Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (31 page)

I didn’t need these things, I thought. The beer, the food, the bed. I didn’t even really want them. I was buying stuff, not out of need, but simply because I could afford them.

Before I enrolled at Duke, I decided not to take out loans because I knew that if I allowed myself access to easy money, then I’d again fall victim to the consumerist trap. I’d be indiscreet with my money. I’d begin to pay for and rely on things I thought I needed but didn’t. I’d lose perspective.

If we put a man in a country club, he’ll suddenly feel the need for a yacht. But if we put him on a solitary island, his only desires will be those essential to his survival. I wanted to keep my needs simple. I didn’t want to lose perspective. I didn’t want to once again be swallowed whole by the dominant culture, accepting its norms and values and desires as my own.

I knew what I was missing in my life. It wasn’t things. It wasn’t heat, plumbing, or air-conditioning. It wasn’t extra space, or an iPhone, or a plasma screen TV. It was people. It was a community. It was a meaningful role to play in my society.

On our last night at the science base, we had a bonfire in the woods. In the early hours of the morning, it was just me, Chuck, and two other male students: Joe, a thirty-one-year-old yogi, and Salman, a Pakistani with an interest in theology.

After a few beers, the mood turned jovial and the conversation meandered. Eventually, the inevitable question arose when Chuck asked, “Ken, where are you living?”

Normally, I would have said, “On Ninth Street,” and that would have been the end of the conversation. This time, though, I said, “I’m living in my van. I’ve been living in it this whole semester. I’m trying to stay out of debt.”

“What does he mean?” asked Salman.

“Ken’s just said that he’s been living in his van,” Joe clarified.

“It’s not so bad. I wash at the gym, get electricity in the library,” I said.

“Does anyone know at Duke?” Joe asked.

“Not that I know. God, I hope not.”

And that was that. My secret was out. Salman had an expression on his face that one would normally reserve for an alien encounter. Chuck and Joe seemed only mildly amused.

“How do you iron your clothes?” Salman asked.

“Ha. I don’t, I guess.”

I went back to Duke and I felt summer’s presence. A half dozen dogwood trees that shadowed my parking lot bore branches heavy with thick, lustrous white flowers. They buzzed with a million bumblebees and smelled of a woman’s hair. On mornings, I awoke to a medley of birdsong so loud and cheery you’d think my little hermitage was tucked away in a copse of trees at Walden Pond. At night, I was whirred to sleep by the chorus of
cicadas. During rainstorms, I listened to millions of raindrops drum against the roof and watched them wiggle like sperm down my windows. My van began to feel less like a novelty and an experiment and more like a real home.

And now that I’d been through almost a full semester in the van, I couldn’t help but observe improvements in my physical condition. Because I’d almost entirely cut out meat, dairy, and beer from my diet, and because I visited the gym frequently, I was leaner than ever. After my mouse and throw-up incidents, I kept the van clean and tidy, and washed my pans more frequently. I never got sick again, and something about sleeping with the climate rather than against it gave me a hardy constitution. I handled the cold with nonchalance. I dealt with the heat with gentlemanly sportsmanship, laughing with it good-naturedly when it got the best of me. I didn’t care as much about being hungry, or being deprived of domestic amenities, or even when insects roamed my body when I lay beneath the giant willow oaks on campus. Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them. But when we deal with the same discomforts every day, they become expected and part of the routine, and we are no longer afflicted with them the way we were. We forget to think about them like the daily disturbances of going to the bathroom, or brushing our teeth, or listening to noisy street traffic. Give your body the chance to harden, your blood to thicken, and your skin to toughen, and you’ll find that the human body carries with it a weightless wardrobe. When we’re hardy in mind and body, we can select from an array of outfits to comfortably bear most any climate.

Yet what physical changes I saw take place throughout my experiment paled in comparison to the financial revolution that toppled old preconceptions of saving, borrowing, poverty, and wealth. In the van, I’d saved hundreds, no, thousands of dollars.
Four months’ rent for a modestly priced apartment, plus utilities, would have cost me more than $2,000 for the spring semester. Over the past several months, I hadn’t paid any rent or bought any clothes, appliances, or material items. I ate for $4.34 a day, and I lived on $103 a week, not including tuition and school fees.

My meal plan—let’s call it the “spaghetti stew meal plan”—would have cost me $1,644 over the course of an entire year. Yet in 2012, one of Duke’s dining hall meal plans would cost some students as much as $5,780 for just a six-and-a-half-month academic year, or more than $25 a day.

Room and board for an average student at an average school costs a staggering $8,500 for an eight-month academic year. I’d learned from my own experiences that living doesn’t have to cost so much. For just the bare essentials (food, vehicle, and miscellaneous costs), I determined that it would cost me less than $5,000 to live for one whole year in a van.

¹
It may be unrealistic to not include cell phone, transportation, and health insurance, as well as other costs, but the table is really only meant to illustrate to the extreme difference between the amount of money required to live in various kinds of dwellings and also how little we have to spend to live if we cut out the superfluous.

I’d survived the semester just fine without heat or air-conditioning or restaurant food. I didn’t melt into a useless puddle of goo for not having the latest technological doodad. The van had
reinforced what I’d already come to know and felt from the bottom of my heart: We need so little to be happy. Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.

After spending my morning tutoring at the elementary school, I’d drive home to the Mill lot, hop in the back, sling up my black partition, and sink into a deep slumber. I’d wake up from my nap content, knowing the rest of the day was mine.

I was a monk, and the van, my monastery. (It’s amazing how a little financial security can put one at ease.) I would lie in bed for hours, reading, thinking, doing nothing, basking in solitude for as long as I wished, staring at the ceiling, idly musing, unworried about feeling industrious or useful. I pondered everything from the Milky Way to the fallen crumb on my floor. After a run, sometimes I’d sit in front of the gym for an hour or more crumpling dried leaves in my hand. Some kind passerby would occasionally ask, “Is everything okay?” as if my being alone and lost in thought were symptoms of depression. “I’m good,” I’d say. “Thanks.”

I missed Sami, but it was clear that our decision to separate was the right one. She was doing well at a community college in San Francisco, and I was beginning to reap the rewards of focused study at Duke. I still wanted companionship, but I knew I could wait. The isolation and focused study and idle thinking were paying off. I knew I’d have to change my reclusive policy someday, but for now, I was embracing “solitude as a bride,” as Emerson suggested, because it was she and only she who’d help me grow in this season of my life.

Loneliness, no doubt, caused anguish, but over time, solitude gave me something I never would have expected: a culture of my own.

There was no envy in this culture. In years past, I was as susceptible to envy as anyone else: always wanting someone else’s car, someone else’s friends, someone else’s life (“If only I had what he had…”). Envy is a bitter fruit, but one that only grows
when we water it with the nourishment of society. Remove society, and it will wither on the vine.

I was no longer influenced by cultural fads or other people’s values. While hardly anyone at Duke knew about the van, I didn’t care what people would have thought about my living in it. I stopped feeling anxious about wearing faded shirts or worn jeans that I’d bought from the Salvation Army. I stopped caring if my hair was too long and out of style. I’d keep my appearance fairly trim and conventional—and the van a secret—but only so I could keep my job and parking lot. I wouldn’t feel a sense of shame if some representative of society disapproved of my looks or lifestyle. Rather, I’d wear my poverty as a badge of honor, as a symbol of my unwillingness to dance to the direction of some corporate puppeteer.

Why should I listen to society? Society—as far as I was concerned—was insane. To me, society was boob jobs and sweaters on dogs and environmental devastation of incalculable proportions. We do not listen to the lunatic on the city corner who screeches every day about how the world is going to end, so why should I stop and let society shout nonsense in my ears?

These are society’s definitions of poverty and wealth: To be poor is to have less and to be rich is to have more. Under these definitions, we are always poor, always covetous, always dissatisfied, no matter the size of our salary, or how comfortable we are, or if our needs are in fact fulfilled.

When I saw people in their flashy cars or expensive clothes, it wasn’t envy I felt anymore. I felt sorry for them. They were obsessed with what other people thought, swayed into accepting the latest fashion trends; deluded by advertisers, marketers, and profiteers; and corralled and branded and shorn of their money. This all revealed an unbecoming manipulability, a lack of real, hard character.

The van kept me debt-free. It kept me dry in rain and warm in cold. It kept me free. How could I feel embarrassed about it? Why should I care what other people thought?

After our trip to the biological station, Chuck and I began hanging out. We went to a free symphony at Duke Chapel, I visited his apartment (where I pretended to be enchanted with the marvelous headroom and light switches), and I invited him over for a beer at the van. Apart from the mouse, Chuck was my first guest.

“Campus security has got to know about this,” he said, sitting on my backseat, laughing.

“You think?”

“Well, that’s just my theory,” he said. “They’re probably just leaving you alone.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they’d even begin to think someone was living in here.”

Chuck and I said good-bye and shook hands. Soon, he’d move up to Worcester, Massachusetts, and I’d be off to Alaska.

“We can go to Walden Pond when you visit,” he said.

“Sounds good, Chuck. Take care.”

I lit up my stove and started boiling some water so I could cook up a pot of spaghetti stew. It was late April and rather hot, so I opened the windows, shut the blinds, and took off my shirt and pants.

This was the most content I’d been at Duke: I had a friend, I’d gotten through my first semester debt-free, I had a great job tutoring kids, and I had a little money in the bank. Plus, I was going to go back to Alaska and would make a ton of money this summer. School was working: My brain felt sharp and exercised. I came to love my van as much as a person can love a hunk of metal.

Wow, I thought. I might actually miss this thing. I even began entertaining the prospect of living in the van for the rest of my time at Duke. Perhaps I could live in this thing forever?

And that’s when a car parked right next to me. Something immediately felt very, very wrong. It was unusual that anyone ever parked directly beside me. Now, especially, because the rest of the lot was empty. I carefully and slowly pulled the blind open so I could see who it was.

It was a white car with blue lights on top. It was a cop. Or a security guard. Whoever it was, I’d been found. I immediately turned my stove off and laid my body flat on the ground so I could stay out of view.

Please, please, please, don’t knock on my door! Don’t knock on my door!