Photo Ken Ilgunas Collection
Children are born with
an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling
and four more years of college to beat it out of them
Edward Abbey.
Ostensibly, Ken Ilgunas’ Walden on Wheels documents how a
twenty something college slacker from New York State, came to grips with a
mounting college debt through a programme of increasingly radical lifestyle
choices. However, ‘Walden’ is about so much more than a mundane account of how
a poor student gets out of crippling debt. Like
Thoreau’s original work, Ilgunas’ Walden offers an alternative vision of what
life could be like if only the dreamers and schemers eternally trapped on the free market hamster wheel, had the courage and vision to
break free of the endless , soul destroying cycle of production and
consumption.
For Ilgunas, redemption begins-not surprisingly-in the
mountains. As a gauche young graduate he
looks to the north and finds work in a rundown travel lodge deep in the wild
interior of Alaska. Working alongside a
variety of likeable and not so likeable eccentrics, he slowly begins to explore
the hinterlands. One of his first major explorations of this strange new environment
involves an expedition with an equally inexperienced work mate, to reach the
summit of a distant mountain-Blue Cloud in the Brooks Range- which had captured
his imagination.
I looked at Blue
Cloud. The hills around it were green and bulbous, as staid and solemn as a shrine
of crossed legged Buddhas. Behind them rose Blue Cloud. It thrust itself over
the hills, puncturing the cloudless blue sky. A warped coal coloured arrowhead
with veins of snow bleeding down its rocky grooves...It was miles away.
With his friend turning back, the young urban slacker spends
the next 28 hours alone in his quest. Dressed in jeans and work boots and
hopelessly ill-equipped, he nevertheless reaches the summit and somehow-without
even a map or compass-finds his way home.From here, the author builds on his mountain experiences and
finds himself combining his role as a chief cook and bottle washer at the
lodge, with work as a rafting guide.
A job which brings with it financial as well as spiritual
rewards. The $38.000 debt he incurred at college is being whittled away at a
satisfactory rate and he finds himself engaged with the great outdoors.
Interestingly, the location in Alaska where the author was based offers a
striking example of two contrasting communities which are socially and culturally
polar opposites. On one hand, the village of Coldfoot -where Ilgunas is based-
exists to service the tourist and oil industry. 15 miles away is another tiny
community-Wiseman- where the inhabitants live a life of self sufficiency.
Supplying their own food, fuel and electricity. A model eco village which is
off grid. Unlike Coldfoot which in common with 99% of US communities, relies on
externally provided food and energy.
Apart from describing
the socio-cultural aspects of life in the Alaskan wilderness, Ilgunas outlines
the horrific state of affairs with regard to student debt back in ‘the real
world’. Something which is just as applicable in the UK as the US. Tens of
millions of graduates-in the US- leaving college with crippling debts and with
no prospect of work. The figures the author quotes are frightening in their
scale. One of these victims is the author’s best friend Josh whose student debt
is almost double that of the writer.
As a side story, Josh’s experiences- his depressing fall
into wage slavery with an unscrupulous higher education establishment offering
useless degrees at great expense to equally innocent poor students-highlights
the rottenness at the heart of many western
higher education establishments. At least Josh’s story offers a dramatic redemptive
conclusion where he breaks out of the cycle. Unlike millions of other students
who are trapped into a lifetime of debt and dead end careers.
Meanwhile, for Ken Ilgunas, life is following a remarkable
trajectory. In the next few years he finds himself working as a park ranger in
Alaska, a conservation corps team leader in the impoverished badlands of
Mississippi, and becomes a ‘Voyageur’. A member of an expedition in Canada which recreated the voyages of the 18th trappers and traders who plied the
waters in birch bark canoes. It’s a physically and emotionally brutal two month
voyage which further shapes his burgeoning environmentalist vision.
Despite working away on his debt while taking on some hugely
stimulating-if poorly paid- work roles, Ken eventually pines for the Elysian
fields of academia and begins applying to colleges offering liberal study
courses.
To his great surprise he is accepted at one of the top US colleges. Determined
not to fall back into crippling student debt, Ken buys himself a $1700 Ford Ecoline van which he plans to
surreptitiously park up in one of the
colleges parking lots. Without the crippling costs of student accommodation and
through a frugal living strategy, his goal is to go through the academic cycle
without incurring any debt. The final quarter of the book details the cat and
mouse game Ken plays with the authorities before his strategy comes to light in
the most public manner possible. We are talking national news and television
here. To Ken’s credit he tells Murdoch’s Fox News to Fox off when they offer
him an exclusive interview to run alongside the breaking Tiger Woods screws
around story. He also turns down a lucrative writing job with a prestigious
magazine where if he had succumbed, he would have been financially set up for
life, but more importantly, he would have sold out his liberal principles and
sacrificed his Thoreau-ian philosophy on the altar of commerce.
Photo:York Times news/Eric Eckhert
In his farewell graduation address to the gathered throng at
the prestigious college where the ‘Vandweller’ had spent his last two years, Ken
Ilgunas ends his speech with the following....
.
“Yet when I think of higher education today, I think of a
James Joyce quote. Joyce said, ‘When the soul of a man is born...there are nets
flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality,
language and religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’. Today it seems there
are more nets than ever. Today, students struggle to fly past a poor jobs
market, around unpaid internships and through the sticky web of student debt
that is nearly as wide as the sky itself. And when the curriculum lack the
liberal arts, college itself becomes another net. This education has taught me
that one does not become free simply by staying out of debt, or living in a
large creepy vehicle; rather; we must first undergo a period of self
examination to see, for the first time, what nets have been holding us back all
along. Unfortunately, economic realities and political priorities require that
most students pay an unreasonable amount of money for their educations even
though the great majority only want to better themselves and society..........
'Today, I leave Duke the same way I came in. I have exactly
$1156, no job and a degree that is-let’s face it- not going to have me, or most
of us rolling around on a mattress covered with $20 bills. And to keep out of
debt, I’ve recently put the van up for sale. While I am more or less broke, in
exchange for the education I have bought, I have received a wealth in return. I
speak of the wealth of ideas, of truth-such is a currency without rates, a
coinage that will not rust, capital I cannot spend. I may leave this place with
empty pockets but I shall carry this wealth with me whether I am young or old,
at home or abroad, housed or homeless, rich or poor till the end of my days’
‘The crowd cheered and
my parents cried. I stepped off the podium and walked back to my seat. My
experiment was over’.
The book ends with Ken boarding a small plane which will
take him back to Alaska. Away from a life spent balancing on the career ladder.
A life of mortgages, pensions, of being over-looked for promotion at work; the
vapid dinner parties and family vacations. The plasma screen TV’s and latest
iPhones. A soul destroying, stultifying life as a cog within a rotten
socio/economic system. A system which only values an individual by his/her
economic contribution.
Photo: KI Collection
Maybe there is no
longer a frontier, but for me the frontier is a horizon as wide and as endless
as it was for the first pioneers. We have real villains who need vanquishing,
corrupt institutions that need toppling and the great American debtors prison
to break out of. We have trains to hop, voyages to embark on, and rides to
hitch. And then there’s the great American wild-vanishing but still there-ready
to impart its wisdom, from an Alaskan peak to a patch of grass growing in a
crack on a city sidewalk. And no matter how much sprawl and civilisation
overtake our wilds, we’ll always have the boundless wildlands in ourselves to
explore.
Ken’s next big adventure was an epic 1700 mile hike along
the planned route of the controversial Keystone XL route. A pipeline to take
oil sands bitumen from Canada to the Gulf of Texas. Full details of the trip
can be found on Ken’s Pipe Dreams website Details on the controversial
project can be found on the Wikipedia page. Walden on Wheels is published
in the UK by New Harvest Publishing.
John Appleby: 2013