Walden On Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013

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Introduction 1-Part 1

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Themes

Debt as a Necessary Burden

The book’s subtitle, “On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom,” positions the work’s central concern as a journey out of debt and toward a better life. However, Ken discusses debt from multiple angles, some of which frame it as a necessary component of modern living. While education, Ken shows, need not carry the burden of debt, many students cannot avoid taking out some loans to bolster their physical, financial, and emotional security. Debt, as a simple measurement of money, was the easiest component of Ken’s journey to overcome, as he worked hard, cut back on his consumption, and dedicated his efforts to becoming debt-free. Only at Duke University did Ken’s perceptions about debt fully develop, allowing him to see how debt is not always bad.

In referring to his decision to transfer from a private university to the University at Buffalo, Ken reflects, “I told myself that incurring student debt was like puberty or a midlife crisis: it was an unavoidable nuisance, a ticket required for admission to the next stage of adulthood” (9), aligning debt alongside other unavoidable nuisances in a person’s life. However, this ticket was also a “burden” that Ken needed to climb the “socioeconomic ladder,” making it a necessity both for the sake of convention and for the promise of future success. However, Ken and Josh, along with many other recent graduates, struggled to redeem this ticket of admission, unable to find jobs, pay off their debt, and live freely and happily. Ken’s perception of debt morphed into an abstraction of evil, and debt became the villain in his quest for happiness.

Ken’s morphing views of debt led to the extreme measure of living in a van at Duke, and he notes that he “decided not to take out loans because [he] knew that if [he] allowed [himself] access to easy money, then [he’d] again fall victim to the consumerist trap” (253) in which he would spend freely and enjoy himself. This fear of comfort extended to his own family: Ken rejected offers from his mother to help him live more comfortably. At the end of his graduate program, Ken realized that he had “a monetarily useless degree, no real home, and hardly anything to my name” (289), but he did not have any debt. Ken came to accept that some assistance is necessary, allowing certain kinds of debts—like help from friends and family—but maintaining his rigid rejection of official loans. The book provides evidence of Ken’s journey to remain debt-free but also expands and contracts the meaning of debt, showing how some assistance can be necessary to live comfortably.

Living Authentically In a Modern World

Ken discusses two sides of living in a consumerist society—work and school—in light of the challenge of living authentically. Both work and school carry possibilities for authentic and inauthentic lives, but in Ken’s experience, the barrier between authenticity and inauthenticity shifts throughout his journey. During his undergraduate program, Ken lamented his job at Home Depot, complaining about his hours and working conditions and sarcastically imagining an extreme way to convince corporate to stop playing Christmas music. Reflecting on the transition from high school to college, Ken compares himself and his classmates to “a school of fish,” noting that “we graduates were capable of going off on our own, in whatever direction we chose, but something demanded we all swim as one” (6) as they all went off to college. Both work and school carry the problems of living in a consumerist society, in which people often make choices and live entire lives that follow the flow of social expectations without examining their own desires and interests to guide them.

Ken’s major argument in the text is that each person must find their own form of freedom, which, for Ken, the wilderness of Alaska embodied. In Alaska, he shed the needs and wants of modern society, finding his peace in frugality and nature. In describing how he brought this lifestyle to Duke in his Econoline van, Ken notes, “I’d be a monk, a hermit, a recluse: within society, yet completely separated from it. I’d hunch over my books and papers and befriend ancient thinkers, never concerned with the neighborhood of man all around me” (191). Although Ken came to see the value of the “neighborhood of man,” he argues that society is more of a burden than a benefit regarding decisions on how to live well. In his hometown, Ken saw how consumerism ran everyone’s lives, noting the same pattern in Thoreau’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, and lamenting how people seem to live to impress or keep up with the “neighborhood of man,” rather than following their dreams.

At Duke, thinking he would find scholars of arts and liberalism, Ken was disappointed to find the two paths of work and school converging, as students prepared themselves for what he considered effectively just higher-paying versions of his job at Home Depot, still fraught with the annoyances of Christmas music and meaningless tasks. Ken concluded, “So to live in harmony with my own particular needs and desires, I knew I had to test ideologies, not follow them” and decided that “it was okay to want things and, if I had the money, to buy things,” emphasizing the importance of resisting the fantasies of “it would be nice” (282). In Ken’s view, consumerism encourages people to both make choices that align with social expectations and to orient their lives around the urges of purchasing and accumulating objects. Instead, he wants readers to test their feelings and beliefs against the real world, exploring themselves and finding out what things, people, and experiences they really want rather than pursuing those that society deems worthwhile.

Contemporary Transcendentalism and the Power of Nature

The title of the book references Walden, a transcendentalist work by Henry David Thoreau, a notable member of the transcendentalist movement. In addition to Ken’s overarching argument regarding the meaning of living an authentic life, he references the tenets of transcendentalism, such as the purity of nature, the value of humanity, and the corrupting effects of society and social institutions. Ken fantasizes about seeing nature through the eyes of the transcendentalists, and he portrays the same kinds of natural scenery and events that the transcendentalists did in the 19th century. However, Ken’s view of the importance of nature and the ills of society is updated to the early 21st century, including issues like shopping malls, industrial factories, and consumerism, which—while aligning with the views of writers like Thoreau and Emerson—convey a uniquely modern perspective.

Much like the transcendentalists, part of Ken’s complaint about modern life is the distance between humanity and nature, as well as the damage that industrialism and modernization have done to the natural world. He notes, “We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us,” adding, “Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred” (72), highlighting the transcendentalist values of purity in nature and the power of communing with a natural environment. For Ken, shopping malls, factories, and pipelines detract from the healing and purifying effects of nature, but he also highlights how climate change and pollution remove these experiences from human memory forever. The natural environment is necessary for humanity not only in the transcendentalist sense of what it means to be “good” but also to give people the option to enjoy them, explore, and discover their meaning within the world.

Ken ultimately realizes that some elements of Thoreau’s transcendentalism are not entirely accurate, such as his disdain for people and desire for isolation, but he retains the transcendentalist values of nature and purity, returning to Alaska even after his encounter with the grizzly bear shows him the limits of the wilderness within himself. He asserts, “I’d give up my retirement years if I could hold up my antlers on mountains like these in my glorious youth” (271), advocating a brief life in nature over a long life in civilization. His message, critically, is that people should enjoy nature while they can. Most importantly, he urges people to do everything in their power to conserve nature so that future generations, too, can choose to explore themselves through the wilderness.