Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (30 page)

They weren’t, though. Every May, it’s as if Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and companies like them position a giant vacuum at the end of Duke’s and other elite schools’ commencement stages, sucking up many of its cap-and-gowned grads to be emptied out on Wall Street.

Reading sixteenth-century French poetry, suffering through Kant, and studying the finer points of the Jay Treaty may seem to be, on first appearance, completely, utterly, irrefutably pointless, yet somehow in studying, discussing, and writing about these “pointless” subjects, the liberal arts have the capacity to turn on a certain part of the brain that would otherwise remain shut off—the part of our brain that makes us ask ourselves questions like: Who am I? What’s worth fighting for? Who’s lying to us? What’s my purpose? What’s the point of it all? Perhaps many students would rather not be irritated with these questions, yet being compelled to grapple with them, it seems, can make us far less likely to be among those who’ll conform, remain complacent, or seek jobs with morally ambiguous employers.

Some students who enroll in business and vocational programs don’t get the chance to ponder such questions. After four years of creating models and punching numbers, they often leave college with a startling unwillingness (or inability) to ask themselves necessary ethical questions. And when students go to school for the sole purpose of getting careers and making fortunes, the degrees they leave with may no longer be flimsy rolls of parchment but dangerous weapons. More and more, I started to believe what Desmond Bagley said: “If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.”

When I was applying for admission to Duke, I had a ludicrous vision of what my education would be like. I figured Duke would be where students questioned everything, dreamed up radical and revolutionary ideas, and reevaluated our economic and social institutions. And while I was getting some of that from my liberal studies courses, I learned that the consumer-capitalist model not only goes unchallenged in most university curricula but that it’s quite literally taught. The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them.

I didn’t know why all this bothered me so much. Why did I care how other people lived their lives? Did it really matter whether they went into debt or worked for Goldman Sachs? What did any of this have to do with me? Maybe I shouldn’t have cared, but I couldn’t stop myself from caring. Maybe it was just that I didn’t like to see lives squandered the same way I hated to see good food thrown away. Maybe I thought they’d be happier if they got off the fast track to careers and out onto the meandering river to nowhere in particular. Maybe I felt this would be a better, smarter, more democratic world if we had more poetry-loving citizens than money-hungry careerists. Or maybe I was just lonely.

I decided I needed to connect with someone. Someone who cared nothing for the career-obsessed future, only the passionate warm-bodied present. I figured I ought to find some middle-aged divorcée with whom I could have a fling—someone who’d just emerged from a rocky, abusive relationship; someone off campus who couldn’t care less about Duke and debt and careers. In a moment of desperation, I scanned the “women seeking men” ads on Craigslist for the first time in my life.

I could just picture it: Things would get off to a promising start. We’d meet up at a coffee shop, and she’d be delighted to have found a symmetric, disease-free student—a passably attractive young man who wanted nothing more than to lavish
her aged, though alluring, body with compliments and caresses. (
Finally a man who’s got his shit together,
she’d think.)

The romance in the air, however, would turn fetid when I’d have to sheepishly present my “home” to her.

“Honey, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she’d say, shaking her head. “This is just my luck.”

“Hold on, hold on,” I’d say. “Have you ever heard of a guy named Thoreau?”

“Lord,” she’d say, scolding the sky, “if there’s an able-bodied man with a job left on earth, you’re sure doing a good job hiding him from me.”

It was a bad idea. Ad titles like “I need a man who can satisfy me” were asking for more than I could offer anyway.

I spent every moment of every day alone. I played basketball alone. I watched movies alone. I sat in the library alone. If I could have afforded it, I’d be the guy in the cafeteria eating alone. When the library closed, I’d go to a classroom in a quiet building that was open 24/7. There, I’d blare loud music on my computer and dance to Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel” alone.

And then, abruptly, I had a guest in the van.

I heard a tinkling of silverware, a crinkling of plastic bags. I knew exactly what this meant.

There is a mouse in my van.

For the next eight hours, I could do nothing but tightly seal all orifices and eye the ceiling where I heard it (or them) running to and fro. In the morning, after only a few hours of sleep, I, exhausted, noticed little black pellets—a third the size of Tic Tacs—scattered everywhere: across my floor, atop my storage container, and—in more concentrated quantities—inside my waste basket and unwashed pots.

I should have noticed the pellets the previous day, but I had probably dismissed them as remnants of other foods I’d eaten, like the meteor showers of rye bread and cracker crumbs that had sprinkled from my lips to the floor.

I tried to forget about it. I’m used to squalor, I reminded myself. Why should I let a little rodent ruin my night?

Yet I couldn’t stop myself from worrying about it. I imagined one of the bolder members of the colony slinking into my sleeping bag at night to tour my body like an explorer charting an exotic peninsula. Perhaps I’d come back to the van the next day to see that, upon making use of my food, they’d multiplied tenfold. Swarms, several layers thick, would be writhing libidinously in a gelatinous orgy. There’d be unrestrained fornication, mothers would eat their offspring, and several of the more acrobatically inclined would twirl on coat hooks and scamper up my hanging partition.

On the second night of the invasion, as I was just about to fall asleep, it hit me. I had cereal the previous morning. Were those cracker seeds at the bottom of my cereal bowl or were they…? Oh no.

I think I ate mouse shit.

The next day, I threw out food the mouse had been in, bought several mousetraps, and slathered them in peanut butter.

But it didn’t take the bait. I could hear it scurrying in my walls and ceiling. I lay there listening, nervously darting my eyes toward each rustle, scrape, and squeak. I could see the impression of its feet in my ceiling upholstery. It was everywhere. Running back and forth, front to back, side to side. What the hell was it doing? What grand schemes did it have in mind? Its diligence was terrifying.

At one point, in a fit of anger, I stomped my boot against the ceiling from end to end in hopes of tormenting it out of the van. Then I got out my frying pan and did the same.

This time it was beneath me. I saw it on my floor. It turned into a dart of fur, flying up into a crack in the ceiling upholstery. I had it cornered. The ceiling upholstery fluttered desperately. I whacked away with my frying pan until it stopped.

I was losing sleep from the mouse and an overabundance of schoolwork. I was doing MRI studies multiple times a week
and tutoring at the elementary school almost every weekday. I felt like I was beginning to revert to the bad habits of my undergrad years. I stopped working out at the gym, and I even spent a couple of dollars on coffee to help me pull all-nighters.

In the library, my head started throbbing. Menopausal hot and cold flashes were making the hairs on my arm rise and fall like time-lapse footage of flowers responding to the sun. I became dizzy and delusional.

I zigzagged back to the van and pulled the sleeping bag over my sweaty brow. What had done this? My unwashed fork? The month-old bottle of squirtable butter? The mouse turds?

I positioned my wastebasket next to my bed and christened it with a few introductory heaves—a mere preamble to the story that would follow. My throat, like a fire hydrant uncorked by a group of overheated inner-city juveniles, discharged the entirety of my stomach’s contents in one impressive burst. Unsure if I was feeling better, I plopped my sweat-soaked head on my bed. A heavy rain began to fall. Near the back of my van, where the water would pool on the roof, I looked up at a small nickel of wetness in the ceiling upholstery that slowly grew to a pancake’s diameter. Then the rainwater began to pitter-patter on the back of my thigh.

What am I doing?
I thought.

I was sick and lonely. There was a hole and quite possibly a dead mouse in my ceiling. I wanted the van to show me how to live. But it seemed like I was missing several essential ingredients. And living in a van wasn’t some sort of model of living that I could use to show people how to live more sustainably. While I didn’t go out much, I was still driving a vehicle that guzzled gas. I shopped, not at farmers’ markets, but at large, inexpensive supermarkets that paid their workers poorly. I outfitted the van with products from Walmart.

I found that I couldn’t do without people the same way I could do without luxuries and material comforts. I thought of Thoreau and how he called the “neighborhood of man” around him “insignificant.”

Bullshit, I thought. He said that he communed with pine needles and dewdrops, hardly mentioning that he constantly had visitors, or that his family and friends were just a short walk away. I thought that if he knew real solitude—not knowing anybody, not being able to talk to anybody, and not having anyone to relate to—then he wouldn’t have written such nonsense.

— Day 115 of Vandwelling Experiment —

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

SAVINGS: $1,771

A
FTER VOMITING WHAT FELT
like half my body weight, I laid my clammy head on the bag of winter clothes that I used for a pillow.

Even though no one was there to see me, I felt embarrassed. It was a pitiful scene. I was lying in a van half-naked. Next to the bed was my wastebasket, full of creamy sewer-green vomit. I had no one to help me. The nearest bathroom was a quarter mile away. There might be a mouse carcass in my ceiling.

I couldn’t help but bring my whole experiment into question.

I woke up groggy the next morning but in far better shape. It was a weekend, so my parking lot was empty, giving me the privacy I needed to dump my wastebasket’s contents under an arborvitae tree behind the van. When I stepped back inside the van, I got a whiff of something sour, sweaty, and moist, reminding me of a sopping-wet bag of hockey equipment.

I palmed my ceiling like a mime in a box, worried that I’d come across a bump, which I sure enough did. I donned a pair
of gloves, lifted the upholstery, pulled out the flattened mouse carcass, and threw it under the same tree.

I cleaned out the rest of the van from top to bottom. I swept out the crumbs and mouse turds. I scrubbed the dried tomato paste off the top of my storage container, and I put my pot, pan, and cereal bowl into a bag that I’d take to campus to wash in one of the bathrooms. I shoved all my dirty clothes and bedsheets into my foldable laundry hamper, which I hauled to the Laundromat across the street. It was too hot to stay in the van, so I brought a tarp to East Campus and lay on it under an oak tree, hoping the sunshine and fresh air might hasten my recovery. Later, I went to the gym, where I played basketball, sat in the sauna, and scrubbed myself clean in the shower before shaving my face and brushing my teeth.

I was determined to recuperate, not just for my own well-being, but also because I needed to get myself into presentable shape for a five-day field trip to a biological station in Highlands, North Carolina, for my Biodiversity in North Carolina course. The day before I was to go, my mother sent me an e-mail reminding me about my tax return. My tax return?
My tax return!
I’d completely forgotten that I was getting a tax refund!

It was a $1,600 golden ticket that Uncle Sam was going to slip into my bank account.

I was rich.

I knew then and there that I was going to get through the semester debt-free.

At first, I felt relief. But then there was ambivalence. This was a turning point, I realized. I had financial security for the first time in months, and I knew I might be financially secure for good, because in just a few weeks, I was heading back to Alaska to work at the Gates of the Arctic for another season.

I’m not poor anymore, I thought nostalgically.

At the biological station, I shared a room with Chuck, a forty-six-year-old student and former accountant who’d quit his job
so he could hike the Appalachian Trail and enroll in Duke’s liberal studies program. In our room, we swapped hiking stories, mused about Thoreau, and described our final papers, both of which were about the importance of wilderness.

For the course, we all went on daily field trips to see different biozones in the Appalachians; listened to lectures given by conservationists, salamander experts, and biologists; and learned how to identify all sorts of trees, mosses, and fungi with our magnifying glasses. In the lab, under microscopes, we looked at the tiny, crawling forgotten kingdoms I never knew existed.

Knowing that my tax refund was coming, I slackened some of my strict spartan standards: I bought a case of beer for me, Chuck, and a couple of other classmates; I mailed Marietta, the woman who let me stay at her house in Durham, a $50 gift certificate to a fancy restaurant; I dined at a restaurant twice; and I slept in a heated room on a comfortable bed.

These were the sort of purchases and pleasures I commonly indulged in years ago, but treating myself to them now made me feel a strange sense of guilt, as if I’d cut some corner I promised myself I wouldn’t cut. During my third night at the station—beleaguered with self-reproach—I dragged my sleeping bag outside and slept on the pavement under the stars.