from Walden on Wheels

On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Ken Ilgunas

Adapted from Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (2013), a memoir by Ken Ilgunas, the following article appeared in the New York Times on April 10, 2013.

Could I live in a van? I looked over the Craigslist ads, took a bus to John’s used car dealership in Raleigh, N.C., and scanned the rows of sedans, trucks and SUVs in search of my new home. And there it was. A giant 1994 Ford Econoline coated with a burgundy sheen, the sun turning its black-tinted windows a blinding white. It looked out of place among the shiny, spotless SUVs, whose bumpers proudly faced away, as if exhibiting a juvenile disdain for their ponderous elder. Its distended underbelly hung vulnerably low—so low I wondered if it would scrape its undercarriage when climbing up and over speed bumps.

It was big, it was beautiful and, best of all, it was only $1,500.

While the ad promised that the van “drives great,” it had more than enough problems to justify its price tag: one of the two side doors wouldn’t open, there were large patches on the windows where the tint had peeled off, and the tires were bald—so bald that, later on, when I went to buy a part at Sears, a couple of mechanics doubled over in laughter when I asked them if they thought the tires would pass inspection.

“I’ll take it,” I told John anyway, unable to hold back my grin. Despite its deformities, it was love at first sight.

5

I had been accepted into Duke’s graduate liberal studies program, but I couldn’t afford it. I had just paid off my $32,000 undergraduate debt, I was nearly broke, and the prospect of taking out loans was unthinkable. Going back into debt made about as much sense as running out of a burning building just to run into another.

Today, the cost of higher education is ridiculous. Average tuition at a public university, in state, is $8,655. At a private, it’s $29,056. My program would cost, in total, a reasonable $11,000 after grant aid. But it’s not just tuition that puts students into debt; it’s room and board. At Duke, where rates are similar to universities across the country, a non-air-conditioned dorm with two roommates costs $5,464 an academic year. The cheapest meal plan for freshmen is a ghastly $5,540, or $27 a day.

When I added up the costs of tuition, books, transportation, food, housing, not to mention car insurance, utilities and, dare I say, a date, I felt hopeless. I had only $4,000 to my name and no possessions except a backpack full of camping gear. But as desperate as I was, I was determined to go back to school.

Which brought me back to: Could I live in a van?

The van-dwelling lifestyle, I figured, would eliminate many of the costs. For Internet and electricity, I’d use the library. For showers, I’d buy a cheap campus gym membership. For food, I’d cook my own meals. For rent, well, I wouldn’t have any rent. For dates, well, I probably wouldn’t have any of them, either.

10

Seven and a half years before, when I had enrolled at the University at Buffalo as an undergraduate, I wasn’t the sort of person who would have done something as bold and weird and possibly illegal as secretly living in a big creepy van on a college campus. But something had changed on my journey to get out of debt.

Along with owing $32,000, I’d graduated with an unmarketable degree in history and English. Naturally, I struggled to find work and wound up taking a $9-an-hour job as a tour guide and cook at a remote truck stop called Coldfoot in Alaska’s Arctic. But while I took the job out of desperation, I’d accidentally placed myself in a near-ideal situation to pay off my debt. In Coldfoot, the nearest store was 250 miles away (eliminating all temptations to buy stuff), there was no cellphone reception (making a phone plan unnecessary), and workers got free room and board (no food, rent or utility costs). After a year, I had paid off $18,000. A year later, I got a better-paying seasonal job with the Park Service. After two and a half years of work, I was debt free.

But my journey wasn’t just a financial awakening. I had learned about subsistence living in Arctic villages, and worked with a 74-year-old maintenance man who lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban year-round. I began to bring into question what passed for “normal” down in the lower 48, especially when it often led to a lifetime of work, bills and Bed Bath & Beyond purchases. Out of debt, I felt for the first time that my life was my own, and that I could do whatever I wished with it.

And more than anything I wished to use this freedom to continue the liberal arts education that had put me into so much debt. While the cost of my education had chained my ankles to the steel balls of debt, the liberal arts had freed some other part of me. Between a Thoreauvian van-dwelling experiment and studying the great thinkers, I thought Duke would help me become a better person. Living in a van wouldn’t just be a way for me to afford school. It would be an adventure. It would be my “Walden on Wheels.”

“Could I live in a van?” I asked myself one last time. Why the hell not?

15

The spring semester would start in just a couple of days, so I spent a day making the van as comfortable as I could. I removed the two middle pilot seats to create living space, brought in a plastic storage container to hold my possessions, neatly folded all my clothes into my suitcase, and bought a big black cloth to hang behind my driver and passenger seats so that no one could see me inside.

I knew I had the personality for van dwelling. I’d developed a comfort with tight quarters, a sixth sense for cheapness and a tolerance for squalor that was (I hate to brag) unequaled. I had the physical constitution for it, too: I was blessed with a high tolerance for cold temperatures, practically no sense of smell and a bladder (I hate to brag) the size of a football.

But the first few weeks didn’t match up with my romantic vision of a Waldenesque life of ancient texts and quiet solitude. I was assigned to the Mill Lot, a parking lot in the middle of a busy shopping district, a mile from campus, in the heart of Durham. I parked in between a college bar and an apartment building within eyeshot of office windows where men and women in business attire, I worried, might discover me.

Although the lot was rarely visited, I was constantly paranoid about getting discovered. Because I didn’t know what Duke would say if it learned of my experiment, I was determined to keep the van a secret. I wouldn’t tell anyone. And to ensure “stealth,” as van dwellers call it (see the Yahoo message board “VanDwellers”), each morning I lifted up the blinds and looked out the windows to make sure no one saw me leave the van, and I didn’t re-enter until late at night. Whenever the subject of my home came up in conversations with fellow students, I lied my pants off.

My secret was making it impossible to make friends, I was sleeping in temperatures as low as 10 degrees, and as a bachelor living in tight quarters, I was constantly inhaling air riddled with strange odors. Worst of all, I felt a terrible loneliness settle deep into me. To compensate, I began to sing and talk to myself with unprecedented frequency.

20

My main concern, though, was my dwindling money supply. After my first week of purchases—the van, books, school fees, car insurance, food and a cellphone bill—I had less than $1,000 left in savings and $2,000 to pay in tuition. I had nothing else to cut back on, so I tried to eat as little as possible. Walking back from the library one night, I spotted a few mangled slices of pizza lying in a box on the lawn. A savage hunger roared in my belly. Has it already come to this?

My worries were temporarily alleviated when I became a paid “study participant” for Duke’s neuroscience department. Several times a week, for $10 an hour, I was zapped by electrodes, pricked by needles and dazed by pharmaceuticals. Shamelessly, I donated three of my four primary bodily fluids. Later, I found out about studies that paid $20 an hour to perform cognitive tests inside an M.R.I.

Though the van-dwelling lifestyle had its share of hardships, I adapted. On my isobutane backpacking stove, I cooked lavish meals each night, usually some combination of vegetables, noodles and peanut butter. I had only one pot, so all my meals were stews: spaghetti stew, rice and bean stew, vegetable stew, with healthy, calorie-dense dollops of peanut butter mixed in. For breakfast, I’d have cereal with powdered milk, and for lunch I’d make sandwiches and carry them to campus. At the gym, I showered, shaved and brushed my teeth, and filled up large water bottles for cooking.

I washed my clothes every few weeks at a laundromat a short walk from my parking space, and I did all of my studying at the campus library, where I used the free Wi-Fi and charged up my electronics. The van offered no protection from the cold, but once I shivered into my thermal underwear and slipped into my sleeping bag, burritoed in my own body heat, I’d fall into a deep and peaceful slumber.

The van-dwelling lifestyle proved to be as affordable as I’d suspected. I was able to eat for $4.34 a day and I lived on $103 a week. My finances became even more manageable when I got a part-time job tutoring at an inner-city elementary school.

25

I didn’t buy my first meal at a restaurant until more than halfway through the semester, on a weeklong trip to a field station for my “Biodiversity in North Carolina” class. The day before I was to go, my mother sent me an e-mail reminding me about my tax return. I’d get a refund! It was a $1,600 golden ticket that Uncle Sam was going to slip into my bank account. I was rich. This was a turning point, I realized. I had financial security for the first time in months. I’m not poor anymore, I thought nostalgically.

Knowing that my tax refund was coming, I slackened my Spartan standards: I bought a case of beer, I dined at a restaurant twice, and at the field station I slept in a heated room on a comfortable bed. But treating myself made me feel a strange sense of guilt, as if I’d cut some corner I promised myself I wouldn’t cut. During my third night at the station, beleaguered with self-reproach, I dragged my sleeping bag outside and slept on the pavement under the stars. I didn’t need these things. The beer, the food or even the bed. I didn’t even really want them. I was buying stuff simply because I could afford it. If you put a man in a country club, he’ll feel the need for a yacht. But if you drop him in the wilderness, his desires will be only those essential to his survival. I had decided not to take out loans for graduate school in part because I knew that if I allowed myself access to easy money, I’d again fall victim to the consumerist trap. I’d be indiscreet with my money. I’d begin to pay for and rely on things I thought I needed but didn’t. I’d lose perspective. I didn’t want to once again be swallowed whole by the dominant culture, accepting its norms and values and desires as my own.

I knew what I was missing in my life. It wasn’t things. It wasn’t heat, plumbing, an iPhone or a plasma-screen TV. It was people. It was a community. It was a meaningful role to play in society. And these were things—as much as I wanted them—that I knew I could temporarily do without.

When not at work or in class, I would lie in bed for hours, reading, thinking, doing nothing, enjoying the solitude, staring at the ceiling, idly musing, unworried about feeling industrious or useful. I pondered everything from the Milky Way to the fallen crumb on my floor.

Oh, and the liberal arts. Studying liberal arts, after years spent working at far-flung camps that didn’t have as much as a stack of used books, felt like vital fare for a famished soul. I read Rousseau and Diogenes and Thoreau, and my liberal arts education, as well as the education of living in a van, came together like two rivers meeting at a confluence and flowing together as one.

30

After the semester, I went back to Alaska for the summer, where I worked and filled up my depleted bank account. As the fall approached, I looked up rates of apartments around Duke. But I began to think of how my van had begun to feel less like an experiment and more like a real home. I remembered the half-dozen dogwood trees that shadowed my parking spot and bore branches heavy with thick, lustrous white flowers, and how they buzzed with a million bumblebees and smelled of a woman’s hair. I’d remember how, on mornings, I’d awake to a medley of birdsong so loud and cheery you’d think my little hermitage was tucked away in a copse of trees at Walden Pond.

To me, Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t just a home; it was the reimagining of a life; it was the conviction that we can turn the wildest figments of our imagination into something real. And I knew that whether I’d come to live in a home on wheels or in one fastened to the ground, I’d in some sense be a van dweller for life.

That fall semester, I asked myself, “Could I live in a van?”

Could I not?

(2013)