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

by Ken Ilgunas

I’d once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They’re not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative.

And it’s when we step outside our stories that we feel most lost.

I didn’t feel my chi. Nor did I feel like I’d won or conquered anything. Instead, I felt nothing but awe and deference and humility. I was nothing compared to all of this.

I now understood why my old Home Depot coworkers looked the way they did: bored, tired, zombie-eyed. My life, like theirs, was so uniform, so one-dimensional, so unadventurous. I spent forty hours of my week doing things that didn’t teach me anything new, that provided no variety, that tested no creative faculties. As a burger flipper, I was a specialist, a cog, an insect, hardly the human being that Jack in Wiseman was. My journal was mostly blank. I wrote only about how I had nothing to write about. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt any emotion in its extreme. How can you feel anything when every day is the same? I felt nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried or laughed or got steaming mad. It almost got to the point where I’d forgotten what these felt like. Give me anger and give me tears, but never this blank nothingness, this gnawing neutrality.

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?

I’d been bent into a consumer by TV, molded into a conformist by schools, and made into a loan drone by a hundred other things. I’d been paved over, polluted, and planned out. I’d been Love Canal–ed. I’d been civilized.

It was a wild river doomed to be dammed.

Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo. Debt is sought so we have a game to play, a battle to fight, a mythology to live out. It gives us a script to read, rules to abide by, instructions to follow. 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.

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.

“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.”