Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (34 page)

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.

Still, though, now that I had money, I became restless. Mostly, I fantasized about van renovations. I thought that it would be nice to have solar panels or a wood stove. It would be nice to have a bike rack, a new paint job, and an Internet connection.

Someone once offered Thoreau a welcome mat, but he declined because he preferred “to wipe [his] feet on the sod before [his] door,” adding, “It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” While I understood Thoreau, in his writings I began to notice an unflinching unreasonableness, a rigid ideology, a foolish dogma. And while he may indeed have rejected that welcome mat, he left out of his book the fact that his mother did his laundry for him. He fashioned himself on the page as an icon of stern independence, but Thoreau, in reality, was just another guy who didn’t like to do his laundry.

This made me think that I might have been unreasonable, too. For the past year, I’d refused all offerings of help from my family, doing away with the whole gift-giving, gift-getting ceremonial act, which is an act that has been forging and fortifying human relationships since the dawn of man. And while I really
did want to stay out of debt, I acknowledged that accepting a gift or going into debt was an okay thing to do in some circumstances. By borrowing money today, we can invest in a house, a farm, an education, or a business, so we can live happier, hopefully debt-free lives in a more prosperous tomorrow. And while Josh and I despised our debts, the educations we’d bought with the money we borrowed were priceless. A college education is one of the few purchases a person can make that cannot be repossessed or auctioned off.

It was easy for me to see now that when we try to be a “Thoreau” or a “minimalist,” or when we live according to a strict ideology, we begin to confuse someone else’s needs with our own. 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.”

I knew all about “it would be nice.” I saw it everywhere. A middle-class family might think it would be nice to have an in-ground swimming pool. A millionaire might think it would be nice to have a yacht. A billionaire, a private jet. The desires never stop.

I knew that there were people living in real poverty—people who really could use an opportunity to “move up.” Someone, somewhere, might think it would be nice to have food to feed her family. Someone, somewhere, might think it would be nice to be enrolled in college. Someone, somewhere, might think it would be nice to have potable water to drink, a job to work at, and a roof over his head. Someone, somewhere—I was sure—might think it would be nice to be in my situation. What if I thought it would be nice to be me, a vandweller? My journeys, the time in Alaska, the year at Duke, Thoreau: from them I learned that I must appreciate what little I have instead of restlessly longing for what I did not.

Even though I no longer thought so ill of gifts and possessions and debts as I once did, I still wanted to see this thing through.
I wanted to get my degree debt-free. Like I’d planned. And even though I had money, I knew that getting through Duke debt-free would still be no simple task. I had another six courses and three semesters to go. Tuition and books would cost me another $7,000 alone.

— 1.5 Years Later —

.............

May 2011—Duke University

SAVINGS: $1,156

O
N MAY
14, 2011, I woke up on the floor in the corner of an Embassy Suites hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The night before, my mom, dad, and aunt had flown to North Carolina from Buffalo. They had planned on sharing a king-sized bed while I slept alone on the pull-out couch in the other room. But just minutes after the lights were turned off, I heard some terrifying snarls that sounded like dinosaurs moaning in battle from the bedroom.

My aunt, we then learned, had a snoring problem. It was a roar that, with each passing sound wave, made the paintings on the wall rattle and my hair flutter.

Justifiably, my dad left the room to join me on the pull-out couch. But he was—I was afraid to learn—just as bad, emitting enough sniffles and snorts to make me think I had bedded down with a pride of slumbering lions.

This time I left the bed, grabbing my pillow, snagging a towel
from the bathroom, and sandwiching my head in between them in the farthest corner of the room.

Poorly rested, I woke up anxious and groggy. It was the day of my liberal studies graduation—the conclusion to my two-and-a-half-year vandwelling experiment. In a couple of hours—to my absolute horror—I was to give a speech as my graduating class’s student speaker.

After publishing an article about my first two semesters at Duke, part of me—despite my social disinclinations and solitary penchants—hoped to enjoy a period of fame as the campus “van man.” I imagined myself walking around campus giving high-fives to strangers, fist-bumping professors, and shaking hands with janitors. I’d walk by a group of girls and they’d cup their hands around their mouths to hide coquettish smiles. Perhaps I’d even take a disillusioned undergrad under my wing. Maybe I could be the campus sage? I’d wear loose white clothing, grow out my beard, and speak in aphorisms to any underclassmen who’d journey the mile on foot to my sacred parking space.

Things, needless to say, didn’t turn out this way.

Duke administration, not sure how to handle the situation, told a local newspaper that they were prepared to offer me “guidance and counseling.” A tenant in the apartment complex by my parking spot complained to the landlord that my presence made him or her “uncomfortable.” I was kicked out of the Mill lot, but I was generously given a new parking spot in the middle of campus (but only if I signed a contract saying I wouldn’t sue Duke and that I’d never live in the van on campus again after graduating).
¹

Eh, fair enough.

I lived in the van for another year. I was visited by another mouse, I dealt with a swarm of ants that overtook my storage
container, and I salvaged food from the Student Union garbage cans whenever I was hungry and low on cash. I took two more creative writing courses and other random, enriching courses like History of Economic Theory and History of Sincerity, and did an independent study on “Student Debt and the Self.”

After two years in the van (and my final semester spent living on a small farm in rural North Carolina, where I wrote my final project), I completed my goal of graduating debt-free. I ended my experiment with $1,156 in the bank and about the same number of possessions I had arrived with. I had a monetarily useless degree, no real home, and hardly anything to my name.

Thoreau said he found it hard to leave Walden Pond but decided to move out because he had “several more lives to live.” Like Thoreau, I thought I could have happily remained in the van, but I felt that I had more lives to live, too. What those lives might be, I wasn’t sure.

But the decision about what life I should live took on an undesired urgency when a respectable magazine, whose editors were acquainted with my Salon article, insisted that I apply for a writing job that paid in the high thirties. Their one stipulation was that I had to make a three-year commitment. Just like that, I could have an apartment, health insurance, a stable year-round job, a decent salary, a comfortable, respectable life.

The graduation ceremony was held at the Washington Duke Inn, a grandiose hotel near campus next to an eighteen-hole, 120-acre, Ireland-green golf course. Men in starched livery opened the doors for my family and me. We walked past bronze busts of Duke presidents, framed pictures of the Duke family, and olive drapes, each set probably worth more than my van. I was used to Duke’s extravagant frills, but my parents oohed and aahed admiringly at the ornate chandeliers, the freshly cut flowers in vases, the desks made of bird’s-eye maple with a burled walnut veneer.

Family members were dressed in their crisp Sunday best and soon-to-be grads swished around in dark robes. Beneath my
robe, I wore my sky-blue dress shirt that I’d bought for $3 from the Salvation Army, the fourteen-year-old pair of dress pants I wore to my high school homecoming dance, dress socks I got for free from the Park Service, and a pair of old beat-up brown shoes. (The origins of my tie and underwear were unknown.)

Fellow graduates and I paraded into a banquet hall, where we were escorted to our seats. Mine was in the front row. As a member of the faculty began the ceremony, I nervously leafed through my speech one last time.

As I sat there, awaiting my turn to speak, I thought about all the people who had played a role in my story. While Thoreau downplayed the society around him, calling them “insignificant,” not a day went by when I didn’t think of the people who’d been a part of my journey.

Jack Reakoff, the wise man of Wiseman, is still hunting and trapping and giving tours for Coldfoot. James, the seventy-five-year old vehicle-dweller, still lives in Coldfoot and works for the BLM, but he has upgraded from his Chevy Suburban to a cozy BLM cabin. The Gulf Coast Conservation Corps has become defunct for lack of funding, and I’ve lost contact with nearly everyone I worked with there, just as I have lost contact with my fellow voyageurs and the hundreds of people I hitchhiked with.

Sami took to a life of adventure, canoeing Canadian rivers and biking West Coast roads. Now she works at a ski park and studies at a college in California. She hitchhikes alone, and I tell her that I now know what it’s like to go through what my mother went through. Chuck moved to Boston and began working for a nature conservancy. My mom and dad still think I’m sort of insane, but never have they shown the faintest sign of “distancing” themselves from me.

And Josh?

After Josh quit, he became outspoken about the evils he witnessed at Westwood. He got in touch with a law firm that was filing a class-action lawsuit against the school, and they had him star in a few anti-Westwood commercials to recruit other whistleblowers.
And in August 2010, when the ruthless sales tactics of the whole for-profit college industry were coming under the scrutiny of Congress, Josh was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate.

Yes, the actual Senate!

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t worry about “burning bridges.” This would be his grand moment of redemption.

He flew from Denver to Washington, D.C. Waking up in his hotel room on the day of the hearing, he opened his suitcase to learn—to his absolute horror—that he’d forgotten to bring dress pants. With the testimony just an hour away, Josh, wearing a jacket and tie (along with a pair of faded jeans), sprinted through the nation’s capital in search of a men’s clothing shop. He found a Men’s Warehouse and tried to yank the door open. The store had yet to open, though, so he desperately pounded the glass doors. Not having fully caught his breath, he explained his situation to the tailor, bought pants, and then jogged to the Capitol Building, breathing heavily and soaked in sweat.

He sat down at a table in front of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, looking up at Senators Tom Harkin, Mike Enzi, Al Franken, and others. His hair was slightly disheveled, and one corner of his shirt collar leaned over to rest on his jacket lapel. Otherwise, he looked all business.

“Now, Mr. Pruyn, welcome to these proceedings,” said Senator Harkin.

Josh coughed, thanked the chairman with a quavering voice, and commenced his speech.

“My name is Joshua Pruyn,” he said. “I’m a former admissions representative of Westwood College, or, as Senator Mikulski might have referred to it, a ‘bounty hunter.’”

He talked about how students had been manipulated and misled, what resulted from the intense atmosphere on the admissions sales floor, and why he decided to quit.

“I quit my job at Westwood on a Monday morning…,” he said. “I started admitting things to myself that I’d been avoiding for almost six months. I accepted that I could no longer tell
myself that it was possible to work for Westwood and consider myself to be working within any degree of ethical standards. That Monday morning, I walked out of the building and never returned.

“When I left,” he continued, “I had no expectation or reasonable prospect for finding another job quickly. I didn’t really think about that. I just thought about how naïve I was when I applied for the job—hoping to help students make a better future for themselves through college. Instead, I left fearing the students I had enrolled would end up with a mountain of debt and little or nothing to show for it.”

Westwood felt so damaged by Josh’s testimony that they denied several of his allegations, called parts of his speech “deliberately false,” and asked that his record be removed from the testimony.

Today, Josh is a grant writer for a nonprofit organization in Denver, Colorado, that promotes early childhood education. In six years, he has paid off $55,000 of his debt. We are still best friends and e-mail each other on an almost daily basis. He still owes $11,000.

After the program director’s introduction, I was called up to the podium. I rose from my chair and paid careful attention to each step forward, careful not to step on my robe.

I looked at the audience. My hands were trembling, and I’d forgotten how to breathe. I placed the sheaf of papers on the lectern and looked at the suit-and-tie audience. My mom and aunt waved and my dad smiled.

Here I am, I thought, a vandweller among the well-to-do, a high school slacker about to give a speech at one of the greatest universities in the world. Just a few years ago I was falling apart and hearing voices in my head. I was a boring indebted suburbanite. And yet now, Josh and I—a couple of losers in high school—are living fulfilling, inspired, principled lives. Perhaps we’d changed because we were able to leave this world for a bit, this world of jobs and schools and buildings, and got to see a
different one: one of mountains and forests and rivers, of the Brooks Range. Maybe it was because we’d somehow managed to bring back the wild with us.