Walden on Wheels REVIEW
Ken Ilgunas is something of a 21rst century radical transcendentalist, in the tradition of Henry Thoreau (thus the title). As such, he believes in the importance of freedom, of direct experience of the self and nature, and of the primacy of the passions. He is also a good writer. If I were still teaching high school English, I would enjoy teaching his book in conjunction with the unit in American History on Transcendentalism. It speaks to numerous themes that Transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century were challenging people to think about and that young people today should be thinking more rather than less about: What is the purpose of education? What is it worth? What should be its ends? What is the relative value of nature, freedom, knowledge, money, and memory in a happy life?
If I were well-to-do and sans home mortgage, I would take him up on his challenge and head out into the unknown somewhere.
Perhaps it would be beneficial to reiterate some of the Transcendentalist themes that can be found in the nineteenth century and in Walden on Wheels.
First, there is the commitment to simplicity as a vital path to an essential freedom. Here he speaks of the way that he surrendered that freedom as a matriculating college student without understanding what he was losing. In Ilgunas’ commencement speech, he quotes James Joyce who once said, ‘When the soul of man is born, there are nets thrown at it to hold it back from flight.’” For him, the most threatening of those nets is debt.
Here is the author explaining the process by which he assumed the college debt that he saw as so imprisoning for years.
“It didn't occur to me to think about how strange it was that the government, my college, and a large bank were letting me, and 18-year-old kid – one who didn't know what interest was or how to work the stove for that matter – take out a gigantic five digit loan that might substantially alter the course of my life.
I do, however, remember not hearing any warnings about the consequences of debt with the likelihood of a bleak post-graduation job market. And I do remember hearing, from a chorus of voices, that student debt is good debt and that money shouldn't stop you from going to the school you want to go to. Like everyone else, I listened.
I never actually thought about why I was going to college, or why I was about to take out thousands of dollars in loans for it. Like most 18-year-olds, I cared little for books, or higher learning, or anything that had to do with school.
I told myself that incurring student that was like puberty or a midlife crisis: it was an unavoidable nuisance, a ticket required for admission to the next stage of adulthood, a burden I had to clumsily carry up the socioeconomic ladder. But as I continue to take out more loans to pay for tuition, books, and my car, I slowly begin to grasp that dealing with this debt was going to be more than some paltry inconvenience.”
I knew there was no way I'd be able to pay off my debt with the sort of money I made pushing carts. If I was going to flounder in the sea of red ink, I hoped my degree, at least, would be a plank of driftwood with which I could keep my head above the surface. So I found myself, more or less, trapped in school.
And while I yearned for new experiences, I recognized that every year I was getting more and more into debt and becoming less and less free.”
“While I had hoped to sneak my way around college tuition,” Ilgunas says on page 192, “I’d met warty mustachioed border patrolmen on all the conventional roads to an affordable education.”
He speaks of the visceral pain he feels in his dead-end shopping-cart pushing job at Home Depot and laments his loss of soul-freedom. “They may not have admitted it to someone else – for fear of sounding entitled, or ungrateful, or whiny,” he says of fellow workers,
“ – but I hated work. I hated waking up early, hated taking orders, hated spending the greater part of my time doing something for somebody else, hated how the hours would go by, hated how the days would melt intto one another.”
Like the Transcendentalists he so admires, he listens to the beat of a different drummer. Sometimes literally. “I became afflicted with a burning restlessness that stirred up irrational, impractical dreams,” he says, “and coaxed out strange, subconscious voices.”
A second characteristic of the Transcendental vision of life that can be found in Ilgunas’ approach to life is the commitment to the development of the self and the actualization of human potentials even at the cost of financial stability. In some respects, he reminds me a lot of Bronson Alcott, who struggled to overcome his love of ideas so as to make enough money to live. Only Bronson had a family. It is tough to be a Transcendentalist and support a family, as Ilgunas will note in a subsequent chapter. When applying for jobs, he admits the pain though pride of being “skill-less” though he has acquired a BA in English and History.
“One lady [who he contacts for a job], though, who sounded like she was still looking for workers, asked me what my trade was. It was a question that hit me like a hockey puck to the back of the knee – the one body part my equipment didn't cover. Because it reminded me of the one thing I'd neglected to prepare for throughout my college education, which was learning an actual skill.”
“I preferred to remain useless at everything” Ilgunas says of his decision to pursue a liberal arts degree on page 211. “I didn’t want a ‘marketable skill – I could learn one later if I wished.”
Thirdly, Ilgunas expresses the Transcendentalist’s inherent suffering in the face of a less than meaningful life of mind and soul. To live a life that was not worthy of writing about was the great sin of the Transcendentalists who all believed that the divine spark within each of us had a mission in mind for our lives when we came into it. “I had once heard that we are nothing but our stories,” Ilgunas writes,
“Forget the blood and bones in genes and cells. They are not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping the narrative.”
We are more than physical beings Emerson and Thoreau and Parker and Ripley and Fuller had insisted. We can never be happy if we treat the spiritual aspect of human nature with contempt.
A Fourth expression of Transcendentalism that we see in Ken Ilgunas’ writing is the voracious need for connection with nature. Perhaps few were as addicted to it as Thoreau but the era of Transcendentalism was rife with the love of nature. As a tour guide in Alaska, Ilgunas is exposed to a nature that he realizes had been denied him his whole previous life. “I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars,” he says of nights watching the aurora in Alaska,
“It was as if I just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it was not 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 had gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sites had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view? We can only miss what we once possessed.”
Like the Transcendentalists, Ilgunas insists not only in frequent immersion in nature but he demands that his interactions with people be unmediated by prejudice, bias, and distance. Instead of flying home from Alaska, he hitch-hikes, specifically so that he can, as Thoreau put it, “suck all the marrow out of life.” “I wanted to put aside a couple of weeks of my life when anything could happen,” Ilgunas says in a way reminiscent of Thoreau, setting off in a boat on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
“When I could mingle with ex-felons, have knife fights with grizzlies, or fall in love on the open road. I wanted to scissor poke cowardice and reservation in the eyes and finally immerse myself in the unknown. And the road certainly was unknown to me, at least by way of hitchhiking. In my 23 years, I had never seen a hitchhiker. Not one.”
All of this leads to a seventh characteristic of the Transcendentalist philosophical approach to life, the radical rejection of convention as a guide. “I couldn't take this lifestyle anymore,” Ilgunas says of life in his parent’s home.
“I was disgusted with the demands of this real world. This is not for me, I thought, looking around me. I couldn't live the lifestyle they wanted me to live or work at the sort of job they hoped I'd work at. It wasn't that I had anything against work. After my time in Mississippi [as an Americorp worker], I knew that I could love work. I loved it even though the pay was poor. And I loved it despite the sore backs, the long hours, and the responsibilities of looking over a crew. It was the first time I did something undeniably good: I helped young people and cleaned up the environment. I learned that when the work is meaningful and when the worker provides some useful service or produces some useful product, work is no longer work but in enriching component of one's day. I had no problem with the idea of a sixteen hour workday; it was just that I couldn't stomach the idea of someone else deciding everything from my salary to my time off to whether I had health insurance to when I could retire. I wanted to work. But I wanted to be free too.”
“Loneliness, no doubt caused anguish but over time, solitude gave me something I never would have expected: a culture of my own. . . . Why should I listen to society? Society was insane.”
Everything about his suburban home pales in comparison to what he dreams life should be. Even Niagara Falls, just down the road from his hometown, fails to satisfy him as it serves as a metaphor for an overly civilized wildness in nature. "This place had been uglified, commoditized, urbanized, civilized,” he says of it.
“This place, I decided, was my old self. Here like Niagara Falls, I had been deformed and disfigured by forces outside of my control. I had been bent into a consumer by TV, molded into a conformist by schools, and made into a loan drone by a hundred other things. I had been paved over, polluted, and planned out. I had been Love Canal-ed. I had been civilized.”
“Thoreau made me feel like I’d been a sane man wrongly assigned to live in a madhouse” he writes. Ilgunas’ decision to live in a van during his years at graduate school is a direct expression of the same impulse that made Thoreau go to his cabin and write.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
Like Thoreau, Ilgunas moves from defining himself to accusing others of failing to define themselves as they ought – of failing to be themselves. Subtly, he begins to accuse those who make decisions based on their more material interests as “inferior.” “Dwelling in me also was an unmotivated suburbanite,” he says, “a lazy couch potato, a sometimes alcoholic, loser. If I put myself in a comfortable situation, my lesser self would take over …” A subtle dig at those of us who may have done exactly that?
“I met students everywhere,” Ilgunas says with his critical eye on all his peers, on page 241, “who had devoted half their twenties to something they had little passion for. Eventually, they would be hyperspecialized and would only be qualified for work that didn’t at all fit their true interests or character.”
“My life was so monotonous, so goaless, so pathless,” Ilgunas bemoans just as had Thoreau of his life as a pencil maker. “What was my purpose? To service truckers who worked for the oil industry?” When Ilgunas meets a man living out of a Chevy Suburban, he is transfixed. “James’ Suburban left me speechless,” he says, “It was a mockery of conformity, an affront to conventional wisdom, a symbol of his complete lack of regard for the rules and norms and standards of our age.” It is in a series of moments like this that Ilgunas determines to “scissor-poke cowardice and reservation in the eyes.”
Two years of graduate school at Duke, living in a van in a college parking lot.
It all makes sense.
Ilgunas talks on page 116 about how the “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience in modern life, leaving no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career.” And as far as he is concerned, the longer that he can postpone the career thing, while paying his accumulated debts, the better.
“I didn’t consider myself above work, but it just seems so silly to have to work, perhaps for the next decade, and put all my earnings toward something as intangible, and clearly unprofitable, as my college education. And while I did think there was something crooked about the system – a system that charged unreasonable amount of tuition to teenagers who only wish to better themselves and their society – I knew that I was responsible for taking out the loans and paying them back.”
“I wanted to work but I wanted to be free”
His ability to write should help. But how many people can make a living writing if everyone else is making a living writing? How many copies of Walden will sell if everyone is living in a van, not making money?
I feel a strange jealousy when I think about what Ken Ilgunas has done and is doing with his life but nevertheless, one must ask, who paid the taxes that funded his ability to be a park ranger in Alaska? Whose property taxes paid for the high school education that allowed him to go to college in the first place? Whose insurance premiums would have covered his medical bills if he had gotten hypothermia on that first hike in the Brooks range? Who’s tution payments paid for the library he used at Duke? For the hot water in the gymn? For the electrical outlets he used to charge his laptop? Can we not admire him but also remember that much of what he did to save money amounted to an externalizing of costs to those who “sucked it up” and went off to that nine-to-five and did their bit. And ultimately, can the country survive if everyone lives in a cabin or a van and postpones indefinitely the responsibility of providing a stable home for children?
With that said, my hat is off to Mr. Ilgunas for doing what someone in every generation needs to do for us: Remind us of how much we could live without to find what is more important.
Question for Comment: How much of a Transcendentalist are you at heart?
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