Read Online Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas - Free Book Online
Authors: Ken Ilgunas
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mountains, which I’d read up on. We’d scan the hills and sometimes spot a caribou, but I’d always wonder:
Is this their idea of travel?
I thought real travel was about spontaneity and adventure. That sort of travel, though, was the last thing they wanted.
Yet I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them. Many only had a couple of weeks of vacation each year, and this tour was all they could afford or had time for. The retirees had worked hard their whole lives and no longer had the energy or strength to do more than this.
Two weeks after my first tour, I got a paycheck in the mail. I took a deep breath and opened it. It was for $300.
“Okay, not bad,” I said to myself. “Just $31,700 more to go.”
The season started slowly. In May, I was putting in a solid forty hours a week—mainly getting trained on how to guide a tour and oar a big blue raft. By June, I was off on my own, driving a fourteen-passenger white tour van up the Dalton, oaring a raft down the Koyukuk, and working a respectable fifty hours a week, which provided me with some much-desired overtime wages. By July, my workweek was up to sixty hours, and while I was happy to be bringing in the big bucks, I also began to mourn the loss of my free time, but I accepted it as a necessary sacrifice. By August, it was up to seventy. I wasn’t just guiding anymore; several workers had deserted camp, so I was now making meals in the kitchen, hastily assembling extra coworker tent cabins for the next season, and helping the cleaners catch up on turning rooms. Some days work started as early as 5 A.M. and didn’t end till 11 P.M. Alaska, which I’d once imagined as a refuge from the nine-to-five working world, turned out to be just as bad.
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 itseems 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.
I may not have admitted it to anyone else—for fear of sounding entitled, or ungrateful, or whiny—but I hated work. I hated waking up early, hated taking orders, hated spending the great bulk of my time doing something for somebody else, hated how the hours would go by, hated how the days would melt into one another.
I didn’t consider myself “above” work, but it just seemed so silly to have to work, perhaps for the next decade, and put all my earnings toward something as intangible, and clearly unprofitable, as my college education. And while I did think 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—I knew that I was responsible for taking out the loans and paying them back.
I despised having to work, now, more than ever, because my situation was so pathetic. After five years of college, two unpaid internships, and $32,000 of debt, I was just as unmarketable as I was as a teenager, doing the same sort of low-skill, low-responsibility, low-income work I’d been doing for years.
Although I was working for a wonderful company, with a wonderful group of people, my actual work didn’t appear to have any of the positive qualities of good employment: It wasn’t a way for me to climb the ladder to a better career; it wasn’t helping me grow or develop; I wasn’t spending my working hours basking in the warmth of job satisfaction by having spent my day making a useful product or providing a necessary service. I was in the tourism industry, so I was little more than a provider of luxuries and satisfier of desires. Ultimately, I was pointless.
I didn’t see work—at least my line of work—as a virtuous undertaking. Rather, I saw it as nothing but a penance for my
Is this their idea of travel?
I thought real travel was about spontaneity and adventure. That sort of travel, though, was the last thing they wanted.
Yet I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them. Many only had a couple of weeks of vacation each year, and this tour was all they could afford or had time for. The retirees had worked hard their whole lives and no longer had the energy or strength to do more than this.
Two weeks after my first tour, I got a paycheck in the mail. I took a deep breath and opened it. It was for $300.
“Okay, not bad,” I said to myself. “Just $31,700 more to go.”
The season started slowly. In May, I was putting in a solid forty hours a week—mainly getting trained on how to guide a tour and oar a big blue raft. By June, I was off on my own, driving a fourteen-passenger white tour van up the Dalton, oaring a raft down the Koyukuk, and working a respectable fifty hours a week, which provided me with some much-desired overtime wages. By July, my workweek was up to sixty hours, and while I was happy to be bringing in the big bucks, I also began to mourn the loss of my free time, but I accepted it as a necessary sacrifice. By August, it was up to seventy. I wasn’t just guiding anymore; several workers had deserted camp, so I was now making meals in the kitchen, hastily assembling extra coworker tent cabins for the next season, and helping the cleaners catch up on turning rooms. Some days work started as early as 5 A.M. and didn’t end till 11 P.M. Alaska, which I’d once imagined as a refuge from the nine-to-five working world, turned out to be just as bad.
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 itseems 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.
I may not have admitted it to anyone else—for fear of sounding entitled, or ungrateful, or whiny—but I hated work. I hated waking up early, hated taking orders, hated spending the great bulk of my time doing something for somebody else, hated how the hours would go by, hated how the days would melt into one another.
I didn’t consider myself “above” work, but it just seemed so silly to have to work, perhaps for the next decade, and put all my earnings toward something as intangible, and clearly unprofitable, as my college education. And while I did think 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—I knew that I was responsible for taking out the loans and paying them back.
I despised having to work, now, more than ever, because my situation was so pathetic. After five years of college, two unpaid internships, and $32,000 of debt, I was just as unmarketable as I was as a teenager, doing the same sort of low-skill, low-responsibility, low-income work I’d been doing for years.
Although I was working for a wonderful company, with a wonderful group of people, my actual work didn’t appear to have any of the positive qualities of good employment: It wasn’t a way for me to climb the ladder to a better career; it wasn’t helping me grow or develop; I wasn’t spending my working hours basking in the warmth of job satisfaction by having spent my day making a useful product or providing a necessary service. I was in the tourism industry, so I was little more than a provider of luxuries and satisfier of desires. Ultimately, I was pointless.
I didn’t see work—at least my line of work—as a virtuous undertaking. Rather, I saw it as nothing but a penance for my
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