Read Online Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ken Ilgunas
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classroom or teacher than that which he’d just deserted: the great outdoors. He came back to Wiseman and raised a family, embracing the arctic and the subsistence lifestyle that he’d never desire to desert again.
Jack would lead the tourists around town and invite them into his two-room cabin. Inside were mounted heads of Dall sheep and a grizzly. The walls and ceiling were covered withpictures of his family and maps of Alaska. The room smelled of soot, fried caribou, and body odor. Every day I’d listen to Jack tell the guests about his lifestyle. I was his secret pupil, learning everything there was to know about subsistence living in the arctic. His was the most northern garden in America. In it he grew hundreds of pounds of potatoes, cabbages, turnips, beets, kale, and carrots, which he’d cover with clear plastic during the cold summer nights. Underneath makeshift tarpaulin greenhouses, he grew zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers. He preserved his winter vegetables in his refrigerator, which was a hole in the floor of his cabin that remains 40°F year-round. He “killed” trees that had reached full maturity, and then harvested the wood on his snow machine years later when the logs were dry enough for the stove. He ran traplines and sold furs. He hunted and fished, and repaired his own machinery. To supplement his subsistence lifestyle with money, he did these tours with Coldfoot guests for an hour or two every day during the summer.
I was having my first man-crush.
I envied Jack’s lifestyle. It was the sort of lifestyle that makes a man self-reliant, intelligent, strong; a lifestyle in which no one ever had to think of the Dow Jones, the unemployment rate, punch cards, or bosses. Jack’s work and leisure, his toil and enjoyment, were one and the same thing. His work was his life, and his life was his work. Every day was a workday; every day was a vacation. And he wasn’t working in abstractions or pulling levers for some morally ambiguous corporation; his hands were in the dirt, occupied as he was with the duties of feeding his family and warming his home.
I could see that Coldfoot and Wiseman, as well as myself and Jack, were polar opposites. One town relied on trucks to bring food and fuel in from Fairbanks; the other created its own. One town had wage slaves; the other, people as free as people can conceivably be. Each town represented two types of living, two types of working. They represented the life I currently had to live and the life I wanted to live.
While I was getting paid plenty of overtime, $9 an hour was still my base wage, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake coming to Coldfoot. Perhaps if I’d looked harder, I could have found something that paid better and didn’t demand so much of my time. I was, however, able to pay the debt off quicker than I originally thought, partly because my mother had offered to put my high-interest bank loan ($17,000) on her interest-free credit card. (My mother had perfect credit, allowing her such a card.) This meant that, for this loan, I’d no longer be paying back a bank—just my mom. This arrangement was advantageous to me because the interest on this loan would no longer accrue, and it wouldn’t cost my mother a thing.
In addition to the $17,000 loan my mom had put on her credit card, I had another $15,000 government loan. Paying my two loans was a simple process. The payments for the government loan were automatically deducted from my bank account. Because I wanted to pay back my mom first, I paid the minimum on these government loans ($114 a month, about half of which would go toward accumulated interest).
Every week I’d mail my checks home to my mom, and she was supposed to put all the money toward my loans on her credit card. Our arrangement was working fine until one day, in the middle of summer, when I viewed my bank account on Coldfoot’s shared computer and realized that she was putting the money not toward the debt but in my bank
Jack would lead the tourists around town and invite them into his two-room cabin. Inside were mounted heads of Dall sheep and a grizzly. The walls and ceiling were covered withpictures of his family and maps of Alaska. The room smelled of soot, fried caribou, and body odor. Every day I’d listen to Jack tell the guests about his lifestyle. I was his secret pupil, learning everything there was to know about subsistence living in the arctic. His was the most northern garden in America. In it he grew hundreds of pounds of potatoes, cabbages, turnips, beets, kale, and carrots, which he’d cover with clear plastic during the cold summer nights. Underneath makeshift tarpaulin greenhouses, he grew zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers. He preserved his winter vegetables in his refrigerator, which was a hole in the floor of his cabin that remains 40°F year-round. He “killed” trees that had reached full maturity, and then harvested the wood on his snow machine years later when the logs were dry enough for the stove. He ran traplines and sold furs. He hunted and fished, and repaired his own machinery. To supplement his subsistence lifestyle with money, he did these tours with Coldfoot guests for an hour or two every day during the summer.
I was having my first man-crush.
I envied Jack’s lifestyle. It was the sort of lifestyle that makes a man self-reliant, intelligent, strong; a lifestyle in which no one ever had to think of the Dow Jones, the unemployment rate, punch cards, or bosses. Jack’s work and leisure, his toil and enjoyment, were one and the same thing. His work was his life, and his life was his work. Every day was a workday; every day was a vacation. And he wasn’t working in abstractions or pulling levers for some morally ambiguous corporation; his hands were in the dirt, occupied as he was with the duties of feeding his family and warming his home.
I could see that Coldfoot and Wiseman, as well as myself and Jack, were polar opposites. One town relied on trucks to bring food and fuel in from Fairbanks; the other created its own. One town had wage slaves; the other, people as free as people can conceivably be. Each town represented two types of living, two types of working. They represented the life I currently had to live and the life I wanted to live.
While I was getting paid plenty of overtime, $9 an hour was still my base wage, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake coming to Coldfoot. Perhaps if I’d looked harder, I could have found something that paid better and didn’t demand so much of my time. I was, however, able to pay the debt off quicker than I originally thought, partly because my mother had offered to put my high-interest bank loan ($17,000) on her interest-free credit card. (My mother had perfect credit, allowing her such a card.) This meant that, for this loan, I’d no longer be paying back a bank—just my mom. This arrangement was advantageous to me because the interest on this loan would no longer accrue, and it wouldn’t cost my mother a thing.
In addition to the $17,000 loan my mom had put on her credit card, I had another $15,000 government loan. Paying my two loans was a simple process. The payments for the government loan were automatically deducted from my bank account. Because I wanted to pay back my mom first, I paid the minimum on these government loans ($114 a month, about half of which would go toward accumulated interest).
Every week I’d mail my checks home to my mom, and she was supposed to put all the money toward my loans on her credit card. Our arrangement was working fine until one day, in the middle of summer, when I viewed my bank account on Coldfoot’s shared computer and realized that she was putting the money not toward the debt but in my bank
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