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

by Ken Ilgunas

Remember who you wanted to be.

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

And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the world will be forgotten, carried away like crumpled leaves from autumn limbs.

“Everyone gets their home.”

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 or expectations but my own.

The soul must first be caged before it can be set free.

if I’d learned anything these past couple of years, it was that a postponed dream was just a dream. If I didn’t do it now, I might never.

The voluntary nature of my experiment prevented me from experiencing poverty in its most extreme and authentic form.

Whenever I’d see him again, he’d ask me for money, and I’d want to throw my fist into his jaw and kick him when he was down, sending his teeth scattering across the asphalt.

Whenever I came across a student who was headed to Wall Street, I wanted to ask: “You actually want to work for one of those companies?! Aren’t they kinda evil? Wall Street? You messin’ with me?”

Envy is a bitter fruit, but one that only grows when we water it with the nourishment of society. Remove society, and it will wither on the vine.

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.”

Style goes out of style. Freedom is forever.

Thoreau said he found it hard to leave Walden Pond but decided to move out because he had “several more lives to live.”

But the truth is that so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we’ve imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?

I had many lives to live still, and I’d get to them, but just not yet.

1 As a result of my experiment, Duke has prohibited students from living in their vehicles on campus for reasons of, as one Duke official explained, “safety, security, health, and liability.”