Walden on Wheels — A Man, a Debt, and an American Adventure
Episode Stats
Summary
Ken explains why he went to Alaska to work as a truck stop burger flipper and park ranger to pay off his student debt, what it s like to hitchhike across the country, and how reading Henry David Thoreau s Walden got him questioning how we live our lives.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Millions of young adults know what it's like to graduate from college with student debt.
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For some, it's a frustrating annoyance. For others, it's a worry-inducing burden.
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For Kendall Gunas, it was a drag in need of slain and a pathway to adventure.
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Ken is the author of Walden on Wheels, On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom.
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Today on the show, he shares a story of how his quest to erase his debt led him to the Arctic Circle
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and through the peaks and valleys of living a totally unshackled life.
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Ken explains why he went to Alaska to work as a truck stop burger flipper and park ranger to pay off his student debt,
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what it's like to hitchhike across the country, how reading Thoreau's Walden got him questioning how we live our lives,
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and how that inspiration led him to living in his van while attending grad school at Duke.
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Along the way, Ken shares his meditations on nonconformity, engaging in romantic pursuits,
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and the benefits of both de-institutionalizing and re-institutionalizing your life.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash waldenonwheels.
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So you had a varied and unique resume after you graduated college.
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So you moved to Alaska, and then while you're there, you cleaned a motel at a truck stop there near the Arctic Circle.
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You flipped burgers during the night shift at a diner at this truck stop.
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You worked as a backcountry ranger in a national park.
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Then you hitchhiked from Alaska to New York, so you were kind of a tramp for a bit.
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You served in the AmeriCorps, in the American South, in the capstone.
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There's some other stuff you did too. We're going to talk about it.
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But the capstone of this career that you had after college was you lived in a van on the campus of Duke University
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from 2009 to 2011 while you pursued your graduate degree.
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And it was crazy. You did all this stuff so you could pay off your student debt.
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Let's talk about this. How much debt did you acquire during college?
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And was there a moment you had in your life when you saw your mounting debt,
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and you're like, oh my gosh, I got to do something about this?
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It was $32,000. I think with interest, it climbed up to $35,000 that I had to pay off.
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For the most part, I did a good job, as so many growing debtors do,
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in that I just completely put it out of my mind when I was at college.
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I never really thought about debt. I was just focused on my part-time job,
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writing my essays, getting whatever grades I needed to get.
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And then one day, I think this was maybe after my third year,
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I was commuting to the university at Buffalo in New York.
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And she had all of these kind of loan bills and papers just kind of piled up on the kitchen table.
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And she's just like, you're going to be in a lot of debt.
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And at this time, I was pushing carts at the Home Depot for $8 an hour.
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And she was just like, what are you going to do?
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Like, how are you going to get out of this situation?
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And I just kind of said, Mom, you know, don't worry about it.
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And, you know, I always had like fantasies of just kind of like moving to a different continent
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or faking my death or, you know, or just like weirdly happening upon a well-paying job,
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And it was one of the few times in my life where I saw my mom fold her arms and put her
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I was just like, wow, I really do need to think about all this debt I need to pay off.
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And a lot of that debt you talk about in your book, Walden on Wheels, a lot of that debt
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you acquired, it happened during that first year of college because like a lot of high
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school students, you think, well, you know, when I'm going to go to college, I'm going
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So I guess the first college you went to was kind of an expensive private school, right?
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It was an expensive private school called Alfred University in Southern New York.
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Now, it's not that expensive to a lot of students who can get grants and scholarships.
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I was just a lousy, slouchy high school student.
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So yeah, I racked up about $18,000 in debt just from that first year alone.
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And it didn't take me long to realize I'm probably not going to be someone who makes the big bucks
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So then I changed schools to University at Buffalo, which is a state of New York school.
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But when you're in high school, this is like the first big decision you have to make.
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And you just don't want to have like a mediocrity frame of mind.
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You want to kind of launch yourself into the world and be ambitious and go for the best thing
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And I was told again and again, don't worry about the debt.
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Now, if I was advising other young folks, I just try to say, you know, go to like the
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best state school you could go to and save yourself a lot of grief if you can.
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So third year, your mom sees the bills and she starts freaking out.
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And that kind of had you have a come to Jesus moment about your debt.
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And you got really motivated to pay off your student loans.
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Besides your mom, you know, crying, was there something else going on where you're like,
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man, I want to get rid of this stuff as fast as possible?
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One, I was right on the edge of being like a loser, you know, like low status man who
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So there was just kind of desperation and really wanting to self-improve and getting rid of
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And oh man, like what I wanted to do was be a journalist.
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I joined the student newspaper at university and I loved it.
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I interned at alt-weeklies and I kind of put all my eggs in the journalism basket.
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And over the course of my last semester, I got 25 letters in the mail rejecting my applications.
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So I was kind of just standing there in my underwear, completely vulnerable, having no
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Because if you don't deal with your debt, the interest accrues and swells and suddenly
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But I don't know, I guess I had romantic longings.
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And by romantic, I'm not talking sexual romantic.
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I wanted to live my life fully and interestingly and in the way I wanted to.
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So I saw my debt as this ball and chain, which was going to prevent me from living that life.
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So instead of getting just a regular job, so you can pay off that debt as quickly as possible,
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you decided to go to Alaska and work these odd jobs.
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Was it just because you couldn't find a regular job?
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So you're like, well, I'll go to the Arctic Circle and see what happens there?
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One, it was like if I had a job offer in journalism, I would have taken that.
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The previous summer for a couple months, I worked up in Alaska.
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So it was just like, if this is my worst case scenario, you know, cleaning beds or flipping
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burgers or tour guiding visitors up in the Arctic, I'll take that over getting my old
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job at the Home Depot pushing carts and, you know, sleeping in my boyhood bedroom.
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And when I went up to Alaska, I was a bit depressed because it's just like, here I am working these
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a low wage, low skill job, which I would have been perfectly able to do out of high school,
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except now I have a college degree, $32,000 in debt.
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I don't feel like I'm launching myself towards anything meaningful.
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So I was just kind of like, I'm just stuck in this purgatory and I could be here for who
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But what I quickly realized was I accidentally landed myself in an almost ideal situation to
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And that's because a lot of these jobs up in Alaska and out West, they provide room and
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board, meaning, you know, your rent and your food.
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I had literally no bills at all except for my student debt.
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So I just decided I'm just going to put everything I can towards my student debt, making $9 an hour.
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And working a full year, you don't make much working $9 an hour.
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I think I accumulated $18,000, which to a lot of your listeners will sound pathetic.
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It's like, oh, you worked year round, you made $18,000.
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Now, working kind of a normal job in a normal American town, how much do you need to make
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I calculate about $50,000 to $60,000 living a normal American lifestyle.
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And that would be really helpful when it came to paying off my debt.
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You, in this book, Walden on Wheels, you do a compare and contrast between you and your
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You have a really good friend from high school who was having the same problems, had a lot
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of debt, couldn't find a job after graduating college.
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And while he was doing the job search, you were up in Alaska, in the Arctic, making $9 an
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And this guy's debt was just constantly accruing.
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Yeah, he graduated with something like, he thought it was $58,000, and then one day he got a letter
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And they're like, oh, it's actually $8,000 more.
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So yeah, it was something like, I don't know, $65,000 in debt.
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He wanted kind of a stable situation, you know, a decent job where he could begin kind of chipping
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I wanted to pay off my debt as fast as humanly possible.
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And what I mean by that is when you take things like, I don't know, narcissism, delusions of
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grandeur, megalomania, OCD, just obsessive thinking.
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And then like applying that to a problem to help you get over kind of insurmountable odds.
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So that's kind of how I thought of my approach to this is just like, be crazy, be obsessive,
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Obviously, there's some drawbacks to that, you know, mental health drawbacks to that, because
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you don't feel like you can take a break at all, because if you're just so obsessed with
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And I think I also kind of had, and this was all unconscious at the time.
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But I was also, as I said earlier, I just kind of had a romantic frame of mind, kind
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And I thought of my debt as like a dragon to slay, and me this hero up against it.
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So, you know, if you can apply these kind of romantic frame of mind to something like
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Well, speaking of this romantic frame of mind, did you go to Alaska also?
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Was this also, there's some kind of Jack London romanticism going on?
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You're thinking, I'm this kid from the suburbs who hasn't tested himself, and I'm going to
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go to the wilds, the great north, to see if I can withstand it.
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I begin my book, Walden on Wheels, with, I dreamt of grizzly bears, because I had these
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These grizzly bears would be just munching grass in my western New York suburb.
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And I remember in my dreams, I'd just be in awe of these, you know, big brown towers of
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And I was just like, why am I dreaming about grizzly bears?
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And I remember one day, I looked at an atlas, and I saw Alaska, and it was just like, I was
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Looking back, I think it was because I'd been such a suburbanite growing up.
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You know, I grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York, Niagara Falls, New York, around these
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boneyard, de-industrialized cities, where there's kind of endless cookie-cutter suburbs, just
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Four miles from my home was Love Canal, the site of this 1970s environmental disaster.
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And I just saw people around me, it was almost like the people living around me, they weren't
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living a life that kind of accommodated normal human instincts.
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They were going to these nine-to-five jobs they hated, paying bills for the rest of their
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life, cramming vacations in tiny two-week windows.
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And I think there was something in my subconscious saying, you need to get out of here.
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You need to go to somewhere completely wild, and then maybe you'll kind of escape this
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So you were in Alaska, you did a bunch of different stuff at this truck stop.
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What was life like working at this truck stop in Alaska?
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Like what kind of people were you interacting with?
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Kind of give us a day in the life of, I mean, you're pretty close.
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I mean, you're like in the Arctic Circle, right?
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Yeah, I was 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
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So the nearest store, stoplight, movie theater, whatever was 250 miles away.
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And I'm right in the middle of the Brooks Mountain Range, which if any of the listeners
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haven't seen it, try to go up to the Brooks Range someday.
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Because it's one of the most amazing, wildest landscapes left on Earth.
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It's this 800-mile east to west mountain chain full of grizzly bears and moose and herds of caribou and wolves.
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And yeah, so the population of there was 32, not 32,000, 32 people.
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And half of it, I'd say, were kind of debt-ridden college students.
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And the other half were just kind of working class folks who did this for a living, kind of bounced around from camp to camp.
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And I just found myself working alongside and living alongside truckers, pipeline workers, carpenters, a lot of weirdos.
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And, you know, if you're going to go 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, you're going to be a bit different.
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And on one side of me was this young man from Utah who was just high all day long.
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He worked at a porn shop where he had to clean out booths every day.
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And then the other side of me was this half-white, half-Vietnamese guy who was a schizophrenic.
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And I'd constantly hear him talking to himself.
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And every day he would bust open his doors and he'd have two invisible machine guns on his arms.
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And he'd start to shoot people with this invisible machine gun.
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And it was very kind of interesting from a sociological and anthropological perspective to, you know, rub elbows with people who were normally outside of my bubble.
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And there was one guy in this town, in case we can call it a town.
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There's this guy who would later serve as the inspiration for your van dwelling phase of your life, which we're going to talk about.
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Well, there was actually two older gentlemen who really inspired me.
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The first was this guy named Jack, and he lived in a town 12 miles north, this semi-subsistence village called Wiseman, which had like 15 people living in it.
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This was the most northern vegetable patch in North America, to my knowledge.
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You know, this is someone, there was kind of no division between life and work for him.
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There was just kind of no separation as there was back in kind of contemporary American society.
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And then there was this older gentleman, James.
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He had this long, white kind of mountain goat beard.
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And he worked for the Bureau of Land Management.
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And he lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban truck, this yellow truck.
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Now, in Coldfoot, it once got to negative 81 Fahrenheit.
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I don't think it got that cold when he was living in his truck.
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He put a little propane stove that popped out of the roof of his truck.
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So I kind of looked at these folks up in Alaska.
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And they were just living lives the way they wanted to.
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They were living them creatively, with imagination, with independence.
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And I thought I could take this kind of wild style of thinking back with me down into the
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What did you do when you were working up there when you weren't working?
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How did you keep yourself entertained and not going crazy, particularly during the long,
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I mean, that's when the town went a little bit crazy.
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Wasn't there like people crapping on people's cars or something like that?
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Yeah, there was some roof defecation happening.
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Um, one guy poured some water on someone's husky, which you don't want to do when it's
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And once they went off a cliff and into a frozen river, and I'm like, okay, thank God
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And they were back at work the next day because you can't just fire one fourth of your workforce.
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Um, so I would just kind of hide away and went inward and I was reading a lot.
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I think I read 62 books that year, despite working long hours and just kind of planning
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You know, I didn't know what was next for me, but yeah, I was studying for the GRE.
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I was starting to really crave going back to school.
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So one of the books you read and all that reading you did was Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
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What did that book do to you when you're in Alaska?
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You know, one of those books that you read and you're just like underlining almost every
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word in it, or you just find yourself nodding your head and, and recognition.
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And he wrote that, I think in the 1840s, but it felt like it could have been written
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It felt like it could have been written in the 21st century.
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And I remember reading this passage where he's talking about shelter and he would go
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past the railroad and the railway workers would lock up their tools in this little six foot
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by three foot shack, which at the time sounded like a coffin to me.
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And he's like, you know, for a dollar, anybody could live in one of these.
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And then he says, if you think I'm jesting, I'm not.
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It reminded me of the folks in Alaska, like they'll do whatever it takes to make it work.
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And I admired Thoreau for just being kind of like an artist of life.
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He wanted to craft his life in a very specific way, the same way an artist, you know, very
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I didn't want my life just to happen to me like it had been happening.
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So between Jack and James and Alaska and Henry David Thoreau, I was questioning everything.
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I was questioning how we shelter ourselves, how we work, how we live, and how we transport
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ourselves, which probably, we should probably get into hitchhiking, right?
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But before we do, tell us again how much debt you were able to pay off thanks to your work
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And again, there were some mental health drawbacks to being so obsessed.
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So the one kind of fix I applied was any tip money I made as a cook or a guide.
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So I think I made $22,000 and $18,000 went to my loans.
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And it would take me another year and a half to fully pay them off.
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During your stay in Alaska, this is kind of a detour.
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You went to go see this Canadian motivational speaker who did 18th century Canadian explorer
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So he would get in a canoe and go down these rivers.
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And then you ended up doing an expedition with this guy.
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Was this part of the plan of paying off your debt?
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Or was this something you just thought, hey, this would be fun to do?
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What had happened was after the tourism season in Alaska died down, my boss invited the tour
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guides to this tourism convention in Valdez, Alaska.
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And one of the motivational speakers was this guy named Bob.
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I forget his last name, but he puts together annual voyages across Canada, kind of replicating
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some of the historic voyages of the voyageurs who were kind of the fur traders in the 19th
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So I was listening to him talk about his voyage across Ontario and Quebec.
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And he said at the end of this, I'm actually trying to put together a team for the next
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So at the end of that talk, without thinking about my debt or anything like that, I just
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And sure enough, I got selected for that summer journey.
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So for two months across Ontario, Canada, I think it was about a thousand miles, we lived
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We had two very leaky birchbark canoes, and it was as close as a person can get to living
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It was just memories, or did you actually develop any skills that you could say, I could
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I learned a lot about knot tying, which helped a lot.
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One, I've kind of talked about all these wilderness experiences I've had, but I hadn't been on
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That's just not what you do where I come from in Western New York.
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A lot of us don't hunt or go camping or hiking.
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I grew up in a hockey rink and on a football field.
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And I thought of the mountains as just another one of those arenas, like something to win,
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that you beat a mountain or something like that.
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And when I was out in Ontario, paddling over Georgian Bay, I began to feel something different.
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Because I think when you see nature through a windshield, it's just like, oh, that sunset
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But a sunset, when you're out on the water like that, could mean, oh man, here comes the
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mosquitoes, here comes the cold, here come the storms, and you don't have a tent or a
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So I felt like I was just kind of becoming nature.
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That kind of divide that separates man from nature was just kind of dissolving.
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And as I noticed, nature was indifferent to me.
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So some of that mesmerization kind of went away a little bit.
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And I'd also say this, like, it made me reflect on how Americans were really lacking kind of
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just that period of no responsibility adventure.
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And he would talk about how his tribes would go on these spirit quests where a young man
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would go off into the woods and starve himself and wait for a vision or something like that.
00:28:13.000
I was like, does kind of my sort of culture in America, do we have anything like the Native
00:28:24.200
And I do think we used to have a legacy of traveling and journeying as young people,
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whether it was being a tramp in the 1930s or beat poets going on long road trips in the
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50s or being a hitchhiker in the 1960s and 70s.
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And it's just like, we kind of don't have that.
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We don't have that thing that serves as a bridge between school and career.
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That period of adventure, it's just kind of been abridged from a young person's life.
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And I just began to think, this is what we need.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:29:11.360
Before you did this Canadian reenactment expedition, you had to get back home to New York because
00:29:20.020
In order to save money, you decided to hitchhike.
00:29:24.620
And hitchhiking, it used to be a thing in America, but it's not anymore.
00:29:29.760
First off, what do you know about hitchhiking culture?
00:29:38.880
One, I'd say the crime rate in the 1980s up to the mid-90s was pretty bad.
00:29:44.800
And maybe that's when hitchhiking culture really started to die down.
00:29:49.520
Hitchhiking, being represented in movies and whatnot, the hitchhiker was always the homicidal maniac.
00:29:58.480
And I think Americans, we were just kind of undergoing this period of reduced social capital and public trust and just general fearfulness and paranoia.
00:30:13.200
But there are pockets in America where it's still commonly done and not too hard.
00:30:19.180
Like I think if you're in the through hiking community around a big through hiking trail, the locals there see someone with a backpack and they know it's just kind of normal and they'll pick you up or whatever.
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Alaska, Yukon territories, British Columbia, Washington State, you know, some of these Western places, it's still somewhat easy and practiced a little bit.
00:30:41.880
But yeah, like where I grew up in Western New York, I never once saw a hitchhiker.
00:30:47.700
So it's just kind of more common in some places than others.
00:30:51.600
What did you learn about people being a tramp for thousands of miles?
00:30:57.760
I mean, I would have to wait on the side of the road, I'd say on average, 30 minutes to two hours.
00:31:06.040
So you'd have to be on the side of the road for a while.
00:31:08.200
But when you get picked up, you get the feeling of like a Christmas morning.
00:31:13.280
It's just like, oh, thank goodness, I finally got picked up.
00:31:16.080
And then you have a few seconds to determine, you know, is this guy going to kill me?
00:31:21.880
So you have to have a quick conversation to determine how sketchy they are.
00:31:26.200
And I'd say I turned down less than half a dozen rides and I've accumulated probably 10,000 miles of hitchhiking across North America.
00:31:37.760
But it was a great time to, it's like the ideal travel experience.
00:31:43.060
Because think about any other way we travel, whether it's cycling or on bus or train or planes.
00:31:51.420
When we get on a plane and travel 5,000 miles, we usually have some earbuds in and watching a movie.
00:32:01.820
But when you're hitchhiking, you're thrown right into that person's culture.
00:32:06.740
Like you're going to get to know that person really well.
00:32:09.760
And what I found is after two hours of talking with a complete stranger, I'd often hear secrets they probably never told their wife.
00:32:21.200
And that's how I paid for my ride, by being a really good, active listener.
00:32:27.520
And yet you really get to see all sorts of folks.
00:32:31.620
Like I don't want to say I grew up in like a complete liberal suburban bubble, but I sort of did.
00:32:38.500
And suddenly I'm getting in the car with ex-cons and people who tell me about their alcohol addictions or their meth addictions.
00:32:48.160
And people who had problems that were very different and far more extreme than the problems I grew up around.
00:33:00.080
But more than anything, it just made me feel like we do have this wrongheaded and somewhat unfounded view of our country.
00:33:09.100
I think we are overly fearful, overly paranoid.
00:33:12.920
And when you're picked up again and again by complete strangers who don't ask you for money or any favors, you know, you begin to see your country and your culture in a new and much more warm-hearted way.
00:33:29.960
Like in some ways, hitchhiking really renewed my love for being American.
00:33:36.220
Any advice for people out there who are listening and thinking, I want to hitchhike?
00:33:43.620
Well, you probably don't need to listen to me because one of the funnest parts about it is just learning how to do it on your own.
00:33:53.740
The biggest one is placing yourself in a situation where the driver is probably going less than 30 miles an hour and has a lot of space to pull over.
00:34:11.120
You know, wear a nice ball cap, put on a collared shirt, tuck in your shirt into your pants, and just kind of look presentable.
00:34:20.660
Never show any anger or frustration because sometimes people will go past you and then feel guilty.
00:34:25.780
And then you'll see that same person five minutes ago.
00:34:28.780
So don't kick the gravel in the road or, you know, show any frustration because you will be frustrated.
00:34:33.940
There was times when I've just been in pouring rain for 12 hours and you're so angry.
00:34:40.760
And also, take a box of crayons and write a nice sign.
00:34:45.840
Write a nice, colorful sign that'll make you seem a little bit more family-friendly.
00:34:54.220
After the expedition, you had this period where you're back at home with your parents.
00:34:58.100
And you talk about how being back in your childhood home in the suburbs, you started kind of falling into this funk and depression.
00:35:07.160
And the mountains, the wilds started calling you again.
00:35:10.680
And this time you decided to go back to Alaska.
00:35:13.080
But this time you were going to be a park ranger in, I think it's like the most remote national park in the United States.
00:35:22.660
Yeah, I remember I went back home and, you know, sometimes when you're away from home for a few years, you can kind of see your milieu, your natural environment more clearly than before.
00:35:35.220
And yeah, I had some really tough conversations with my mom.
00:35:38.820
I remember once she sat me down and she said, you know, are you trying to kill yourself doing all this?
00:35:45.760
And she told me she's going to start to distance herself from me because she just thought I was acting in a very kind of reckless and erratic way.
00:35:55.800
And she once said, you know, when are you going to grow up and start acting like a human being?
00:36:02.340
And I understood because she was fearful of losing me because I was hitchhiking and all that.
00:36:11.620
I'd never felt more alive and more charged with life when I was climbing a mountain in the Brooks Range or getting into a car and, you know, hitchhiking across Mississippi or something like that.
00:36:25.960
So I felt this very stark disconnect with the place I grew up and the life I wanted to lead.
00:36:33.380
So, yeah, I got a job with the National Park Service, which paid a lot more than the wages I was getting working at the truck stop.
00:36:41.120
So this would help put me over my student debt.
00:36:47.180
I had this job as a backcountry ranger in the gates of the Arctic National Park where they dropped me off on a little four-seater plane in the middle of the wilderness with these big bush tires or land me on a pond out there.
00:37:02.560
And I'd go on an eight-day backpack patrol, either on canoe or on foot, and I got paid to go hiking.
00:37:11.720
Like, having three months living in the wilderness, I didn't kind of need any more adventure or wilderness.
00:37:16.920
That was like an ideal amount of time living in a state of adventure in the wilderness.
00:37:21.780
Because then I was kind of eager to go back to school and embrace the life of the mind.
00:37:27.300
It was just that for a couple of years, I had a really nice balance between the life of the mind and the life of adventure.
00:37:35.320
What were you supposed to do when you're out on these trips?
00:37:42.760
I mean, you have to imagine gates of the Arctic.
00:37:45.200
It's over 8 million acres, and it's, I think, the second least visited national park.
00:37:50.940
So over the course of eight days, I'd be lucky if I saw one group of people.
00:38:00.040
But it was more kind of presence to prevent poaching activity, any sort of trash cleanup.
00:38:07.420
Sometimes we'd be told to go in and take out an old gold mining barrel or a caribou collar or educate folks out there about bear safety and fire safety, stuff like that.
00:38:24.340
And I probably, you know, one part of me could have just kept doing that for the rest of my life.
00:38:31.300
I didn't want to, because it kind of felt like a vacation.
00:38:33.600
You know, I felt like I was getting paid to hike, and I'm sure there's some listeners like, oh, you had it made.
00:38:41.020
You know, I wanted more of an existential, spiritual fulfillment from my work.
00:38:51.240
No, if you're a young person, I think I would have done this if I were, if I could do this again.
00:38:56.620
Jobs with the National Park Service or the U.S. Forest Service seem like they're really cool.
00:39:01.400
You can be doing something like you did where they just drop you off for a week and you get the backpack in beautiful country and get paid well for it.
00:39:12.280
It's one of my favorite episodes we did with this guy named Philip Connors.
00:39:15.940
And he is a fire watcher for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico.
00:39:22.160
And he just goes to one of the few remaining, these fire towers where they're looking for smoke.
00:39:26.320
And he just lives there during the fire season.
00:39:31.020
Like you just, you're out in nature, you get to hike, and it seems awesome.
00:39:35.300
If people want to listen to that, that is episode number 473.
00:39:46.060
And because of this job, you're able to pay off your debt.
00:39:48.180
You're finally able to pay off like $32,000, $34,000 worth of debt.
00:39:53.420
How did it feel to finally accomplish this goal that you've had for years and were obsessively trying to accomplish?
00:39:59.840
I wish I could say there was a celebration with champagne and confetti, but there wasn't.
00:40:09.680
Because I did the math months before, and I kind of knew exactly when the debt was going to die.
00:40:15.300
So it was kind of rehearsed in my mind well ahead of time.
00:40:19.240
And I don't know, sometimes like you're in a relationship that's kind of bad for a long time.
00:40:25.920
And when it comes to the breakup, you kind of feel nothing.
00:40:29.180
And it's kind of because you've rehearsed this so many times in the past.
00:40:33.900
And I think that was kind of the case with my debt.
00:40:36.240
But honestly, I missed the debt a little bit because, and you know, that's going to sound crazy,
00:40:42.680
but I just loved having purpose and a goal and something, you know, a dragon to slay.
00:40:49.840
So, you know, you kind of have to be ready to kind of replace that one sense of purpose with another.
00:40:57.920
And luckily, I had something lined up, you know, as we'll get to.
00:41:02.500
So, yeah, there was no, there was no really real sense of relief or celebration.
00:41:08.960
Yeah, I think that's what happens with most goals that you think a lot about.
00:41:12.440
When you finally get it, you might feel good for like two seconds.
00:41:21.600
And so for you, the next thing to work on was you're going to get your graduate degree.
00:41:28.440
But you did not want to go to grad school and take on any more student debt.
00:41:34.940
So to avoid that, you decided to live in a van on the campus of Duke University.
00:42:01.380
So this was kind of before the whole hashtag van life movement.
00:42:06.560
And I remember as I was thinking about Thoreau living in that like coffin box,
00:42:11.500
I was like, oh, I could do that at Duke University, live in a little coffin or something.
00:42:19.940
And I couldn't find one person who'd done this before on a college campus.
00:42:26.800
Because again, back in 2009, you were either like homeless or a pervert if you were living in your van.
00:42:33.400
So I'm happy to kind of help change the image away from that.
00:42:37.680
So yeah, I thought if I could buy a cheap van and just live in it year round,
00:42:45.620
then maybe I could avoid expensive apartment payments.
00:42:51.000
And I'd do all my cooking in the van and not move it around on campus.
00:42:56.260
And the big thing was I had to keep it a secret because I did not want campus security or any students finding out.
00:43:03.480
Because I thought if they found out, they're going to spread the news on social media.
00:43:11.420
And suddenly I'm going to get kicked out of my parking lot.
00:43:14.640
So stealth and secrecy were the names of the game.
00:43:18.680
Well, it was technically not against the rules to do this.
00:43:29.320
And I think I just kind of purposefully look the other way.
00:43:33.720
It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
00:43:38.560
And that was kind of a huge approach to almost everything in my mid-20s.
00:43:43.260
So I just decided I'm just going to secretly live in this van.
00:43:49.380
And I put up this big black sheet behind the windshield whenever I was in there.
00:43:56.120
And Duke, I mean, that's where a lot of affluent young folks go to school.
00:44:01.680
So I didn't think any locals or campus security were thinking that one of their own was living
00:44:13.740
Like what kind of food were you cooking in a van?
00:44:16.540
Well, I've learned a lot about nutrition since then.
00:44:19.620
So I was just eating a lot of peanut butter, cereal, oatmeal.
00:44:25.600
I kind of put peanut butter in almost every meal I ate.
00:44:30.820
I had like a Whole Foods basically right next to my van.
00:44:34.600
So I'd go there and buy a couple of vegetables, chop them up, put them in a stew.
00:44:38.340
So just kind of like a vegetable stew or rice and bean burrito night.
00:44:44.780
And that first semester, I was quite extreme with keeping my budget as low as it could be.
00:44:51.460
I had it down to about $4.34 a day for my food costs.
00:44:57.600
And all my other costs, whether it was gas for the van, car insurance, whatever, came to
00:45:07.820
So I lived on a budget of about $400 a month, which I found quite manageable.
00:45:17.240
And then your bathing, I guess you did at the school gym, the locker room there.
00:45:21.560
It was not a life of deprivation at all, I should say.
00:45:25.300
I mean, like the Duke gym had like a sauna, like a swimming pool and a sauna and a basketball
00:45:33.520
So it's not like I was living in complete deprivation.
00:45:39.760
So if it was too hot or too cold, I always had a place to go.
00:45:52.320
So I know what it's like to be in a state of sleep deprivation for years on end.
00:45:58.220
One of my favorite parts of that period of my life was just waking up because I was so time
00:46:04.560
I would just wake up and just like slowly wake up and think and just kind of stare at
00:46:10.500
the roof of my van and listen to all the birds and the bugs outside.
00:46:17.260
That's the biggest thing I miss about that period of my life.
00:46:19.860
You talk about how the hardest thing about living in a van, right?
00:46:28.700
You had access to showers, to a sauna, to a gym.
00:46:34.480
But you were seeing people at your classes and whatnot.
00:46:38.900
Well, one, I'm an introvert, a little bit shy and things like that.
00:46:46.080
So making connections out of nothing doesn't come as easy to me as it might to others.
00:46:58.000
Like, I didn't know who I could trust with my secret of living in a van.
00:47:04.060
So I just found myself telling little white lies with all these new acquaintances I had.
00:47:10.980
They'd always ask me, you never know how quickly the question,
00:47:15.020
where do you live, comes up until you're secretly living in your van.
00:47:18.600
It's usually like question number two, where are you living?
00:47:21.940
And I would say I live on 9th Street, which was true in Durham, North Carolina.
00:47:25.880
But they would always think I lived in the apartment complex there and not the parking lot.
00:47:32.660
So yeah, so it was just in grad school and college in general can be quite lonely
00:47:40.220
when you lose your neighborhood and your old friends and your family.
00:47:44.580
So I think what I was going through was quite common.
00:47:50.860
In Walden, Thoreau talks about the cost of a thing.
00:47:53.880
And thanks to your unconventional life, you're able to pay down your debt and you're able to avoid new debt.
00:48:00.840
But were there unintentional costs of your extreme measures that you might see now thanks to hindsight?
00:48:08.680
Well, at some point, I would say I kind of – my 20s was a period of deinstitutionalization.
00:48:16.940
And what I mean by that was I was getting rid – I was just shedding off all institutional influences,
00:48:24.960
whether that was your family, your neighborhood, your church, stable work.
00:48:32.540
All of that was kind of being shed in the name of independence, of self-improvement, of adventure,
00:48:44.780
So you're kind of playing with fire when you shed everything.
00:48:48.440
And when you live in a state of institutionlessness, there's a lot of wonderful things that can happen in that period.
00:48:57.840
You know, you can really see your society and your culture around you almost with fresh eyes
00:49:06.300
And you're really able to kind of fashion your own character outside of these institutional influences.
00:49:16.980
And this was a period of my life where I wasn't devoted to developing friendships,
00:49:21.640
building that friend network, finding a church or a workplace.
00:49:26.100
So you just – when you're completely adrift like that, sometimes you feel a bit empty and a bit lost.
00:49:35.500
You know, I was living the life of perfect freedom.
00:49:42.320
And that sounds like the American dream in some ways.
00:49:56.860
There's a part of humanness you miss out on when you're not embedded in a community.
00:50:03.760
And I just – and I didn't go on that journey, I'd say, until my mid-30s.
00:50:07.860
So did people eventually find out that you were living in a van on the campus of Duke University?
00:50:16.580
I kind of outed myself after a year of doing it.
00:50:20.780
I wrote an essay in my – a travel writing class I was in.
00:50:25.180
And my teacher said – it was kind of like, I live in a van down by Duke University.
00:50:30.200
And she's like, oh, man, you got to publish this.
00:50:35.220
Because this is like – this was just in the height of the Great Recession after 2008.
00:50:42.440
There was a lot more awareness about student debt.
00:50:45.600
And she thought the story of someone desperately trying to live within his means would really register.
00:50:52.960
So I wrote this article for Salon.com, an internet magazine, and it just took off.
00:51:00.240
So overnight, I went from completely anonymous and secretive van dweller to momentary celebrity.
00:51:09.380
Like, the next day, I had, like, NPR on the phone.
00:51:15.020
Rachel Ray wanted me on her show to pimp out my van.
00:51:19.840
And I remember I was on the phone with, like, a rally newspaper.
00:51:23.340
And my hand was just shaking, like, shaking uncontrollably.
00:51:27.640
It was, like, exciting in a great and terrifying way.
00:51:32.100
One of the first things Duke University, their spokesman, said, we're prepared to help Ken find guidance and counseling.
00:51:43.640
And soon after that, a local student complained that they didn't want to share a parking lot with someone living in it.
00:51:50.180
And that's when I felt like I was being persecuted.
00:51:53.080
It felt like, oh, they're persecuting the van dwellers now.
00:52:00.520
They just made me sign a contract saying I wouldn't sue them for anything as long as I parked near the campus police station.
00:52:09.940
So they gave me a new parking lot and let me finish and graduate.
00:52:13.800
And when I did graduate, they passed a new parking law prohibiting anyone from doing what I did, which is the legacy I left out.
00:52:26.300
Okay, so this period of your life, you call it the deinstitutionalized period of your life.
00:52:31.740
But recently, you said in your mid-30s, you've gotten married, you had a kid, you've put down some roots in a village in Scotland.
00:52:38.060
So you're starting to re-institutionalize yourself, kind of reintegrate yourself into community life.
00:52:45.220
How do you think people should balance freedom and having institutional attachments?
00:52:57.260
And it really varies on the person and the culture the person comes from.
00:53:01.660
Like, whatever it is about my ethnic background or whatever, you know, I kind of glorify this kind of thorough, individualistic frame of mind.
00:53:13.460
Whereas, you know, some of my Italian-American friends, they're just a lot more connected to their families and don't have those same kind of lonesome longings.
00:53:26.280
But just speaking from my own point of view, I do think it's good to kind of deinstitutionalize and go on that crazy year-long or two-year-long journey where you're kind of outside.
00:53:43.580
And again, I think it's great to kind of see them anew from the outside and to fashion, you know, your own individuality and character through experiences that no one has ever had.
00:54:00.980
And I would advise not trying to rebuild your institutions as late as I did.
00:54:05.480
I remember I was 34 and I was living in a cabin in Alaska in this park called Lake Clark National Park.
00:54:19.680
Like, I'm living the dream of my 21-year-old self in my mid-30s.
00:54:25.900
Like, I felt like I should have been, like, dating and trying to find a partner and trying to find a home.
00:54:32.680
And I just keep going back to these really remote, dangerous places in Alaska.
00:54:38.780
So that's when I kind of unconsciously made the decision.
00:54:52.760
Like, you know, I'm not religious, so I don't have a church.
00:54:55.840
I'm a writer, so I work from home in front of my computer all day.
00:54:59.860
So there's still things I want to do to kind of rebuild the institutions in my life.
00:55:05.980
So maybe have like a rumspringa, like an Amish rumspringa when you're young.
00:55:10.760
Have an adventure, and as you get older, start adding attachments back into your life.
00:55:19.060
I mean, do you still have that itch to go off to Alaska, go off to the wilds?
00:55:24.300
How are you balancing freedom and roots as a 40-year-old?
00:55:29.960
Well, first of all, I think rumspringa, that should be like the name of someone's memoir.
00:55:34.020
That's an awesome title for a travel memoir or something.
00:55:40.780
Yeah, I mean, I've got a four-year-old daughter.
00:55:44.020
I moved into a very shoddy house that needed a lot of work.
00:55:49.320
So I've just kind of been living the domestic existence for a few years.
00:55:55.620
And as my wife has a much more stable job than I, I was kind of a primary caretaker for
00:56:11.500
But it felt like I almost lost a part of myself.
00:56:16.440
And I remember I had these weird ideas of creating an effigy of myself and burning it over a bonfire
00:56:29.060
But things get easier as a dad and things are getting a lot easier for me now.
00:56:35.280
And yeah, I feel like that kind of wilder half of myself, he's still there.
00:56:44.640
And I look forward to the day when I can let him out again a bit.
00:56:49.100
Yeah, maybe you'll be like that guy who lived in his Subaru.
00:56:52.380
He's in his 70s and he's living in a Subaru in the northern.
00:56:58.360
That's going to be my rum spring sequel memoir to Walden on Wheels.
00:57:06.340
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:57:18.300
That's just kind of like a once a month or once every two month thing.
00:57:34.660
You can find more information about his work at his website, kenilgunis.com.
00:57:37.820
Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Walden on Wheels.
00:57:51.620
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:57:54.420
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com.
00:57:58.080
While you're there, make sure to sign up for a newsletter.
00:58:02.440
The best way to stay on top of what's going on at AOM.
00:58:06.260
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00:58:11.760
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00:58:15.500
As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:58:17.600
Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you
00:58:19.540
to how to listen to AOM podcast would put what you've heard into action.