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.

grassy and open except for a procession of gnarled

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.

Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.

I read Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, as well as many of the works of Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, and Jack London. And then I picked up Walden.

Maybe we wanted to be stuck in school for four years and, after that, stuck in debt for decades. Maybe we wanted these limitations and walls because they made life simple. We wouldn’t have to be bothered by the great existential questions of our day if we had to spend forty-plus hours a week “gettin’ ’er done.” If we take gravity away from a man, odds are he’ll fear the novelty of flight so much that the first thing he’ll want is his feet back on the ground. If freedom was our fear, debt was our gravity.

For some, it’s hard to think that the direction of success is anywhere but up the socioeconomic ladder, especially when success is largely measured by security, comfort, and wealth. But maybe progress can point in funny directions. Must we measure our success by the size of our homes and salaries? What if we got healthier, lived more sustainably, and became more self-reliant, albeit in tighter dwellings and in smaller families? Isn’t that success, too?

many students

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.