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

by Ken Ilgunas

My debt was a black hole, a swirling abyss that sucked from my clutches all my hopes and dollars and dreams.

En route, we trudged through mud-bottomed swamps; through dense, junglelike thickets of dwarf willow and alder; across spongy sphagnum moss; and over fields of tussocks, which were easily the worst of our hiking obstacles. Tussocks (or “nature’s herpes,” as I’d come to call them) are round, furry clumps of sedge that look like hairy green basketballs and are almost impossible to walk through without twisting an ankle and cursing maniacally.

Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.

When I pictured my future self, I thought about my old coworkers and friends at the Home Depot: sad, tired, saggy-eyed souls who’d spend forty hours a week doing things they hated at a place they all wanted to burn down. Some were stuck because they had debts of their own, because they needed the health insurance, or because they needed the money to feed their kids. But it seemed they weren’t all bound by these external constraints. Most were just too scared to leave. They tolerated the daily drudgery of work because dealing with daily drudgery was easier than quitting and doing something truly scary: sailing into unknown waters in pursuit of a dream.

The wandering life wasn’t a ladder leading up an office hierarchy; it was a web of intersections that presented its wayfarers with U-turns, entrance ramps, and highway exits: chances to change the direction of their lives whenever they so pleased.

We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us.

We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log?

Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation.

When we eliminate the high cost of living, we can amaze ourselves with how much we’re capable of saving.

Up until now, I was never anything but a worker and a student. When I looked up at a dark arctic night sky, I thought I could be something else. I didn’t want a job, a salary, a home. I didn’t want to be a bolt in the consumer-capitalist machine. Or a boring Ph.D. student. When I looked at the stars, I could see my path. I wanted to be a comet hurtling through the sky, governed by no one’s laws

Coldfoot had made me into a lot of things: a lover of nature, a competent cook, an able guide, and, most prominently, a cheap son of a bitch.

We curved our way around thousands of small granite islands that rose up out of the water, plump and gray, as if some stone giant was flexing his muscles beneath. Here, the sea and sky were so blue and calm that it was difficult to tell one from the other. Bob and Christian, in the canoe ahead, looked as if they were paddling atop the wavy drafts of the stratosphere.

Comfort and security, it seems, when overprescribed, can be poisons to the soul—an illness that no amount of love can cure, freedom being the only antidote.

thought: Is this the real America? Have I just been quarantined in my happy little college and suburban bubble my whole life? And is this my real generation: poorly educated, overmedicated, abused, addicted, indebted?

I never understood why I’d wanted to drive to Alaska so badly years before. But I did now. I realized that I’d needed to see some place that was real, some last corner of the world that hadn’t been buried beneath strata of pavement and people, technology and trash.

The Alaskan arctic is impossible to fully explore, to fully know. There’s always another creek to follow, another promontory to gaze from, another dripping-wet cave to climb into.

And when we see someone who doesn’t play by our rules—someone who’s spurned the comforts of hearth and home—we shift in our chairs and call him or her crazy. We feel a fury for the hobo and the hitchhiker, the hippie and gypsy, the vagrant and nomad—not because we have any reason to believe these people will do us any harm, but because they make us feel uncomfortable. They remind us of the inner longings we’ve squelched, the hero or heroine we’ve buried beneath a houseful of junk, the spirit we’ve exorcised out of ourselves so we could remain with our feet on the ground, stable and secure.

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.

Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.

For years, the grizzly had lumbered through my dreams. I was never sure why. Maybe it was just plain old fear: knowing that if I walked around in the Brooks long enough I’d eventually have one such encounter. Yet it wasn’t simply fear. I revered the grizzly. I spoke of it in hushed tones if I spoke of it at all. Maybe it was because I’d wanted to be everything the grizzly was: wild, strong, free.