Read Online Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ken Ilgunas
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sins, for the profligate decisions I had made as a clueless eighteen-year-old.I thought of my job as nothing but frivolous toil—the only thing keeping me from living the free life I now dreamed of: of mountains and books and adventures and independence. I was ungrateful to have a job, yes, but I was grateful to have a life with which I might do better things.
I could have easily justified that I was lucky to even have a job unlike millions of other grads, or that I was better off than the twentysomethings who were starving, had AIDS, and were fighting a war somewhere in Africa, but I didn’t want to make “the best of a bad situation.” To make the best out of a bad situation seemed like an act of resignation. Instead, I embraced my bitterness and hatred and ungratefulness. Ungratefulness, I thought, was my only ticket out of debt and jobs like this.
And so, without time to visit the mountains or savor the books and lectures and higher things that kept me mostly sane in college, I relied on the blackout quantities of alcohol I’d lustily drink at weekly riverside extravaganzas—when we’d drink until we couldn’t think of work or debts or troubles anymore. In June, for my twenty-third birthday, one of the chefs, Karla, who’d given all the males in camp stripper nicknames (mine being “Kenny G String”), awarded me with a G-string she’d made out of velvet and muskrat fur that she’d acquired from a local trapper. After my eighth Miller Lite, egged on by a cheering crowd, I donned my present, wearing my G-string over my jeans like a washed-up arctic superhero. I can say from experience that when you wake up on a weekly basis with cottonmouth, a throbbing hangover, and a dead muskrat on your crotch, you can’t help but question the direction your life is headed in.
I became obsessed with destroying what I thought was most constraining me. The debt wasn’t a mere dollar amount; it was a villain that needed to be vanquished, a dragon that needed to be slain, a windmill that needed to be toppled. I thought of the debt as if it was the only thing keeping me from
really
living. It was the only thing on my mind. Nearly every dollar I made went toward my loans. I bought nothing and kept nothing inthe bank. I squealed with pleasure when I tortured it with payments, like a sadist plucking legs from a captured mosquito.
On the drive back to Coldfoot on the van tours, we would stop at Wiseman, the historic mining village just thirteen miles north of Coldfoot. In the 1930s, Wiseman was home to 375 Eskimos and white settlers, but today there are only 15 people there, living largely subsistence lifestyles: hunting moose, caribou, grizzlies, and Dall sheep; growing vegetable gardens; foraging for blueberries and cranberries; and creating their own electricity with solar panels, as well as with wind and diesel generators.
Many of the cabins—made of stacked birch logs—are still standing from Wiseman’s boomtown days. They are crowded by raspberry bushes or giant clusters of blue delphiniums. Rooftops are made of sod or shingled with old rusted tin oil containers or hidden under large solar panels. There are moose antlers hanging above doors; hunting caches, which looked like mini cabins on stilts; and vegetable gardens bursting with heads of lettuce and the greens of potatoes and carrots that would feed the townspeople for the long winter. My company paid one of the Wiseman locals to show the tourists his subsistence lifestyle.
Jack Reakoff was in his late forties, yet he didn’t look a day older than thirty-five. He had a sturdy, frontiersman’s carriage, and wore a necklace made of wolf teeth and a belt buckle made of Dall sheep horn. He’d lived in Wiseman ever since he was a boy and had grown up hunting, trapping, and fishing in the arctic’s woods and rivers. As a young man, he attended the University of Alaska at Anchorage for a semester to study biology but quickly realized that there was no better
I could have easily justified that I was lucky to even have a job unlike millions of other grads, or that I was better off than the twentysomethings who were starving, had AIDS, and were fighting a war somewhere in Africa, but I didn’t want to make “the best of a bad situation.” To make the best out of a bad situation seemed like an act of resignation. Instead, I embraced my bitterness and hatred and ungratefulness. Ungratefulness, I thought, was my only ticket out of debt and jobs like this.
And so, without time to visit the mountains or savor the books and lectures and higher things that kept me mostly sane in college, I relied on the blackout quantities of alcohol I’d lustily drink at weekly riverside extravaganzas—when we’d drink until we couldn’t think of work or debts or troubles anymore. In June, for my twenty-third birthday, one of the chefs, Karla, who’d given all the males in camp stripper nicknames (mine being “Kenny G String”), awarded me with a G-string she’d made out of velvet and muskrat fur that she’d acquired from a local trapper. After my eighth Miller Lite, egged on by a cheering crowd, I donned my present, wearing my G-string over my jeans like a washed-up arctic superhero. I can say from experience that when you wake up on a weekly basis with cottonmouth, a throbbing hangover, and a dead muskrat on your crotch, you can’t help but question the direction your life is headed in.
I became obsessed with destroying what I thought was most constraining me. The debt wasn’t a mere dollar amount; it was a villain that needed to be vanquished, a dragon that needed to be slain, a windmill that needed to be toppled. I thought of the debt as if it was the only thing keeping me from
really
living. It was the only thing on my mind. Nearly every dollar I made went toward my loans. I bought nothing and kept nothing inthe bank. I squealed with pleasure when I tortured it with payments, like a sadist plucking legs from a captured mosquito.
On the drive back to Coldfoot on the van tours, we would stop at Wiseman, the historic mining village just thirteen miles north of Coldfoot. In the 1930s, Wiseman was home to 375 Eskimos and white settlers, but today there are only 15 people there, living largely subsistence lifestyles: hunting moose, caribou, grizzlies, and Dall sheep; growing vegetable gardens; foraging for blueberries and cranberries; and creating their own electricity with solar panels, as well as with wind and diesel generators.
Many of the cabins—made of stacked birch logs—are still standing from Wiseman’s boomtown days. They are crowded by raspberry bushes or giant clusters of blue delphiniums. Rooftops are made of sod or shingled with old rusted tin oil containers or hidden under large solar panels. There are moose antlers hanging above doors; hunting caches, which looked like mini cabins on stilts; and vegetable gardens bursting with heads of lettuce and the greens of potatoes and carrots that would feed the townspeople for the long winter. My company paid one of the Wiseman locals to show the tourists his subsistence lifestyle.
Jack Reakoff was in his late forties, yet he didn’t look a day older than thirty-five. He had a sturdy, frontiersman’s carriage, and wore a necklace made of wolf teeth and a belt buckle made of Dall sheep horn. He’d lived in Wiseman ever since he was a boy and had grown up hunting, trapping, and fishing in the arctic’s woods and rivers. As a young man, he attended the University of Alaska at Anchorage for a semester to study biology but quickly realized that there was no better
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