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

by Ken Ilgunas

It didn’t occur to me to think about how strange it was that the government, my college, and a large bank were letting me, an eighteen-year-old kid—one who didn’t know what “interest” was (or how to work the stove for that matter)—take out a gigantic five-digit loan that might substantially alter the course of my life.

It’s always adorable to watch a little boy play make-believe, but it gets a touch desperate and disturbing when he’s eighteen.

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.

It feels almost blasphemous to admit hating work. It’s true that people often complain about working twelve-hour days, balancing two jobs, or suffering through double shifts, but it seems our complaints are often just thinly veiled boasts about how busy our lives are, as if having no time for leisure, for a good night’s sleep, or to do the things we actually want to do is some virtuous sacrifice we should all strive to make.

there was something crooked about the system—a system that charged unreasonable amounts of tuition to teenagers who only wished to better themselves and their society—

If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?

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? The statues, the paintings, the epic poems, the things we buy, the homes we strive to attain, the great cities and timeless monuments. In time, they’ll all be gone. And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the world will be forgotten, carried away like crumpled leaves from autumn limbs. Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.

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.

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

And while each rejection stung, the one good thing about being continuously rejected is that your pride, over time, begins to callous over

Sometimes, to cede control to fate, I realized, is to assume more control than ever before.

I can’t say when it happened, but at some point in the last forty years, it seemed as if something like a giant crop duster flew over our once wild and free country, sowing fear into the belly of America. People now are afraid to take walks at night. Parents won’t let their kids wander through the woods. And young men and women are reluctant to hitchhike or embark on adventures for fear of all the terribleness out there that we’ve been daily reminded of.

There is little-to-no “enjoyment,” but I feel that today’s sacrifice will be tomorrow’s reward.

When your life is all toil and hardship, the things that matter and the bullshit that doesn’t become easy to separate.

When we are raised by institutions, we are fashioned, in ways big and small, to be like everyone else. But when we go on a journey—especially a journey that follows no one else’s footsteps—it has the capacity to help a person become something unique, an individual.

The voyage was teaching me how unexceptional I was and how exceptional the human mind and body is. What wonders the human mind and body are capable of achieving! How so few know how much we can do! Our limits are merely mirages on the far side of the lake—we can see them ahead, but that’s all they are: mirages. Our real limits are beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the horizon, a boundary worthy of our exploration.

I relied on my usual tactic of bottling my anger and hoping the problem would blow over—a tactic that had never worked in the past, yet was one that I continued to apply to situations with an irrational faith.

In the midst of good, steady work, all conscious thought comes to a halt.

With distraction would come peace; during those moments, there was no more debt, no more aching desires, and work no longer felt like work but a happy engagement of mind and body that could be rightfully confused with the joy of all joys, the epitome of human existence.

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.

self-reformation could be achieved through the process of becoming self-aware.

I learned that when work is meaningful and when the worker provides some useful service or produces some useful product, work is no longer “work” but an enriching component of one’s day.

Sometimes, we can’t help but assume the nature of the landscape we inhabit. Just as the farm fosters industry; the desert, frugality; the mountains, hardiness; and a rocky coastline, a romantic restlessness; so does the suburb foster boredom, conventionality, and conformity.

Saint Francis of Assisi quote. He said, “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

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.

Sometimes it’s not until you see your shackles that you see your dreams. The soul must first be caged before it can be set free.

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.

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?

When we accept a gift, I thought, sometimes we don’t just acquire a debt but an identity. Taking a gift can be like taking a sizzling-hot brand to the backside. The giver gives us a marking, a bubbling scar that only the brander and branded can see. It’s a mark of dependence.

But is freedom from work really freedom? Is our money—no matter how we acquire it—a ticket to freedom?

it’s always easier to ask for the second favor than it is the first.

Real poverty has little to do with being broke. Real poverty is not being able to change your circumstances.

What’s the point of schools like Duke if they’re merely funneling grads into careers that—excuse the colloquialism—fuck shit

the liberal arts have the capacity to turn on a certain part of the brain that would otherwise remain shut off—the part of our brain that makes us ask ourselves questions like: Who am I? What’s worth fighting for? Who’s lying to us? What’s my purpose? What’s the point of it all? Perhaps many students would rather not be irritated with these questions, yet being compelled to grapple with them, it seems, can make us far less likely to be among those who’ll conform, remain complacent, or seek jobs with morally ambiguous employers.

More and more, I started to believe what Desmond Bagley said: “If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.”

And while I was getting some of that from my liberal studies courses, I learned that the consumer-capitalist model not only goes unchallenged in most university curricula but that it’s quite literally taught. The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them.

Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them. But when we deal with the same discomforts every day, they become expected and part of the routine, and we are no longer afflicted with them the way we were.

Why should I listen to society? Society—as far as I was concerned—was insane. 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.

I knew then what the heart of man can hold. I felt in me the potential for the best and worst of our nature. I was capable of murder and rape, cruelty and deceit, yet also firmness, assertiveness, courage, determination, vitality.

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. I learned such a glimpse cannot be gotten with half-hearted journeys and soft endeavors. Nor could I hope for such a glimpse merely by setting out to conquer some random geographic feature, like getting to the top of a mountain. Rather, I knew one must confront the very beasts and chasms that haunt our dreams, block our paths, and muffle the voice of the wild man howling in all of us, who calls for you to become you—the you who culture cannot shape, the you who is unalterable, uncivilizable, pure. You.

“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.”

With each charge to my credit card, I rode the “buyer’s high”—a high that I hadn’t experienced in years. It occurred just after each purchase, and, like the addict’s hit, I felt the gush of instant gratification, followed by a guilty hangover—a hangover only to be cured with yet another purchase and another after that. It was easy to live frugally when I didn’t have any money. Being voluntarily poor was something else entirely.

How fickle we can be with freedom! How thoughtlessly do we surrender our autonomy! The fanciness of our dress, the make of our car, the brand of our gadgets, the name of our school. We spend our savings or go into debt for no other reason than to bask in the warm rays of peer approval. Yet fashions are slavishly followed one day and ridiculed the next. Be a devotee in the Church of the Consumer and you’ll

forever live in fear of the capricious God of Style. Freedom, though, is an honest pair of eyes, a healthy physique, a cheerful laugh. Style goes out of style. Freedom is forever.

So to live in harmony with my own particular needs and desires, I knew I had to test ideologies, not follow them. I told myself that it was okay to want things and, if I had the money, to buy things. But I knew better than to fall victim to “it would be nice.”