Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (18 page)

Every weekend, the crew would try to persuade me to join them at a karaoke bar called the Salty Dawg. But except for the occasional used book online, I was buying nothing, spending nothing, and saving everything. I was no less reluctant when they invited me to join them on their trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but my defenses began to falter when I found out that Sami was going, too. Much to all their surprise, I agreed to go. Seven of us crammed into a small sedan, and because there were too few seats, Sami sat on my lap, which sent me into a helpless state of excitement and nervousness and barely concealed ardor (among other barely concealed issues that arose).

On the ride over, she said she was looking for her next job, and I told her I could probably get her a job cleaning rooms at Coldfoot, adding that I might live up there that summer, too, because I was applying for a job as a backcountry park ranger at the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, which has a ranger station in Coldfoot. I knew I could set Sami up with a job easily, but I also knew that I had little chance of getting the Park Service job, as I was still, to say the least, far from being a competent outdoorsman. But if I couldn’t impress the Park Service with competence, I’d do so with diligence. Every two weeks I called or e-mailed them, restating my interest in the job. If I got it, I knew my debt worries would be over. I entertained the
idea of us both working up there, making love on mountaintops, emerging naked from hidden lagoons.

The way our relationship started was, I’ll admit, less
Jane Eyre
and more
MTV Spring Break.
(Starting a relationship at Mardi Gras, after all, may be just a notch above starting one in a porn shop.)

It all began when she asked me to go to a Yonder Mountain String Band concert. I dropped $20 on a ticket, and at the concert, on the dance floor during the first song, she leaned against me, and from that moment forth, I was hers and she was mine.

Thereafter, back in Gulfport, Sami would sneak out of the female bunk after everyone went to sleep in order to bed with me in my one-person tent on the baseball diamond. In the morning, she’d wake up before everyone else and head back to the female bunkhouse in order to keep our trysts a secret.

She was all passion—all feeling and warmth and wet kisses. She carried about her an air of effervescence that was so real and unaffected it was intimidating. She wasn’t intellectual, or logical, or deliberate. She was all spontaneity and carefreeness and impetuosity; her actions governed entirely by passing fancies and momentary whims. She lived by a code that I wanted to live by but didn’t think I’d ever be able to.

I knew it was dangerous to be dating a crew member, but there was no fighting it anymore. My defenses had hoisted a white flag, my chastity belt had fallen to my ankles, my passions were stirred to a fever pitch. I desired her with a disquieting intensity; my deliberate style of living gave way to the impetuous now. Sami was in my every waking thought. At work, the minutes ticked by too slowly. I couldn’t wait to get back to our tent, where life was nothing but caresses and copulation, her cool auburn hair dancing on my bare chest. I was a high schooler again, stupidly, foolishly in love.

During our nightly trysts, she’d ask me to tell her about Coldfoot and my hitchhiking adventures. For some reason, she
always wanted me to tell the stories. Hers, for some reason, were too hard to tell.

As we got to know each other, I could tell that we were like two different-colored rivers becoming one, each coming from wildly different sources. I came from the concrete dam of student debt and she from the melting glaciers of depression, where her very existence hung in the balance.

Two years before, Sami had been lying in a hospital bed with tubes jammed into her throat. Throughout high school, she had tried to kill herself on five separate occasions.

She’d had a happy childhood and was raised by loving parents in middle-class Minnesota, but for no clear reason, Sami plummeted into a bottomless, inescapable depression. She stopped eating, and when she did eat, she threw it back up. She’d cut her wrist, OD’d on pills, and chugged peroxide. Clueless and without any better idea, her parents and doctor put her on a high dosage of prescription drugs, which numbed her so much that she’d go to wild parties and get wasted just so she could feel something. At one party, she got raped. She was sent to therapy, hospitals, and even college. Nothing worked.

Providence, though, had other things in mind for her. On a trip to the mall to ask for cardboard boxes so she could move out of the college she’d just dropped out of, she joined a crowd that had surrounded a magician who was on tour raising funds for his animal sanctuary down south. Sami, drawn to the tiger and lion cubs that the magician had brought with him, asked him on a whim if she could join the tour. The exchange marked the first time she’d let her spontaneous instincts lead her in a constructive direction.

A week later, she was working at the sanctuary in Oklahoma, where she cared for displaced animals. She went on tour across the country with the magician to help raise funds for the sanctuary. A year later, she found her way to Mississippi, where she joined the trail crew.

Suburbia, work, school: These, for the adventurous at heart, are no more than boxes—boxes too small and confining for souls made to fly. Because Sami had never had the chance to acquaint herself with the adventurous sensations her soul longed to nourish itself with, she’d seen little reason to go through the trouble of living. 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.

When I met her, she was on a “living high.” She reminded me of myself when I decided to drive to Alaska and climb Blue Cloud years before. She was willing to do anything, chance anything, and risk anything if it meant she’d get to feel some new sensation that had previously gone unfelt.

“I’m going to hitchhike to Alaska,” she said to me one night.

“What?”

“You know, like you did.”

“Sami, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it was different with me.”

“You mean because I’m a girl?”

“Well, something could happen to you.”

“But wasn’t it you who told me that the world wasn’t as bad as everybody said it was?”

She was thinking about Alaska because she’d gotten the job in Coldfoot. I, on the other hand, hadn’t heard back from the Gates of the Arctic National Park, so my reverie of us up there together seemed far-fetched, and I wasn’t sure what to do about our relationship. While I didn’t want our rivers to branch off in different directions, it seemed like separating was the best thing for each of us. She had a job, and I needed to find work. But now this hitchhiking business changed everything.

“Sami, please don’t hitchhike. I’d be worried sick,” I said.

“Kenny, I’ve been told my whole life what I should and shouldn’t do.”

I didn’t want her to hitchhike all alone. Despite her brush with depression and death, despite all the poverty and destitution
she saw in Mississippi, she still really believed that this was one big, happy world. She didn’t know when to feel afraid. She didn’t know when someone was hitting on her, or when not to tell a joke. After her last suicide attempt, she’d experienced something like a rebirth, and she was rediscovering everything anew, with a fresh set of eyes. I loved her for the cheerful world she saw, but I knew it would work against her if she were to strike out on her own so soon.

I begged her not to go, but there was some part of me that knew such an adventure might be good for her, as it had been for me. I knew I couldn’t, for the sake of her well-being, shove her back into one of her airtight boxes, so I told her that I’d hitchhike with her, not to Alaska, but to New York—where my parents lived—if she promised not to hitchhike alone.

Meanwhile, Josh, over the course of my six months in Mississippi, grew more and more disenchanted with his new job at Westwood College. He had the title of admissions representative, but he was really no more than a “glorified telemarketer,” as he described it. He sat in his cubicle all day and called up teenagers to persuade them to attend Westwood. Most of them came from low-income families who—Josh pointed out to me—were a lot easier to persuade. At first, he thought the job was socially beneficial: He figured selling education was better than selling anything else. But when he learned more about Westwood, he found himself in a moral quandary.

Students enrolled at Westwood’s online school pay $64,000 to $79,000 for a three-year degree. Because Westwood—like many for-profit colleges—isn’t regionally accredited, students can’t transfer their credits to conventional four-year colleges. After a little googling, Josh discovered that hundreds of Westwood students couldn’t get jobs with their degrees, nor could they pay back their astronomical debts. Plus, Westwood was lending loans to students with ungodly 12 percent interest rates.

It was a cruel irony that Josh, floundering in student debt of his own, was now in the business of getting other young people
to go into debt. This was not the time for idealism, though; Josh needed the money, and morally unambiguous jobs were clearly in short supply. So, like a good loan drone, he shuffled out of bed each morning, groaned, put on his collared shirt, and settled into his cubicle.

Our season with the GCCC ended in March. Sami and I said good-bye to the crew. I still didn’t have a summer job lined up, and Sami’s new job at Coldfoot didn’t start till the beginning of May, so we had a whole month to explore America’s East Coast.

Hitching rides never seemed so easy. Rarely would we have to wait for more than half an hour. On my Alaskan hitchhike, I was stranded on the side of the road for hours at a time, sometimes a whole day. Sami was the key: She’d hold the sign while I sat on my pack behind her trying to look harmless (or attempting to remain out of view entirely). Her bright, innocent smile was the perfect bait for the predominant demographic of our drivers: lonely, middle-aged males.

One of our first rides was with Terry, a professional driver who takes train conductors to and from their stations. He spoke with a slur, fumbled with the gear stick, and casually remarked that he had stopped at a bar for a cold one on his way home. But I didn’t realize that he might have been drunk until I caught him staring at a fridge full of beer in a gas station, eyeing his options long and hard, as if pondering some great moral question. He bought a Coors tallboy and cracked it open halfway to Jacksonville, Florida, where Sami was hankering to see the beach. Terry, like most of our drivers, had a checkered past. His was fraught with prostitutes, crackheads, and alcoholism, as well as a devastating separation from his wife. Before he dropped us off, he shared with us the six words of wisdom that he’d failed to live by: “The truth will set you free”—a phrase that Sami later stitched into her hemp purse.

Rusty, a trucker, would take us all the way from a thruway entrance ramp in Jacksonville to a truck stop in South Carolina.
He told us about his mail-order bride in Ukraine, and he spoke of his many travails, listing his tragedies nonchalantly, like a mechanic smugly specifying repairs needed after an inspection. It all started when a tornado blew down his boyhood home. Later, burglars stole his inheritance that was kept in a shoebox. His stepfather raped him as a child and, decades later, would have an affair with his wife. Rusty said his wife tried to kill him with rat poison after she had a nightmare—or a premonition—that was so terrifying she miscarried their unborn son. He had had four types of terminal cancer, validating the premonition, and finally, after having a vision on his deathbed, he overcame his illness, converted to Christianity, and became a new man.

Harry, our next driver, said things like “Hey, man…” in that nasally, slightly annoying, hippie sort of way. He was forty-four, but he looked sixty-four. He had a long, feral beard and a white ponytail. He had a bad limp, which he picked up a couple of years back when he was sandwiched between a pair of forklifts when he’d been drinking on the job. His son’s toy race cars were strewn across the dash, and his floorboards were covered with a rat’s nest of papers and plastic bottles.

Harry saw everything as a sign from God—even us standing on the side of the road. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do, but something spoke to him and said, “Pick them up, and take them where they want to go.” Even though he had no reason to drive in our direction, he drove us four hours north.

When his son was a baby, Harry told us he’d watched a news report of a series of crib deaths, and he couldn’t sleep for three straight days because he was so worried about his son dying. He’d started to have a nervous breakdown, and he’d known it was only a matter of time before he would descend into inescapable madness.

“I saw smoke billowing in the corner of my son’s room,” Harry said gravely. “This smoke kept getting bigger and bigger, expanding.

“The smoke took the shape of a giant marble foot, as large as
the sky in front of us.” He waved his hand at the expanse of the wide gray sky through his windshield.

“And I hear this giggling. It’s a baby giggling. And I realize that this foot is the foot of God. And suddenly I see this baby…” He paused. I looked over at him. Large tears were rolling down his cheeks. “I see this baby next to this foot. And it’s laughing and bouncing up and down. And that’s when I knew that all babies go to heaven. And from that day forward, I could sleep.”

Before he said good-bye, he told us how he was going to murder his ex-wife and her lover: “I’m going to back my truck into their trailer and finish them off with my shotgun. Then the police will come and we know what will happen from there.”

Brent and his wife, Paula—hauling a pair of horses in a trailer behind their battered SUV—would pick us up in Williamston, North Carolina, and take us all the way to Manns Harbor (along the Atlantic coast), where they lived in a trailer on a peninsula near the Outer Banks. They looked leathery, with faces cracked and weathered by forty years of labor, trucking the roads we hitched along. When we got to their place, they invited us in for shrimp and vodka. This was the best part of a hitchhike: sharing comforts, lives, and stories with strangers. Grateful for their hospitality, we offered to help with chores the next day. Sami combed the horses while I heaved a pile of manure out of the horses’ shack with a pitchfork.