not as much as the humans, the worst of all in Mississippi’s animal kingdom, who reproduce with as little forethought as the cicadas restlessly moaning for mates in the bayou.

Mississippi—with its sister Gulf Coast states not far behind—has the highest teen birth rate in the nation. Hammered onto pine trees on even the most desolate backwoods roads are signs advertising reduced-rate DNA tests. In the little bit of time I served with the GCCC, among the thirty members who came and went from our crew, eleven of them—yes, eleven!—either got pregnant or impregnated someone else.

In Mississippi, for the first time in my life, I’d become an object of attraction. Not only did one of the single moms start to court me, but a gaggle of Mississippi girls would lavish my “bootie” with compliments when I rounded home plate on my jogs. Owen told me his girlfriend’s girlfriend wanted to “get with me,” and while I was no doubt flattered, I politely declined all invitations, partly because I recognized that all the males were getting this sort of attention.

In Mississippi, everybody’s getting laid.

Because I’d been more or less single and celibate for years, I could identify with those sturdy, southern live oak trees that were among the few that Katrina had failed to yank from the earth. I knew what it was like to be alone—a forest of one—forever holding fast to the ground amid tempests of temptation.

I was again dedicated to my goal of paying off the debt, and I couldn’t let the lure of material items, alcohol, or girls cause me to topple, however tempting they were. I left the male barracks, took my tent out to left field, and slept in it every night to put space between the hordes and me.

Despite the low pay, I loved being out on the trail, wielding a pick-mattock, Pulaski, or ax for hours on end, carving lanes through logs that had fallen onto trails, delighting in the strain of muscles, my torso and arms lubricated by the quarts of sweat that flooded out of my pores, lumpy droplets trickling down my back like a procession of ants. In the midst of good, steady work, all conscious thought comes to a halt. Neuroses vanish as if they never existed. I was engaged in a constant state of sensory distractedness: the arc of the ax, the flying chips of the log, the sweet fragrance of minty pine needles. With distraction would come peace; during those moments, there was no more debt, no more aching desires, and work no longer felt like work but a happy engagement of mind and body that could be rightfully confused with the joy of all joys, the epitome of human existence.

We submerged ourselves nipple-high in swamps to drag out tires, cleaned the beer bottles out of Gulfport ditches, and walked through pine forests, pulling out rafters, appliances, and anything else Katrina had tossed there. Normally, I was engrossed with the work, though sometimes, in the jungle, I’d find myself distracted upon catching sight of Sami, a tomboyish nineteen-year-old crew member from Minnesota.

Like me, Sami kept mostly to herself. She was quiet and focused and one of our hardest workers. She’d be sawing off a branch that hung over the trail and I would steal a glance at the
cherry-colored hair cascading down her back in frenzied swirls. It was always, from want of a shower, frazzled, oily, lustrous, practically alive.
Just how I like it.
She was the very embodiment of all the female charms that so enchanted me: she had a pale snow-white complexion made ruddy by the sun, spattered with sun-browned country-girl freckles. She wasn’t manicured or groomed or dolled up; rather she was the dirty-kneed, smooth-muscled woman of the woods, a wood nymph who attracted suitors less with the artifice of makeup or the exaggeration of a Wonderbra, and more with an irresistible fertility, a delectable ripeness, an enamoring comeliness that made the earth tremble beneath me and set my loins aquiver. I wanted nothing more than to set down my ax, put my arm around her soft waist, and draw her against me. Maybe I’d stick my nose in the back of her hair and glory in the curls and smells. Maybe I’d kiss her sunhot shoulder and she’d turn around and we’d make gentle love on the warm forest floor.

She’d wear the same thing in camp every day: a baggy blue tee and an ill-fitting pair of jeans. Though the getup did nothing to accentuate her feminine features that other girls wouldn’t hesitate to flaunt, her approach turned me on far more, for it communicated to me something far sexier than curves and hips: It was her complete disregard for prevailing norms and up-to-date fashion. And that independence of mind and self-assurance thrust me into a state of constant, hopeless, agonizing, “I will kill to have her” desire.

My previous girlfriend was a Baptist girl from Buffalo. I was a sophomore in college, and she, a senior in high school who carried a full-sized eight-pound Bible in her purse that affected the way she walked. She was passionate and devoted. Not for me, of course, but for her god. To her, I was a mere momentary corporeal distraction, a mere blip on the timeline of her eternal soul—that one time she consorted with an unbeliever. How could I compete? God promised an afterlife, forgiveness, salvation. All I could do was turn clockwise on the gymnasium floor with her at her homecoming dance.

One night, I took her out on a date to get milkshakes at a McDonald’s. After successfully getting to first base in the parking lot, the sweltering summer heat and my pent-up longings and a sugar high made me take a desperate, fleeting glance at what wonders might exist on second. She, stricken by religious fervor and offended by my advances, began to describe Christ’s gruesome crucifixion in vivid detail, bursting into tears halfway through, announcing that my earthly desires and I were obstructing her “walk with God.” When I objected that I was doing no such thing (even though I was, in fact, trying to casually nudge God off her path and down the canyon walls), she muttered hopelessly, “You just don’t know how it feels to have Jesus inside of you…” After she broke up with me, I decided to steer clear of girls and sex and relationships for the remainder of my college life, if just to stay focused on my schoolwork and keep my sanity intact.

Yet now, after meeting Sami, I couldn’t help but reevaluate my policy. She was just so different, so unlike many of the girls I knew. She was more than just cherry hair and comely features. There was something complicated about her. Something complex. There was something about her that made me think she was one of the first full-fledged human beings I’d ever met.

She reminded me of Jane Eyre—the type of girl who might have, at an earlier age, clung to notions of chastity and temperance, proudly wearing a tattered governess’s dress, unconcerned about what others thought. She had a wide, cheery white smile and big brown eyes. In those eyes, I saw innocence, but I also saw fatigue. I could tell she carried with her some terrible burden from her past that she didn’t know how to shrug off.

Sami was my secret crush.

I spent three wonderful months in Mississippi and was prepared to leave to find work elsewhere, but after TJ, a Mississippian and one of the four team leaders, was fired (due in part to having been caught fornicating with a crew member in the shower), they promoted me to his leadership position.

I decided to sign up for another three-month term. Despite the low pay, I was still able to make my loan payments. And just like at Coldfoot, the free room and board were allowing me to save what little money I made. Plus, now that I was going to be a crew leader, I’d get health insurance, an additional $50 a week (boosting my weekly salary up to $300), and an extra $1,000 to pay back my loans. After three months in Mississippi, I’d paid off $2,000 of my debt, with $14,000 to go.

But it wasn’t just about the money. I had fallen for Mississippi, and I thought it would be good for me to assume my first-ever leadership position. Because of the newfound self-discipline that the voyage and the hard work on the trails had instilled, I didn’t think I’d have any problem obeying the one rule expected of us leaders: Don’t sleep with the crew members.

I started to get to know my fellow crew members and did my best to help them out. I knew from my dealings with Bob that to win their respect I’d never order but ask, and that I’d treat them all as equals.

I learned that they weren’t as hopeless as I’d once thought. And contrary to my first impressions, they all wanted to improve themselves. They were off the streets, and the hope they felt was palpable.

“All right, Lyle,” I said, “first things first.” I started with the basics. I taught him how to fold clothes and turn on a washer. While folding one of his shirts, I told him, in earnest, “You’re a good-looking dude. You just gotta lose a little weight.” I helped Robert with his math homework and drove him to his GED class every Wednesday. When Grant asked me to take him to the hospital to get more pills, I told him about my correspondence with Josh, which had been my therapy, and I suggested that he didn’t have to wash his feelings away with a white capsule. I set Owen up with an e-mail account and tried to get him to take his goal seriously about becoming a chef.

Every day, I took someone to the hospital, to get checked for STDs or if I found out that another female crew member was
pregnant. I drove them to get groceries, helped them apply to school and fill out job applications, and listened to their problems (which all seemed so much more ponderous than my own trifling, privileged worries). And I loved every second of it. The work was good and honorable, but to psychologically cope with all the horrors around me, I found myself becoming emotionally detached—detached so I could bear other people’s misfortunes. I didn’t have any time to think about my loneliness, my debt, or my future worries. I became a robot: I worked and ran and read and slept. It seemed as if it wasn’t so much the schedule that was ruling my life anymore but a self-imposed, rigid sentence of self-discipline that I was serving.