Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (8 page)

In addition to the $17,000 loan my mom had put on her credit card, I had another $15,000 government loan. Paying my two loans was a simple process. The payments for the government loan were automatically deducted from my bank account. Because I wanted to pay back my mom first, I paid the minimum on these government loans ($114 a month, about half of which would go toward accumulated interest).

Every week I’d mail my checks home to my mom, and she was supposed to put all the money toward my loans on her credit card. Our arrangement was working fine until one day, in the middle of summer, when I viewed my bank account on Coldfoot’s shared computer and realized that she was putting the money not toward the debt but in my bank account.

I thought of my dollars like Spartan soldiers trained from birth to die in battle with debt, unconcerned with the likelihood of defeat. Yet here they were in my account, doing nothing, living it up like drunken sailors peeing on one another in port. I called my mother to find out what was going on.

“I see that you’ve gotten my checks,” I said to her over the phone, trying to remain composed. “But they haven’t been put toward the debt. How come?”

“Well, I put them in your bank account,” she said sweetly, “because I thought it would be good for you to have some money just in case. You know, for emergencies.”

“There won’t be any emergencies. Can you please put it toward my debt?”

“No. You really need some spare money.”

“It’s my money, isn’t it? Can’t I use it the way I want to?”

“Ken, what if something happens to you? You don’t have any health insurance. You know Dad and I don’t have a lot, either.”

“I don’t care. Just put it toward the debt. I’m begging you. Please. Just put it toward the debt. You have no idea how much it bothers me. I know I sound crazy, but I want the debt gone more than anything.”

“You’re doing great with your payments, Ken. Why do you care so much?”

“I can’t explain it. Just please put it toward the debt.”

“No, you really need some reserve mon—”

“
Put it toward the debt!
” I screamed into the phone. “It’s driving me
crazy!
”

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

Fall 2006—Yukon River Camp, Alaska

DEBT: $24,000

A
LONG WITH LEADING
van tours and introducing the tourists to Jack in Wiseman, I also oared a large blue ten-person raft down the Koyukuk River for two hours at a time. The river was slow and gentle and easy to navigate, but it would pick up speed at the last bend in the river near Coldfoot.

On a trip with six retirees, I rounded that last bend where the river, predictably, picked up speed. I grabbed the rope, rolled over the side of the boat, and leaped out onto the gravel. The current was strong, so the boat yanked my legs into the icy water. But it wasn’t a big deal: I was able to stop the boat from floating away and I didn’t mind getting a little wet. Yet this caused something unexpected to happen. Just before the tourists went back into the inn, each of them—glancing apologetically at my wet pants—handed me a twenty-dollar bill. I stared at the wad of money in my palm in a state of awe.

I’d just learned an important lesson.

At the end of each rafting trip, I’d pretend that docking the
raft was a hazardous, life-threatening undertaking. When docking it, I’d always make sure I got wet, sometimes even submerging my whole body underwater. “Everybody hold on!” I’d yell, as we approached the bank. “This might get a bit tricky.”

From that point on, the tips poured into my pockets like the mighty Koyukuk. Each night, I’d bring home stacks of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills, sometimes with a fifty shuffled in. I became an expert at spotting moose hiding in clusters of spruce trees. I’d laugh at the tourists’ jokes, tell them about my Blue Cloud adventure, and hold my tongue when they were rude. Despite my timid nature, it turned out that I was an okay tour guide. And I could see that the elderly guests thought of me as a well-meaning and cash-strapped grandson. While I felt bad for taking their money, I knew I was giving them what they wanted at the same time.

Sometimes I’d come back to my room from a day’s work with more than $200 in tips. I’d count the bills over and over, making sure all the heads were upright, before stretching a rubber band around each stack and hiding them under my mattress. By summer’s end, I was sleeping on top of $3,000. Tip money not included, I’d paid off $8,000 of my debt.

While I’d made progress on my debt over the course of the summer, things weren’t going so well for Josh. He was $58,000 in debt, most of his loans were given to him by banks that charged high interest rates, and, worst of all, he couldn’t find work.

We’d heard of students putting their loans on deferment for a year or two to either go back to school or find a job, or because they were sick or just lazy. Whatever the reason, each story ended the same. Their debts—when they decided to begin paying them off—doubled. So if Josh let the interest accrue like other graduates had, his debt could get so big and unmanageable that paying it off might be impossible.

Josh, though, was hopeful at first. After all, he did wonderfully in college. He figured that with his B.A. and a year of grad
school, he might be able to, at worst, land a respectable office job that paid in the low thirties.

At first he applied to jobs he thought he’d like, such as working for a medium-pay nonprofit or as a counselor at a school for troubled youths. After the first round of rejected job applications, he was rudely awakened to the fact that—even with his impressive academic record—he was a dime a dozen, just one of thousands of liberal arts majors who had to turn to corporate America to pay for their idealistic degrees. All prospective employers told him that he was either too unqualified or inexperienced. He had no choice but to lower his expectations.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
August 21, 2006

Subject:
Re: Josh’s job situation

Determined to find a job, I started looking through internet job ads like a frantic mother whose child wandered away in a department store. I dont even know what sites I was on, but the end result was harrowing: I applied to be a sales representative for a publishing company and a health care recruiting firm, a fraud analyst for Bank of America, and a financial advisor for Ameriprise. As I sit here now, I could barely describe what each position even entails. I hate banks more than anything. And yet I consider working for one? Combine that with the miserable, bottom of the food chain role in the organization I’d play, and I’m just disgusted at the thought of working for these companies.

He decided to keep looking for a job in accord with his ideals, so he moved into his parents’ home where he could save on rent and apply for more work. Weeks later, he still had no job.

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
September 15, 2006

Subject:
Coldfoot and future frustration

I desperetly want to move on. I can’t take it here, and my debt
feels like a raging cougar chasing me down while I just stand there tying my running shoes. I need to figure out the next stage of my life and I need to now. I dont think either of us has ever been in the situation where we had absolutly nothing lined up for our future—and its a terrible feeling. Add this into my debt and I’m anxious… And this feeling is almost constant.

And a week later…

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
September 23, 2006

Subject:
Re: Coldfoot and future frustration

I need to fucking find a job and figure ouT WHAT THE FUCK I AM DOING WITH MY LIFE BUT I CANT FUCKING DO THAT FOR THIS REASON AND THAT REASON AND I’M READY TO GODDAMN EXPLODE FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

And a few days after that…

To:
Ken Ilgunas

From:
Josh Pruyn

Date:
September 25, 2006

Subject:
career frustrations

My friend, I am at a crossroads and I dont know where to go. I’ve been delaying and delaying applying to those jobs. Marketing Trainee. ugh. When I thnk that I’ve even been comparing it to the military… And in all honesty, I’m starting to think I’d rather join the Army than be a sales representative. I dropped the military idea to you before and I told you there may be a time when you needed to slap me for this… well now is the time because I can see myself researching that route in the next couple of days. Please get back with your thoughts on all of this ASAP…

Army? Josh in the army? Josh’s hero was
Ralph Nader.
Josh going into the military was like a vegan working in a slaughterhouse, or a feminist on the pole. It wasn’t like the country
was in one of those rare periods of American neutrality. Hell, we weren’t in just one war but
two.
Had it really come to this already?

What could I say? While I’d found a job and had been paying off my debt, I was in no position to give advice. Yet I was worried that he really would get stuck in some cubicle or, worse, shot down in a helicopter over Kabul.

I wrote Josh an e-mail asking him to come to Coldfoot. He read it and took a steaming hot shower. When he got out, he excitedly wrote me a response saying something along the lines of “Okay, you’re right. What do I need to do?”

Unlike Josh, I had job security. Even though the tourism season was over, the truckers’ café was open year-round, so I decided to stay in Coldfoot to be their night cook for the next eight months.

My boss, realizing that his trio of guides had been overworked during the summer, invited the three of us to join him for a fall weekend in the town of Valdez, where that year’s Alaska State tourism convention was being held. I didn’t see myself in the tourism business for long, but I figured a vacation would do me some good. As expected, there was fine dining, workshops, networking, and motivational speakers. I decided to attend the speech of a fifty-four-year-old Canadian motivational speaker, Bob Abrames, once a CEO of a Canadian travel agency and now the “World’s Foremost Voyageur,” as his promotional poster advertised. I had no idea what I was in for.

His head was spit-shine bald, and from his chin dangled a straggly, gray, Mennonite-long beard. Bob had the sort of stare that would burn holes through cotton. He had my full attention before he even said a word.

“Does anybody know what this is?!” He held up a long red scarf and draped it around his shoulder. “This… is a voyageur sash!” He marched from one end of the stage to the other. “This is a sash worn by the voyageurs!”

Canadian voyageurs, he would tell us, were like the United
States’ version of mountain men. They were a group of people who traveled across Canada in birchbark canoes, transporting goods to the western frontier and bringing back fur pelts to the cities in the east.

“2005!” he screamed. “There’s an article in the newspaper. And this article says, ‘We’re looking for nine people to paddle a birchbark canoe from Montreal to Winnipeg. You will live outside! You will not have tents! No sunscreen! No toilet paper! No toothbrush! One pair of pants! One shirt! You will eat boiled peas and salt pork! For one hundred days!’

“What do you think I said?” Bob asked rhetorically, pausing to look over the audience. “My god! Yes, I’ll go!”

Bob spent the summer of 2005 living as a voyageur, starring in a ten-episode documentary called
Destination Nor’Ouest
that was a hit in French-speaking Canada. He lived exactly as the article described: paddling ten hours a day in a birchbark canoe, abstaining from modern conveniences, and wearing the clothes and using the gear of the eighteenth-century voyageurs.

He spent the next hour telling us about this voyage. He spoke of rapids, adventure, sacrifice, “fortitude in distress,” glory. Glory, goddammit! I had no idea what any of this had to do with tourism, but I was entranced. At the end, he announced that he was embarking on another voyage the next summer. This time, he was organizing and leading an expedition of his own, and he was seeking three voyageurs to paddle with him. (My thought:
My god! Yes, I’ll go!
)

But then I remembered my debt and how there was no conceivable way I could pay it off by next summer.

At the end of the speech, members of the crowd—equally affected by his words—surrounded Bob to shake hands and introduce themselves. Normally I’d be too paralyzed by my timidity to do such a thing, yet I found myself pushing through the crowd toward him.

When I got to him, I grabbed his hand and said, “Bob, I’m your man.”

I came back to Coldfoot charged up from the speech. But because I didn’t have the freedom to embark on journeys or voyages, I refocused my energies on paying off the debt. Get out of debt, then have adventures, I thought.

In Valdez, my manager mentioned that he needed help closing down one of his other camps for the winter. The Yukon River Camp (YRC), 120 miles south of Coldfoot, needed to be scrubbed clean. No one else wanted the job, so I told him that my friend Josh was looking for work and that he was willing to do anything for a steady paycheck. He agreed, and Josh flew up to Alaska. When Josh arrived, we bear-hugged each other and drove down to the Yukon River Camp.

The YRC is the sort of place that would lose to a Soviet labor camp in a charm contest. It would give Holocaust survivors flashbacks of bleaker times. It’s the sort of depressing industrial work camp where you’d half expect to find, upon walking into your dorm room, your melancholic roommate Fred hanging from the ceiling by the elastic of his underwear.

A stone’s throw from the 1,980-mile-long Yukon River, the YRC has a small café, a pipeline trailer converted into a one-story inn, and an abandoned tire shop that looks like a fitting stage for a horror movie massacre. The normally stunning landscape of the subarctic that surrounds the YRC looked grim and foreboding that fall, as the spruce trees had just been reduced by a forest fire to a field of brittle and blackened pencil-thin porcupine quills. The ten seasonal employees who lived there stayed in a regular-sized home (which would be quite cozy if it weren’t for the adjacent diesel generator that ceaselessly blared outside). We Coldfoot employees jokingly referred to the YRC as “prison,” partly because we were always worried about being sent there, but mostly because of the place’s metallic austerity and the steely gaze of the seasonal coworkers—one of whom, Josh and I worried, might suck the very souls out of our breasts with their empty, end-of-times, coal-black eyes.