The Spartan Student

A Walk across Wheatfield: My Search for Wildness in Suburban America (Part III of III)

2011-12-19T14:44:00.004-05:00

[This is a three-part series. Click here for parts I and II.]

After disassembling my tent, stuffing gear into my pack, and wolfing down a dozen store-brand Oreos, I continued my march west across Wheatfield.

As I walked over lumps of earth in farm fields that were hard and sparkling in frost, I kept close to the edge of the woods to reduce my chances of being spotted. After skirting around a pond, where an alarmed long-legged Great Blue Heron launched from an icy pond, I found train tracks that I stumbled along en route to Walmore Road. Once I hit the road, I’d change direction to the south, back toward my parents’ home, the old Summit Mall, and my recently discovered Wheatfield Lakes.

On Walmore, I strolled by quaint, ranch-style homes, St Peter’s Cemetery, the old Military Road School, and Guy’s Lumber—old sights on a road I’d driven over in buses and parents’ vehicles hundreds of times to attend school or football practice. Then a blue collar bar, Talarico’s pizza, and the giant, sprawling Air Force base, which had “no photography” signs posted on a cage link fence. Tiring of the road, I climbed a small, manmade ridgeline to walk along more railroad tracks so I could see things from both a novel pace and perspective.

To my left were more giant rectangles of fallow fields with cut cornstalks, hewn by tractors to a rough and jagged stubble, the abrasive texture of a woman’s prickly leg hairs. To my right was the military base connected to almost two miles of runway (9,130 feet)—the longest in New York State and the only strip in the area where large cargo planes had enough room to land.

In between Williams and the railroad were a series of parking lots overgrown with weeds and full of derelict cars, along with some sort of “war games” enclosure where I’m guessing the military practices strategic maneuvers. A “No Trespassing” sign warned that “Deadly Force is Authorized.” After walking over a railroad bridge that hangs over the Niagara Falls Boulevard, I made my way down to Jagow Road, near a small neighborhood mall called Summit Park.

When I was a boy, going to the Summit was a big deal. All the cool kids went there after school, alone, without their parents, which made going with your parents about as embarrassing as crapping your pants in class. Getting caught with your mom was an embarrassment of apocalyptic proportions that made you wish, if just for that fleeting moment, that the gods grant you a swift and merciful death. But parent or no parent, I delighted in surveying the Sega titles in Toys “R” Us, the feeling the rush of juvenile glee in Spencer's, or spending hours in the “trading card” shop, scanning over coveted hockey cards, wondering what gems I might discover in a sealed pack of “Upper Deck,” and fantasizing about owning Mario Lemieux’s rookie card encased in its own special glass display.

I knew the adjacent Summit Park Six Theater had been shut down and destroyed long ago, and that the 800,000 square foot mall had become mostly abandoned, but I'd hoped to at least walk inside and view the deserted shops in a hazy daze of nostalgia. Instead, I was disappointed to learn that the whole mall—except for a Bon Ton on one end and a Sears on the other—had been boarded up.

Railroad between Ward and Walmore.

Mountain of concrete and rebar near rail road tracks on Williams Road.

Military land, I believe.

Cornfields by Cayuga Drive Extension.

Forest recently cleared for home on Jagow.

Summit Park subdivision.

Summit Mall

This is Love Canal. It's now just a big plot of grass enclosed by a tall fence.

Fuzzy burrs

Wheatfield Lakes again, circled by ATV trail.

Wheatfield Lakes. You can see lakeside homes on left side.

Wheatfield Lakes Subdivision

The Summit Mall is less than a mile from historic Love Canal—a community where, in the 1950’s, a corporation buried 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals. People young and old near the site were stricken with epilepsy, cancers, nervous disorders, and miscarriages. Between 1974 and 1978, 56% of children in the neighborhood exhibited at least one birth defect, often in the form of enlarged heads, hands, and feet, among more serious illnesses. One child had a second row of teeth. This is how one EPA administrator described it:

“Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.”

It was one of the worst manmade environmental catastrophes the country had ever seen. This occurred less than four miles from my home.

You’d think that—because of Love Canal—the townspeople and politicians of Wheatfield and Niagara Falls would have decided to usher in a new period of environmental awareness. Not only would we clean up Love Canal, but perhaps we’d also preserve some of the undeveloped land—not for future development or industrial exploitation—but as a nature sanctuary: a small square of land set aside to remind people that, oh yeah, places can exist without pipes and roads and cancerous chemicals.

Instead, we got this: dead malls, suburban sprawl, industrial squalor; our natural wonder surrounded by power lines and towering casinos.

Then again, is this place all that bad?

I was walking past a line of apartments on Plaza Drive, near a subdivision where my first girlfriend used to live. Here’s a neighborhood much like my own, where kids can ride their bikes, enjoy their own aboveground pools, and play videogames all night long at their best friend’s house. Parents can leave their doors unlocked. Dogs can catch an occasional rabbit in the backyard.

These parents aren’t bad people. They didn’t chop down the trees or drain the wetlands. They just wanted the best possible life for their kids.

Wasn’t I happy as a child? Didn’t I have a good childhood?

Have I just become cynical over the years? Am I bound to become some old, cranky curmudgeon who complains about everything that isn’t the way it was or should be? The creation of all towns and homes and cities entails some environmental destruction, doesn’t it? Is suburbia that bad?

Why do I even care? Why do I hate it so much? Why do I hate anything at all? Do I really even hate it, or am I forcing myself to hate it to legitimate an identity I've adopted?

Not sure what to think, I decided to head back into the woods south of the subdivision to explore new territory. Better yet, I’d head back to the lakes—where I had "a moment" two days before.

After walking over a log that had fallen over Black Creek, wading my way, ankle-deep, through a farm field (that had become wet and muddy upon thawing in the afternoon sun), crashing through a dense stand of bushy tailed reeds, and accumulating a shirt full of fuzzy burrs, I made it to the secret lakes of Wheatfield.

Except this time they didn’t seem so secret or majestic. Hiding in the reeds, I watched three expensive looking and slightly muddy jeeps depart on a gravel road. On all sides of the lakes was swampy diarrhea-colored water, where ATVs had grinded their tires into the ground over and over again. A box of Labatt Blue Light sat next to a tree overlooking the lakes. The sky wasn’t so clear and celestial as it was two days ago; rather, it was a bland, slightly hazy blue-gray that made you think something was stuck in your eyes.

I quickly left and made my way back to Ferchen Road, slightly unsettled, knowing these lakes weren’t as pristine as I’d originally perceived them to be. Not only that, but I began to wonder how I could possibly have gone twenty years without ever noticing them, just a mile from my house. How is that even possible? Have I really been that out of touch with my surroundings? Am I really that oblivious? Or is it suburbia’s fault? Has the landscape and lifestyle done irreparable damage to my finer senses, the same way working in a factory can impair our hearing?

On my way to my subdivision, I came across an old man wearing a navy blue veteran’s cap who was on the other side of the road having just gathered his mail, waiting for the traffic to go by so he could cross again. When he did, I asked, “Excuse me sir, do you know if those lakes back there are… real?”

“Well, I think they’re manmade, if that’s what you mean. Are you from around here?”

“Yeah, I live in Country Meadows.”

“I can’t tell you much more. I’ve only been living here seven years.”

He was new to the neighborhood. But wasn’t I, as well? Aren’t we all? As far as I know, no one has lived in a suburb like Wheatfield for more than a generation or two. We’re all strangers—strangers who don’t really understand the land, its cycles, its history. And because we’ve all just moved here, our roots haven’t had a chance to sink into the soil, so our understanding of this place is partial at best. We are here for a decade or two, and then we're off to some slightly more prosperous locale or some southern state for the warm winters, leaving the decay and decrepitude in our catastrophic wakes.

We have no clue what this place is. Hardly anyone cares that we’re building more and more subdivisions because our relationship with the place is incipient at best. The rocks, the trees, the ponds—they mean nothing to us symbolically. They are segregated from our values, our religions, our society, our lives; the only relationship we have with them has been exploitative.

Later on, not only did I verify that the lakes were in fact constructed a few years ago (presumably built to give homeowners a “lakeside” view), but I learned that the beavers that live there—that I was so pleased to discover—are commonly harassed because their dams, allegedly, cause floods.

Thinking about the mall, the lakes, and the suburbs that I'd traveled through the past three days, I couldn’t say I felt hatred. This lake discovery was too predictable a conclusion to my journey. Hatred requires some element of surprise. Hatred occurs when something is seized from your grip. Thing is, I didn’t have much that could be stolen in the first place.

Plus, I can't feel hatred for such a simple way of living, for people so kind and caring. So, I guess it isn’t so much the individual suburb or the individual homeowner or the individual house that upsets me, but the broad, overarching trend of what’s happening to the land across America. If a family member is dying of cancer, we do not get angry with a mere cell of the cancer, or even the cancer as a whole, for these aren't things that can absorb anger or change as a result of our anger. Rather, we lament the loss of what was and grieve what could have been.

So I guess now—as I think about what's happened to this place—I don’t feel anger or sadness; just frustration and a sense of powerlessness. I think about my time in the woods as a boy: building forts with friends, catching frogs in the pond, befriending my old duck, Howard (who was run over by a garbage truck), and I think about how I can never reenter the scenes of these memories, just as I can no longer enter a decaying, boarded-up mall.

Yes, I have the memories themselves, but so long as I have them all to myself, not to be enjoyed or shared by others, these memories will forever be tainted, as they’re no longer the sweet memories of a “loved one,” but that of a loved one having been taken away.

Wild ideas

1. Summit Park Bird Preserve. Once Bon-Ton and Sears go out of business, we’ll have almost—by my calculations—one hundred acres between the abandoned mall, the bulldozed theatre, and ghost town parking lots. Additionally, there are another 500 acres nearby that can be bought (which I know because the Wizard of Oz people had considered buying it years ago). This could make almost one square mile of nearly contiguous protected land for birds and small animals. Where will we get the money to buy the land (most of which costs $7,500/acre)? I have no idea. But its location directly across from Love Canal might attract national attention, possibly enabling a nationwide fundraising campaign.

2. Ban ATVs and Jeeps around Wheatfield Lakes. If we’re going to create natural spaces, we should treat them as such. Let’s set aside a place that can be peaceful and quiet; where our mode of travel doesn’t scar the land. We Western New Yorkers spend most of our time sitting at desks, on couches, and in cars; it wouldn’t hurt if we used our feet a little bit, too.

3. No new subdivisions.

4. Twelve-mile Wheatfield Farm-and-Forest Trail. It’s absolutely insane that there’s no wilderness trail anywhere near Wheatfield. If we’re going to get people to care about nature and make them want to preserve it, we first need to give them some place to experience and enjoy it. It’s about six miles from Oppenheim Park north to Bond’s Lake—a route that, except for a few road crossings, goes through almost all forest and field. Create a loop, and we double its size to twelve. (People can park their cars either at Oppenheim or Bond’s Lake.) The trail, like the AT, will be maintained by volunteers.

5. Bring the buffalo back to Buffalo. Yes, I said it. Let’s bring the buffalo—the animal—back to Western New York. Relocate a small population from a national park, assign a few rangers on horseback to protect them, and preserve a network of grasslands all across Western New York to which they may migrate and graze. It’ll be a source of local—hell—national pride, and a message that we’re turning a page and will no longer erect mindless sprawl.

A Walk across Wheatfield: My Search for Wildness in Suburban America (Part II of III)

2011-12-18T02:34:00.002-05:00

[This is Part II of a three-part series. For Part I, click here.]

“The first rule is that pedestrian life cannot exist in the absence of worthwhile destinations that are easily accessible on foot. This is a condition that modern suburbia fails to satisfy, since it strives to keep all commercial activity well separated from housing. As a result, the only pedestrians to be found in a residential subdivision belong to that limited segment of the population which walks for exercise. Otherwise, there is no reason to walk, and the streets are empty.” – Suburban Nation

“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” –Bill Vaughn

Throughout my adulthood I’ve had two recurring dreams.

The first occurs about a half-mile south of my home, near woods I’d never visited, where I happen upon a grizzly bear grazing in an open field. In the dream, I stand still, paralyzed and awestruck and exhilarated. After the dream, lying in bed—in that half-dreaming, half-awake state—I’ve often wondered if it really happened. Even now, the memory of it feels so real, I only know it isn’t because of its implausibility.

The second occurs a few miles to the north, off of Walmore Road, in Wheatfield’s farm district. In the dream, I’ll sneak into a cobwebbed attic of an old farm house where some foreigners are hiding—like Jewish survivors in the walls of the ghetto—except their situation isn’t so dire, as they’re merely anxious for having trespassed on someone else’s property.

On the second morning of my journey—after a night full of dreams that, upon opening my eyes, are instantly forgotten—I awoke in John’s yard to the sound of sleet gently pelting the roof of my tent. In his kitchen, I ate two slices of white toast that I’d slathered in honey, before heading north on Shawnee Road to Wheatfield’s agricultural district, where my second dream takes place, and where I hoped to explore what woods I could find.

The sleet was more rainy than snowy, so after walking a few miles north—wary of getting soaked in cold weather—I turned into a new suburban development called “The Briars,” where I’d have more privacy to put on my rain gear, away from the hundreds of cars speeding down Shawnee.

Many of the houses had yet to be built, as the street wound around fields of mud where houses would soon be. I was self-conscious carrying a large backpack through a subdivision, aware that any onlookers would be a little unsettled with the presence of a tramp in a neighborhood that never sees homeless people or tramps or probably people of color. (In 2007, Wheatfield residents formed a Residents Action Committee to resist a proposed "low income," 68-unit housing development that resistors claimed—in fliers distributed—that the new neighborhood would bring in people "of all colors.")

The houses were brand new, all probably constructed within the last ten years. They looked fresh and trim and sturdy, placed squarely on simple, smoothly-shaven monocultured lawns, though the neighborhood, as a whole, was spookily—eerily—quiet.

I wondered: Are there people even living in these homes? Where was everyone? While I acknowledged that it was cold and wet and that I was hiking on a Friday afternoon—when parents were at their jobs and their kids, at school—I was still struck that I hadn’t seen one person grabbing their mail, putting up Christmas lights, or walking around the the cul-de-sac for a little exercise. After several hours walking through various suburbs, I didn’t see one person outside of their homes or cars.

But is it that strange? I’m hardly any different when I stay at my parents’ home. I’ve literally gone several days in a row without leaving the house. Here, I gradually metamorphose into highschool-Ken: wallowing in self-pity, eating five meals a day, indulging in an endless combination of napping, videogames, and sleeping in until two in the afternoon.

There are no fences to repair, no bean fields to hoe, no water to fetch from the stream. Apart from washing a few dishes and carrying the groceries inside, there’s really nothing to do. So, unless I can conjure the necessary self-discipline to write or go for a run, I do nothing. Life is so easy: when I’m hungry, I grab food from the well-stocked pantry or fridge. My water comes from magical sinks and my heat comes from magical vents. Because I am not needed for anything, I spend my time fulfilling desires: watching TV in the family room, reading books in my old room, and playing videogames on the computer.

Of course things would be slightly different if I had bills to pay and a job to go to. But would it? I’ve worked and gone to school full-time in the past while living at home, and I’m not sure—even then—if I felt needed.

In suburbia, we work our forty hours a week and then spend the rest of our time on automatic pilot. We drive to work, work, and then come home to a nearly fully-automated comfort box that—except for a little energy burned when mowing the lawn or building a deck—only costs money, and little sweat, energy, or ingenuity to maintain.

I can’t help but think that we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. We need to be forced to sacrifice, forced to grow a garden, forced to fix a roof, forced to interact with neighbors. Rather, we strive to gain the comforts and conveniences to be enjoyed privately without realizing that such gains often come with the cost of social isolation, of purposelessness, of spiritual deflation.

While nature all around us continues to do it's thing: unleashing terrifying storms, spinning circular cycles, inflicting bone-chilling colds, and renewing with springy revivifications, in a neighborhood like mine, we are almost completely oblivious to it all, for we have little meaningful connection to nature, and no true practical purpose to actually go outside.

I wonder, might it do us good to have more toil, more hardship, more pain, more suffering? To actually be at the mercy of the weather? Might we be better off with a little wildness in our lives?

***

I continued my march up Shawnee, seeking some empty fields or shrouded forests. Instead, I found little more than one subdivision after another.

Shawnee Road has scores of brand new subdivisions like mine and "The Briars," each more absurdly named than the previous. Here’s a list of most of the subdivisions in Wheatfield. (See if you note any similarities.)

Woodstream Landing

Lakes of Wheatfield

Woodstream Meadows

Country Meadows

Witmer Shores

Settler’s Run

Alder Creek

Willow Lake

Dreamhaven Estates

Spice Creek

Woodland Estates

Wheatfield Heights

Ashwood

Timber Lakes

Eagle Lake Patio Homes

Stone Ridge

Meadowwood Estates

Eaglechase

No trespassing signs everywhere.

Subdivisions.

Lots for sale everywhere.

Almost all of the subdivisions I saw were named to evoke some image of pristine natural beauty. And while I understand that it would be poor marketing to accurately name the neighborhood you’re trying to sell as “big, bland, ugly box lot,” I find something absurd about naming your community after something that was destroyed so it could be erected. It’s like naming a football team after Native Americans who'd been run out of the region a century before. It’s like promoting some super fat, sugary, chocolaty, diabetes-coated cereal as “part of a balanced breakfast” to make us feel better about eating it. We name our suburbs after some fake manmade pond or a few artfully planted trees to kid ourselves about what this place really is and what suburbia really does.

Easily the most ridiculous of the subdivisions was “Wildwing Preserve,” the name of which caused me to scoff aloud. The houses were huge, bland-colored monstrosities commonly referred to as "McMansions," some with column-like structures probably made out of plastic descending from the roof to the porch. The houses curled around a pond that was most likely dug out so people could brag to other people that their homes have “waterfront” views.

Why do we need homes so big?! I thought this was the big, bad Great Recession? Where's all this so-called middleclass suffering? Does it really make our lives that much better, that much happier when we have decked-out basements, never-used living rooms, and six television sets? Why are people flooding into and fighting over the latest shade of pastel purple bedspreads at my local “Bed, Bath, and Beyond!?” Why are we calling this fucking Hiroshima a “bird preserve” when the housecats more than likely devour hatchlings and the dogs shoe off whatever blackbirds have descended to rest their wings?! Get me out of here! Burn the whole fucking place down! We've gang-raped, bombed Dresden-style, and shit on the land, only to name it “Happy, Beautiful estates,” hoping that no one will notice what we've done.

More unsettling was that all the vacant, yet-to-be-developed land along the road was for sale (11 acres here, 13.3 acres there), or had signs denoting where a new development will one day be. And the fields that were still okay being fields had “No Trespassing” signs spaced every three feet apart.

So between the suburbs, the lack of wildland, and the property owners’ disinclination to allow other people on their land, where’s a young boy or girl to go for adventure? From my home, I can literally see suburbs in all directions. When I was a boy, at least there were pockets of woods here and there to stoke my imagination. A distant forest is a generator of wild dreams. But now, all a child sees here are endless rows of cookie-cutter homes, bland corporate parks, vast retirement complexes, separated by a gridwork of loud, fast, angry roads—the most unenchanting, uninviting, uninteresting landscape ever made by man, glacier or god.

***

I took a left on Lockport Road, walked up Ward—another busy street like Shawnee—and stopped to have lunch at a diner called Hoover’s for lunch: a basket of crinkle cut French fries artfully drizzled in a checkerboard of cheese and mayonnaise with bacon sprinkled on top.

The sun, thankfully, came out, so I took off my rain suit and set out to find a suitable forest for exploration. All along the road, behind vast fields, I could see plenty of forest in the distance, but I was thwarted from advancing forth because I knew I’d either have to sneak past homes or cross large fields with the “No Trespassing” signs.

I walked past several homes and fields and then finally decided to head for the woods—a quarter-mile walk through someone's backyard.

I walked under electrical lines held in place by giant metallic robot-looking structures, over clumpy, swampy, fallow cornfields, and finally into the woods.

It was only 5 p.m. but it was getting dark so I needed to find a spot to camp. I walked the perimeter of the forest—a decent square-mile-sized stand of hardwoods that was bordered by wide, empty, roadless farm fields on all sides, so I thought I had a good chance of going undetected for the night.

After setting up my tent, I wanted to build a fire, but had trouble finding dry wood since it’d rained/snowed all morning. There was a giant tree that must have toppled years ago, so I grabbed what dry wood I could find under it before starting a small fire, no more than a foot in diameter with some twigs and notebook paper.

I stepped out of the woods and onto the field to watch what was left of the sunset.

There was herd of dark blue clouds in a peach sky floating to the south, a relaxed and self-assured migration that followed a trail of a trillion years. The sun, behind one of these dark clouds, lit up its center, the beating, beaming heart of a blue whale.

Birds were atwitter, falling and beating wings, falling and beating wings, a northward undulation of skyward crests and earthward troughs. A plane rumbled across the sky, a train tooted, a scurry of ATVs growled belligerently, the electric lines, just a little ways away, discharged their steady metallic buzz, and I could hear cars all around me, but far enough away that I couldn’t hear honks, or tires, or engines, but a steady, uninvasive dial tone of activity.

This was something close to a happy compromise: almost a sweet spot between civilization and nature. It was a bit too small, the trees a bit too young, the forest a bit too littered with farmers’ industrial trash, and camping here, probably a bit too abnormal for the townsfolk, which made me feel paranoid about the possibility of getting caught and upsetting somebody. Still, though, for good and evil, looking at everything going on, I couldn’t help but think: What an incredible world.

At midnight, lying in my tent, I was startled awake by the hideous chatter of cackles and squeals from a pack of coyotes. It sounded like there were 30 or 40 of them (even if was just six) maybe a hundred feet from my tent. I'm not sure if I was dreaming, but I suppose it's plausible I wasn't.

***

Electrical lines everywhere.

This is the forest I escaped to.

Hoover's Dairy.

Hoover fries.

My forest for the night.

Nearby pond.

Fallen tree. I harvested the only dry wood in the forest underneath it for firewood.

Farmer's garbage.

Sunset from the edge of forest overlooking fallow field.

My small fire.

Trail riding in Texas

2011-12-15T15:15:00.000-05:00

For the past week I've been working on a article for "GO," Airtran Airline's travel magazine. I flew down to Danciger, Texas (an hour south of Houston) to participate in a "trail ride" which is a cultural event common across the south, but is particularly popular in the African American communities in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. Here are some pics taken by photographer Chris Curry; our article will appear in the February issue.

A Walk across Wheatfield: My Search for Wildness in Suburban America (Part I of III)

2011-12-04T21:39:00.001-05:00

Day 1: Country Meadows to Niagara River to Shawnee Road

“You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you?” asked/said my mom as I jammed the last of my gear into my backpack.

“I’m going on a journey across Wheatfield.”

Assailed by a hailstorm of incredulity and irritation, my mother’s panicked response (“Oh my god!”) seemed a bit of an overreaction—appropriate, maybe, if I’d told her I was going to my “boyfriend Ron’s place” or was about to fornicate with a month-old pumpkin in the front yard.

“Okay. Well, where are you going exactly?” she asked, trying to thrust some sense into the senseless.

“The lakes.”

“What lakes?”

“Exactly.”

I hoisted my pack that contained my tent, sleeping bag, an extra coat, and a few power bars, buckled my waist belt, and began strolling down the streets of my old neighborhood.

I walked past the two-story homes, barn-styled mailboxes, and overturned blue recycling bins that I’d jogged, biked, and driven past a thousand times before, slowing my travels to a steady march—an ideal pace for seeing old things in new ways; for discovering new wonders in old settings. I’d decided that I’d explore the town at whim, with no real route or destination in mind: advancing only in the direction of my curiosity to whatever field or forest, suburb or street that piqued my immediate interest.

I was embarking on this little adventure, I suppose, because I’ve always been troubled with how little of my hometown I’ve seen. There was something silly, I thought, about how some travel thousands of miles to view a mountain range while leaving the undiscovered glories of their backyards unexplored.

Father taking picture of me and his finger on our lawn.

My neighborhood.

Street hockey.

Let me tell you a little bit about Wheatfield…

Wheatfield is a topographically-challenged, 28-square-mile plot of flatland, home to 14,000 (mostly Caucasian) residents. It’s a rural-turned-suburban community situated between the boneyard industrial cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo of Western New York. More specifically, Wheatfield, to the suburban south, borders the mighty Niagara River, and to the agricultural north—stops a few miles short of Lake Ontario. To the east, the town abuts the slightly older town of North Tonawanda, and to the west is the city of Niagara Falls, where the environmental disaster of Love Canal took place in the mid-20th century, just four miles from my home.

For the most part, the town has stayed off the national radar, except for a brief flare up from PETA a few years ago when an old man here mixed anti-freeze into a can of tuna to kill a skunk (but ended up killing two of his neighbor's dogs), and when a group proposed a “Magical Lands of Oz” theme park a few blocks from my home, complete with a “Munchkinland Waterworks,” “Uncle Henry’s Barnyard Petting Zoo,” and the “Labyrinth of the Nome King,” which, thank god, wasn't taken very seriously.

When my family moved to Wheatfield 1989, I remember a mostly rural landscape: There were vast fields of waving green weeds and rows of papery golden corn. There were adolescent forests, and long, straight-as-a-ruler country roads. In the undeveloped lot next to my family’s home was a pond where my brother and I would skate in the winter and catch frogs in the summer. We built forts in the woods behind our house and played hockey in the streets.

My childhood was an American idyll. But over the past couple decades, Wheatfield has changed. The fields have been smothered with asphalt; the forests yanked out to make way for new subdivisions. Between 1990 and 2000, 1,318 housing units have been added, and since 2000, the town’s population has increased by 21 percent (or 3,000 people). It’s one of the fastest growing towns in all of New York State.

Wheatfield is an exaggerated example of what’s been happening to towns across America for decades. In between 1982 and 2001, 34 million acres (the size of Wisconsin) of forests and farms, wilderness and rangeland, have been disfigured into “developed” land. Wheatfield, I guess you could say, is capitalism run amuck—a libertarian dystopia where the golden gods of the Free Market and Private Property have reigned mostly unchecked for years. My subdivision, once a cozy hamlet surrounded by corn fields, is now just a mere cell of an uncontrollable cancer.

I wanted to see this "progress" up close. Better yet, I wanted to see if there was any wildness left in Wheatfield; to see if this place could still be an arena for adventure; to see if there was something more to it than rows and rows of houses, retirement homes, and corporate parks. So, on this crisp afternoon of December 1st, I set off on a three-day journey to explore my hometown anew.

***

While I didn’t have any specific route in mind, I first wanted to see a scattering of lakes within a mile of my home that—I’m ashamed to confess—I’d never even seen.

I walked through the new loopy, cul-de-sacked suburb of “Wheatfield Lakes,” and elbowed my way through thick thorny brush and ten-foot-tall reeds. I’d gotten off to a late start, so the sun was sinking below the horizon, casting a rosy autumnal hue on the bare upper branches of the trees I walked beneath.

I skirted around forest swamps, broke through some more reeds, and set my eyes for the first time on the secret lakes of Wheatfield.

A light breeze made the reeds’ bushy tops wag like dogs’ tales. The water lapped innocently against the shore. A family of ducks or geese swam leisurely in the distance. Except for an onion-shaped water tower, the scene was probably as wild and serene as it would have been for the Iroquois tribes that resided here centuries before.

The departing sun sank behind a wall of low-lying, horizon-hugging clouds, coloring their crests with a sharp red rim. For this fleeting moment, it appeared as if Western New York was a fertile valley protected behind a snow-topped mountain range of feared and revered puffy peaks.

There have been only a few moments in my life when I’ve been struck silent by the wonders of nature; when I've experienced something people call "the sublime." And when I saw that a tree on the water’s edge had been freshly gnawed by the teeth of a beaver, I came close to tears. I am just a mile south of my boyhood home, in the midst of suburbia, and yet nature, here, lives unperturbed, and has been left, unbelievably, unblemished by the oily touch of man. A beaver… A beaver! I might as well have happened upon some fabled Pleistocene beast like a saber-toothed tiger.

I was only minutes into my trip, not a mile from my home, yet I was prepared to, right then and there, pronounce that wild and suburbia, man and nature, can coexist peacefully after all.

I galloped up a nearby hill in between the peaks to admire the water, laughing ecstatically, helplessly prefacing my exaltations with expletives: “Fucking beautiful.” “Fucking amazing.” “Fucking incredible.”

Off to the left, my attention was drawn to a fenced in rectangle of rolling green hills, perhaps a mile or two in length. (It seemed to me extremely unusual that the land was both “rolling” and fenced in.) So I hopped the fence and walked along the grass, wondering why there was no sign of crops or harvesting. Spread out over the field were large four-foot-tall black pipes that pointed out of the ground and curled downwards like Gonzo’s nose. I figured they were some sort of irrigation mechanism, but determined they were for something else when I put my nose to them and inhaled a whiff of something inside the continuum of sewage and natural gas.

When I found a sign that said “Niagara County Landfill,” I realized just what I'd been walking atop. It was as if my steamy affair with nature had abruptly and awkwardly ended when she confessed that her private parts were grotesquely dappled with the toxic bumps of "syphilization"--news that would make me practice more restraint if I caught myself again ardorously surrendering to her rustic charms.

Evidence of beaver.

Deer hunting encampment in woods.

More evidence of beaver.

Strange collection of car seats by lakes.

Fence I hopped.

With daylight waning, and nowhere to set up camp, I set off from the Niagara River up Witmer Road so I could camp in my friend John’s backyard—my base camp before launching tomorrow’s exploratory campaign into Wheatfield’s slightly wilder, more agricultural district to the north. But first, a visit with my friend Quaz—who’d grown up in my subdivision and has become a successful mechanical engineer—but has since moved out into his own house in the nearby “Greenfield Run” subdivision.

“We’ve lived here for years Quaz, but we don’t know anything about the place,” I said, impassioned, in between bites of a turkey sandwich he’d handed over to me. “This is why I’m on this journey. We’ve lived here for years, but we don’t know anything about the place! Did you know there’s a big landfill behind your old house? Did you know there are lakes out there?”

“Are they real?” Quaz asked.

“Of course they’re real,” I said.

“Well, I think so,” I said on second thought.

He had to run to his bowling match, so I walked the Niagara Falls Boulevard—a busy, four lane, pedestrian-unfriendly road on which you can find cheap $30-a-night hotels, ATV dealerships, gas stations and local restaurants en route to my friend John’s on Shawnee Road. On the Boulevard, the throngs of head-lamped SUVs, like a stampeding cavalcade of angry elephants, zoomed past me, each passing juggernaut whipping gaseous swirls of wind into my face.

John—a cancer survivor—is trying to become a law enforcement officer, and would probably find a job easily in more prosperous locales, but refuses to leave Western New York so he can be close to his family.

We rarely talk about things philosophical, but I couldn’t hold back.

“I’m just so upset that I’m so unaware of my surroundings," I said. "Do you know there’s a huge landfill by my old home? Do you know there are three large lakes behind my house?”

“Really?”

“Yeah… There’s hardly any woods, hardly any farms down here. There’s no wildness left. The suburbs stretch as far as the eye can see. All our adventures must be confined to the borders of football and soccer fields. To escape suburbia we’d literally have to drive hours. I just think this town was so poorly planned...” I said exasperated.

John told me that, when he was a kid, he practically lived in the woods. “I’d wake up, go into the woods behind my home, and come back when it got dark. Everyday.” Those woods, he told me, have since become the 120-acre “Woodlands Corporate Center” filled with big box-like buildings like “Big Bob’s Flooring Outfit.”

We spent the next few hours playing videogames—just like we used to do back in our high school days. It had been years since I’d played a videogame, so I was astonished with how far the graphics and gameplay have come. In Skyrim, a PS3 game in which you slay dragons in a Tolkien-esque world, I could make out the veins in the characters’ muscles. There was an elaborate constellation of stars, intricate detail of individual plants, and mountains in the distance that weren’t just a paper backdrop, but geographical features you could literally explore.

I had a lot of fun playing these sorts of games, yet I also found it strange how I was exploring a fake world on the television screen while sitting on a couch in the real one.

It’s interesting how many games take place in pre-industrialized medieval worlds—Skyrim, World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed—where you puppeteer your hero through wild lands fraught with thrilling vistas and thorny villains.

It seems like the worlds in videogames have become our new frontier. These are the places where we go to wander and wonder; it's a refuge of virtual wilderness— a protected plot of pixelated land that must exist in fake worlds because we've denuded and defanged the wilderness in the real one.

Currently, in the lower-48, only 2.7% of our land (the size of Minnesota) is protected wilderness. To residents in towns like Wheatfield, it very much seems like the suburbs go on and on and on, perhaps for hundreds of miles in all directions.

But I couldn't make such bold assertions having never fully explored my hometown. I put on all my layers of clothing and camped in John’s backyard, eagerly awaiting the daylight so I could recommence my search for wildness in suburbia.

Niagara River.

Quaz.

John.

Eureka in John's backyard.

Images of Black Friday

2011-11-30T03:38:00.001-05:00

This past Friday, in a moment of masochism, I went to the local Wal-Mart to bear witness to the horrors of Black Friday. I arrived at midnight. For some reason, there was a long 15-minute line I had to wait in--perhaps to manage just how many people could be in the store at one time.

Consumer with two TVs #1.

These people were lined up in the frozen section--not for food--but for some hot electronic item du jour. Wal-Mart management was cleverly finding ways to reduce traffic in heavily browsed areas of the store.

Consumer with two TVs #2

Celebrate!

Consumer with two TVs #3

After that, I walked over to the Factory Outlet Mall. Shoe stores, food courts, clothes stores..

The mall crowd was much younger than the Wal-Mart crowd. Except for some minor fashion alterations, the girls looked just like the girls from my high school days, and same with the guys. Super-tight jeans, stupid looking boots, and the guys with square, athletic jaws with slightly sinister yet kinda happy-go-lucky smiles.

It was, needless to say, incredibly depressing. And while I do think there's reason to be optimistic about the Occupation Movement, I can't help but think that it's going to come to nothing when I see something like this... When you have 50 people here occupying some city plaza and 200 students demonstrating on their college campus, it's easy to believe there there is some ongoing "mass movement." But the truth is, a block away--on Wall Street in NYC or Harvard Square in Boston--people are walking around and shopping like they've always done. The country's youth are not "uprising"; most of them are walking around malls, deluded into buying mostly useless crap.

A fifteen year old male wearing his hat to his side was inspecting jewelry for his girlfriend. A trio of young girls--who all looked the same: skinny, long brown hair, stupid boots, super tight jeans--had draped new, still-expensive clothes over their arms like slabs of meat. Outside, I had to step off the sidewalk to make room for a lady carrying three absurdly large pillow-sized bags.

The horror... The horror...

Here's an old entry I did on Black Friday.

More images of Walden Pond

2011-11-30T03:01:00.001-05:00

I was staying with a friend in Boston for, oh, a week and a half, so I decided to buy a $12 train ticket to Concord to visit Walden Pond. (I'm currently in Western New York spending time with family.) I've been to Walden Pond before (and wrote about it here), but I've uploaded some new images below.

Here's a bronzey sculpture of Thoreau, which, for some reason, is slightly smaller than human scale--and behind the sculpture is his "replica" cabin. The original was long ago used as firewood.

The Pond. It was a pretty dreary day and I got thoroughly (or Thoreauly?) soaked when eating a banana at the site of his original cabin. No moments of transcendence, unfortunately.

Lots of rails and wire to keep foot traffic from harming the land. Supposedly it gets pretty busy here in the normal months.

Original site of cabin.

Figuring out my political ideology

2011-11-18T01:00:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: David, over at his "Into the Woods" blog, has a reaction to my post, which you can read here.

***

In October of 2008 I moved into my friend’s basement in Denver. I moved there to make a little money before I went to Duke, but also to—I hoped—help Obama become our next president.

So I became a canvasser.

My job was to go door-to-door in the Denver suburbs. For the homeowners who were “on the fence,” we were trained to tell them about how Obama would create jobs, save the environment, and solve the energy crisis, among other promises we all wanted to believe were true.

I only lasted two days. I couldn’t stand the job. I hated bothering people; hated rousing them from dinner tables, hated interrupting phone conversations. They all had this “Oh, not again…” look on their faces when they saw me—the sort of look I’d normally reserve for Jehovah’s Witnesses or bums begging for change.

I only found one person “on the fence,” but I was too sheepish to thrust my opinions on a complete stranger. Walking down his porch steps, I think I said something like “maybe it’s time for a change, ya know,” hoping that he’d catch my drift and cast the tie-breaking vote that would turn Colorado blue.

While I wasn’t a canvasser anymore, I was as passionate as ever about Obama. My friend Josh and I hosted a party on election night. There were balloons and streamers. I painted my chest blue and made an elaborate chart to keep track of Senate seats.

During Obama’s acceptance speech, the camera panned over the audience. Everyone was crying. Jesse Jackson was crying. Oprah was crying. I might have been trying to hide some sorta allergic reaction going on in my eye. It was glorious.

In a moment of half-drunken, half-naked impetuousness, Josh and I sprinted through suburban Denver around midnight, victoriously hoisting “Elect Mark Udall” banners that we’d appropriated from neighbors’ yards.

Having read his books, listened to his speeches, and attended his rallies, I really did think that Obama might be the answer; that he really would “change” things for good.

***

Three years have passed and you don’t need me to tell you that things haven’t gotten much better. We still have an embarrassing disparity of wealth, millions of Americans without access to affordable health care, pointless wars, a warming climate, yadda yadda yadda.

And while I realize Obama has had to deal with the filibuster, Republican majorities, special interests, and everything that stands in the way of creating a better world, I’m still disappointed with the guy.

Here’s a guy who got elected because he was so skilled with rhetoric, with storytelling, with symbols, but stopped using all of the above the moment he moved into the White House. He’d presented himself to voters as an anti-establishment hero—the incorruptible Luke Skywalker—a man full of morals and mettle who’d rebel against the Darth Vaders of the world, fighting them to the death, no matter the odds. But this narrative ended the day he got elected. He negotiated. He compromised. He made deals. He started governing, but stopped leading.

I still have a sneaking suspicion that the guy is good deep down; that there’s a real progressive in there somewhere; that he really wants to be a transformative Lincoln-like leader. But whatever hope I’d once felt is gone. He can still give a helluva speech, but his words have become hollow to me, his message, empty. When I hear him speak, I am like a cuckold with his fingers in his ears, and he, the adulterous lover, whose promises I secretly wish to believe.

Why couldn’t he have taken a stand on something? Why couldn’t he have gone down swinging on an issue? I wouldn’t have cared if he’d have “lost.” I wouldn’t have cared if the initiative-of-the-day had been struck down. Just show me some backbone for God’s sake! Show me you still have ideals. Show me that you’re willing to risk great failure to achieve great success.

To quote the movie Braveheart: “Men don’t follow titles. They follow courage.” Yet it seems he’s obsessed with seeming nice; with seeming competent. But this world doesn’t need nice and competent; it needs radical and revolutionary. It needs courage.

***

So maybe Obama isn’t the guy to lead us to the promise land… But who is? Or better yet: What political party or ideological group is?

In order to support a group or movement, we have to be able to envision a better world. We have to see our own little utopia. And with that utopia in mind, we give our support to certain groups or parties that will hopefully get us there.

Honestly, there isn’t a political party I identify with. There’s not one group that represents my views or wants to take the country in a direction I want it to go in.

Here’s why:

Libertarianism

For starters, I respect and agree with a lot of what libertarians believe. I, too, believe that people might be happier if they were more dependent on more natural social safety nets—like families and communities—and less on the programs of a big, faceless government. But their obsession with private property and free markets is just, well, kinda cultish and creepy, not to mention out of touch with reality.

And while I appreciate some of the benefits of a free market, I don’t see the need to worship it as if it were an infallible, do-gooding god, especially when our country is everywhere tiger-striped with the smelly skidmarks of capitalism: the inky oceans, the smoggy skies, the flaming hydrofracked water faucets.

Socialism

It’s hard not to like the idea of universal education, universal health care, a vast publically-owned park system, or a government-run oil industry, not to mention economic and social equality… Yet I just can’t bring myself to wholeheartedly embrace a society that’s so governmental, so manipulated by an amorphous blob of bureaucracy that decides everything from what schools we attend, to what jobs are available, to what old folks’ homes we die in.

I guess my utopia is too individualistic, too farm-on-the-prairie, too cabin-in-the-woods for me to identify as a socialist. Having lived up in Alaska, I’ve seen how much good there is in community-based, rather than government-based, social structures.

But hoping to go back to some idyllic agrarian way of life with seven billion people on the planet is unrealistic. And while part of me wants to support the sort of libertarian initiatives that would reduce the influence of big amorphous blobs on our lives, I end up realizing that the world I wish we'd build is no more real than the forts I’d make out of bed sheets and upended couches as a boy. So, despite my dreams of rugged individualism, I can’t help but wave away the figments of my fantasies and determine that it’s probably just best to vote for the most empathetic, left-leaning politician available.

Capitalism: Republicans and Democrats

I don’t even know where to begin with Republicans. Between the adoration for big business, their lust for war, their revulsion for equal rights, their denials of manmade climate change, and their belief that man coexisted with the dinosaurs, it’s hard for me to believe I’m part of the same species, let alone citizenry, as a whole third of America.

While I tend to side with Democrats, I don’t think either party is pushing us in the direction we need to be pushed. And while Democrats have at least a couple of redeeming qualities, they, like the Republicans, still seem to accept consumer-capitalism as the end-all, be-all of economic systems. Grow, grow, grow. Spend, spend, spend. Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. This is the two-party way. Even far left liberals like Paul Krugman think that American citizens should spend to keep the economy growing, prospering, stimulating.

For all I know, he might be right. To get back to the way things were, and the way things were going, perhaps we really do need to stop saving and start spending to “stimulate the economy.” Maybe; but I guess I don’t want to live in a country and take part in an economy where frugality, prudence, restraint, and saving are looked down upon, and where buying the latest cheap configuration of plastic crap is somehow a virtuous act.

The Occupy Movement and a Third Party

I guess if I could make a party it would be the “Sustainability Party,” or the “Zero-Growth Party,” or the “Amish Party”—some party that shall address the most important, pressing, civilization-ending issues that most all of these other groups sweep under the rug.

I think that maybe the best thing that could come out of the Occupation Movement is a viable third party. Maybe the country’s not ready to accept the Amish way of life, but a group of anti-corporate, pro-people leaders that could, at worst, influence the greater political discussion and, at best, actually represent real people, would do a lot of good. (Personally, I’d rather the Occupiers storm the Capitol with a list of demands, but this will do, too.)

Zuccotti has been cleared out and there are murmurings the movement is coming to an end. But getting kicked out of Zuccotti should mean very little. It was inevitable. Besides, movements of the past didn’t need to continuously occupy space. And if their eviction is the end of the movement, then, well, the movement simply wasn’t meant to be.

I support the movement and hope it keeps going because the occupiers remind me I'm not alone. None of us have parties to vote for or leaders to follow. If our problems could be solved by simply voting for the right guy or gal, there’d be no reason to march downs streets and occupy places.

If McCain was in office, I’d wager that there’d be far fewer occupations, protesters, demonstrations, if any. Not because things would be better (as I think they'd be far worse), but because we’d still have hope that “our guy”—someone like Obama in a future election—would swoop down and save the day.

So it's funny how it took actually getting our guy in office to make us lose hope with our government, with our democracy, with him. We tried to get "change" with votes, not knowing, quite yet, that it would take demands.

More thoughts on OWS

2011-11-07T12:50:00.002-05:00

Since I'm currently staying with a friend in Boston, the other day I decided to check out "Occupy Boston" in Dewey Square. It was similar to "Occupy Wall Street," but clearly more civilized, more tame, and more orderly; and clearly less raucous, less fanatical and less crazy. The tents were in orderly rows, the people looked a little cleaner, and there was far less congestion down all the walking lanes. (Then again, I was only there for twenty minutes.) It was less like the frenzied festival-like atmosphere of Wall Street, and more like, at best, an unusually enthusiastic bake sale.

While Occupy Boston looks like it has its shit together, Occupy Wall Street seemed to throb with an angry, frustrated, and (dare I say) revolutionary energy that could keep it going longer despite all its faults. And while it appears Boston doesn't suffer as much from having their ranks swelled with the disinterested and the insane, they lack that angry, sweaty, farty vibe, not to mention the symbolic importance of OWS--the absences of which might make it difficult for them to bear the challenges ahead.

I don't know what to think of this movement.

I guess I'm delighted that it's happening. For all the (mostly unfounded) criticism it gets, it's clearly, at the very least, creating awareness about our country's ridiculous disparity of wealth and corporations' role in the buying and enslaving of politicians.

But I personally won't be happy if the movement merely gets Congress to pass half-assed legislation that distributes wealth somewhat more fairly, thus placating most everyone involved until things gradually shift back to the way things are now. If our country is a house, this to me would be like adding decorative trimming while the crumbling stone foundation is neglected.

Yet I have trouble seeing how the occupation will contribute to even minor improvements.

The movement isn't angry enough. It's not big enough. It's not mobby enough. While there are occupations everywhere--and some who are doing really incredible stuff--the occupations constitute a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of each city. To get what we want, we cannot merely pester and annoy. We must frighten and overwhelm.

Among the occupiers there are plenty of homeless people who could care less about the movement. And there are those--sorta like me--who only come for the cultural experience, so they could say they were "there." But what was most telling about the state of the movement were my impressions of the "real" occupiers--the good ones. These men and women were aware and upset, but not desperate and fierce. They were smart and articulate, but not livid and determined.

I can't help but guess that creating awareness, occupying, and going on modestly-sized protests will soon become tiresome to both the occupier and media alike. And when the occupiers see that their efforts have produced no change, and when the visitors thin and the media attention wanes, they will begin to wonder if it's worth this cough, these numb hands, these grimy clothes.

Frankly, I think it's out of the occupiers' hands for now. I think things need to get far worse before this movement can realize its potential. We need a deeper depression, or a Republican president, or more egregious behavior from the powers that be. We need angrier, more determined people. We need to make young people think they're "missing out" on something big. Dissent needs to become "cool," and playing videogames for hours on end needs to be rightfully deemed slothful.

And if that happens, then we need a clear goal to strive to attain. And while there's lots of stuff messed up in the country and world right now, the movement can't be so fractured and unfocused.

My idea: If the dissidents were to swell to appropriate numbers, the occupations should relocate to Washington, hopefully so that they're no longer an easily extinguishable rabble of scruffy-faced kids that could be snuffed out with the twist of a cop's boot heel, but an intimidating million-strong conflagration. The demand must be simple and understandable to all. And if there's anything that unites the left and right, young and old, black, brown and white, man and woman, it's to have for ourselves an actual democracy; to remove corporations, special interests, lobbyists--whatever you want to call them--from our elections. The other changes that need to be made should follow.

Things of course wouldn't be perfect. Our government would still have its faults. Not all the occupations' demands will be met. But at least with representatives chosen by the people, we will for once be able to both govern ourselves and let people with our interests in mind govern us.

Salon: My stay at Zuccotti

2011-11-02T20:55:00.001-04:00

I'm in Salon again. I did a story about my week in Zuccotti, which you can read here.

I'm currently in Boston staying with my friend Chuck, under a deadline to finish book proposal stuff. Wish I could still be out there braving the cold, but I must first complete this personal project.

Rain and raid

2011-10-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

After our march for solidarity with Occupy Oakland, the police have been hanging out more and more around Zuccotti. They're gathered in riot gear in the pictures below.

This morning, some police, along with the fire department, came through camp and confiscated two of our generators. One of which, I believe, powered our media station.

The weather has been miserable for the past 36-hours. Blistering winds have uprooted tents, it rained almost all day yesterday, and the temperature got as low as 37 degrees.

Here's my tent, soaked. I'd laid down cardboard and a tarp to keep the floor of my tent waterproof, but it's almost impossible to keep things dry when sleeping on asphalt since the water has no where to drain. My sleeping bag and clothes have been soaked for the past few days. From the comfort station, I borrowed three emergency blankets and a woman's cardigan sweater, the sort that has those big folded sleeves around the wrists.

Just stretching out the walls of the tent is difficult since there's nowhere to put down stakes and because the place is so crowded. Here' I've tied a rope to a stack of sopping wet cardboard that stretches one side of my tent taut.

Solidarity with Occupy Oakland

2011-10-27T14:05:00.001-04:00

On Tuesday October 25th, about one hundred demonstrators of "Occupy Oakland" were arrested and their encampment was torn down. Several were injured including Scott Olsen, an Iraq war veteran, who is in now in critical condition after being struck in the head with a tear gas canister, rubber bullet, or some other implement fired from riot police.

Last night at 9 p.m., Occupy Wall Street marched up Broadway to Union Square as a symbol of solidarity with those who were violently evicted. (We also allocated one hundred tents and $20,000 of our funds to pay for bail, and medical services.)

The march was mostly peaceful, but the crowd was far from docile. When the NYPD attempted to cordon us off with orange netting, many protesters barged through, lifting and ducking under the orange netting. I watched a crowd of protesters wrest a fellow protester from the hands of a cop. There were a dozen arrests.

A tour of Zuccotti Park (Part II)

2011-10-27T12:54:00.002-04:00

In the week I've been here, the site of the occupation has changed considerably. There are now street signs (Bakunin Ave, Jefferson, Trotsky, etc.), there is a "Kids Safe Zone" and now almost everyone is sleeping in tents, rather than in sleeping bags with tarps pulled over. Anyway, here are a few more pics of the park.

Comfort station: offering everything from toothpaste, sleeping bags, and tarps to clothes.

The empathy booth advises on how to deal with problems in a non-confrontational manner.

The cigarette rolling station.

The anarchist booth.

The community rules. (Click on picture to enlarge.)

The kitchen, now with tarp cover.

Sanitation department. Lots of cleaning supplies: brooms, mops, buckets, etc.

There is now a children's safe zone.

Lots of cool technology. There is a live stream of video and audio of the park, which you can check out here: http://www.livestream.com/occupynyc. They also put up a twitter feed on a large screen via a projector, so we can read what's being said at the General Assembly meetings.

Info booth.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal. You can download a copy here.

Press team.

When the real Fox News shows up, much of the crowd chants, "Fox New Lies! Fox News Lies" I heard a couple people mutter something about tarring and feathering Geraldo Rivera when he came through.

The many initiatives of Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-26T17:35:00.001-04:00

It seems like everyone is here for a different reason: for better treatment of animals, for better education, for climate change, for the end of wars, etc., etc. While everyone may know what they're here to accomplish, as a whole, there is no clear message, no clear agenda, and no clear solution. I have more thoughts on the matter, but for now, here are some of today's signs.

While I do sympathize with this movement (and did feel some desire to cull out some of the more asinine signs), I want, more than anything, to give as accurate a picture of this movement as possible. So here they are, uncensored.

Stopping "stop and frisk"

2011-10-24T17:05:00.003-04:00

The Occupy Wall Street Movement--initially written off as a bunch of white hipsters--has joined forces with black leaders and religious leaders in New York City. Together, they marched in solidarity with one another in order to raise awareness about the NYPD's outrageous "stopping and frisking" policy, in which police officers stop and frisk young men of color for no clear reason.

John, a 25-year-old Navy veteran, spoke to a crowd at Zuccotti about his experiences with "stop and frisk." While going to get Chinese food with friends, he was pulled over, handcuffed, and asked to perform a dance by the NYPD called the "Chicken Noodle Soup." The leaders claimed that the NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk 700,000 this year in NY. 85 percent will be blacks and latinos, and 92 percent of them will have done nothing wrong.

Because of situations like John's, Dr. Cornell West and Carl Dix, a spokeman for the Revolutionary Communist Party, led a march to a local police precinct in Harlem. With religious leaders and OWS protesters, they linked arms in front of the police station as an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. They were all arrested.

A tour of Zuccotti Park

2011-10-24T16:43:00.002-04:00

Today is my fifth day at Zuccotti Park (or Liberty Plaza). The Occupy Wall Street Movement is getting bigger and bigger. Every day, it seems, there are more wannabe occupiers wandering in wearing backpacks and carrying bed rolls. For the most part, though, the people at Zuccotti are mostly visiting onlookers. And each time a new visitor comes by, I note a smile of amusement. (There are, after all, a lot of ridiculous things to be amused with here.) But I also detect a sense of enchantment. Many are inspired by the movement. For just sitting on my pack, I've had at least half a dozen passersby "thank" me for being here. Several have offered food.

Anyway, here's a tour of the park....

There are many activities throughout the day. There are meetings, workshops, dining hours, performances, speeches.

There are a lot of impromptu performances. Here's a four-piece bluegrass band.

Some occupiers from Montreal traveled down to NYC and put up this banner. In front of the banners, occupiers put their names on a sign-up sheet to perform music.

Occupiers and anyone who wants any get free food. Mostly, it's simple fare like break and peanut butter, but I've had some incredible stuff like vegetarian lasagna, spinach biscuits, pepperoni pizza, bagels, plus chili, coffee, tea, water, etc.

There are a lot of educational workshops. Everything from meditation to leadership. Below, the Indian male and the woman in the red scarf--both economics professors from Columbia--teach us about the Federal Reserve and give suggestions on how to radically change how our economy works.

There's a growing OWS library. Occupiers can freely take anything they wish and bring it back when they're done.

There are two medical tents who treat people injured in marches or people with common illnesses.

Spiritual gathering. Each pair would "rise with consciousness" and lower "with peace."

There is a drum circle that plays almost around the clock. From afar, they sound like heavy construction machinery.

Here's the kitchen area.

Many occupiers have put their stuff in plastic containers; others wrap it up in tarps or large plastic sheets. We are sleeping shoulder to shoulder. It would certainly help if we had a larger park.

Many are living in cardboard box contraptions like this guy.

In the bottom left is my sleeping bag. I'm sleeping atop a tarp. The clear plastic (which I got from the comfort station) will be used if there's rain. Luckily, the weather has been perfect since I've been here.

My view from the sleeping bag.

The last two nights many tents have been erected (despite being illegal), so I decided to follow suit and put up my little one-person Eureka.

There are lots of jobs the occupiers take up. This guy and I grabbed some brooms and dust pans.

Port-a-potties are banned from the park, so we occupiers must rely on local businesses. I've been going to a church and a nearby McDonalds. The wait is often 15-20 minutes for the men's restroom.

If there's any impression I want to leave with you, it's just how diverse the crowd is. All races are represented. There are crazy freak out here who rail against Jewish people and who get high at night. But, for the most part, they are just normal people fed up with the state of democracy and want to do something about it.

Peter Schiff stopped by to claim how the 1% is doing us all a favor.

Local sanitation union stopped by.

Cops are everywhere.

The other night, parents brought their kids to camp out. There were probably 20-30 kids sleeping next to parents in a "child safe zone."

Everyone is documenting the experience. The number of cameras is incredible. Just for carrying my backpack, I've been interviewed three times by visiting media outlets.

Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-22T11:42:00.002-04:00

I got a ride from Coldfoot to Fairbanks -- stayed with my friend Josh Spice for two days -- flew to New Jersey -- dropped off my laptop and other unnecessaries at an acquaintance's apartment in Manhattan -- and then moved into Zuccotti Park, just a few blocks away from Wall Street.

I'm writing this from Staten Island in a public library. The computers, unfortunately, do not have memory card adapters, making it impossible for me to include pictures.

I've slept in my sleeping bag in the park the last two nights. I'll do a bigger post when I have more time and better technology, but for now, I thought I'd share some quick observations:

-The park place is packed. We are literally sleeping shoulder to shoulder. On one side of me was a lesbian in high school, and on the other, I think, was a transvestite. Both were very nice.

-There are"freaks" here (not that there's anything wrong with being a freak), but there are far more people who we'd consider "normal." I point this out because whenever some insane anti-semite starts sqwaking, all the cameras get in his face. The media coverage, then, is probably giving the public the impression that Zuccotti is occupied only by dread-headed, acid-dropping nihilists. That's not the case. There are old people and young people. Blacks, latinos, Asians, and Native Americans. Last night, "Parents for Occupy Wall Street" held a sleepover for kids. (There were probably 30-50 kids camping out in their own section of the park.)

-There are cops. Everywhere.

-Last night--Friday night--it felt especially packed. It seems the park is populated by 30% inhabitants and 70% visitors. It has a festival-like atmosphere. Very caring and giving. Positive vibes. Many of the visitors have thanked the occupiers for their presence. Last night, I broke bread with three Jewish visitors.

-Food is free, almost 24-hours a day. There have been tons of donated supplies: food, camping gear, brooms, medical supplies.

-There are various "working groups": sanitation, cooking, dishwashing, medical, library. This place seems VERY organized, and while I've heard that there've been sanitation problems, things are actually pretty neat and orderly given the circumstances.

-The occupiers do seem to be, as they're portrayed, fractured and unfocused. At one point yesterday, there were three ongoing speeches at different ares of the park: one on corporate greed at Wal-Mart, another on the evils of fracking, and another on unjust use of police force on blacks and latinos, who are being stopped and frisked in record numbers. Another group went to "occupy" a nearby museum. Some sort of unified message/agenda would do some good, I think.

-No one here wants handouts. While I'm sure some want it, I haven't even heard anyting about "student loan forgiveness." Ultimately, I think everyone's just disillusioned with the state of our democracy. The one prevalent theme seems to be a disgust for corporate power, and corporate America's ownership of our democracy. This protest is happening, I think, because voting is no longer a means of affecting positive change, as politicians are beholden to the corporate interests in power.

-Yesterday, I witnessed my first act of civil disobedience when Cornell West, Carl Dix, some religious leaders, and members of Occupy Wall Street were arrested when they linked arms in front of a police building to protest the NYPD's outrageous "stopping and frisking" numbers. Good stuff.

-Despite being a nature-loving introvert now surrounded by pigeons and people and police, I'm enjoying my time here. Not sure how long I'll be here, but I'll put up photos and share more impressions when I can!

A tour of Coldfoot

2011-10-15T17:24:00.002-04:00

After spending a week and a half in Ferry, I hitchhiked up to Fairbanks and guided a van tour up to Coldfoot. I've been here since. Because I'll be leaving Alaska in a couple days, I thought I'd do a picture tour.

Coldfoot, in 1898, was first a "boom town" during the Alaskan gold rush. It was soon after deserted, but became home to several hundred workers in the mid-70s, during the construction of the pipeline. It was deserted again until Dick Mackey, a famous dog musher, came up here to serve burgers out of a blue school bus. The truckers--desiring something more--dropped off their empty packing crates and built this cafe.

Coldfoot serves truckers and travelers who travel up the Dalton Highway--a 416-mile half-gravel, half-asphalt road that's become popular on the reality TV show "Ice Road Truckers." Coldfoot is in the middle of the Central Brooks Range, and the mountains we see in the pictures are between 3,000 and 4,500 feet tall.

Here's the "Truckers Only" table. Fox News on the telly as usual.

The "Frozen Foot" saloon.

Here's Sassy, who lives in and around the cafe.

Here's the 52-room, Slate Creek Inn, also owned by the people who run the cafe. This building was refurbished from one of the original pipeline dormitories.

There are about 20 or so dogs in camp (outnumbering the winter population of people). They're mostly Alaskan Huskies. They'll be mushed throughout the winter.

Incinerator.

There are lots of old equipment, vehicles and buildings behind Coldfoot.

The Diesel generator, plus some ravens hanging out by the dump. Most of the garbage is shipped to a dump in Fairbanks.

The "Tire Shop." There are lots of blown tires on the Dalton Highway.

In search of a medicine man: Journeys through Peru

2011-10-12T18:55:00.001-04:00

This past winter I created a scholarship to encourage students to do some non-academic related travel. With the help of reader donations, I gave the money to a California student named Chanaye, who'd hoped to find a medicine man in Peru, so she could help her ailing mother. Like any good adventure, hers, in ways, was a misadventure, but one that, I think she'd argue, was valuable in its own way.

Here's the first part of her story, which she sent to me from Peru. The second part is below.

I made my way to the Amazon jungle by hitching a 23-hour truck ride from the coast to Moyobamba. From Moyobamba I went to Tarapoto, there I looked around for herbalists and anyone who could connect me with a healer, with whom I could learn about medicinal plants. Ideas and words were exchanged but the wait continued. My time in Peru was significantly shorter than I had initially planned for this endeavor of learning a bit about medicinal plants—about 10 months shorter—so there was pressure to make the most of my time until I could return to Peru again. While walking one day in Tarapoto, I noticed a small native herb shop, run by a woman and her two sons. I walked in and ended up speaking with the woman for almost an hour about various things, including healers and my search for one. She told me that one of the men who harvested medicinal herbs—who sold them to her—was a healer and could possibly be the one to teach me a bit while I was there. The healer's name was Pedro, and after an hour ride to the end of the road, we would have to walk four hours further into the jungle together, and up the mountain to find his house, crossing the river thirteen times. Two days later, Pedro met me and my buddy from Peru at the woman's herb shop, and the journey to Pedro's land began.

From the very start I had the vague impression that Pedro might not completely understand my intentions. After all, I wasn't present when the woman spoke with him and explained the situation. After a forty-minute motorbike ride to the end of the road, the three of us began the four-hour trek up to his land. Half-way up the mountain Pedro mentioned ayahuasca a few times; a very sacred psychoactive vine in the Amazon, and it seemed as though he thought my intention was to drink ayahuaca, like most of the foreign people who wonder into the jungle looking for a healer. I, however, had no plans of drinking ayahuasca, I was only trying to learn about the most used medicinal plants, including but not specifically the sacred hallucinogens of the native peoples. It was clear that Pedro had become so accustomed to foreigners, or gringos, searching for some kind of new-age spiritual enlightenment through ayahuasca, and willing to pay, that he could not understand, nor value, my desire to learn about the medicinal properties of Andean plants.

Pedro was one of few people on the entire mountain, and once we arrived at his land, it became clear that he wasn´t going to teach us much at all, or even make sure that we ate. My buddy and I had to search his land and gather beans, and had only beans and bananas to eat (a perfectly fine diet for those preparing to drink ayahuasca), which we prepared and cooked ourselves while Pedro slept or chopped down branches. After the first three days we had spent about 20 minutes learning about plants, and significantly more time explaining that we did not want to drink ayuhuasca with him and explaining once again what we were there for. The woman from the herb shop never told us that Spanish wasn't Pedro's native language, but instead one of the much older languages of the Andes. Pedro didn't offer many words unless he was addressed, so my friend and I weren't sure if Pedro's Spanish was weak, or if he was simply unconcerned about the agreement. One thing seemed clear; as long as he got paid he could care less about what we learned while we were with him. After Pedro prepared a sacred cactus for us to drink, which was prepared incorrectly and gave no medicinal benefit, my friend and I gave up on him.

My friend was from Peru, and I had been there three times before this one. Peru had already become a second home in my life, after California, and over time I had become very critical and rather disgusted with the overwhelming presence and effects of tourists in Peru, and I thought about the issue often. It was clear to me that the experience with Pedro was a product of that presence.

After a few days we left. Less than half way down the mountain we paid Pedro less than he expected, after explaining why we were doing so, and ditched him for two Peruvian guys who had a tiny animal protection project and living space set up on the river. My friend and I had run into these two guys on the way up the mountain, and we decided to stay with them for two nights. It was with them, after accusing Pedro of not being a healer, that we were told he was indeed a healer who knew much about the jungle's plants, but he was a man concerned with money and uninterested in teaching anybody what he knew. Pedro had healed one of the guys we ditched him for, and the two came to know, and dislike each other over the years.

Last year, for a college newspaper, I wrote an article entitled Don’t go to Peru. I discussed how Peru, its people, its culture and its land were being spat upon by the inundation of tourists, or gringos. One of the issues I spoke about was the tourist's search (certain kinds of tourists) for spiritual enlightenment through shamanic ceremonies; searching for a healer and the ceremony of drinking ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, and the ceremony that accompanies it, belong to the indigenous peoples of the Andes. It is one of the most powerful psychoactive medicines that our earth offers and it has been used by peoples whose connection, knowledge and respect for the earth surpasses that of most of who inhabit the earth today. But change has come.

After the jungle is blessed, time and time again with the presence of tourists, a shaman, who possesses old knowledge, wisdom, experience and remarkable healing power, comes to realize that his/her practice is no longer serving those who are part of his tribe, community or village (those who live with the earth, with relative simplicity, and have grown within the context of spiritual healing through plants) but instead, also to an entirely new people, made up of foreigners, from cities, with money and without the language of the land: A market. Many shamans have taken in these tourists, and the financial gain that comes with them, and other shamans have not. What happens to the sacred history, tradition, and power of ceremony when it becomes exploited? And exploited from both sides? People without any healing knowledge or power claim to be a shaman, or healer, and offer their services and prices. Struggling people in the jungle, aware of the tourists and their money, seek out the opportunity to attack and rob. A sacred ceremony, the sincerity and power of the shaman, the healing...all shape shift into a business, and with the business comes a more dangerous environment, a corruption of tradition, the degradation of a healer, the poisoning of culture, and the commercialization of what was once sacred. And perhaps, with the potential to reshape the value of the ceremony, even in the mind of the shaman, if not only the intention. For reasons not worth stating, I have never been a tourist, I have always been a traveler (some recognize the difference, others don't), and have paid close attention to my presence in the lands I travel to. Nevertheless, as I left the jungle, I asked myself, how can the difference between me and tourists be evident and valuable as I search for a healer? How does one demonstrate their genuineness and intention to be greater than that of another? And what responsibility do I have as a foreigner, when I return to the Amazon?

Anyway, I ran out of money and left the Jungle, but not the Amazon. I took a five-hour bus to Chachapoyas, a very magical place in my history, where I spent around three weeks making and selling jewelry in the plaza every night, to pay for my room and food. I talked to old acquaintances and strangers and explored the ways I could continue looking for a healer. I almost got connected with one, but it didn't work out. The search is pretty tough and the culture distorted, at least for what I was looking for. Anyway, the jungle is such wonderfully indescribable place. The magic and power found in the Amazon surpass even our ability to comprehend it. The earth, la Pachamama, is where all potential waits, where all wisdom walks.

May all who have the privilege of traveling recognize the immense value and necessity of knowing the social, political and cultural conflicts, struggles and shifts of the people and land they wish to admire so closely. As well as the impact of their presence, culture, and money.

Interview with Saveup.com

2011-10-11T16:53:00.004-04:00

A fellow Coldfoot alumnus writing for Saveup.com--which is a blog that helps people save money--recently interviewed me for his website. I suppose the interview is nothing new for readers already familiar with my debt story, but here it is nonetheless.

Ferry

2011-10-09T21:13:00.000-04:00

After hitchhiking 600 miles and thirteen hours with a sheet metal worker from Deadhorse (who was en route to Wasilla down south), I was dropped off in the middle of the night in Ferry, Alaska—which is not so much a town, or a village, but a scattering of cabin-esque homesteads about 100 miles south of Fairbanks near the northeastern corner of Denali National Park.

Where I was going mattered little. I was running from work and chasing after someone. This someone had traveled to Ferry to visit with friends—a family of four living a mostly subsistent lifestyle in the woods. Within driving distance of town, they have some modern amenities like electricty, internet, and cell phone service, but for the most part it's a DIY lifestyle: growing vegetables, chopping wood, making jams from berries, and hunting animals for meat. I’d spend the next ten days with these strangers.

I stayed in their Arctic Oven, which is a 7-foot-tall, 9-foot-sided tent. It's ideal for cold weather habitation and costs in the vicinity of $1,500. It comes with a wood stove that connects to a pipe that pops out of the roof. Outside, the temperature ranged from 25-40 degrees, but inside, when the fire was going, it was a comfortable 80 degrees.

I was eager to take part and learn about the daily tasks of their lives. Here I am separating leaves from a pot of blueberries. The blueberries would made into jams and syrups, which they'll use for the rest of the winter.

Tyler and Erin getting the jars ready. (Erin doesn't like having her picture taken; Tyler doesn't mind.)

A friend, with excess meat, gave them the front quarter of a bear.

Taking my first stab at butchering.

Plain bear meat to be served over rice. Not bad at all.

Tyler, Mowat, and me, repairing a neighbor's floor.

Koa in the greenhouse where tomatoes are growing.

Ferry funny farm: cabbage, snap peas, arugula, corn, lettuce, snap peas, beets, carrots, etc. etc. They also have honey bees.

Hauling fallen wood out on ATVs.

The Ferry cemetery.

Trying to get writing done, but Romeo made it tough with his constant pleas for affection. He would often grab my hand with his paw as if to tell me I should be using it to lavish him with caresses.

Son, Mowat, 7, unearthing a carrot.

Daughter, Koa, 10, harvesting beets.

Picking cranberries.

The geese were heading south.

Drinking from stream. They will haul large plastic canisters from the spring to the house.

Boot Hill. People commemorate lost loved ones up here.

Not sure exactly what the story of this plane is, but I'm told it was put here on Boot Hill, and didn't land in this fashion. That's the Alaska Range in the background.

In their cabin, there’s no shower, no flush toilet. Baths are infrequent, and visits to the Laundromat in Healy, even more so. There’s no home workout gym, no wine rack, no jewel-toned vases, no liquid-screen television (or whatever they’re called now).

It’s the sort of home where kids and dogs (and chickens, in a previous year) run wild. There’s clutter. There’s mess. But their home—absent the trappings of the modern McMansion—is full of a soulfulness, a kindness, and a warmth that is characteristic of homes whose inhabitants are tightly-knit as a family, a community, and with the environment of which they're a part.

In the morning, I heard, then spotted, a sky scribed with V’s of geese pointing south, honking loquaciously. At night there was the trembling of a hot stove stuffed with spruce logs, then the high-pitched howls of coyotes. For breakfast, blueberry jam spread over homemade bread. And everywhere was the fall forest—a congregation of gnarled green spruce and leafless, bleach-boned birch: the latter of which form a grove of skeletons that will remain numb and bald and bitter until spring.

In such moments, I experienced the rare instance of recognizing that the “now”—the present moment—was going to be a memory that I'd always carry with me. And it would be the sort of memory whose warm glow will always beckon you back, but might be tarnished if you go back and you or it has changed in the interim.

While I’ve lived in Alaska for many years, I’ve mostly resided in dorm-like housing units at Coldfoot, or in lavish government homes when working for the Park Service. My experiences with living a frontier-esque lifestyle have been few.

And while I experienced the discomfort of bathing in ice-cold rainwater, and while it was tedious to keep the stove in the Arctic Oven full of wood, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt a greater sense of belonging in a lifestyle or more at ease with myself. It's the sort of place that'll wash away one's neuroses and self-consciousness; the sort of place where it's impossible to care about the existence of unsightly shoulder hairs.

How rare and refreshing it is to come across a home so absent of pointless decorum and so full of soul. And I can't help but think the absence of the one fosters the presence of the other. It seems as if—in all the time we devote to disinfecting our homes to kill some one-in-a-billion germ that might cause our innards to grumble for but a few hours—we pollute what should be a carefree, easygoing atmosphere. It is a toxic obsessiveness. Cleaning—for the sole purpose of cleaning—creates a culture of stuffiness and resentment. Aren't our bones and skin and hair borne of the soil? Why must we be so squeamish of a little dirt?

Upon heading back up north, I thought of an Inuit word the Eskimos have called "Koviashuvik." They use it to describe “a time and place of joy in the present moment.” And while Koviashuvik is—by its very definition—fleeting, I couldn't help but think that maybe there are ways and lifestyles and people that could make it last.

How a piña colada almost killed me

2011-10-05T06:00:00.006-04:00

Two weeks ago, I was on my hands and knees on the floor of Deadhorse Camp’s “coworker lounge,” trying to cough, or breath, or do so something, anything, with my lungs. But I couldn’t do anything except pound my chest and look at my friends with wide, frantic eyes. I was choking to death.

Moments before, I’d been drinking my third piña colada of the night. I was still wearing my red and black kitchen uniform because I’d just finished my evening dish shift. I had a friend bring up my bottle of rum that was in my room in Coldfoot, so we celebrated by making piña coladas.

I was in a jolly mood, and after Liam told me about his absurd but amusing idea to start a “munchies catering business” (in which he drives to parties to serve munchies to drunks, crafting the meals out of whatever’s in their pantry and fridge), I started laughing uncontrollably. The piña colada, which had some ice cream mixed in, started to come up and out of my nose. But because it was thick with ice cream, the drink didn’t gush out of my nose like it should have; instead, it just clogged my upper respiratory area.

I coughed for a few seconds, and when my lungs could no longer take in air, I dropped to my knees, holding my throat. At first, Liam and Emma (the only members of the get together), looked away. Liam thought I was throwing up, so he respectfully turned his head. Emma got up and stood over me, slightly more concerned. Seconds later, I was pounding my chest, signaling them to give me the Heimlich. But they were in a state of shock. Liam could only gently pat my back, and Emma, forgetting how to give the Heimlich, set up a chair, so I could give it to myself.

“What should we do?” Liam asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” said Emma.

With Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” (or some such song) streaming on YouTube on my computer, I realized that I was running out of air and that I wouldn't be able to last much longer. This could be it for me. Yet even amidst the panic, I took a moment to feel embarrassed. Here I am choking to death, in my dishwashing outfit, sprawled across the floor, just halfway through my third drink.

I am being killed by a piña colada…. Give me a bear, starvation, a mountain cliff, some worthy cause… Anything other than this! If I’m going to go, let me at least go in respectable fashion. Oh, how un-literary a death.

And then, all of a sudden, I coughed up the thick drink that had been lodged in my throat into the plastic cup beneath me. I got up, coughed some more, sat back down on the couch, and tried to laugh it off. The party ended soon after.

***

I had disturbing dreams that night. I dreamt that I had been fasting. And after fasting for a couple days, I wanted to wow everybody and fast some more. I gradually withered away, turning into a bag of bones. In my dream, I remember thinking that there was something beautiful about dying this way.

I awoke in the late morning with a scratchy throat and a slight hangover. I thought about the dream and remembered how Liam had once described to me Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist.” I walked out of my room, out of camp, and towards the Sag River, the wind bludgeoning me in the face with 20 mph gusts.

I was hoping to be struck by some epiphany, some lightning bolt; to be given some message about where to go and what to do with my life. Maybe I should just keep walking. Maybe I should pack my bags and put my thumb out and head south.

But the epiphany never came. I just thought about this place; this barren coastal plain. I thought about how this place reminds me of the film Black Narcissus—set in the Himalayas, where some well-meaning nuns try to turn an old palace into a school. They never could, though. The palace will always be a palace—a place for kings and queens, ornaments and jewels and delicacies. The wind from the mountains drove the nuns mad. It never stopped. It moved into their rooms, invading, molesting, reminding them, like a ghost, that this place is and only will be a palace, and that you can either accept that and change or die trying to change it.

That’s how I feel here. Like we shouldn’t be here—that this place is meant to be still and silent and unbothered. I looked north at the facilities, the giant drills, the mud-spattered cars. It’s like we’ve planted a big ugly town on some sacred site, some ancient burial ground. There just seems to be something wrong about our presence here, like a cathedral on the edge of a volcano, a log cabin on a city corner, an industrial work camp on the deathly still coastal plain. We don’t belong up here, at least not this way, I thought. A place like this could drive a man mad.

That evening, I went back to the kitchen for my dish shift. I felt like I was a character in a story, but a poor, unassertive character in a story without a proper conclusion. Shouldn’t this be a turning point? Shouldn’t this be where I change shit around, when I change and grow, when I get the hell out of here? Instead, I just put out the salad bar and washed my spoons.

We are, by nature, impressed with stories and symbols. Our lives are our stories, made up of events and people and things to which we assign symbolic meaning. And when we step outside our stories, I think it’s then that we feel most lost; when we feel like we’re losing the grip on our identity.

A couple days later, two Deadhorse Camp coworkers came back from their vacation in Japan. I packed my bags, put on my rain suit, and set out in the blistering misty gales, under a bleak storm scorched sky.

There was nothing grand or literary about my departure, but once I got on the Dalton and set my pack down and held out my cardboard sign to south, I was excited about the prospect of turning to a new chapter.

I got a ride with this sheet metal worker. He took me 600 miles to the south.

Escape from Prudhoe Bay

2011-09-12T05:22:00.000-04:00

“It sounds like your inner Odysseus is lost at sea,” said Liam, the prize chef of Deadhorse Camp.

I’d just let out a sigh—a desperate, pleading, “kill-me-now” sigh—for the third time in the hour. With a wire brush, I’d been trying to scrub dried specks of mashed potato off the rim of a large metal stirring bowl.

I’d been working the evening “dish shift” almost every night for the past three weeks. And I’d never felt so purposeless. Somehow, over the course of the summer, I’d gone from an inspired and well-meaning “writer in residence,” to tour guide, to dishwasher. It was as if I was on some cruel Scrooge-like, time-traveling tour, visiting my previous jobs, each demanding less skill and responsibility than the previous.

After a while, I no longer felt like a writer, or a vandweller, or some principled Thoreavian; I’d momentarily forgotten "me"; I was now nothing more than a dishwasher. I cursed more. I told crass, tasteless jokes. I wore smelly, stained, soup-splattered shirts. I spent my nights drinking cheap beer, watching TV, and the beginnings of a paunch began to bud out of my belly. Dishwasher. I’d grown my beard out, but not for the usual reasons—facial warmth and aesthetic beauty—rather, my patchy brown scruff was evidence of a rapid degradation of self-worth, which made all established habits of hygiene and physical upkeep seem pointless. I felt bitter and demoralized; an invisible automaton, a dishwasher.

I knew my mental health had become ill when I—upon dropping a tray of turkey lunch meat—didn’t maniacally curse as I normally would in such instances; rather, I just stared at the meat sprawled across the floor silently, my frustration silently approaching the brim of its containment tank, like brown water nearing the rim of a clogged toilet ready to spill over in a deluge of messy, violent anger. I just hope I’m nowhere near the knives when it happens, I thought.

Then Liam said, “We need to get out. We need to packraft the Sag and see the ocean.”

And so we did.

Liam said it would be a five mile hike to the Sag River. We’d packraft north (two or three miles) to the Arctic Ocean, then we’d paddle west across the coast and descend south down another branch of the Sag to Deadhorse.

Sounded like a plan to me.

Donning dry suits and toting light day-packs, we hiked out over the flat, hard, easy-on the feet tundra. The fall foliage was colored with squash yellows, apple reds, and pumpkin oranges. Most of the birds that had been up here had already migrated south, but there were still vestiges of the summer swarms of flying life: we spotted snowy owls, flamboyant loons, floating gulls, flocks of geese, and gaggles of ravens. Off to the north—through Liam’s binoculars—we saw a golden eagle (or some giant bird) on the ground that flapped its wings at a ghostly-white arctic fox obnoxiously running laps around it.

We inflated the packrafts and let the Sag—swift and powerful at these northern latitudes—carry us to the Arctic Ocean. Except the ocean wasn’t a mere couple miles away as Liam thought it was. We’d stayed on the river for three hours, and while we expected to see the ocean after each bend in the river, we never did.

Because of our late start and the longer-than-anticipated time we'd spent on the river, we began to appreciate just how late it was getting and how low on time we were. (We had to be back in camp by tomorrow morning for our kitchen shifts.)

And then, on the river, just ahead, we spotted something white and bulbous. We both pulled over to the bank, quickly and instinctively.

“Do you see that?” I asked Liam.

He took out his binoculars and glassed the object. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but it’s big and it’s moving.”

I will openly admit that I have a fear of bears, but the polar bear—the bear I know the least and the bear that is, reputedly, the most fearless of the ursine family—was enough to make me think about showering my eyes with pepper spray, right then and there, just so I didn’t have to watch it come and maul me.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth paddling past. We decided to raft to the other bank, deflate the packrafts, and get the hell out of there. As I feverishly deflated the raft and sloppily strapped it to the outside of my pack, my frozen hands and saturated gear coated in rough sand, I watched the polar bear, which actually turned out to be a gull, leisurely float down the Sag passed us.

One’s sight, we learned, can no longer be trusted on this flat, lunar, northern landscape.

Okay, no polar bear, thank god, but we had more than enough problems. For one, because we thought this would be a short day-trip, we didn’t have any overnight gear: no sleeping bags or tents. And because we were so far north, there would be no wood to start a fire. And, after looking at my GPS, I saw that we had a 12-mile hike back to Deadhorse, which would actually be more like 15 when you consider that we would have to walk around ponds, lakes, and tundra bog. And our biggest problem: it was getting late, dark, and foggy, and we had to illegally walk through the vigilantly monitored, hyper-secure Prudhoe Bay oilfield—the largest oilfield in North America that, before drilling started in 1977, held 25 billion barrels of oil. Hiking through the oilfield is strictly prohibited, and while we had no desire to break the rules, there was no way we could get around Prudhoe Bay. We’d have to sneak through.

And then I felt, for the first time in a long time, the pangs of panic. We’d walked a mile west, or where we thought was to the west, but when I looked down and picked up my pack that I'd set down for a moment, I’d forgot from which direction we’d come and to which direction we were heading. I did a 360. And then another 360. Everything was flat. The sky was an overcast gray. Everything looked the same, in every direction. I pulled out my GPS and compass and they each seemed to be as disoriented as I was. Sit down, Ken, and calm down, I told myself.

Eventually a light popped up on the horizon. It was one of the many oilfield facilities, which we knew was to the west. It was the ugly, all-seeing eye that would monitor our impossible jaunt through what felt like Mordor. (After I made this reference to Liam—a fellow Tolkien fan and another overeducated English major—we proceeded to use LotR references to describe our situation, forcing us to periodically acknowledge our nerdiness.)

To stay warm, we walked inside our wind-resistant dry suits. Night supplanted day, and a frosty mist clung to facial hair. On the edge of a lake in front of us sat a giant, bull caribou, bearing a curled crown of skyscraping antlers that were orbited, elliptically, by two bat-like short-eared owls, both of which—after the caribou had regally trotted off and disappeared into the fog—came to inspect us, flaplessly hovering above us like kites.

In front of us was one of many oil camps. It was a small, metallic, rectangular facility with about a dozen outdoor lights. We were all whispers now, wary of being caught and having to deal with the possibility of an interrogation or, at worst, a fine, for trespassing. It was close to midnight and dark, so we thought we could slip by undetected. As we neared the building, we saw some humanoid-like movement. A spotlight clicked on; whoever was manning the light drew figure eights onto the tundra. We stood still, but eventually he trained the spotlight directly on us. We were shocked that he’d spotted us because we were still a good distance away.

“We’re fucked,” I said.

“Just stay still,” Liam said. “If they come near, just lay on the ground.”

“What? I don’t know man. Maybe it would be better if we just gave in if they’ve already caught us.”

We debated what we should do in whispers, remaining perfectly still as the light shone upon us. Because it didn’t appear that they had any plans to capture us and because we thought that there was a possibility that they merely thought we were caribou, we recommenced hiking, each of us lengthening our strides and adding an alarmed briskness to our gait.

We reached an industrial road and placed our footsteps carefully and in sync with one another's to lessen the volume of our boots crunching atop the gravel. We ducked under an oil pipeline and continued on.

Disaster was averted, but we were far from home-free. Ahead of us were several more well-lit facilities that we’d have to get around. We walked next to wells and pipelines and a gravel road—the horizon of Prudhoe Bay was lit up with fool’s progress, a spider web of industry, an Ayn Rand wasteland.

We were close to the next facility, walking parallel with a road. There were lights everywhere, in all directions. White lights, orange lights, red lights, blinking lights, the lights of trucks on the prowl, moving from facility to facility. We couldn't tell which lights were close and which lights were far. And the buzz of machines was ubiquitous. This foreign land never felt so eerie. Here we are, intruders, sneaking through the land of other intruders.

As an augury of ugly things to come, atop a pingo—which is a mound of earth-covered ice—the silhouette of an arctic fox appeared. It howled (which sounded more like a raven's crow), and we nervously strode past it, worried that its cackles would call attention to our location.

We were within a stone’s throw of the facility and the gravel road. I kept an eye on the fox, but when I turned my head south, I saw Liam sprinting away, his arms pumping furiously, piston-like, going as fast as he could over land we couldn’t see beneath us, his packrafting oars rattling with each footfall. I joined him, sprinting across the tundra until I was out of breath. We dove behind another pingo and I asked him why we were running. “You didn’t see it?” he said. “There’s a truck with a spotlight right behind us.”

He was right. On the other side of the pingo, the truck had come to a halt at the end of the road. We could hear its motor rumbling and could see its spotlight oscillating from side to side, its beam causing a white halo to form around the tip of the pingo we sat behind. It was obvious that someone had spotted us at some point. And now they were on the lookout for us. This is it, I thought. All they have to do is get out and look over this pingo. And we’re caught.

But they never did. We continued on through night and fog, around lake and across the other waist-high branch of the Sag.

The trip was a catastrophe; we didn’t make it to the ocean and we ended up back in camp after 3 a.m., prohibiting us from getting a good night's rest before our shifts in the morning.

“This is the best experience I’ve had in a long time,” said Liam.

“I know. Me too.”

***

The Sag. Somewhere to the north was the Arctic Ocean which we never got to see.

Here's packrafting guru and prize chef, Liam (which isn't his real name).

My pack is actually pretty small and light, but looks huge in this picture. (After we got off the Sag neither of us had any feeling in our hands, so I couldn't help but sloppily strap the raft to my pack.)

One of several pipelines we crossed.

The mythic caribou.

How to afford college

2011-09-02T06:04:00.002-04:00

Just this afternoon, a couple high schoolers writing for the youth section of an Indianapolis newspaper interviewed me, seeking ideas about how to afford college. Because my mind is on the subject and because the fall semester has just begun, I thought I’d put down, in one post, all my ideas on how to afford college.

The Atlantic has recently reported that The College Board has the average student debt at $27,650, which is far more than the $24,000 total I’ve been using for a while. By the time a freshman today leaves college, it’ll probably be more than $30,000…. So if you’re thinking about leaving school with little-to-no debt, here are a couple ideas that might help.

1. Pick an affordable school.

Too often are we lured to certain schools for the wrong reasons: successful sports teams, lavish accommodations (gyms, climbing walls, elegant dining options), and, worst of all, prestige. Some of these things are, no doubt, nice, but are they worth an extra $20,000 of student debt? While some colleges are better than others, there are great professors everywhere, and oftentimes the best ones are not at your priciest and most prestigious schools. (I’ve had mediocre professors at Duke and stellar ones at SUNY Buffalo.) I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to go to community college for two years and transfer to a state school to finish up your degree.

2. Commute from home.

Room and board for a year at many colleges is around $11,000. Which is just ridiculous. It does not cost $11,000 to house and feed yourself. In my first semester in the van, I lived on $103/week. Over the course of the school year, that’s about $3,700, and that includes EVERY cost in my life—entertainment, transportation, clothes. Every cost but tuition. Let me breakdown how much housing and feeding and transporting yourself costs depending on your style of home...

Living in a dorm: $11,000 / academic year (includes mandatory housing and meal plan)

Living in an apartment: $7,733 / academic year (includes rent [$550 x 10 months=$5,500], food, all vehicle costs).

Living in a van: $2,233 / academic year (includes food and all vehicle costs).

Living with parents: $1,524 / academic year (includes vehicle costs, but not food.)

The above costs only reflect the cost of food, housing, and vehicles (gas, insurance, and repairs). Of course, each of these numbers will get bigger when you factor in cell phone bills, entertainment, clothes, haircuts, etc. And the estimates are by no means perfect because—during my first semester at Duke—I ate very cheaply and drove very little. But the estimates should indicate just about “how low you could go” and highlight just how ludicrous the costs of a dorm/apartment/meal plan are. Over the course of four years, you could pay $44,000 to live in a dorm versus $8,932 in a van or $6,096 in your parents’ home.

3. Manage your finances meticulously.

Find out where your money’s going. Write everything down.

My first semester I kept track of my every cent. I wrote down, in a Microsoft Word file, what I bought, how much I bought it for, and when I bought it. By the mid-point of the semester, I could see how much of my money was going to food, to gas, to insurance… If you watch your money carefully, you’ll quickly see how much of it goes to unnecessary luxuries, and you’ll be enlightened as to which costs are bleeding you dry.

4. Don’t buy crap you don’t need.

We desire things less because we need them and more because other people have them. And we think we can climb to their social status by looking the way they look, acting the way they act, or having what they have. That’s nothing but nasty, weak-kneed conformity. It's what Thorstein Veblen calls "emulative desire." Don’t sacrifice your independence and freedom to fit in with the mass of materialists. Be comfortable as yourself. Be comfortable having a friend cut your hair, buying your clothes at secondhand shops, or cooking noodles and vegetables for $5 instead of going out to eat for $20.

5. Speaking of food, avoid campus dining plans.

Campus dining is a crime. At Duke, it costs as much as $25 a day to eat. A day! That’s highway robbery, and I’m sure it’s just as bad at most other colleges. I ate healthily, deliciously, and abundantly for $4.34 a day. Here’s what it looks like over the course of an academic year:

Duke’s priciest meal plan: $5,500 / academic year

Spaghetti stew meal plan: $1102 / academic year ($4.34 x 254 days)

6. Live in a van.

Live in the woods. Live in a tent. Live in three-foot by six-foot box. I know a girl who lived in a tent and a sailboat at college. I know another girl who lived in a yurt at Duke. I know a guy who lived in a tipi. There are lots of ways to live creatively, boldly, and cheaply that will not only save you—literally—tons of money, but will give you, arguably, a more valuable education than the one you’ll get in the classroom.

7. Realize that you will not get a good, honorable, well-paying job when you leave school.

It is easy to think that you’ll be one of the exceptions, but it’s probably more responsible and realistic to think that you won’t. In 2008, 17.4 million grads with B.A. degrees had jobs that required less than a B.A. degree such as waiting tables, answering phones, and mopping floors. Your starting salary will not be in the high 40’s. More like the high 20’s, or, at best, the low 30’s. Plan accordingly.

8. Maybe don’t go to college at all…

There are a million things we could do after graduating from high school, but it’s been pounded into our heads so much that we don’t consider any option except going to college. It’s a rare opportunity to be young and free and debtless. We can use that freedom to volunteer, travel, hitchhike, hop trains, live in a van, work odd jobs. We can join WWOOF and travel and learn about organic farming. College is great, but there’s a much larger, and far cheaper classroom that we can learn from: the world at large. And if we go out and learn how to camp, how to save, and how to manage our money, by the time we finally enroll in college, we’re probably not going to be so willing to thoughtlessly take out a giant loan and go $50,000 in debt.

9. Get good at saving money

If you’re just leaving high school, you’ve probably yet to have the chance to learn how much it costs to house and feed and transport yourself. Unless you do something extreme, a large chunk of your salary will go to apartment rent, food, and the other basics. Finding jobs that offer room and board are key. Lodges and working camps often offer free room and board, as do AmeriCorps programs. In many cases like these, you won’t need a car. In other words, every dollar you make is a dollar you save. In one year at Coldfoot Camp in Alaska, I made, at $9/hour, $18,000 and saved almost every dime of it. I forgot exactly how I did the math then, but I determined that my saving capacity ($18,000) was equal to the saving capacity of someone making $42,000 in a conventional home-dwelling, car-driving, supermarket-shopping lifestyle. It goes to show that, when you have room and board, getting paid a little can mean saving a lot.

Resources

Coolworks.com — Great website for finding working camp, lodging, etc. jobs.

Americorps.gov — Lots of great opportunities for young people (18 to 24 year olds) to do good, honorable work for a small, though not insignificant, amount of money.

Wwoof.org — World Wild Opportunities on Organic Farms gives travelers a place to eat, sleep and see culture in return for a bit of work.

[PS: If anyone else has any useful tips, please feel free to share in comment section!]

Two and a half days on the Sag

2011-08-30T18:41:00.009-04:00

The Sag sags. It's a gentle gurgle, a patient dribble, a sleepy two-lane road through a school zone. It leaks like blood from a wound. Unlike other wild Alaskan rivers, it neither screams nor fumes, but flattens and snakes. It suppurates. That's because the Sagavanirktok River (or "Sag")--which stretches 180 miles from the North Slope of the Brooks Range to the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean--moves mostly over flatland.

The other day, I got a couple days off from my dishwashing shift, so my friend Sarah from Coldfoot came up to Deadhorse and we went on a two and a half day trip on a sizable section of the Sag.

We took Alpacka Packrafts with us--expensive, ingenious inventions that typically weigh less than five pounds (plus a couple more when you add the weight of the oar). The rafts can be deflated and easily carried, permitting hikers to cross otherwise uncrossable lakes and rivers (and navigate along really shallow rivers like the Sag in ways that canoes, kayaks, and rafts can't).

Sarah, walking over tundra plain with raft in her pack.

Here I am in my dry suit, which kept my skin and underclothes dry (even if I had submerged my whole body underwater). The suit also functions as a windbreaker and rain gear. If it was hot (which it wasn't) I would have been perspiring nastily inside. (I'm not sure why I look so distraught in this picture since I'd just enjoyed a cookie break.)

The rafts are crafted in such a way that they can hold all your gear at the foot of the raft. My lower half is underneath a protective sleeve that prevents the ingress of water. On my backpack, I have my bear spray handy in case of a charge, though the grizzly bears are few and far between this far north, and the polar bears rarely venture this far south.

The North Slope, the arctic coastal plain, the Sag... It all feels just so alien, so unearthly, so unwordly. Give the sky an apocalyptic tint and it would be easy to believe we were on a different planet.

It's just so bafflingly flat. And it feels even more so when on the river because we rarely could see over the edge of the bank. And because there are no skyscrapers, no mountains, and no trees, we no longer have a landscape, only a skyscape. And the sky never seemed so huge. I felt like a tiny organism in a pool of water under the microscope of the sky--a lens so large you can't help but feel how proportionally tiny you are.

These unfamiliar skies are filled with the hieroglyphics of winds and storm and cloud--whose origins and intentions are unknown to my untutored eye. At any time of the day, I could point out dozens of distinct species of cloud--all coexisting peacefully, indifferent to one another, like animals of the Serengeti around a watering hole. Curling around the horizon is a foggy haze; off to the northwest there are bubbling microwaved marshmallows; to their northern flank is a hauntingly-flat alien starship; and above us directly is wispy Chinese calligraphy whose figures bend and stretch with the stratospheric gales.

"Where the hell are we?" Sarah asked.

I didn't know. Maybe it's just that I'm so new to this landscape, this skyscape, but I felt like I could never know this place; that I'd never feel at home or at ease here. Romantic bullshit aside, the north slope can be a downright dreary place. But maybe that's just because my eye is trained to look yonder at wide, sweeping changes in the land, at places with an ever-startling array of features, like the Appalachian Hills or the Brooks Range. Maybe it's just that I don't know how to properly see and feel a place like this.

While I don't think I could be content to live in such a landscape, I do very much appreciate its bizarre nature, and the bizarre feelings it causes to bubble up to the surface.

Franklin Bluffs, one of the few points on our trip where the land rose.

Musk ox! First time I've ever taken a picture of one. This was taken on our drive down the Dalton Highway en route to our starting point on the Sag. It was all by itself. It watched me for a couple minutes as I snapped photos of it from the road.

Sometimes the Sag can feel almost Bahama-like. The blue skies, the still, glassy water, the salty gales, a half dozen gulls sounding alarms, floating on the breezy drafts. The sun pokes out around the edge of a cloud and casts a bright light on a stand of squat lime green willow trees. While I was cold and bundled underneath layers of clothing, I couldn't shake the feeling that such a cold, dreary place can feel oddly tropical.

Lots of birds up here on the coastal plain. In the picture below, on the ground is a raven; above, a flock of geese headed south.

Warning: If you major in English, you may just end up washing dishes in a working camp on the arctic coast

2011-08-21T07:02:00.012-04:00

So, I’m a working man again. I just finished my first forty-hour week (of menial labor) in over five years.

At Deadhorse Camp (which is one of several camp/motel facilities in the greater Deadhorse area), we have about 30-50 oilfield employees who, for three weeks at a time, live here and work twelve hours a day. We house them, serve them food at breakfast and dinner buffets, and make them sack lunches. (No need to point out the hypocrisy of a raving environmentalist indirectly abetting the initiatives of the oil industry.)

I am one of five people who work here (three of whom are permanents). And while I’m not one of the permanents, if you include me in the five, then sixty percent of the Deadhorse Camp workforce has a college degree in English—a degree that has clearly served no purpose in preparing us for the duties of our jobs, but does, however, empower us to have impassioned 45-minute conversations on whether the film Scream does or does not fit within the horror genre. (Self-deprecation aside, I do and always will cherish my impractical degrees.)

I’ve been spending about six hours a day in the kitchen, every day of the week. I scrub the bottoms of burnt soup pots with wire brushes, dip my hand into sink drains to pluck out palmfuls of slippery vegetables, and cram heavy black industrial trash bags into polar bear-proof dumpsters. I set up the salad bar, slice the bread, arrange the dessert rack, and fold used cardboard.

Apart from the hikes I’ve gone on over the course of the summer, it’s been awhile since I’ve had to be in a continuous state of movement for hours on end. By the end of my first shift, I was physically exhausted, with sore feet and an aching back—and duly embarrassed because everyone around me had been working twice as long. Now—after a week—my back and feet have adjusted and I am in full-out, body-on, brain-off, work mode.

The job, more than anything, makes me reflect on my many previous menial jobs. Over the years, I've mowed lawns, sharpened skates, flipped burgers, scrubbed toilets, delivered papers, cashed a register, and pushed carts. While it is in fashion to glorify some of these blue collar trades, I have no issue unequivocally stating that I hated all these jobs and admitting that I hate work in general. And I realize that—as an American—such an admission is just about as blasphemous as doubting the existence of Jesus as our savior, but there’s no way around it: I hate work and I’ll do most anything to avoid it, short of taking unemployment checks. And when I mean “work,” I mean working for somebody else, punching a clock, at a job that isn’t entirely of your choosing, at a place or company you’re not exactly free to leave whenever you want. I don’t consider tutoring kids work, or building David a stone path work, or writing my book work—largely because of the loose, unstructured, independent nature of those “jobs.”

Mostly, I hate how the hours go by, how the days melt into one another, and how you realize, suddenly, just how many weeks, months, and years have passed—with the great majority of them devoted to giving someone else your time and spending what few hours you have of your own recuperating from the exhausting toil.

After dishwashing, by the end of the day, I have no ambition to do anything. I have little desire to write, or self-improve, or do anything constructive. All my instincts tell me to lie down, drink cheap beer, and watch another episode of “The Wire.” (In the week I’ve been here, my coworkers and I have exhausted our supply of booze and watched the first 13-episode season of “The Wire,” which, by the way, is one of the greatest TV shows I’ve ever seen.) And while there's nothing wrong with resting after a day's work in front of the tube, a man can't help but question his purpose in life when he spends his time doing something of very little consequence for just a little bit of money.

I know I’ve only been doing this for a week, but there’s nothing like washing one individual spoon after another, for half an hour, in the middle of the night, in a silent kitchen, at a working camp 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, that makes you think about the direction your life is headed in.

My prevailing thought: What the fuck am I doing washing dishes up in Deadhorse?

This question takes on added significance when I consider a recent job opportunity I turned down. Right around the time I got my degree from Duke, an EiC of a respectable magazine strongly encouraged that I apply for a writing job that offered a yearly salary in the high 30’s. I was tempted. But only for a moment. The catch was, if I took the job, I had to stay there for at least three years.

But if I took it, I would be able to do what I love most (writing), I would have a respectable job that puts me on a track to a respectable career, and I would make plenty of money I could put away for a rainy day, as well as the other standard perks: health insurance, dental, 401k….

Ultimately, I turned it down because I didn’t want to be stuck somewhere for three years, sitting at a desk for much of that time, writing articles about things I’m not entirely interested in… I thought I’d be missing out on other challenges, glories, and wonders if I sentenced myself to three years of obligation. In other words, I sacrificed financial security for freedom.

But freedom to do what? I’m effin’ broke and I still have no idea if the book is really going to happen. I currently have $2,000 in the bank, $400 in my wallet, and about $1K in checks that I’ve yet to cash. Freedom to wash dishes?

I suppose, while washing spoons that night, I wondered, for the first time, if I made the wrong decision. I wondered if I’d become too rigid, too unrealistic, too dogmatic. I wondered if maybe I ought to start making more “responsible” decisions. Maybe I should have taken the writing job. Maybe I should have been a park ranger again, making twice as much money doing fun, worthwhile stuff…

But then I reminded myself how lifestyles are traps—traps that are incredibly difficult to escape from. Once you get a career, you get things, you get money, you build around you the infrastructure to have a family. And then—now that it’s convenient—you get a family. And ten years later, you find yourself stuck—stuck in a career you can’t afford to give up, stuck in a family you can’t morally extricate yourself from, stuck inside a personality that is one-dimensional. I think I’ll be happy to be stuck someday, but not now.

What I want more than anything is to write and to continue to experiment with life, which a career very much inhibits. I guess I sometimes forget what I want; I lose sight of the path I put myself on. So I guess it’s good to do what you hate once in a while. When you're most constrained and least inspired, dreams are resuscitated from the dead, empty souls glow to life like blood pumped back into slumbering limbs, and the comatose are shaken awake with a swift kick to the groin.

Mopping the kitchen.

I make about 25 lunches a night. You got me what this lady wanted.

Drinking beer with fellow coworkers after my shift. They were eager, to say the least, to get their paws on the Pabst, as they'd been subjected to Genesee before I came up.

Deadhorse, my new home

2011-08-15T16:40:00.012-04:00

Whenever I'd tell one of my Coldfoot coworkers that I was heading up to Deadhorse for a couple of weeks, their first response was maniacal laughter followed by--when they observed my steely glare and were reminded of their imprudence--heartfelt expressions of earnest sympathy. Because of its distance from the mountains, civilization, and the female gender, Deadhorse is generally looked upon as a step down from the comforts and conveniences of Coldfoot.

"Deadhorse is like someone took a shit and forgot to flush," one of them opined.

Two nights ago, I drove a van full of linens up to Deadhorse, where I'll be living for the next couple weeks. As I've mentioned in a previous post, one of the workers up here quit, so the manager (who also runs Coldfoot Camp) needed a guy to fill in to clean rooms and wash dishes.

The Dalton Highway, at these latitudes, can be quite rough. In certain sections, the road is like a washboard, with parallel grooved lines every foot apart that rattle the van so much you can't help but drive the rest of the way with a headache and a grossly uncomfortable erection. When I advanced north through the Brooks Mountain Range and onto the flat coastal plain, I watched, terrified, as the clouds moved in an east-to-west, end-of-times fashion. The pinkish-red storm clouds seemed to blow across the sky just feet above the van, moving at blistering, unearthly tornado-like speeds, which just looked so, so, very, very weird because everything on the ground remained perfectly still (probably because there's nothing on the ground but rocks, low shrubs, and six-inch hight cotton grass). "This place is just weird," said Steve, another coworker from Coldfoot who drove up with me. My thoughts exactly.

Here's my new home. This unit was just brought in, as were several more, so they could house the employees up here who work in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, as well as the few tourists who come up here and need a place to stay.

Here's the inside of my room. The heater unleashes odors of sauteed battery acid, and the room smells of nicotine and formaldehyde. I actually don't know what formaldehyde smells like, but it has has that chemically sterile flesh-burning odor to it, which the word brings to mind. (Note: The guest rooms at Deadhorse are actually quite nice, so, noble traveler, please don't let my hardly-objective descriptions stop you from visiting.)

The camp manager offered me two rooms. With the first, the view offered nothing more than a wall of orange aluminum siding. But with the unit I chose (to which he refers, hopefully, as my "writing studio"), I can see a bit of the landscape. The Dalton Highway--which you can't quite see--is just a stone's throw from my place. Everything up here in the coastal plain is so flat and there are so few geographic features, the view in all directions appear to be the same.

"Is that the ocean?" I asked while looking out my window to one of my coworkers.

"Ken, that's east," she said.

"Oh."

In ways, the room is a step up from my cabin in Coldfoot. I have electricity, heat, a closet, and I now have, amazingly, a stable internet connection permitting me access to YouTube and Pandora for the first time in months, which are modern conveniences that I have "done without" just fine, but they are warmly re-embraced nonetheless.

This carbon monoxide detector chirped anxiously every few seconds. Because I figured it was a greater risk to my sanity than the monoxide was to my health, I dismantled it.

After feeling grimy from the long drive, I took a shower yesterday evening. (Coworkers share the communal shower with the tourists and pipeline workers.) The water here, I've been told, costs 35 cents a gallon. So it's no surprise that the water leaves the shower nozzle at an exasperating dribble; the pressure being so slight, I must stand directly beneath it. Whenever I turned to wash a different part of my body, I'd accidently nudge the hot-cold dial, which, for whatever reason, is hyper-sensitive, so much that a millimeter adjustment to the right or left would send boiled, skin-melting water onto my shoulders, or a polar, heart-stopping frosty slush.

Some more views. Here's Deadhorse Camp, where I'll be working.

Bleakness.

It seems that my homes are getting gradually smaller and smaller in weirder and weirder places. But maybe it's just that sometimes progress points in funny directions.

Oh god, I'm going to Deadhorse

2011-08-13T03:55:00.003-04:00

(Deadhorse Camp is the yellow building on the right)

Tomorrow, I'm heading up to Deadhorse, a greasy, steely working camp near the oil fields and Arctic Ocean, for a couple weeks. The guy who runs both Coldfoot Camp and Deadhorse Camp is short on a cleaner/dishwasher up there because someone recently quit.

Because I'm the only person in Coldfoot who's technically unemployed, and because I want to do him a favor for providing me with room and board this summer, but also because I'm eager to put away a little cash, I agreed to fill in.

So tonight I'll pack my bags: clothes, computer and a 12-pack of Pabst (surely not enough to get me through two weeks, but I'm not going in unarmed), and tomorrow morning, I take off.

Working in the arctic

2011-08-08T19:12:00.006-04:00

It's starting to get cold up here. Summer is turning to fall, green to red, rain to snow. Because I don't have any source of heat in my cabin, I've been having to wear a set of thermal underwear, as well as a coat and hat while I write. Lately I've been able to see my breath.

It was my original agreement with Coldfoot Camp that I'd work one day a week (for free) to cover my room and boards costs, and I'd spend the rest of my time writing. While we faithfully kept to that agreement for the first month, things have changed lately, now that business, here, has picked up. So, for the past several weeks, I've been working about 20 hours a week--all on the clock--for $11/hour. And it's been great.

I've learned that writing is not the greatest full-time job. It's a lot of fun to write every day, but I tire of sitting on my ass. Plus, the muse is fleeting when you continually harass her for inspiration. Working a part-time job and making a little extra cash has been an unexpected benefit of my life up here, plus I don't feel like such a free-loader because I'm no longer sitting in my cabin all day while everyone else around here does what is commonly regarded as "real work."

Here I am roto-tilling two large rectangles of ground. Coldfoot Camp is powered by diesel, and about a half-decade ago there was a 4,000 gallon spill. That dirt was removed to a special location. And here, once a year, it's roto-tilled so the diesel that has drained to the bottom can evaporate in the sun.

I found this frog in the unlikeliest of places: the diesel pond. A striking find because this is my first sighting of an amphibian in the arctic.

I've also done a good deal of tour guiding (which I did up here full-time five years ago when I was paying off my debt). Typically, I'm either oaring a raft down the Koyukuk River or driving tourists up to Wiseman (a semi-subsistence village fifteen miles north of Coldfoot) where the tourists get to meet hunter and trapper, Jack Reakoff, who's lived in rural Alaska all his life. I give them a broad overview of the region's history, plants and animals; Jack tells them everything about Wiseman and subsistence living.

Here I am, guiding.

Jack talking to tourists by his home in Wiseman.

Jack with moose and caribou hooves.

Jack showing tourists the inside of his cabin.

Jack's cabin.

The northernmost garden in Alaska.

Princess and Holland America buses do tours up and down the Dalton Highway, from Fairbanks to Deadhorse, which is just a few miles south of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Arctic Ocean. I have a love/hate relationship with the tourists. They're all so kind and nice and grandmotherly, yet I'm constantly appalled with their poor health, and I--in general--frown upon their overly structured way of living/traveling. But still, I like them.

A few weeks ago, one of the Princess buses broke down 30 miles north of Coldfoot, and 220 miles from their destination, Deadhorse. Because all the guides here in Coldfoot were busy, I got to drive them all the way up in one of Coldfoot's tour vans to Deadhorse--easily the worst place man has ever created.

("A" is Coldfoot; "B" is Deadhorse.)

This is what the road looks like north of the Brooks Range when it turns to flat tundra.

And here's Deadhorse, near the arctic ocean, which is working camp that houses all the oil field workers. It is a cold, steely, metallic industrial town with guys outnumbering girls at least 15 to 1--a ratio I created based on my own observations. And while this number may seem intriguingly favorable to some of my female readers, I beg you to beware of the common Alaskan adage that holds true all along the Dalton Highway: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." In Deadhorse, there are no schools, no churches, no libraries. There's nothing really, except for lots of oil, dudes, and metal. I feel like the joke needs some punch line, but Deadhorse is no joke. It's the sort of place you go if you want to descend into a Shining-like mania; the sort of place where you'll find your roommate hanging from the ceiling with the elastic of his underwear ringed around his neck.

Some views of town.

I drove back to Coldfoot the same night--literally a 500 mile trip in a day. Here are some pics of the sun hovering above the horizon at midnight.

Lastly, some weird/dumb things tourists have said... I've spent much of my time at Coldfoot dealing with tourists as both a tour guide and park ranger in the visitor center (also located in Coldfoot). Recently, I got hold of a document containing a secret list of quotes, which I share for your amusement.

“Where do they put them at night?” –woman from NY asking about what animals she might see and someone mentioning a musk ox.

“Do you drive back to Fairbanks every night?” (Fairbanks is 250 miles away.)

“Do you have any sort of 7-11 up here?”

“When do the caribou turn into moose?”

“Do you sell condoms here?” (not a stupid question, I guess)

“This is the United States. A places like that should not exist.” (Woman referring to the lodgings at Coldfoot Camp. She refused to shower there and desired to sleep in the bathroom at the ranger station across the road.)

“I was wondering if bears are attracted to blood and if so, should I be worried about this cut?” –girl from NYC

“So how do I go about applying for religious objection for paying to go into the park?” (There is no fee to enter the park.)

A couple asked a tour guide if they were still offering dog-mushing tours for $79. (It was summer and there was no snow on the ground.)

“Is there a dotted line marking the location of the Arctic Circle?”

“I have heard that watermelon berries have a laxative effect. Is that true?” –Older man

“Is that the sun or the moon?” asked looking up at crescent shape in a dark sky.

“This is a snowy owl,” someone said, looking at a ptarmigan

“Where am I??! THEY NEVER TELL ME WHERE I AM!” said an old lady, while threateningly pursuing a guide with her cane

“We’ve just come down from Deadfoot!” (probably referring to Deadhorse)

“Are the northern lights running now?”

“I’m not sure if I want to go to Deadwood.” (again, probably referring to Deadhorse)

“Today we came up from… somewhere.”

“Is this all there is to Fairbanks?” (woman upon waking up in Coldfoot after a long drive.)

“Don’t do drugs. This is what you’ll look like.” (Framing her face with her hands)

“Wolf-colored” (Lady’s response to a question about what the color of the wolf was that she saw.)

“Is there any water at Galbraith Lake?”

“Good morning.” (It was 6:30 p.m.)

“Can we stamp our US passport?”

“It’s like a Stephan King novel” (referring to Coldfoot)

“Will there be other people at the campground? We don’t want to be alone.”

“I need some help here… this stamp pad is completely dry.” (The pad was closed)

“Can I have an Arctic Circle certificate for my cat?”

“How do the animals know when to sleep?”

“Well, you’ll have to tell me where your glory holes are then.”

“How far is Horse-dead?”

My first paid article: A story on Duke's new campus farm

2011-08-07T02:14:00.005-04:00

(Photo Credit: Megan Morr / Duke Magazine)

A few months ago, I wrote an article about Duke's new campus farm. It just printed in Duke Magazine. You can read it here.

This occasion makes me want to discuss two things: my paid writing "career" and campus farms.

1. Paid writing

I've been writing semi-professionally since 2004. It all started when I became a writer, and later, an editor, for the Arts & Life section of my undergraduate school's student newspaper. In the years before I started this blog, I wrote a couple freelance articles for Buffalo's alternative weekly newspaper (Artvoice) as well as a guest op-ed column for The Buffalo News. (I'm exceedingly embarrassed about most of my work back then, so I won't be going out of my way to share any of those articles.) Anyway... during the past seven years, I estimate that I've made a mere $1,800 for my words.

This article marks this first time I've been fairly paid by a publication. And goddamn, it feels good. Between this article and another that will print in their next issue, I received a check for $1,200. I guess it's my goal--and my main purpose of being up here writing in Alaska--to make a living with my words. While this goal seems as impossible as ever and this check is by no means enough to permit me to live in anything more than a van (or as a freeloader up in Northern AK), I guess it's a step in the right direction.

2. Campus farms

I absolutely love the idea of a campus farm. The great thing about Duke's new farm is that it's not only run by students, but all the food produced on it is sold to the food company that runs various dining halls at Duke. In other words, students produce the food, then eat the food.

More and more, I think colleges should encourage, if not enforce, their students to receive a practical education to complement their classroom-based liberal arts educations. Don't get me wrong: I do not think college should be a place where you go only to obtain "career skills." That's not what I'm talking about at all... Rather, I think college should be a place where we go to become the most well-rounded, cultured, and complete persons we can be. It should help us become full-fledged human beings.

College does not do this... By the time we graduate, we've spent much of the last 16 years of our lives sitting in front of desks, sitting in front a computers, or sitting at boring on-campus jobs. Not only do we have almost no practical skills, but we've focused our studies on some minute subject; "Biomedical engineering" or "Parks, recreation, and leisure studies," for instance. We become specialists: great at one thing, and useless at everything else.

So what's a graduate to do who can neither land a job, nor has any useful skills to help her take care of herself? I don't know the solution, but here's a wild idea: colleges include a requirement to take x number of "Self-Sustainability" courses during the course of a student's undergraduate education. It would be a hands-on, dirt-under-your-fingernails education. Some examples of such courses:

"Tending an orchard"-- In a semester, you'll learn about planting an orchard, maintaining the trees, canning, preserving, etc.

"Farming"--You'll learn how to till the soil, plant, irrigate, etc.

"Construction"--framing walls, the basics of masonry, roofing, etc.

There could be semester-long courses on carpentry, cattle farming, electronics, plumbing, car maintenance. But only the basics of surviving on your own; nothing too narrow or esoteric (i.e. basket weaving). No one will leave such a course an expert, but the student will no doubt feel at least somewhat comfortable with a skill she'd be reasonably familiar with.

I think 2-4 such courses over the course of one's education would help produce graduates that are on their way to becoming free-thinking, self-sufficient citizens. Crazy? Insane? Any thoughts?

Anyway, campus farms are a step in the right direction. It provides such an arena for students to receive practical educations.

National “Scandal” (Part II)

2011-08-06T04:11:00.005-04:00

The conservative online magazine, The Daily Caller, has recently printed two more “exposés” on Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat/Iowa) and my best friend, Josh Pruyn.

Here are The Daily Caller’s Parts One, Two, and Three if you care to read. If you don’t (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), here’s a brief recap of events that I covered in my recent post, “National ‘Scandal,’” that should bring you up to speed:

My friend Josh, years ago, worked as a student recruiter for an evil for-profit school called Westwood College. Over the course of his five months at Westwood, he took note of the many unethical recruiting practices that were encouraged by superiors on the Westwood salesroom floor. Eventually, he quit. And last fall, Josh testified before the Senate about his experiences at Westwood during a hearing presided over by Sen. Tom Harkin, who was aware of the many crimes the for-profit college industry had been committing. Recently, journalist Jonathan Armstrong of The Daily Caller printed three articles about Josh and Harkin, claiming, for one, that Harkin’s staff “supplied” Josh with an answer to a question that Harkin was going to ask him. In Part Three, Armstrong reports that Josh lied about a particular anecdote (which I’ll get to in a bit.)

[Before I go on, I should admit that this fiasco has stirred my passions and enflamed my anger like little else. And I write the following not with steely objectivity in mind—only the impassioned truth. This narrative, as you can tell, includes most everything I love or loathe in this world: the for-profit college industry, billions of dollars of student debt, millions of hapless debtors, the desecration of my friend's honor, and the rightwing's brainwashing media. (No, actually, I loathe all these things.) The only thing missing from this story that could excite my ire even more is news of Westwood’s new initiative to fund a genocide on all of the arctic’s moose calves—an event that would surely push me to join some lunatic, gun-toting anti-everything fringe group like the Montana militia. (Note to self: Joining the Montana militia probably should have no place in my fantasies.)]

I digress. Please permit me to sort out all the bullshit into smoking, smelly, orderly piles:

1. Josh is “supplied” an answer.

Armstrong reports, in Part One, that Josh was supplied answers by an aide of Senator Harkin. Let me back up and explain the story a bit… At the time of the Senate hearing (Fall 2010), there were baseless and flagrantly false rumors that Josh had a “connection” to the James Hoyer law firm that was, at the time, suing Westwood. (Josh has, literally, connections to no one minus his online Euchre friends and members of his old club college hockey team.) If Josh did in fact have an unethical connection to or was getting paid by the James Hoyer law firm, then news of such a relationship could have, as Armstrong correctly observes, “undermined [Josh’s] credibility as a witness” in the Senate testimony. (Needless to say, Josh had no such connection with the law firm.) To address this issue and to give Josh an opportunity to make it known to all that he had no such connections, Senator Harkin would ask Josh a question about such connections at the hearing. Senator Harkin’s aide emailed Josh a suggested answer. The email is below.

I admit: it looks a little fishy. But here’s why it’s not fishy: First of all, everything Harkin’s aide wrote is true. Secondly, Josh told Harkin’s aide all this stuff. The words in that email are, more or less, Josh’s words. Harkin’s aide was merely repeating what Josh said to him. (To his credit, Armstrong points out that “the answer Pruyn gave in the hearing was technically true.”) So what’s the big fucking deal? There really is no big fucking deal, but let me go on…

2. Josh was hypnotized (Manchurian Candidate-style) and his brain was disfigured by an evil liberal not-for-profit that manipulated how worded his testimony. (Detect sarcasm, please.)

Josh wrote a testimony for the Senate hearing. This was edited by multiple people: 1. Angie Moreschi (who is a lawyer at the James Hoyer firm, which was independently suing Westwood); 2. Ryan McCord (who is Senator Harkin’s aide who sent the above email); 3. Jennifer Webber (who was from TICAS, a left-wing nonprofit organization.); and 4. Me, (who touched up his grammar in a couple rough spots.)

Armstrong insinuates that these groups (minus me) manipulated Josh’s words, and that they were more or less using Josh as a mouthpiece to do harm to Westwood for their own interests. It’s more than clear to me that they of course did want to make Westwood look bad—a task that, no doubt, is incredibly easy. And while I’m no legal ethics scholar, I quite frankly do see how the law firm’s suggestions to Josh might be unethical (even if they didn't suggest anything noteworthy). That said, this is the sort of stuff these people were changing in Josh’s testimony, as Armstrong reports:

-“I do have one suggestion,” said Jennifer Webber, member of TICAS, in an email, “and that is to remove the phrase where it says that he functioned like a salesperson with leads, like an encyclopedia salesperson. I don’t think an analogy is needed, plus, aren’t encyclopedias a good thing? They were (are?) are [sic] great resource in the days before the internet!”

-Also, McCord and Moreschi found a “factual weakness” in Josh’s essay: “I just want to make sure he’s giving the most accurate information,” they wrote.

Let me clarify that these people didn’t insert lies into Josh’s testimony or wildly radicalize his words. Rather they fact-checked his assertions and softened his tone. (McCord, for instance, questioned Josh if he really wanted to use the word “evil.”)

How, uh, dare they?

3. Josh, allegedly, lies to the Senate about a Westwood student named Jeffrey.

In his testimony, Josh claims that a prospective student, Jeffrey, was harassed by Josh’s superiors who wanted to sign him up. When contacted, Jeffrey, for whatever reason, couldn’t remember such a phone conversation. This, as Armstrong insinuates, further brings Josh’s testimony under question. Josh has no idea why Jeffrey doesn't remember that conversation.

4. Let's look at this from a wider angle. Westwood is evil and this is all bullshit.

Josh made many claims at that Senate hearing. Here are a few of them:

-“If [an admissions rep] fell behind in your enrollments or start quotas you’d be expected to make at least 150 calls a day if you didn’t want to be harassed and threatened by your supervisor.”

-“At any given time, multiple contests for gift-cards, paid time-off and other incentives were offered [to admissions representatives] in order to motivate representatives to enroll as many students as possible.”

-“[The students] were often characterized and described among admissions staff as stupid, lazy, and generally unaware of what was in their own best interest.”

-“Individual enrollments could mean paid time-off or gift cards, and when I was there, a successful year earned the top representatives an all-expenses-paid trip to Cancun.”

-“The representatives I was told to emulate would exaggerate expected salary data, present misleading tuition information, and fabricate the credentials of faculty members.”

-“The most appalling example was when the assistant director of admissions on my team was presented with a “Best Liar” award at a team celebration.”

Armstrong or Westwood or anyone couldn’t question any of this because it's all true. And it was all terribly damaging to Westwood’s reputation. So what’s an evil corporation to do? You do the only thing you can: You try to damage the reputation of the witness. You try to damage Josh… You encourage people at “news organizations” with overt political agendas to write pseudo-news stories that do, on first appearance, looks like actual news to the polarized and easily deluded. You pick out meaningless, minor aspects of the story (Harkin’s aides email, the “Jeffrey” thing) and blow them out of proportion in hopes of bringing the whole testimony into question.

This is a non-issue. A non-story. I agree that there are some ethical questions about a law firm giving Josh’s suggestions, but in no way was any one manipulated, and in no way was anything falsified.

I’m disillusioned to see that the writer, Jonathan Armstrong, is my age (27). Any American, young Americans especially, I feel, should be empathetic toward the downtrodden and disadvantaged; toward those who’ve been lied to, bilked, and stolen from. We should be exposing stories about the corporations that steal from thousands, not the courageous few who risk all by standing up to them.

Yet what we have here is one of the many handmaidens to the corporate elites who--for favors or money or jobs--aid the avaricious and powerful on their crusades to make profits. I suppose I shouldn’t judge someone's character too harshly, as I know nothing about him other than what he's written in these stories. And hell, perhaps he was ordered to write such stories by his superiors? But if I’ve learned anything from Josh, it’s that the only voice one should heed, is not your boss’s, or your father's, or your president's, but the true arbiter of all that's right and wrong: that of your conscience.

Exploring the Central Brooks Range

2011-08-04T01:31:00.014-04:00

Hiking in the Brooks is one of the few places on earth where one can still get a sense of what it was like to explore country as humans did in pre-map, pre-GPS, pre-Google Earth ages. Because there are few if any trails up here, hikers must read the landscape as much as maps.

This past week, my friend Josh Spice (not to be confused with my other friend named Josh) and I planned a two-day hike up Nutirwik Creek in the Central Brooks Range, just a few miles south of the treeline. We had plans of following drainages, climbing mountain passes, and hopping onto wide river valleys.

Our plans, though, fell apart within the first hour. You'll see why.

Here's a picture tour of our hike. (Most of these photos were taken by Josh--you can check out his outdoor adventure website here. He also sold me his Sony TX-5 for $150, so I'm happy I can once again take photos while I'm up here.)

Here I am on Nutirwik Creek. We'd planned to walk up to the headwaters and over a mountain pass.

But from afar we could see that the creek narrowed considerably.

What to do now?

We wanted to continued to follow this creek since it led to the Chandalar River. So we needed to get around the waterfall. So we, uh, decided to climb the mountain to our left. (Which is a decision that didn't seem as stupid and badass as it looks in the pictures below.) Here I am climbing.

And here's Josh, who--an overly dedicated photographer, one could argue--refused to pack away his camera, forbidding himself the luxury of a second hand. "This is definitely 'sketch,'" he yelled to me as he carefully watched his purchase on the rocks.

Can you espy Josh?

Finally, we made it a comfortable spot near the top. Some views of the Brooks Range.

We wanted to get back on the creek that had the waterfall, so we walked east on the side of the mountain on a Dall Sheep trail.

And then we realized that there is another, potentially impassible gorge that will prevent us from getting back on the creek.

We hike to the bottom of the gorge, hoping that we could reach the creek from boulder to boulder.

But then we came across yet another waterfall, except this time we were standing above it. With no other option, we climbed the mountain in front of us again.

Finally, we made it back onto the creek valley. This is called "Warm Water Creek" because there's a natural spring that shoots out 50 F degree water throughout the year.

Easy walking now. Weather got crappy, though, so here we are in our rain gear.

And finally we made it out to the Chandalar. This area is called Chandalar Shelf.

Josh is obsessed with ultra-light backpacking. (On the way, he gave me a 45-minute dissertation on the virtues of both down and synthetic sleeping bags. (It's a complex subject, supposedly, because by minute 40 I still had no idea which was better.)) His tent weighs something like a pound and it's held upright with his two trekking poles.

I was a little wary of sleeping it in because there's no bottom to the tent. I don't care too much about getting wet or cold, but I was reluctant because mosquitoes could get in through openings on the bottom. And sure enough, in the middle of the night, I woke up on several occasions, with two of them fat and plump on my nostril, needling their little probosces through my skin. Eventually, I had to don my bug hat for the rest of the night. Josh's face, when I looked over, was, curiously, left unperturbed.

The next day we walked to the road. Here we are walking on the pipeline, which, in parts, is underground. We walked 10 miles south on the Dalton Highway back to his vehicle and then drove back to Coldfoot, home sweet home.

National "scandal"

2011-07-25T01:23:00.004-04:00

I’m excited to report that my best friend, Josh Pruyn (who’s been mentioned a dozen or so times on this blog), is at the center of a national “scandal."

Let me back up and give you Josh’s story (which is, in many ways, my story).

I’ve known Josh for about 22 years. We go back to when we played in the same youth ice hockey league at the age of six. A couple years later, he moved into my suburban neighborhood where we played street hockey on an almost daily basis after school for the next ten years. (I challenge any duo in the world to beat me and Josh in a street hockey match.) I’d say we became best friends late in high school when we used the newly discovered “email” as an outlet to complain about our unremitting sexual frustrations.

We dormed together for a year at Alfred University. He stayed and I transferred, but we kept in touch via email, still mostly complaining about our unremitting sexual frustrations. But we also began to discuss other, more substantive things: nature, religion, morality, politics, goals, dreams, failures, insecurities. Everything. I don’t know how many emails we've sent to each other since our late teen years, but from 2005 until today we’ve sent a total of 1,750 emails to each other, which averages out to sending and receiving an email every 2.5 days. (I know, it’s a little weird.)

I left college with $32,000 in debt and a history and English degree. He left with $66,000 with a history and political science degree. Needless to say, we no longer complained about women anymore. Our debts were the only things on our minds.

(Me drunkenly embracing Josh on my 21st b-day.)

(Josh came up to work up in the arctic for a bit. Together we burnt and then hauled the Yukon River Camp's summer garbage down to a dump in Fairbanks.)

I got a job with Coldfoot and, later, the Park Service. Josh, too, tried to enjoy the itinerant lifestyle, jumping from job to job for a while at places like Coldfoot. But because there were huge gaps in between his seasonal employment, Josh had trouble keeping up on his loan payments, which were far more demanding than mine.

He needed something more permanent, so he moved to Denver and took a job as a “admissions representative” with an online for-profit school called Westwood. At first, Josh was excited to be working for a college. He figured he’d be inspiring young people to go to school and improve themselves. (His job, essentially, was to get prospective students to sign up for classes.) But the more he learned about Westwood, the more he found himself in a moral quandary.

Here’s the thing about most online for-profit schools… They’re mostly a scam. They often cost around $70,000 for a three-year degree. Because they’re nationally-accredited (which is very different from a regionally-accredited school), students cannot transfer their credits to normal universities. And most employers don’t take their degrees seriously, so they can’t get jobs, either. Places like University of Pheonix and Kaplan and Westwood are putting many many young people in terrible, terrible debt that they can’t get out of.

Josh, as an admissions rep (which made him little more than a glorified telemarketer), began to see what was going on around him. Many of his fellow coworkers were lying to or misleading prospective students. Those who got the most students to sign up were rewarded with vacations to Cancun, parties, bonuses… At an employee celebration, one coworker laughingly received a “Best Liar” award. Those who didn't sign up students were fired. It was cruel irony that, to pay off his debt, Josh was now in the business of putting other young people into debt.

After five months, Josh ended up quitting. This is where I come in (and where I play a very minor role in this narrative).

I moved to Denver to stay with him and his girlfriend for a couple months (right before I bought a van and enrolled at Duke). After hearing Josh’s horror stories about Westwood, I wanted to publish an exposé on the school’s unethical practices. I wanted to bring Westwood down. (It was an unrealistic goal, as I'd published just a few very minor professional articles at that point.) I spent a couple months emailing ex-professors, ex-students, and ex-administrators from Westwood. I wrote a great article, but no one wanted to publish it (which frustrates me to this day).

While researching, I discovered a law firm that was representing former Westwood students, who were suing the college. I got some info from the lawyers and told them about Josh. They began talking with Josh. Josh told the lawyers the many gory details about what happens on the Westwood sales floor.

So when Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat/Iowa), who was conducting a hearing about the crimes of for-profit trade schools, found out about Josh and his experiences at Westwood, Harkin asked Josh to testify in front of the Senate.

Josh flew to D.C and, last fall, delivered his testimony about Westwood. It was his shining hour, his redemptive moment. (To watch Josh, fast forward to minute fourteen.)

Let me fast forward to the present day. The Daily Caller a conservative online newspaper founded by journalist and dweeb Tucker Carlson, has printed an exposé on Josh and Senator Harkin, claiming that Harkin and his staff “supplied an answer” to Josh. For some delusional reason, people representing Westwood claimed that Josh was working for the law firm that was suing the school—a bullshit tactic employed to hopefully discredit whatever Josh had to say at the Senate testimony. Needless to say, Josh has no connection with the law firm. Josh merely wanted to expose Westwood’s bullshit. He wanted to do the right thing. When Harkin's aide advised Josh via email, the aide was merely reiterating what Josh had told him. (PS: I'm the "freelance journalist friend" mentioned a couple times in the exposé.)

You’d think that being at the center of a national controversy would be stressful and chaotic for someone like Josh, who now has a big, ugly, warty evil corporation breathing down his neck. But for the most part, he and I couldn't be more amused with the whole thing. Josh is still in student debt, so he really has no money or valuable assets that Westwood can take. Plus, he’s right, and Westwood (and The Daily Caller) is wrong. Plus, it's fun to think back on when we were a couple of losers in high school who've each had our fifteen minutes of fame.

Writer in residence

2011-07-19T04:59:00.003-04:00

For a little over a month, I’ve been Coldfoot’s writer-in-residence—a title I use reluctantly because I’ve actually done very little writing on this blog in that timeframe. I’ve mostly been writing my book. And when I say “I’ve mostly been writing my book” I mean: “I’ve mostly been procrastinating writing my book.”

Confession: I am a master procrastinator. And I don’t mean that in a funny, cynical, sarcastic way. I could teach classes on how to procrastinate. A procrastinator who knows what he's doing knows how to procrastinate efficiently. When I have something important to do, I find myself unable to do the important thing, yet I am exceptionally good at getting secondary, semi-important things done.

So just exactly what have I been doing? I have indexed my whole 140-page “quote collection,” which is on a single-spaced Word file. To retain the insights and ideas from the books I’ve read these past three years, I’ve been collecting and saving quotes in this file, typing out each interesting passage that I think might be of some use to me in the future. Before I indexed them, my collection was little more than a confusing, unorganized jumble of words. I’ve taken it upon myself to, this summer, read every single quote and assign to each an index heading (i.e. “wilderness,” “travel,” “agriculture,” etc.) to be placed under its proper index heading on a separate document.

While I was working on my index on my laptop, one of my female coworkers asked me “how’s the writing’s coming?” I said I’m not writing but that—with no shortage of pride—“I’m just indexing 140 pages of wisdom,” adding that these quotes represented all the topics under the sun that are “the most important to me.” I wanted to impress her with my diligence, so I opened up the index file on my computer, and, on the top of that page—in large, emboldened, 20-point font—was the word “MASTURBATION”—one of several hundred index headings. For the record, “masturbation” is not a topic that I consider of the utmost “importance” to me, but I decided to give it its own section because Jean-Jacques Rousseau has some curious opinions on the matter that I desired to preserve. (PS: If anyone wants a copy of my index, let me know via email and I’ll be happy to send you one. I’ll be done with it in about a week.)

I’ve also gone through 112 pages of my book's “scrap file” on which I've pasted hundreds and hundreds of passages of crappy writing that I wanted out of the book, but didn't have the heart to delete because it had some value to me. I’ve culled this file down to 79 pages and reorganized every passage under the appropriate chapters so I can easily reincorporate passages into the book if I choose to.

And when I ran out of things to procrastinate, I finally buckled down and edited my first seven (of twenty) chapters.

Another confession: Before I undergo an editing session, I read a chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat. Pray. Love., which—I’m embarrassed to admit (as a young, straight male)—is a masterfully written travel memoir that I really, really like. And because I’m in the business of writing a travel memoir, I figured I ought to learn from the best. There are few authors who are able to come across as both sincere and self-deprecating, who make you laugh and cry. Gilbert’s one of them. It’s an incredibly difficult balance to strike—being both stupid and serious—but it’s a magical thing when a writer pulls it off. And by reading her book, I’m able to “Gilbertify” my own words, helping me express ideas colloquially without dumbing anything down.

The real reason I haven’t been writing on this blog is because I’ve been bummed out lately—I’ve been bummed out for quite a while in fact. And while sharing bummed out stuff—which is normally juicy stuff that is sometimes the most fun to write and the most enjoyable to read—I’ve decided to withhold my petty troubles from you, dear reader, because my troubles, currently, aren’t of the interesting sort.

Mainly, I’ve been stressed out about the book: Is it going to happen? Am I just wasting my time? Is my story even worth telling? What am I doing sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle? And while I have tons of reasons to moan about my previous literary agent (who stopped responding to my emails), I’m just not going to go there, as complaining about your agent is just one short step away from whining about my assistant Brant who got me a soy latte when I specifically asked for a Caffe macchiatto. In other words, these are boring, privileged travails—not the sort of travails I want on a blog that I’d like to be about travel and adventure and poverty and journeying and important stuff.

And while I’m still very unsure if the book is going to happen, I am pleased to report that I’m beginning to drub up interest with literary agencies. So we’ll see. I plod on.

***

I just told someone the other day that “I love being unemployed.” It’s not exactly true that I’m unemployed, as I work about eight hours a week, and last week—because a guide had gone on vacation—I worked close to thirty, allowing me to bring in about $500 between salary and tips—but, for the most part, yes, I am unemployed, and goddamn, do I love being unemployed.

“Unemployed” is probably not the best way to describe my current status because I most definitely am employed with book-writing (when I’m not procrastinating it), so I suppose I mean: I love being self-employed. I love working on projects of my own creation; on a schedule that I've devised. When work is fun (which the book is for the most part) work is no longer work. Work and leisure become one and the same thing.

As much as Ken the wannabe scholar likes writing, Ken the wannabe wildman feels ignored. Truth is, I’ve spent most of the past three years sitting on my ass in front of a computer. And while I'd rangered for a couple summers and farmed a little bit, I was, for the great majority of that time, sitting on my ass, too. (My ass, as I type this, is quite literally sore from being planted on a chair for so long.)

I’m convinced that 18-year-old Ken (who played on his varsity hockey and football teams) could kick 28-year-old Ken’s ass. Which is kind of sad to think about because I could easily be at my physical peak today if I wished to be. And I guess I’m starting to think that I ought to take advantage of my youth, and go on some once-and-for-all limit-testing physical adventure and use my body to do things I know I won’t be able to do in twenty years. In other words, I want to get off my ass and do something. I want to finish this damn book.

Plus, I find that the whole memoir-making process is kind of fucking with my memory. Let me explain… In order to write a memoir, you must first take actual, real-world experiences (like hitchhiking with a driver in Virginia) and then translate that experience into words that are arranged on a page. (This is the first time you tinker with your memories.) What goes onto page, of course, will never be a perfectly accurate rendition of the original experience because the event that actually happened and your memory of that event are two very different things. Then you have to rearrange those experiences—which are now on page—so that they make sense and are interesting to your reader. For instance, I’ve had to cut important people in my life out of the book because they don’t contribute to the central narrative, or I’ll have to play around with dates a little bit so as to create moments of suspense. (This is the second time you tinker.) Here's the F'd-up part: I find that now, when I think of my actual experiences, I no longer think of the actual experience; rather, I think about how I’ve rearranged it in my book. I am disfiguring my memories. I suppose this stinks because I no longer see things the way in which they actually happened, but in a weird sort of way, I think I am restructuring my memories in such a way that makes my “story” make more sense. I once heard that all we are are our stories. While my story may no longer be real (and remember no one’s story is perfectly real because all memories are imperfect), my story, now that it’s been disfigured, is better than ever.

All in all, I feel like I’m living in the past. I’ve been writing my story for, off and on, eleven months, and I feel like I can’t move on and can't create new memories until the book is published. It’s not that simple: I am meeting new people and seeing new stuff up here and having new experiences, but I am far from fully living. After this book, I think I’ll be emptied of stories, yet more than eager to fill up on new ones.

Hike on the continental divide

2011-07-05T04:22:00.009-04:00

I recently went on a two-day hike with my friend Sarah on the North Slope of the Brooks Range, about 30 miles north of the northernmost tree. It amazes me how such a desolate, barren, and empty place can still be appetizing for the eyes. You'd think that an endless vista of 7,000-foot rock piles--bearing only the most resilient patches of moss and lichen--would produce sensations of disgust and repulsion. But oh no. While the wavy green grass of a well-cared-for pasture entices us with fertility, and the jungle, biodiversity, the desolation of the Brooks bedazzles us with a different kind of beauty; the kind that--through awe and wonder--sets our imaginations astir.

We drove up the Dalton Highway in a truck my friend Chad lent us, before parking atop Atigun Pass--which is a mountain pass that's also along the continental divide. (If a water droplet split on the pass, half of it would head north to the Arctic Ocean, while the other half would wiggle south to the Yukon River before being poured into the Pacific.)

We came across a grizzly crossing the road near a place called Chandalar Shelf. It walked into the grass and began scraping off layers of tundra either with hopes of pulling out an edible root or a ground squirrel to snack on.

The mountains we climbed were around 6,500 feet, though we started at a relatively high base: something like 4,500 feet. From the picture below, you can see the Dalton Highway snaking across the valley.

A band of Dall sheep choose to inspect us from above. The stared at us curiously and motionlessly. They seem to have rather stoic dispositions, despite their keen curiosities.

On the trip back, I slipped on some ice and fell into a small creek. For the rest of the way back, I had a small stone stuck in my finger, which I didn't want to pull out until I had my first aid kit supplies at hand. (Finger was fine.) Much to my disappointment, though, my camera, which was in my back pocket, has been severely damaged, so I regret to say that my pictures will be severely reduced in quality until I buy a new one. (Which is atop my materialist desire list.)

Slate Creek Trail

2011-06-28T03:25:00.005-04:00

Recently, I set off on a two-day, 24-mile hike down the Slate Creek Trail--the only trail anywhere near Coldfoot. Nothing dramatic happened, but here are a few photos.

The Slate Creek Trail (also called the Chandalar Trail) is a mining road. There is still some mining activity in the area. Four-fifths of the trail was graded smooth by the large trucks they drive to their mines from Coldfoot, but one-fifth of the trail was purely in the Creek, so I had many, many creek crossings. (Nothing too taxing, as the water level never rose past my knees.)

Wolf scat. I also saw tons of moose prints and several grizzly tracks.

The creek was narrow, meandering around cliff faces like the one above, but after rounding a corner I came upon a giant ice field, called "Aufeis," which is layered ice that, as the temperatures warm, melts into a creek or river. I walked atop the ice and could hear water gushing beneath me. Sometimes I'd hear the crash of thunder, but it only hunks of ice plopping into the creek bed somewhere else. In places, there are little creeks atop the Aufeis, like the one below, which had a yellowish tint for some reason.

After getting off the ice, the mosquitoes attacked me at once. I wore a headnet, long sleeves, and and pants, so they focused mainly on my hands and on my deltoids, where my backpack stretches my shirt tight against my skin, making it easy for them to get through my clothing. I had to slap my shoulders every few seconds, killing 10 at a time, leaving the jellied remains of fruitless genocides on my shoulders.

The pictures below don't do justice to how bad the mosquitoes are in the arctic. (FYI: They're especially bad in the arctic because beneath the ground there is a layer of "permafrost," or frozen ground," which prevents water from seeping through, as it does everywhere else. Because of the permafrost, puddles and ponds and lakes form everywhere, which is perfect habitat for those sons of bitches.)

Here's my tent which I set up atop a knoll next to my destination: Winer Lake--the headwaters of Slate Creek.

I love being in my tent because then it's my turn to torment the mosquitoes. When they're inside, they're easy killing. I like to catch them on my screen door, because when I swipe them across it, it's like running them over a cheese-grater, and they're easy to dismember. Sometimes, for those who haven't gotten in, I hold my arm just millimeters from their noses, just to intensify their blood lust and get their panties in a wad.

Can you espy the moose?

How to hitchhike FAQ

2011-06-25T03:36:00.003-04:00

I’ve recently been trading emails with a young man who is thinking about hitchhiking up to Alaska. Inspired by those emails, I’ve decided to write this “how to.” I’ve styled this entry as an FAQ, though I should note that I haven’t actually been asked many of these questions, and I certainly haven’t been asked them frequently.

I should also note that while I have hitched for over 8,000 miles across many states and provinces, I do not, by any means, consider myself an “expert.” For anyone looking for serious hitchhiking advice, I suggest digihitch.com, which is online community of hitchhikers—many of whom make my mileage look miniscule.

*One more word about this post before I get to the actual advice: I believe that sometimes one can over-prepare before embarking on an adventure. Sometimes we plan and prepare so much that we feel obligated to take the path we planned rather than the one fate seems to want us to follow. So I offer this advice with some reluctance as I feel that “learning on one’s own” is one of the greatest joys of doing anything. But sometimes one needs a push, or someone to say “It’s possible; you can do it.” So this post is my way of saying “It’s possible; you can do it.”

**Okay, one more word. This post would more accurately be titled “How to long-distance hitchhike through the U.S. and Canada” because I know nothing about hitching elsewhere. If you plan on hhing through Europe or South America or anywhere other than English-speaking North America, I strongly suggest getting advice elsewhere.

I’ve asked many of my drivers, out of curiosity, “Why did you pick me up?” The advice I give below is based entirely on the answers they gave in addition to the tactics I used that contributed most to my success.

Is hitchhiking easy?

Yes. Very much so. I went on a 5,500 hitchhike (hh) from Alaska to New York in 2007 in fourteen days, and 2,500 miles from Mississippi to New York with my then-girlfriend in 2008 in 25 days (we were in no hurry). I’d posit that anybody can hitch a ride, but, like anything else, it gets easier the more you do it.

Where should I hitch rides?

Firstly, you want to do it in relatively safe places, like a thruway rest stop, a thruway entrance ramp, or on a highway just outside of town. You want to be in a place where you’ll feel safe even if you don’t get a ride by nightfall. In other words, you don’t want to be close to a city, where there are little to no places to camp.

It’s crucial that you pick a place where:

(1) The driver is going slow enough to see your sign [ideally less than 30 mph], and

(2) the driver has plenty of space to comfortably pull over going at that speed.

(Drivers, of course, are going very slow on ramps and at rest stops.) Just after a stop light at the end of a town or city is also a good place because, at that red light, they will be able to see your sign and get a good look at you, affording them a moment to contemplate picking you up.

Should I use my thumb or sign?

I’ve used my thumb only once or twice. I’ve been told and I’ve discovered that it takes a lot longer to get a ride using only your thumb. Instead, I strongly encourage using a sign. A sign communicates a couple things to your driver: it says that you’re not just some aimless drifter, but that you’re going somewhere and that you have a plan and that, because of these things, you’re likely to be more responsible and trustworthy. Plus, when the driver sees the town’s name (“Charleston”), and recognizes that he’s going to or through that town, he’ll be more likely to help because he knows he will be able to help.

How do I make a sign?

Find cardboard. You can get cardboard at any gas station or McDonalds or just about wherever. Just ask someone working there for an old box, and they’ll be happy to give you as much cardboard as you want. Make your signs really effin’ big. Use the whole box. They should be, at minimum, two feet tall and three feet wide. The bigger the better. And your writing should be very big and legible. A black marker will work, but I use crayons because

(1) there is no ink so you won't run out,

(2) the colors are more eye-catching, and

(3) they communicate friendliness to your driver in a way that a black marker can’t.

Always think about your driver. To pick you up, he needs to see

(1) where you’re going based on your sign, and

(2) he needs to get the impression that—from the looks of you—you won’t kill or harm him. So having a big legible sign makes things easier for him.

What town/direction should I make my sign out to?

There is a complex art to this, which you’ll learn by trial, error, and common sense. If you’re going 1,000 miles in one direction, sometimes it’s a lot easier to use one directional sign (“north”) over and over again, rather than making a new one for every next town on the map (“Charleston”). Drivers, sometimes, will not like the ambiguous nature of a directional sign; they might be more likely to pick you up if they recognize the town written on your sign.

If you’ve been stranded on the side of the road for an unreasonably long time, it might have a lot to do with what you’ve written on your sign. (Always have an extra square of cardboard.) On my hh from Alaska to New York, it would have looked ridiculous to put “New York” when in Tok, Alaska. (I put “Whitehorse”—the next big town—instead.) If I wrote “New York,” drivers will either think I’m crazy or that there’s no point in picking me up since they aren’t going nearly that far. In cases like these, you’re better off writing down the name of the next big town.

What should I take with me?

Firstly, you must learn a little bit about where you’re going. If you’re headed to Fairbanks, Alaska in October, you must prepare for very cold weather. If you’re going to Seattle, you better have a poncho and a pack cover. I’d recommend checking out the average “low temperature” for the coldest place you’re going at that point in the year, subtract 10 degrees from it and then make sure you have the gear to survive that. (And presume there will be freezing rain at the same time.) If you prepare for the worst, you’ll be fine.

It is good to have a pack with you. If you’re hitching without a pack, drivers will think you’re some aimless, pathless drifter and be less likely to pick you up. (Several drivers have mentioned this to me.) And a pack, of course, will help you prepare for a variety of situations.

Think of hhing cross-country as just a really long camping trip. Obviously, where you’re going—whether it’s hot or cold, or wet or dry—will alter the contents of your pack, but, if I were heading up to Alaska in the summer, I’d carry the following:

Clothes:

Gloves

Winter hat

Baseball cap

2 pairs of pants (jeans/khakis)

2 nice shirts (button up or polo)

2 white tees

Set of long johns or polypro

Jacket

Rain suit

3 pairs of underwear

3 pairs of wool socks

Boots or sneakers

Gear:

Water bottle

Backpacking stove

Propane canister

Tent

Sleeping bag

Tarp (at least 6x8 ft)

pocket knife

headlamp

lighter/matches

cell phone

weapon

industrial garbage bag (to cover your pack in the case of rain and if you don’t have a proper pack cover)

Toiletries:

Soap

Shampoo

Razor and shaving cream

Toothbrush and toothpaste

Deodorant

Misc:

Maps of places you’re going (absolutely essential)

Book for reading

Camera

Crayola crayons

Journal

Wallet with $200

Passport

Food (two or three day’s worth):

Noodles

Breads

Nuts

Granola, etc. etc.

What should I wear?

If you want to get an office job, you’re going to have to show up at the interview in a suit and tie. If you want to hitch rides, you may, similarly, need to acquiesce to the requirements of your driver. That means you gotta dress up a bit.

I make sure all my clothes are clean and reasonably unwrinkled. I tuck my shirt into my pants, and wear nice shirts like polos and button ups. Remember: you want to look innocent and harmless. Of course if you’re in a hippyish community where tattoos and piercings and smelly armpits are the norm, you’ll have no problem getting a ride, regardless of the cleanliness of your garb. But good luck getting a ride in the Midwest.

There are plenty of places to wash up along the way. Motels will sometimes let you pay just a couple bucks for a shower. You can also buy a shower at truck stops. If you’re clean and smell okay, not only are you more likely to get a ride, but the driver will be more likely to give you a longer one.

How can I better my chances of getting a ride?

Again, you want to look innocent and harmless. You can get a ride by sitting on your pack with your sign, but I think you’re better off standing since it’ll make you look less tired and lazy. Always think of your posture. And be sure to look pleasant. You don’t have to smile, but whatever you do, don’t look bored or angry or sad or frustrated. I’d say try to look somewhere in between neutral and happy.

Prepare to be frustrated. Hundreds of cars will pass you without so much as looking at you. But never show your frustration by kicking the ground or swearing or anything that might communicate anger to passing drivers. (In many cases, drivers who saw me turned around after going up the road a bit, only to come back and pick me up. If I had in some way expressed resentment over their initial snub, and they saw it, they never would have turned around.)

Is hitchhiking fun?

God no. Well, sometimes. Realize that, at times, you will have to sit or stand on the side of the road for 12 to 24 hours, sometimes in miserable weather. This is of course extremely boring and tedious and frustrating. Though, it’s arguable that it’s all worth it when someone finally pulls over.

How long should I expect to wait?

This is hugely dependent on two things:

(1) The town/state you’re hitching in and

(2) luck.

In many areas of the country, hitchhiking is still fairly commonplace. In Washington state, I rarely had to wait more than 20 minutes, but in places like Florida or Connecticut—where it’s not so common—I waited more than two hours for a ride. The most I ever waited was 12 hours in a town in the Yukon Territories; the least was less than a minute, both in British Columbia and Vermont. Ultimately, though, I think you can expect to wait 30 minutes to two hours.

How much money should I bring?

If you’re making your own food and sleeping in a tent, you don’t need much. I wouldn’t bring more than $200, plus a debit card. Even though no one has ever tried to rob me, I think it’s helpful to presume that someone will. This way, you won’t bring expensive items like iPhones and laptops and worry about them the whole time.

Do drivers expect anything in return?

No. If they need money, they’ll ask up front. (These are usually the rides I turn down, anyway.) Most drivers only wish to experience the joy of helping someone and the pleasure of having a captive listener. So be thankful—and be sure to play up how much they’re helping you—and be a great listener. I’ve extended many rides by being interested in their life stories (either genuinely or not).

Many times I’ve bought my drivers meals if they picked me up when I was standing in miserable weather or if they took me a far distance or if they went out of their way to drop me off somewhere. This is not required, but it always made me feel better about taking the ride.

Is hhing dangerous?

I think, in general, the level of fear and paranoia most Americans experience is not in accord whatsoever with the actual level of danger out there. In other words, our nation (and hhing) is safer than most perceive it to be. That said, there are still risks of course. When you get in someone else’s vehicle, your driver can easily, say, pull out a knife or gun and make you give him your money or do stuff you don’t want to do. (This never happened to me, but it’s worth considering.)

To decrease the chances of this, do the following:

1. hh in places where there are lots of passing cars (rest stop), which will make a would-be bad guy less likely to screw with you in open view.

2. Don’t hh at night. No one wants to pick someone up at night anyway.

3. Trust your gut instinct. Have a short conversation with your driver before getting in. Ask where he’s going. You only have a split second to determine if he’s a good guy or not. If he even, in the slightest way, gives you the willies, do not get in. (I’ve turned down maybe half a dozen rides because of this.) Just say “No thanks” or that “I’m actually going a lot farther than that” and they won’t be offended. If you have below-average “people reading” skills, don’t hitchhike at all.

Is it dangerous for women?

I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say it’s dangerous for women, but it’s certainly more dangerous for women than it is for men. It should be noted that most drivers are males, either for male or female hitchhikers.

I once hhed with my then-girlfriend for 25 days and we didn’t have any problems, but a couple passing drivers made lewd sexual gestures at her, so if she were alone, such and such a person could very well have been her driver.

While hhing solo is certainly possible, to ensure safety, it would be ideal to travel with a partner (male or female), and I’d strongly suggest carrying an easily accessible knife or can of mace. Also, it helps to call someone or text someone in front of the driver while on the drive, which will also deter crime.

When should I decline a ride?

You should obviously decline a ride if, as mentioned above, you're at all creeped out by your would-be driver, but there are other reasons to do so as well. And this is where the "art" of hitching rides comes in because sometimes—to get where you're going as quickly as possible—it's better to stay put rather than taking a ride.

Consider the following situation: You're on the outskirts of a hippyish town accepting of hitchhikers. The place where you're standing is safe and a large number of vehicles are heading in your direction. There's plenty of room for them to pull over. In other words, you're in the perfect spot to hitch a ride. If someone pulls over and offers to take you six miles when you're trying to go 300, you might be better off declining the ride and waiting for a longer one. You can get dropped off—at this place six miles up the road—and it can potentially be the worst spot to hitch rides out of. In other words, if you know you're going to get plenty of offers, wait for an ideal one, because willing drivers may be few and far between elsewhere.

Where should I sleep?

I carry a tent with me. In many towns—in Northwest U.S., Alaska, or Western Canada—I set up my tent in open view of the road, and felt safe doing it. There are still lots of places where sleeping on the side of the road in a semi or RV or tent is normal and safe. Of course, in other places, it’s weird, and it will give cops cause to harass you. In these cases, you can slip into the woods where you and your tent will be concealed. (Near thruways, there are always woods.)

If you’re stuck in the city, I’d splurge on a hostel or try to find a church or homeless shelter, or even call the cops before trying to sleep in really sketchy places.

What about hhing with groups of people?

It’s easy to hh as a solo male or solo female, or as a male and female couple, or as a female and female duo. But any other combo, I’d guess, would be far more difficult (like two or more males.) Between the people and gear, many drivers won’t have the room to support three hitchhikers. And there’s a certain risk with picking up two males since the driver knows he could be overpowered if the occasion called for it.

What are some other ways to get rides?

You can always ask for rides at truck stops and whatnot. If you’ve been stuck for a while, it might make it a lot easier to offer to pay for his coffee or meal.

Is hhing illegal?

Yes. In many places it is. Hitchhiking is not exactly—from what I know—wholly prohibited in any one state, but there are many places in those states where it is. For instance, hitching on thruways is illegal almost everywhere, except Oregon I think. (However, hitching on thruway entrance ramps is legal in most places.)

I’ve been approached by cops in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and New York among others—and have been told by all these cops that hhing is illegal and that I can’t be doing this—BUT they almost always let me go and wish me well.

How should I deal with cops?

Kindness and honesty go a long way. Be sure to have an ID to give them so they can run your name through their system. When they realize that you’re clean, you’re usually good to go. If they tell you hhing is illegal, act surprised and be apologetic, and tell them you’ll never hh here again (which will probably be true). Most times they don’t mind too much since they know that, in an hour, you’ll likely be out of their district.

If they’re adamant about you not hhing there, tell them that you’ll find another way or that you’ll walk. (There are no anti-walking laws (except on thruways and some highways)). And once you’re a good ways away from them, you can probably pull out your sign and hitch a ride before the next cop finds you.

Should I hitch on a highway or thruway?

If you’re going for speed, definitely the thruway. You can probably cross the country in under three days if you’re lucky. If you're going for culture, use the highways and seldom-used country roads.

Is it possible to hitchhike in a city or town?

I wouldn’t even bother trying. Go to the very edge of town, where there’s less traffic, and the only traffic is outgoing traffic. If in a city, take a bus or train to the farthest suburb or country town where hitching rides and finding safe places to camp will be easier.

At what time of day should I stop hitching rides?

The last thing you want is to get a ride at dusk and then get dropped off somewhere at night. You want to set up your camping site well before the sun drops, so you can identify safe and concealed places. Obviously “nighttime” depends on the place and time of year, but, in general, just don’t put yourself in a situation in which you need to set up camp in a dark, unknown place.

Any last words of advice?

You’ll never learn exactly how to do it until you, yourself, go out and do it. So don’t worry if you’re not 100% prepared. After all, you can’t have an adventure without the unknown. At the very least, just carry enough clothes to stay warm and dry and you’ll more than likely be fine.

***

If you have advice of your own (or disagree with any of mine), please feel free to comment in the comment section. If you have other questions, please ask away, so I can update and expand this FAQ.

Film Review: “Default: The Student Loan Documentary”

2011-06-16T05:05:00.004-04:00

God… Student debt pisses me off like nothing else. That millions of young students have to go into massive debt so that they may become competent and functional citizens is just astoundingly stupid and bizarre.

Default, a documentary that will air on PBS sometime in the near future, chronicles the stories of a half-dozen or so students and their experiences with debt. These people have debts of galactic proportions, yet none of them are dumb. Just as I was when I was 18, they were young and hopeful, but ignorant and deluded. They have been taken advantage of by corporate interests and left to dry by the government.

Who benefits from student loan debt? The private student loan companies of course.

Because we can’t declare bankruptcy on student loans, these companies have no reason to be cautious about giving out loans. That means: If you get sick, you still have to pay your loan. If you can’t get a job, you still have to pay your loan. In fact, it’s good for them if you can’t pay back your loan. If you go into forbearance (when you momentarily put a halt to your loan payments), interest causes your debt to keep growing and growing and growing. The more money you owe, the more money they get.

In the documentary, one woman owed $35,000 and paid back $26,000 of it. Yet, because she went into forbearance, she still owes $57,000. Another guy, who had a $46,000 loan, owes $122,000.

Couple thoughts generated by the film:

1. I think we need personal finance education in high schools. Of course this wouldn’t be as necessary if we had a better consumer protection agency—one that wouldn’t allow credit card companies and for-profit colleges to prey on unknowing young people—but until then I think a lot can be gained from a high school personal finance education. Just as “health class” is required in many high schools—covering topics like STDs, contraception, and the consequences of drugs—students should also learn what interest is, how much college will really cost them, and about sobering job placement statistics. (I didn’t learn any of this when I was a high school senior—how could I if no one taught me?)

2. The film supports a movement to forgive all student loans ($700 billion), which I think is actually $900 billion now. I don’t know how I feel about this. Of course it’s unlikely that they can get Congress to pass such a measure, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. But is it the right thing to do? A lot of students have been taken advantage of and mislead, but should all students—those with reasonable debts and those who are in debt largely because of profligate decision-making—be relieved of their debts too? While it would be great if all debts vanished, might such actions encourage even more fiscal irresponsibility, knowing that the government will bail you out whenever you need it?

3. I was able to pay back my $32,000 loan so quickly partly because my mother put my whole high-interest private loan (something like $18,000 of my debt) on her credit card. (She had perfect credit so there’d be no interest accumulation.) I simply paid her back and didn’t have to deal with increases due to interest. If other people had this option, they could pay off their debts much more quickly. How ‘bout if interest is made to fluctuate based on how quickly the debtor is paying off his debt? As an incentive to pay it off quickly, the interest could, say, drop from 6% to 1% if you’re doubling your payments. If you’re paying it off slowly, perhaps it should stay at its normal level to encourage you to speed up.

***

Anyway, Default is a timely documentary, and one that should be shown to all high school students before they make the five-digit decisions that may wildly alter the course of their lives.

Check out their website here for info: defaultmovie.com I recommend joining their Facebook page; every day they put up stories related to school and student debt.

The bus

2011-06-15T04:24:00.005-04:00

Last week, with friend and photographer Josh Spice, I hiked to Bus 142 on the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska. This is the site of Chris McCandless's death.

Josh took over 900 photos and I'm dying to write up a travel narrative and post his pictures, but I've decided to pitch the article idea to an outdoors magazine. Here are a couple shots of the bus.

Fox and porcupine

2011-06-13T04:07:00.004-04:00

On a drive up the Dalton Highway, just above tree line, near Chandalar Shelf, I came across five very curious and unafraid fox pups who posed for me for nearly five minutes.

At the Coldfoot airstrip, I came across this porcupine which appears to be missing half of his quills on his back, perhaps due to a skirmish with a predator.

Radio Interview

2011-06-10T04:13:00.004-04:00

I did an interview with NPR Buffalo a week ago, which you can read about and listen to here.