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

Ken Ilgunas (2013)
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THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

Walden on Wheels is a memoir of an American student who challenges some important questions on the constraints incurred with student debt and the assumed commitment to the daily grind of working in an office.  Ken Ilgunas graduated from the University of Buffalo with a “useless liberal arts degree”, $32,000 in debt, and a burning desire to escape to the wilds of Alaska.  Inspired by the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, he worked for several years cleaning, cooking, picking up garbage and guiding tours, ruthlessly saving every penny to help pay off that debt and learning much along the way about what made him happy and fulfilled.  After enrolling in a graduate program at Duke University, he vowed not to take out any more loans, deciding to live in a 1994 Econoline van in a campus parking lot.  He faces daily challenges with heat and hygiene, the risk of discovery by campus security, and simple loneliness, but he also discovers the fulfilment of a life less dependent on material possessions and more accommodating of adventure and freedom.
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ABOUT KEN ILGUNAS

Ken Ilgunas is an up-and-coming Canadian-born author who was raised in Niagara Falls, NY.  His adventure travel career is already notable having hitchhiked 10,000 miles across North America and canoed across Canada.  He also worked as a tour guide in Alaska and as a ranger at the Gates of the Arctic National Park, and perhaps just as adventurously, as an elementary school tutor.  We recommend his book Trespassing Across America, the account of his hike across the heartland following the proposed trail of the Keystone XL pipeline.

GREAT QUOTES FROM WALDEN ON WHEELS

“I am a member of the 'career-less generation.' Or the 'screwed generation.' Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn’t some heartbreaking tragedy to me.”

"How fickle can we be with freedom?  How thoughtlessly do we surrender our autonomy?  The fanciness of our dress, the make of our car, the brand of our gadgets, the name of our school.  We spend our savings or go into debt for no other reason than to bask in the warm rays of peer approval.  Yet, fashions are slavishly followed one day and ridiculed the next.  Be a devotee in the Church of the Consumer and you'll forever live in fear of the capricious God of Style.  Freedom, though, is an honest pair of eyes, a healthy physique, a cheerful laugh.  Style goes out of style.  Freedom is forever."

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • Read the 2013 New York Times preview from Ken Ilgunas, "When Home is a Parking Lot", on Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
  • Iglunas was of course influenced by Walden, the classic philosophical book by Henry David Thoreau chronicling his two years spent living in 1845 on Walden Pond and his attempt "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and … learn what it had to teach."  

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