Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas
Authors: Ken Ilgunas
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plagued them for years. The town of Coldfoot was named for all the miners who’d come up there with sincere dreams and noble aspirations, but turned back home when it got too tough. They got cold feet.
I told myself that I was different, that I was nothing like these addicts and alcoholics. But in a way, I wasn’t much different. I felt just as weak. I was thousands of miles from home, but I felt as contained as ever. I lived nearly the same sheltered, scheduled life I’d lived back in New York. And without the return of the sun to announce a new day, each twenty-four-hour period melted into the next. My life was an amorphous blob of flipping burgers, mopping floors, and sleeping. I was in a dream that I couldn’t wake up out of. I was lost in a forest whose canopy concealed the sun, wandering in circles. Somehow I’d traveled four thousand miles yet had managed to bring with me the repetitious and ordered and cubicled life that I’d wished to leave behind. While I’d gotten myself out of the suburb, I couldn’t get the suburb out of me.
My life was so monotonous, so goalless, so pathless. What was my purpose? To service truckers who worked for the oil industry? To pay off my debt? To work for years and years at shitty jobs and be thankful that I, unlike other people, had a job, or at least one not quite as shitty as theirs? I wanted more than anything to have something to work toward and strive for.Something important. I longed to stop muddling around and dedicate my life to some high and noble purpose that would give it clear meaning.
I now understood why my old Home Depot coworkers looked the way they did: bored, tired, zombie-eyed. My life, like theirs, was so uniform, so one-dimensional, so unadventurous. I spent forty hours of my week doing things that didn’t teach me anything new, that provided no variety, that tested no creative faculties. As a burger flipper, I was a specialist, a cog, an insect, hardly the human being that Jack in Wiseman was.
My journal was mostly blank. I wrote only about how I had nothing to write about. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt any emotion in its extreme. How can you feel anything when every day is the same? I felt nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried or laughed or got steaming mad. It almost got to the point where I’d forgotten what these felt like. Give me anger and give me tears, but never this blank nothingness, this gnawing neutrality.
As expected, kitchen work was kitchen work, but occasionally, when the rare group of winter tourists made it up to Coldfoot, I had the good fortune of getting to lead an “Aurora Tour.” On the tour, I’d drive them in the van to Jack’s house in Wiseman, where we’d view the aurora borealis—the northern lights.
On my first Aurora tour, which I led in early January, I put on every heavy article of clothing I owned: a parka and a logger’s hat that a departing coworker had sold to me for $20, a set of thermal underwear my mother had mailed to me, as well as gloves, wool socks, and bunny boots, which are large white boots made for polar excursions that Josh had found abandoned when we’d worked at the Yukon River Camp.
Coldfoot is one of the best places on earth to view the aurora. The camp sits directly under the auroral oval, which is where solar winds collide with and excite atmospheric atoms and molecules that cause a display not to the north—where most people see them—but directly overhead. Tourists, many fromJapan, would come up to Coldfoot during the winter months to see them.
I drove the tourists twelve miles up the road to Wiseman, where there were no outdoor lights to obstruct the views. Because the aurora would sometimes show itself for only a couple of minutes, the tourists would wait in Jack’s cabin, where they stayed warm and drank hot cocoa while I stood outside waiting for it to appear. When it finally appeared, I’d run to the cabin, open the door, and yell for everyone to
I told myself that I was different, that I was nothing like these addicts and alcoholics. But in a way, I wasn’t much different. I felt just as weak. I was thousands of miles from home, but I felt as contained as ever. I lived nearly the same sheltered, scheduled life I’d lived back in New York. And without the return of the sun to announce a new day, each twenty-four-hour period melted into the next. My life was an amorphous blob of flipping burgers, mopping floors, and sleeping. I was in a dream that I couldn’t wake up out of. I was lost in a forest whose canopy concealed the sun, wandering in circles. Somehow I’d traveled four thousand miles yet had managed to bring with me the repetitious and ordered and cubicled life that I’d wished to leave behind. While I’d gotten myself out of the suburb, I couldn’t get the suburb out of me.
My life was so monotonous, so goalless, so pathless. What was my purpose? To service truckers who worked for the oil industry? To pay off my debt? To work for years and years at shitty jobs and be thankful that I, unlike other people, had a job, or at least one not quite as shitty as theirs? I wanted more than anything to have something to work toward and strive for.Something important. I longed to stop muddling around and dedicate my life to some high and noble purpose that would give it clear meaning.
I now understood why my old Home Depot coworkers looked the way they did: bored, tired, zombie-eyed. My life, like theirs, was so uniform, so one-dimensional, so unadventurous. I spent forty hours of my week doing things that didn’t teach me anything new, that provided no variety, that tested no creative faculties. As a burger flipper, I was a specialist, a cog, an insect, hardly the human being that Jack in Wiseman was.
My journal was mostly blank. I wrote only about how I had nothing to write about. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt any emotion in its extreme. How can you feel anything when every day is the same? I felt nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried or laughed or got steaming mad. It almost got to the point where I’d forgotten what these felt like. Give me anger and give me tears, but never this blank nothingness, this gnawing neutrality.
As expected, kitchen work was kitchen work, but occasionally, when the rare group of winter tourists made it up to Coldfoot, I had the good fortune of getting to lead an “Aurora Tour.” On the tour, I’d drive them in the van to Jack’s house in Wiseman, where we’d view the aurora borealis—the northern lights.
On my first Aurora tour, which I led in early January, I put on every heavy article of clothing I owned: a parka and a logger’s hat that a departing coworker had sold to me for $20, a set of thermal underwear my mother had mailed to me, as well as gloves, wool socks, and bunny boots, which are large white boots made for polar excursions that Josh had found abandoned when we’d worked at the Yukon River Camp.
Coldfoot is one of the best places on earth to view the aurora. The camp sits directly under the auroral oval, which is where solar winds collide with and excite atmospheric atoms and molecules that cause a display not to the north—where most people see them—but directly overhead. Tourists, many fromJapan, would come up to Coldfoot during the winter months to see them.
I drove the tourists twelve miles up the road to Wiseman, where there were no outdoor lights to obstruct the views. Because the aurora would sometimes show itself for only a couple of minutes, the tourists would wait in Jack’s cabin, where they stayed warm and drank hot cocoa while I stood outside waiting for it to appear. When it finally appeared, I’d run to the cabin, open the door, and yell for everyone to
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