Walden On Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“I was able to keep the car running, but what little money I was able to put toward my debt always felt negligible—pointless even. It was like throwing a glass of water on a burning building. It was a sacrifice to appease the gods, but a pitiful, emaciated, bony goat of a sacrifice. Such paltry offerings, I worried, might seem less a declaration of submission—which it was—and more an affront to the debt’s greatness, which just might make it angrier, prodding it to swell with interest.”

The embellishment of Ken’s debt to demonic or divine degrees, implied by terms like “sacrifice” and “offerings,” expands the weight of the debt proportionally to his perception. While some people may not be bothered by debt, Ken saw his as a supernatural entity threatening to kill him at any time.

“But it wasn’t just the carts, or the exams, or the debt that left me feeling battered and frayed and a little crazy; it was that I began to see that I lived in a free country but couldn’t say I knew what it felt like to feel ‘free.’ And while I owned plenty of stuff—a car, DVDs, CDs, clothes—I never felt like I owned my own life. College had helped me see how everything, for my whole life, had either been predetermined or planned out: I went to high school because I was forced to; I went to college because I was supposed to; and now I’d enter Career World because I was financially obligated to.”

This passage highlights Ken’s desire to live authentically, which for him required that he remove himself from society’s normative desires and behaviors. Consumerism is the ideology from which Ken wanted to free himself, but he needed a new ideology to guide him.

“Yet after each rest, I was able to get up and take a few more steps, and a few more after that. At some point, I’d wandered into that strange territory between my perceived limits and my actual limits—that stretch of land called the ‘unknown,’ a territory as wild and unfamiliar as the Alaskan country before me. Climbing Blue Cloud was like climbing a hill of pennies. For every two steps up, I slid down one because the loose rocks would move beneath me, jingling down the mountain with each foot placement.”

Ken’s description of his hike up Blue Cloud mirrors that of his fight against debt. He even compares the mountain to a pile of pennies. The climb is a literal uphill battle, similar to combatting accumulating loan interest.

“I thought I was made to live such a life—a free life: hopping trains, hitching rides, climbing mountains, traveling, wandering…I’d always felt uncomfortable when someone asked me what I wanted to be. But now I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted the sensations I felt atop Blue Cloud and in the Brooks and on that drive to Alaska. I wanted to be a tramp. I’d toil in Career World as long as I had to, but the minute my debt was paid off, I’d be gone.”

Alaska convinced Ken to forego the normal path from school to work, instead focusing on himself and his potential for broader experiences. The text sets Alaska in direct opposition to “Career World,” which to Ken represents complacency and despair.

“I became obsessed with destroying what I thought was most constraining me. The debt wasn’t a mere dollar amount; it was a villain that needed to be vanquished, a dragon that needed to be slain, a windmill that needed to be toppled. I thought of the debt as if it was the only thing keeping me from really living. It was the only thing on my mind. Nearly every dollar I made went toward my loans. I bought nothing and kept nothing in the bank.”

This passage uses vivid imagery and metaphors to describe how the effects of Ken’s debt began to drain him, as he started to focus entirely on it without regard for his well-being. Although his plan worked, he illustrates here how the cost of paying off his debt was greater than the “mere dollar amount.”

“But I felt guilty for spending money on something other than my debt. The plane ticket was a luxury purchase. I felt as if I’d cheated somehow; that I’d cut some corner that I promised myself I wouldn’t cut. Worse, the Ecuador trip made me realize that I couldn’t have ‘real’ adventures so long as I had monthly debt payments to deal with. Instead, I’d have to sandwich my travels into three-week vacation blocks sandwiched in between lifetimes of work, just like the tourists who came up to Coldfoot.”

Ken’s guilt over spending money when in debt was a symptom of his obsession with paying off his debt: He could not enjoy himself without feeling guilty. This consequence was both a direct effect of the debt itself and a problematic element of Ken’s perspective on it.

“Strangely, I also felt an odd sense of relief with each rejection. I began to reexamine my original motivations for applying to school. While it was true that I sincerely wanted to develop my mind and become a better, smarter person, part of my decision had to do with fulfilling social expectations: with going to a big-name school to impress my friends and family; with climbing the socioeconomic ladder in hopes of reaching a comfortable life in a house similar to, but slightly bigger than, the one I grew up in.”

This passage conveys another moment in which Ken questions his motivations and the ways society influenced him. Although going back to school seemed like the logical choice, Ken saw how that logic was founded in consumerism, which he wanted to avoid.

“I presumed this had to do with a few things: 1) the law, which prohibits hitchhiking in many states; 2) fear, which—thanks to B-rated horror movies and fear-mongering news media organizations—makes us think that if we hitchhike we’ll be raped, murdered, and mutilated (though not necessarily in that order); and 3) too many young people have jobs they are unwilling to leave, either because of debt or because they didn’t want to lose their health insurance.”

Ken’s analysis of the contemporary resistance to transient lifestyles and activities, like hitchhiking, obscures the legitimate risks associated with such activities for people of color, queer people, and women. His final point, however, supports Ken’s argument about how modern society leads people to feel trapped by their financial needs.

“The voyageurs back then came entirely from the lower classes. They could have lived reasonably free lives as peasant farmers, but they chose to be voyageurs. They sometimes worked fourteen hours a day, paddling at a rate of forty-five strokes a minute. On portages several miles long, they carried hundreds of pounds of gear using tumplines strapped around their foreheads. Many voyageurs didn’t live past their forties, dying of crippled backs and strangulated hernias.”

Ken acknowledges how voyageurs in the past were not having fun or taking a vacation but working and often dying to try to make a living. For Ken, voyaging was a summer activity that strained him but also rewarded him, while the people he was essentially imitating lacked the modern amenities that he could return to.

“I didn’t want her to hitchhike all alone. Despite her brush with depression and death, despite all the poverty and destitution she saw in Mississippi, she still really believed that this was one big, happy world. She didn’t know when to feel afraid. She didn’t know when someone was hitting on her, or when not to tell a joke. After her last suicide attempt, she’d experienced something like a rebirth, and she was rediscovering everything anew, with a fresh set of eyes.”

Ken frames his issue with Sami hitchhiking alone as a personal problem related to her trusting personality, but he is actually pointing to the difference between himself and Sami. He realizes that Sami, as a woman, would more likely be a target for assault than he would, which is likely the real reason for his reluctance.

“My mom limped from an ankle injury caused by thirty-five years of standing as a nurse. When she walked up the stairs, she gripped both handrails, gliding her hands along them before picking up her leg and placing it on the next step. I looked on in agony. My mom would complain about her ankle, and when I’d ask her why she didn’t quit her job or reduce her hours, she’d tell me about all the bills that needed paying and how she couldn’t afford to lose her health insurance.”

Ken’s perception of his parents’ lives is bleak, as he feels they traded their freedom for a normal life in the suburbs. His mother’s injury highlights the physical and mental toll that such a life takes on a person.

“Wilderness is a wellspring of wild dreams. Leave the forest on the edge of your suburb unexplored and the place will expand in your imagination. It will assume a mysterious, enchanted nature, growing into something like a wilderness. Even though that forest may actually be half-diseased and carpeted with an understory of used condoms and crumpled beer cans, for all we know it could be a howlingly wild, green-bearded Germanic forest where tree nymphs gather in glades and mythic beasts live out great stories.”

Ken’s love of the wilderness expands in this colorful passage, encompassing even the imagined possibilities of the forest. Beyond the actual experience of the woods, he values the potential of the wilderness to inspire people and promote conservation.

“I had sympathy for him. Without his job, his debt would spiral out of control. He wouldn’t be able to meet his payments, and the interest would accrue. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who is this person? This wasn’t the Josh I’d known—not my friend who laughed while vomiting at the Yukon River Camp, not the hiking partner who climbed mountains with me bare-chested in the Brooks, not my freshman roommate who wanted to join the Peace Corps and save the world. What had happened? Did the job do it to him? The debt.”

Ken saw how Josh was a foil to his own journey, noting the debilitating effects of debt on even the most skilled and talented people. Although Josh had lofty goals in his youth, he started to settle into a boring and even unethical routine after college.

“But I also hoped—from this upholstered hermitage—to look upon the world around me from a novel vantage point and see my country with an enlightened pair of eyes. I’d be a monk, a hermit, a recluse: within society, yet completely separated from it. I’d hunch over my books and papers and befriend ancient thinkers, never concerned with the neighborhood of man all around me. I didn’t need them, and they didn’t need me.”

Ken’s perspective on “vandwelling” at Duke centered on Thoreau’s view of society and isolation. He wished to emulate Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond by turning inward, focusing on introspection and meditation rather than on social activities or spending.

“Before my experiment began, I knew I had the personality for vandwelling. Over the course of my journey to get out of debt, I’d developed a penchant for rugged living, a comfort with tight quarters, a sixth sense for cheapness, and a tolerance for squalor that was, well, (I hate to brag) unequaled. Not only that, but I knew I had the physical constitution for it, too: I was blessed with a high tolerance for cold temperatures, practically no sense of smell, and a bladder (I hate to brag) the size of an adolescent’s football.”

This passage highlights how Ken’s experiment was not something that any person could accomplish. His nature was aligned already with the lifestyle, and his experiences in Alaska had hardened, preparing him to live with inconveniences.

“Perhaps I took the implications of accepting a gift too seriously, but I couldn’t stop the alarms from ringing in my head whenever I considered taking a gift. I didn’t think of a gift merely as a gift but as a debt with a bow wrapped around it. The exchange may seem harmless, but I knew my accountant within was always diligently at work, carefully recording in his ledger my gifts and loans and debts, none of which could be truly forgotten until they were paid back.”

Ken faced another problematic symptom of his relationship with debt as he expanded its meaning to encompass gifts and assistance of any kind. Although Ken did not see gifts as a serious infringement on his freedom, he feared that he would give in to the urge to accept more gifts than necessary.

“It wasn’t just my experiment that was at stake. My freedom, independence, and comfort were, too. If I got caught, I’d have two options: I could find some other radically cheap dwelling, or I could drop out of school. What wasn’t an option was breaking the promise I made to myself months before: I was not going to go back into debt. No matter what.”

This passage confirms Ken’s dedication to his experiment, though he acknowledges that he could likely have found a living situation other than his van. The fact that he is willing to leave school rather than go into debt, however, is a mark of his perseverance.

“As much as I prided myself for living ‘on the edge,’ I had to admit that I wasn’t homeless in the way that he was homeless. The voluntary nature of my experiment prevented me from experiencing poverty in its most extreme and authentic form. I wasn’t poor, of course. Real poverty is having no way out.”

Ken’s foray into frugality and poverty is artificial in the sense that he chose to undergo his experiment. Encountering other people who are unwillingly impoverished forced Ken to look at himself through their lens, in which he was still privileged.

“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.”

Although much of Ken’s time in the van was unpleasant, the descriptive imagery in this passage conveys the natural advantages of living outdoors. Much like the transcendentalists, Ken uses such imagery to emphasize the importance of nature as well as its power to transform people.

“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.”

Ken’s reevaluation of the meaning of poverty shows how everyone becomes poor in a consumerist society. No matter how much wealth one accumulates, it only spurs the need to accumulate more wealth.

“When I thought about my hitchhikes, the voyageur trip, Duke—I was happy to have suffered; I was happy to have been miserable; I was happy to have been alone. And I knew I’d soon be happy to have been scared half to death by that bear. That’s because it was in those moments, when I was pushed to my limits, that I was afforded a glimpse of my true nature.”

In reflecting on his experiences, Ken realizes how his most difficult moments have also been his most rewarding. In a way, his perspective is that of martyrdom, in which pain and suffering are also paths toward salvation.

“‘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.”

Josh’s decision to quit and testify against Westwood marks Ken’s narrative transition from the personal to the public. Although most of the book focuses on Ken’s journey, Josh’s experience expands that journey to exemplify and encourage social change.

“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.”

The difference between frugality as a necessity and frugality as a choice highlights how Ken views the consumerist society he criticizes in this work. Frugality is always a reasonable choice, to Ken, and he upholds spartan living as the hallmark of freedom.