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

“They’re parked inconspicuously in front of hotels and mechanic shops. They’re asleep on your city street one night and gone the next. They’re America’s modern-day vagabond; the twenty-first century’s tramp and hobo, drifter and gypsy. They’re people who take pride in living lives of thrift, adventure, and independence. They’re unburdened by belongings, unfastened from earthly foundations, and unruffled with the prospect of going to the bathroom in an empty Gatorade bottle. They’re vandwellers.”

Ken’s praise of “vandwellers” sets up the basic premise of the text as a story about living frugally in exchange for greater freedom. His positive outlook on poverty obscures the struggles of people who live this way unwillingly but also reveals his early views on transcendentalism.

“I was able to keep the car running, but what little money I was able to put toward my debt always felt negligible—pointless even. It was like throwing a glass of water on a burning building. It was a sacrifice to appease the gods, but a pitiful, emaciated, bony goat of a sacrifice. Such paltry offerings, I worried, might seem less a declaration of submission—which it was—and more an affront to the debt’s greatness, which just might make it angrier, prodding it to swell with interest.”

The embellishment of Ken’s debt to demonic or divine degrees, implied by terms like “sacrifice” and “offerings,” expands the weight of the debt proportionally to his perception. While some people may not be bothered by debt, Ken saw his as a supernatural entity threatening to kill him at any time.

“But it wasn’t just the carts, or the exams, or the debt that left me feeling battered and frayed and a little crazy; it was that I began to see that I lived in a free country but couldn’t say I knew what it felt like to feel ‘free.’ And while I owned plenty of stuff—a car, DVDs, CDs, clothes—I never felt like I owned my own life. College had helped me see how everything, for my whole life, had either been predetermined or planned out: I went to high school because I was forced to; I went to college because I was supposed to; and now I’d enter Career World because I was financially obligated to.”

This passage highlights Ken’s desire to live authentically, which for him required that he remove himself from society’s normative desires and behaviors. Consumerism is the ideology from which Ken wanted to free himself, but he needed a new ideology to guide him.