Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas Page A
Authors: Ken Ilgunas
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get out as quick as they could.
In all my winter gear, I managed to stay fairly comfortable in temperatures as cold as–40°F. I’d lie in the snow, looking up at the sky, waiting for the aurora to unfurl.
Nowhere had I ever seen a sky so full of stars. From my suburb in Niagara Falls—for the first twenty-three years of my life—I could make out only a few faint twinklings in the smoggy, light-polluted skies. But here, the stars gushed across the clear, clean arctic sky, a Gulf Stream of light that illuminated the rounded snowcaps on the Wiseman cabin roofs, making them look like squat mushrooms.
I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?
We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this.But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?
A pale green band appeared. It inched across the sky, a luminescent caterpillar slowly nibbling its way to the eastern horizon. Then several bands of light materialized—all parallel to one another—making it look as if the firmament wore a celestial comb-over. Those pale bands began to pulse. One ball after another would move down the green bands like a family of rabbits being digested by a python. And suddenly the aurora bloomed into full color. The sky lit up with spumes of reds, pinks, purples, and blues that swooped, twisted, and curled into each other. There was no sense, no order, no logic to the aurora’s movement. It moved wildly and swiftly, changing into a different shape from one moment to the next. It was a glowing, throbbing, sashaying curtain of color, a Rorschach test that looked like whatever you wanted it to look like: a heavyset grizzly, a woman’s hips, a highway climbing hills. The aurora was a powwow of ancestral spirits—writhing apparitions, conjured from the depths of a village bonfire. It was a desert storm, a million individual particles of light whipping over dunes in patterns that no human mind could comprehend or computer-generate. The aurora is alien and unworldly, but it does not frighten or flabbergast; it is a tranquilizer that sprinkles down onto its onlookers an opiate from the heavens. It puts you at ease. After a few oohs and aahs, Jack, the tourists, and I all turned still and silent, our heads tilted upward to space.
I was bearing witness to an ancient ritual that I felt I’d seen in a previous lifetime. I was being reacquainted with the images processed by a million eyes before me, reveling in the privileges of the great human experience. Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log? The statues, the paintings, theepic poems, the things we buy, the homes we strive to attain, the great cities and timeless monuments. In time, they’ll all be gone. And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the
In all my winter gear, I managed to stay fairly comfortable in temperatures as cold as–40°F. I’d lie in the snow, looking up at the sky, waiting for the aurora to unfurl.
Nowhere had I ever seen a sky so full of stars. From my suburb in Niagara Falls—for the first twenty-three years of my life—I could make out only a few faint twinklings in the smoggy, light-polluted skies. But here, the stars gushed across the clear, clean arctic sky, a Gulf Stream of light that illuminated the rounded snowcaps on the Wiseman cabin roofs, making them look like squat mushrooms.
I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?
We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this.But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?
A pale green band appeared. It inched across the sky, a luminescent caterpillar slowly nibbling its way to the eastern horizon. Then several bands of light materialized—all parallel to one another—making it look as if the firmament wore a celestial comb-over. Those pale bands began to pulse. One ball after another would move down the green bands like a family of rabbits being digested by a python. And suddenly the aurora bloomed into full color. The sky lit up with spumes of reds, pinks, purples, and blues that swooped, twisted, and curled into each other. There was no sense, no order, no logic to the aurora’s movement. It moved wildly and swiftly, changing into a different shape from one moment to the next. It was a glowing, throbbing, sashaying curtain of color, a Rorschach test that looked like whatever you wanted it to look like: a heavyset grizzly, a woman’s hips, a highway climbing hills. The aurora was a powwow of ancestral spirits—writhing apparitions, conjured from the depths of a village bonfire. It was a desert storm, a million individual particles of light whipping over dunes in patterns that no human mind could comprehend or computer-generate. The aurora is alien and unworldly, but it does not frighten or flabbergast; it is a tranquilizer that sprinkles down onto its onlookers an opiate from the heavens. It puts you at ease. After a few oohs and aahs, Jack, the tourists, and I all turned still and silent, our heads tilted upward to space.
I was bearing witness to an ancient ritual that I felt I’d seen in a previous lifetime. I was being reacquainted with the images processed by a million eyes before me, reveling in the privileges of the great human experience. Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log? The statues, the paintings, theepic poems, the things we buy, the homes we strive to attain, the great cities and timeless monuments. In time, they’ll all be gone. And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the
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