Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (33 page)

Koviashuvik
is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment.” I’d used to think that the word probably meant something like “nirvana,” attained only by the Eskimo version of the bald, saffron-robed man on a mountaintop who’s able to achieve a state of unity with everything. Maybe that was the case, but more and more, I began to believe that to live a happy present requires having lived a full past. It requires that we go on our own journey. And if we are so lucky as to reach the end of that tortuous, troubled path, we may be afforded the gleaming vista of self-discovery. This, I thought, was
koviashuvik.

Days before, in front of the bear, I was reminded that I was as civilized as I was wild, and that I was as drawn to humanity’s many marvels as I was to the wilderness’s. I was headed back to Duke and civilization again, but I wanted it to be different this
time. This time I wanted to bring the wild back with me. To do that, I knew I couldn’t seal myself in a house or an apartment or any sort of expensive, luxurious box. If I wanted to stay close to nature and my true needs, I would have to continue to live a bare-bones, simple, uncluttered lifestyle.

While living in the van started off as an experiment, it was clear to me that it was a way of life I’d never truly leave.

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

Fall Semester 2009—Duke University

SAVINGS: $13,000

I
T WAS AN ORDINARY MONDAY
at Westwood College’s corporate building in Westminster, Colorado. Just the standard babble of business: the pitter-patter of computer keyboards, the bleating squeals of swivel desk chairs, the jumbled chorus of smooth-voiced salesmen peddling their company’s products over the phone.

Josh had been working at Westwood for five months. Westwood admission representatives like Josh—let me remind you—were misleading prospective students about graduation rates, the sort of jobs they’d get, and the enormous cost of the degree. The education itself was substandard, with credits that couldn’t transfer over to traditional colleges.

The job was causing Josh’s relationship with his girlfriend to fall apart. Random spats about laundry blew up into battles of Homeric proportions. The tone of his e-mails to me had become desperate. He wanted to quit, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The dreary white walls. The bland facial expressions. The
corporate jargon of the office employees. The orderly, sanitized nature of the place. It was as if he’d woken up one day to find himself as one of the background drones in a dystopian novel.

Josh nudged his arm against his computer keyboard and noticed a small piece of paper sticking out. Curious, he picked it up and saw that there was a message written on it.

His heart heaved. Josh had slipped this message under his keyboard months before but had since forgotten about it. He looked at it for less than a second. He didn’t have to look at it any longer. He didn’t have to read it. He knew exactly what it meant.

He shoved the message back under the keyboard as a last-ditch effort to sweep his conscience under the rug. But it was too late. He sat there thinking for the next thirty minutes.

He took an early lunch and headed to a nearby Target.

Written on that piece of paper was a quote from Hannah Arendt, the writer Josh had admired in college. In her book
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi leader who organized the murders of millions of Jewish people. Eichmann helped the Nazis not necessarily because he subscribed to their ideology, but because he was a man of little character; he was a bureaucrat who followed orders.

Josh had copied the quote down when he’d thought of one of his supervisors, Mick. Josh didn’t think Mick was a bad guy. Mick was perfectly likable: a fair boss and reputedly a good father. But, as Josh saw it, Mick had confused doing well at his job with doing well in life. He was determined to get his admissions representatives to excel, even if that meant the students they signed up would become enslaved by debt. It wasn’t that Mick was ignoring the pleadings of his conscience; it was just that he didn’t have an actual conscience when it came to such matters.

“The trouble with Eichmann,” the Arendt quote read, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, [but] that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

The quote, Josh realized, wasn’t about his supervisor anymore. It was Josh who’d become terrifyingly normal. It was Josh who’d become complacent about the evils he was committing. It was Josh who wasn’t thinking enough about the students he was sentencing to lifetimes of debt.

“I think I’m gonna quit today,” he told me over the phone, his words linked to one another by a nervous trill.

“No way! Do it, man!” I yelled.

While he’d dreamed of telling off his boss and inciting some sort of mass exodus among his fellow employees, what actually happened was far less dramatic. He walked into his boss’s office beaming with pride and resolve, but he was too polite to make a scene, so he waited forty-five minutes as his boss tried to persuade him to stay. Josh said he’d think about it, left the office, grabbed his things—the Arendt quote included—and told his coworkers he’d see them tomorrow, which wasn’t the case at all.

When Josh left Westwood that afternoon, he still had more than $50,000 in debt. He still had rent to pay. He still had gas and insurance bills. And he didn’t have another job lined up. But despite his many obligations, for the first time in his life Josh was finally free. He would never again let anything—job or debt or responsibilities—get between him and his conscience. And seeing that quote under his keyboard and feeling in his belly the euphoria of rebellion, he knew he’d never again wonder if his costly education was “worth it.” He knew now that even though his education cost him tens of thousands of dollars and years of work, it was worth every goddamned penny.

The euphoria, though, was only temporary. He thought about the students he’d persuaded to enroll at Westwood with remorse. (It turns out that Josh was a horrible salesman, but he had managed to sign up something like three people while he was there.) His old debt had lost its importance, but he now had to figure out a way to pay back this new one.

Meanwhile, for the first time in my life, I had more money than I knew what to do with. After paying my semester’s tuition, I had $13,000.

Upon returning from Alaska, I took a $40 taxicab ride from the Raleigh-Durham airport to the van. (I’d paid $200 to a guy I found on Craigslist to watch it for the summer.) I drove it to Sears to buy a set of white tees and a pair of cargo shorts, and then to Whole Foods where I spent liberally on food: organic yogurt, freshly baked bread, gourmet peanut butter. I went to an outdoors store and bought a $90 backpack, a $225 pair of hiking boots, and a $45 headlamp. Online, I bought a $300 camera.

With each charge to my credit card, I rode the “buyer’s high”—a high that I hadn’t experienced in years. It occurred just after each purchase, and, like the addict’s hit, I felt the gush of instant gratification, followed by a guilty hangover—a hangover only to be cured with yet another purchase and another after that. It was easy to live frugally when I didn’t have any money. Being
voluntarily
poor was something else entirely.

I was now a head tutor at the elementary school, still putting in close to twenty hours of work a week, teaching many of the same boys and girls I’d worked with the previous semester. I enrolled in two courses again: one was an undergraduate creative writing course called Travel Writing, and the other was a liberal studies course titled Emotion, Morality, and Human Nature. For my writing course, we wrote stories about our travel experiences and read them aloud in class. I wrote essays about my voyageur and hitchhiking adventures and, for my final paper, a story about living in my van. Afterward, I asked the class to keep my confession a secret, but my professor said, “That was really good, Ken. You should think about publishing it.”

Throughout the semester, I dealt with typical vandwelling discomforts: September heat, November cold, loneliness, sexual frustration, squirrels on my roof, and the landscapers who’d
rev leaf blowers around my van every Monday morning, oblivious that someone was trying to sleep inside.

After my last class of the 2009 fall semester, I flew to Boston for winter break, where I went to visit Chuck, my liberal studies friend. Together, we drove to Concord so I could finally embark on a holy pilgrimage to my idol’s pond.

It was a mere mile-long walk from the town of Concord, which, since Thoreau lived there a century and a half before, had become a bustling warren of cafés, stores, and restaurants, where shoppers, turbaned under layers of wool and polyester, entered and exited as if on holy missions of their own. Not only had some of the businesses borrowed Thoreau’s name, but a picture of his iconic neck-bearded portrait was plastered on posters, T-shirts, and buttons. (How ironic was my urge to buy!)

Cars curled around the curves of Walden Street, along which horses and buggies had clip-clopped and creaked ages ago. At an intersection, tires plowed through slush, SUVs groaned to a halt, and engines purred while drivers waited for green.

The trails around the pond, during pleasanter weather, are typically clogged with fellow pilgrims, but freezing temperatures kept other would-be pilgrims at home, giving us the whole place to ourselves.

I was surprised to see how big the pond is. At sixty-one acres, it’s actually more like a small lake. Brittle, translucent ice formed along its perimeter. A covey of ducks flurried to the pond’s liquid center, agitated by the sound of our boots plowing through rust-colored leaves. The forest, partly made up of long, slender pines extending bushy green needles, blotched an otherwise bleached-white sky.

If I had been in a dreary mood, I would have called the scene dreary. But as we edged around the pond, I was excited about the anticipation of something—exactly what, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I imagined the ghost of Thoreau rounding the next bend of
the trail on his midafternoon walk, silently nodding to us without slackening his gait.

My strongest impression of the place was how close we were to town. Not only that, but evidence of our frenetic culture was everywhere. An Amtrak train rumbled by. Planes screamed overhead. We could hear the hum of traffic from all corners of the forest. Thoreau, back in the 1840s, certainly wasn’t bothered by any of this clatter, but it was obvious that he was hardly separated from society.

And that’s what struck me most about his experiment. He wasn’t living in secret, or far away in the woods. He was surrounded by society. For everyone to see. And while it seemed he was living only for himself out there in his cabin, I now realized that this experiment wasn’t just for him. It was for everyone.

I’d been living for myself for years now: paying off my debt, going on adventures, enrolling in college, and saving money for my own endeavors. Yet what I desired now more than anything wasn’t more adventure, or excitement, or money. It was purpose. I wondered what the purpose of this past year in the van had been. To save money? To have a zany experience that I might joke about with friends someday? I felt I had learned something in Alaska and in the van, but it seemed so wasteful to keep it all to myself. While I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the hermit who kept to himself out in his cabin in the woods, I didn’t think I could be satisfied to live a life in which I played no meaningful role in other people’s lives. Unlike the hermit, the ascetic who lives in his woodland cabin or wears his homespun cloth—and does so in the midst of civilization—has the important duty of sharing his experiences. So with Thoreau in mind, I decided to publish the article I wrote for my class on the online magazine
Salon.com
—where my professor knew one of the editors—revealing the secret I’d kept for almost a year.

The day after it was published, I had eighty-six new Facebook friend requests, more than a hundred messages and
e-mails, and media outlets calling me for interviews. The story had gone viral over the Internet, and I experienced something close to fifteen minutes of fame. I was an object of adoration: “It was your picture that caught my eye,” said one admirer over e-mail. “I wanted to drop you a note to tell you my heart flutters each time I look at your picture.” This was from a dude, actually, and all other amorous advances, curiously, came from homosexual men (but compliments taken nonetheless). When I was walking down Ninth Street, one woman from her car cheeringly called out, “Hey, van man!” While interviews with me made the front page of the Buffalo- and Raleigh-area newspapers, I told Fox News to go to hell when they contacted me. And after watching my first episode of
Inside Edition
(90 percent of which was about Tiger Woods’s affair), I turned down their offer of money for an exclusive interview.

My predominant thought:
What’s the big deal? Why all this fuss?
I knew there was nothing remarkable about living in a van. There were probably a billion people, after all, living in tighter, smellier, less-hygienic dwellings. Plus, for the great majority of human history, our ancestors lived under animal hides, within dirt walls, in freezing caves. I had a metal roof, a bed, and even an engine and tires that could take me wherever I wanted to go.
Hell, I had a TV.
Yet I knew from the many messages I’d received that it wasn’t the van that people were drawn to. It was the freedom the van gave me.

The popularity of the article made more sense when I considered the historical context of the times we were in. We were in the middle of the Great Recession. Everyone was in debt. Many were underemployed. Values were changing. Ideologies were shifting. This is what happens in hard times, I thought. In more prosperous times, if we saw someone growing her own food, sewing torn clothing, or living in an austere dwelling—doing things that a “poor person” might do—we might have felt sorry for her. But in hard times, when we find ourselves in positions of dependence—whether on friends or family or the government—we
are no longer so quick to associate frugality with poverty. We can see, rather, that it’s the frugal who are immune from economic epidemics. Frugality becomes a virtue, not necessarily because we admire frugality, but because we admire independence.