What's it like to be $200K in debt? (Interview with Kelli Space)

In May 2009, 23-year-old Kelly Space graduated with a top-notch education from Northeastern University. And a degree in sociology. And, uh, $200,000 in student loans.

How did an intelligent, responsible young woman find herself in an impossible situation with a humungous debt and an unmarketable degree? I’ll get to that, but first let me breakdown some of the financial particulars….

-Northeastern tuition cost $30,000/year. Room and board was an additional $10-15,000/year.

-To pay for it, Kelli took out $163,000 in student loans.

-While in school, the interest accrued, so by the time Kelli graduated, the debt was $200,000.

-Kelli owes $11,000 in low-interest government loans and $189,000 in a multitude of private loans, some of which have interest rates as high as 9 percent.

-After graduating, she entered into a two-year program in which her monthly bills were momentarily reduced to $900/month. At the end of this program, she will owe $1,656/month.

I spoke with Kelly about a year ago (and never got around to transcribing our interview till now). At that point, she was still in the midst of her “fifteen minutes of fame,” which began when she asked for donations on Gawker. The response to her plea was mostly negative, with commentators claiming she was begging for handouts and not taking responsibility for her actions, even though she’d been working 60 hours a week, residing at her parents’ home, and living a frugal, barebones lifestyle—and despite all the sacrifices and hard work—hardly putting a dent in her debt.

What’s remarkable about Kelli is just how unremarkable her situation is. Like her, many students find themselves caught in a perfect storm of bad counseling, poor financial education, and blind hope.

KI: Forgive me for putting the question this way, but I think a lot of people are wondering the same thing. So… ummm… What the hell were you thinking?

KS: I was thinking that I’d get a really good education. Everyone always asks me, ‘Didn’t you know [how much you were going to have to pay back] when you were going to school?’ And the answer to that is ‘Yes, of course.’ But I don’t think I understood the gravity and the enormity of that number. [A high school student] thinks it’s normal to borrow when everyone borrows money to go to school. To a lot of people, this sounds like an excuse, but honestly, if you’re not taught something, how are you supposed to know?

Were you at all “financially aware” before you attended college?

In high school, you don’t learn personal finance. You hardly learn about economics. I think that’s a huge issue. I don’t think I was stupid. You only know what you’re taught. I thought I was doing the right thing.

How should we educate young people so they don’t make the same mistake?

I think it’s so necessary [that we educate them]. If we’re going to teach kids geometry and English, why shouldn’t we teach them [personal finance], which will affect their lives directly?

What made you want to get into the best school you could get into, no matter the cost?

My parents expected me to go to college. It wasn’t expected of them. I had blinders on. It was only [college] that I could see at the end of my tunnel. During my high school sophomore year, my history teacher told us, 'The one requirement I have of you guys is that you go away to school. Don’t live at home.' Stuff like that was instilled in me over and over. [It was all about] going away and having this adult life starting at age 18 at the best possible place you can get this education and get the best career. There was no talk of money.

In college, when did it hit you, when you thought, “wow, I have all this money to pay off?”

My first year, I was loving being away from home. In my sophomore year, it started to hit me a little bit. ‘How am I going to do this?’ I knew I needed to sit down and figure out how what kind of jobs I could get and what I should do after graduation to ensure that I got the highest paying job. I was more optimistic than anything. Junior year, it got a little worse. The recession hit, and I thought, ‘The last thing I need is to graduate in a terrible economy and not get a job with all this debt.’ 

You've been paying it off for a little over a year now. Has the debt gotten any smaller?

At first, when I made a payment, the number didn’t move at all. I was just paying interest basically.

How awful. ::sympathetic laughter::

Yeah, it’s so depressing. ::laughs::. In October—when I was like, 'oh no, I only have 13 more months of these low payments.' Low! They’re $900 a month! ::more laughter:: And soon I’ll have to start paying $1,600 a month. Nothing says depression like putting $1,000 toward a loan payment and not seeing the debt decrease at all. Or even if you see it go down a little bit, the interest shoots it right back up. It’s just so depressing. So when I got some contributions, it was just such a great day to see that number go down.

Has the debt affected your personal life?

The depression has gotten increasingly worse since graduation. I don’t think it’s affecting my job, but I do think it’s affecting my relationship with friends and family. All I can think about is my debt. It’s just such a burden. My posture… If you saw me standing… I can’t stand up straight. It just feels so heavy. I’m constantly upset. It’s so overwhelming. 

Do you think it’ll affect your decision to have a family (if that’s something you want)?

There’s too much of a wall in front of my face to see the future. If I still have this debt in 10 years, in 15 years—which I’m hoping I don’t—I don’t think I’ll have a family. I don’t think I’ll be married.

I’m okay with sitting at home. I’m okay with not spending my money. I’m okay with putting all my money toward my debt. Yet it doesn’t feel like the debt is coming down at all. It just feels like I’m giving, giving, giving to this debt. I’m making all these sacrifices for it. But there’s no positive result yielding yet.

When do you think you’ll be out of debt?

This is something I need to be clear of before I can move on, be happy, and do things for other people. I don’t know exactly when I’ll be out of debt, but I definitely know it will not be 25 years from now. It’s going to be sooner than that.

What would you say to an 18-year-old girl who wants to go to the best school she could get into, regardless of the cost?

I dream of this. I’d tell her that she should start off at a community college for a year or two. Get credits and good grades, and reapply to these great schools she wants to go to. Maybe she’ll get more scholarship money. Maybe she’ll be able to save up money so she doesn’t have to take out any loans. I think those two years in community college—and maybe two years just working—would give you such a different perspective.

[The other day I asked Kelli about her progress. Her debt is down to $140,000 and she expects it to be as low as $120,000 by June. She’s working in the legal department of a large media company and has moved out of her home and into a $500/month apartment just outside of NYC. She has raised $12,000 on her site, on which she calls for better youth financial education and is trying to raise awareness about student debt. You can follow her on Twitter here, or buy what's left of her possessions on sale here.] 

A walk across Stokes County

I have friends editing the book at the moment, so--to stretch my legs--I took two days to hike the 28-mile Sauratown Trail that spans across Stokes County, North Carolina. I started at Pilot Mountain in Surry County in the west and finished in Hanging Rock State Park in the east.

One of the most iconic features of all of North Carolina is Pilot Mountain, a tree-topped teat jutting from the round udder of the Piedmont. The mountain is a 2,421-foot tall "metamorphic quartzite monadnock," also referred to as "Mount Pilot" in The Andy Griffith Show, which was set in the fictional town of Mayberry.

Stokes County, abutting the southern border of Virginia, is home to 47,401 residents who live in small villages and along country roads. The county formed in 1789, and was named after a Revolutionary War captain, John Stokes. For decades, the county residents were involved in the mining, iron-making, and tobacco-farming industries, but around 1850, Stokes began to develop into a "resort town." Affluent visitors from Winston-Salem would travel to Stokes to stay at one of three grandiose, Shining-like hotels nestled in the Sauratown Mountains, where European orchestras would entertain.


The hotels burnt down long ago, and Stokes, today--without a flagship industry--seems to be suffering from a mild identity crisis. Much of the rolling farmland has gone fallow, and the old barns--careening green-bearded Pisas--have been left to rot. There are hideous chain restaurants in the towns, ruthless crystal meth murders, and obese kids who have calves as meaty and round as roast chickens. The place just feels old and forgotten, but that's not entirely a bad thing. There is a silver lining to neglect and disinterest. The woods still grow tall and green, the streams run wild and clear, and the farmland is some of the most glorious scenery I've ever set eyes on.

While most of the Sauratown Trail goes through forest, a great deal of it leads the hiker over private farmland. While there are, no doubt, benefits to immersing yourself in wild man-less, machine-less country for days or weeks on end, leaving the trees for a short sojourn on bucolic farmland is always a treat for the eyes. It is just one of those timeless complementary combinations of pleasure: wine and cheese, milk and cereal, beer and pretzels; if there is anything that makes you want to plod on, it's a variegated landscape.

A good portion of the trail takes the hiker down backwoods country roads.



Pine and poplar forest.

Lots of holly, mountain laurel, and rhododendrons in some of the lower, shadier elevations.

Hanging Rock is in the distance.

The cave below is called "Torey's Den." During the Revolutionary War, there were several skirmishes in the area between the American patriots (called the Whigs) and the British loyalists (called the Tories). In one such skirmish, a gang of Tories, who had been removed from their land, stole provisions from (and allegedly the daughter of) Colonel Martin, a Whig leader. About 100 Tories were hiding in this cave. None escaped Colonel Martin's wrath.

Weekly quote: On voluntary poverty

“One gains by losing and loses by gaining.” – Tao Te Ching, 6th century BC

“Themistocles, when asked whether he would marry his daughter to a good poor man, or to a rich man of less respectable character, replied, ‘I, indeed, prefer the man who lacks money to the money that lacks a man.'” – Cicero, 106 BC - 43 BC

“Perhaps I am more than unusually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting a living.” – Thoreau, 1817-1862

“Practice poverty of spirit in the midst of riches, practice richness of spirit in real poverty.”  – St. Francois de Sales, 1567-1622

[All passages taken from the wonderful book of quotes, Less is More.]

How to make shiitake mushroom logs

Last year, I inoculated two oak trees with shitake mushroom spawn. For the longest time I thought I didn't do it correctly because the logs, after almost a year, had yet to bear any mushrooms.

That all changed last month when they started producing. We've stir-fried a couple of them and they were delicious.

Please don't consider the video "expert advice," as those were just my first logs. We bought our spawns from Maine. You can find additional advice here.

New Look

I figured it was about time that I spruced up the old blog. If just for the different colors, I liked the above picture (that's Duke Chapel in the background), but I never liked the name "The Spartan Student." I thought it was a touch too self-promotional and I was always a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Plus, I haven't  been "poor" or "desperate" for a long time. And I'm more frequently pitching articles to magazines, so I desired a more professional look. The old look had to go.

I guess I need some sort of new title for this blog because my Duke years are over and my life is headed in a new direction. What that direction is, I'm not exactly sure, which is why I'm struggling to think of the proper words to capture the blog's themes. (The new picture above is me standing on an unnamed mountain in the Brooks Range next to Walker Lake. It was taken by my ranger-friend, Adam.)

A couple other housekeeping notes:

- My new domain name is www.kenilgunas.com. You can access the blog by using this new address, or my old one (spartanstudent.blogspot.com). (PS: If you're thinking of starting a blog, I can't say enough good things about Blogger/Blogspot; they've really made it easy for the average person to make a decent looking website. Plus, the new domain name will only cost me $10/year.)

- I liked the narrow text columns I had in the old blog template (because I thought it made for some easy-on-the-eyes reading), but these new wider columns permit me to post really big pictures, which is a feature I'm excited about. If you there's anything about my new format that you find disagreeable, please email me or post a comment and I'll see what I can do.

- In an effort to post more than once a week (which is a rate I clearly haven't been able to maintain lately), I think I might do a "weekly quote" post. I have 162 single-spaced pages of interesting quotes/passages I've written down over the years--many of which aren't to be found on the Internet. I thought such a weekly post would be an easy way for me to bring a little more activity to this blog; my life hasn't been incredibly blog-post-worthy of late because I've been doing little more than book-editing for the past many months. Perhaps I need to find new ways to compensate.

- Anyway, thanks again for your readership. The comments and emails and well wishes are always encouraging. I never would have thought that I'd still be "blogging" after three years, but it's been incredibly fulfilling.

To get a book deal (Part 2 of 2)

[This is Part 2 of a two-part series. For Part 1, click here.]


A tough decision (August 2011)

“Does any other agent have this?”

Ahhahahah! I loved that question. I read it over and over again, smiling and laughing to myself. This email was written by someone who WANTS ME. This was the first time in a long time when someone in a position of power recognized that the book had potential.

Was I surprised? Of course. But just a little. Deep down, I knew the book was good. Well, maybe it wasn’t good quite yet, but I knew that it would be good.

But to answer her question, yes, anther agency did have the proposal in their hands.

My friend JanaLee hooked me up with a small, two-person, mom and pop agency. (Let’s call them mom and pop.) While mom and pop had represented a few impressive clients—a Nobel Prize winner for instance—they were a small website-less, two-person agency. When I talked to them on the phone, they were laid back and casual. Picking up a new writer to them seemed as ordinary as picking up the morning paper. But now that I had options, I didn’t want to be “picked up.”

I wanted to be seduced.

The seductive agency (let’s call them Agency A) was passionate, sending me emails and setting up multiple phone conferences. (This is the agency that sent me a couple emails including the “Does any other agent have this” line.) And while they called themselves “small,” they had a host of clients, several of whom won awards and were New York Times Bestsellers.

One of the co-owners of Agency A insinuated that my book could be “big.” He threw around writers names like mega-bestseller Tim Ferriss, hinting that my book could achieve similar success. He was a bit pushy, though, telling me that I was merely “molting” as a writer, and that I needed to rewrite the book with a completely different structure. He wanted it to be a “how-to,” with tables and charts and such. I didn’t know anything about writing a “how-to,” and while I had nothing against how-to’s, I just didn’t think that was my style.

An editor at Agency A—detecting my reluctance—sent me an impassioned email:

“So I just had a long conversation about your book with my graduate assistant, a widely-read guy with an outlook similar to yours, and it really helped me crystallize some of what I was thinking about yesterday.

  

“What I find so arresting and relatable about your story is that you are not, by your own admission, a renaissance man, championing an abstract philosophy or living a life that is unreachably extraordinary. You are someone anyone could, or can, become under the pressures of financial burden. It’s, as my assistant said when he first pulled your proposal from the unsolicited pile, a reasonable and coolly calculated answer to a question that young people have asked and will ask for decades: Can I live the way I want to live, and have a life full of growth, learning, and adventure, without having to capitulate my values to social and financial pressures?

“If you took that structure and filled it with nail-on-the head particulars—exuberance in the most concrete little bits of experience you had along the way—the end result would be something practical AND satisfying AND NYC-commercial.”

They were passionate. They were big. And they were promising big things if I did it their way…

Mom and pop, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care how I wrote it. Plus, they offered free book editing, which is a service basically unheard of among literary agencies. Plus, they were just really nice; I knew that they weren't the type who’d let me agonize over an unanswered email for months on end.

With much reluctance, hesitation, and second-guessing, I turned down Agency A.

I wanted to write the book my way. I went with mom and pop.

Proposal submission (November 2011)

After I selected an agency, I edited the manuscript and revised the proposal. I fixed up the sample chapter, created a “comparable books” section, described my core audience, and touched up my overview. The document, now, was well over 100 pages. I thought it was looking pretty good.

We had to wait till November to submit it because there are only a few times over the course of a year when a publishing company is able to approve new projects.

Once we put some last touches on the proposal, my agent submitted it to editors at 17 big-time publishing companies, the names of which most any casual reader would be able to recognize.  

How was I feeling when my agent submitted the proposals? I was excited. Optimistic, even. We couldn’t have picked a better time. Because of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, student debt was suddenly at the forefront of the national consciousness. My book dealt with a lot of issues facing the indebted demographic. And while there were books about debt—I couldn’t find one narrative about someone actually getting out of debt. It was timely. It was relevant. It was inspirational! Millions will want to read it!

But I’d been rejected from school and internships and girls enough to know not to go my hopes up. After all, there was the possibility of getting rejected across the board. I didn’t have a backup plan, so if the book was rejected, I figured I’d just call it quits and buy a ticket to Europe or Asia or South America or some continent I’d never visited.

First responses

The following responses came from editors at various publishing companies. I’m keeping their names and the company’s names anonymous out of courtesy:

1) Although this story does sound interesting I'm afraid the amount of publicity he did after the Salon article scares me off. I think it would be a real impediment to getting (repeat) publicity for the book. Of course, this is just one editor's opinion; maybe another will be less skittish and more bullish about this.

Okay, I thought, no biggie. She didn’t say anything about the writing being crappy or anything. In fact, she said it was "interesting." She just figured there was a publicity technicality.

2)  Interesting story, but as luck would have it, I just passed on a student debt book the other day. Our sense is that these kinds of books are difficult to sell because there’s so much advice on reducing student debt on the internet for free.  And even though Ken has a decidedly different slant on this, I just have a sense it would be difficult to get out big numbers.

Okay, no big deal. He thought it was interesting, too. 0 for 2, but not a bad 0 for 2. 

3) Ken is a delightful writer, and an inspiration to anybody who has ever despaired at their own personal student debt, but I’m afraid this project isn’t quite right for us. This is more of a personal memoir than it is an examination of the debt crisis, and I don’t think we’d be well-positioned to publish this effectively. Thanks very much for the chance to read!

“Delightful writer.” Now that’s what I’m talking about. It seemed like he liked the idea, but his company didn’t appear to be into memoirs. I shouldn’t take this one personally.

4) He has a terrific voice indeed and is quite a lively writer.  I enjoyed these pages very much and it couldn’t have a more timely resonance.  I regret, however, that I just couldn’t see a way for us to break this out at a larger level.  Thank you again for thinking of me; I know you’ll find a great home for this.

“Terrific voice?” “Delightful writer?” What’s the problem, here??

5) Ken Ilgunas is a very winning guy and has a story that certainly tracks the political/economic moment. However, I didn’t find the writing terribly strong.

Oh, Jesus, this is going to be painful.

6) It rests somewhere between a full bodied memoir and a truly practical guide for students and graduates, not quite either one. I liked Ken on the page, but I found him a little too earnest and lacking in fresh insight at book length.

Earnest? I'm not sure I'd say I’m earnest, but what’s wrong with being earnest? Must all writers be sarcastic and cool and hip and ironic?

7) I wish the writing were stronger—it’s perfectly fine, but because the premise is so quirky, I think the writing might need to be a notch more distinctive.  (I did stop reading it somewhere along the way, feeling I got the gist….)  Let me take another look and consult with my colleague, who was interested in the subject from a generational perspective.  I’m glad you checked in, since I read it right after you sent it and am now a bit foggy about it.

Oh god, not another “strong writing” comment.

8) Unfortunately we don’t think it’s quite right for us, in part because the writing isn’t as strong as I would have liked it to be, but also because as all of the younger readers commented to me, they’ve got much more debt than the range that he’s writing about and his solutions wouldn’t really come close to helping them to pay it off. So they felt his story was largely irrelevant for them.  I’ve got to listen to that, as they’re right in the core potential readership.

Conference Call

And suddenly, I became numb. As the rejections continued to trebuchet into my inbox, I’d become a diligent mason, erecting mile-high stone walls around my brittle, defenseless psyche.

This was it. This was my writing “career.” I’d been writing on a semi-professional basis since 2004. In eight years, I’d gotten paid something like $2,000 for all my work. How much longer am I going to write for pocket change? It’s not like I had another book idea in the back of my mind. If I can’t sell a book about student debt when EVERYONE is in debt, then what can I sell? If I can’t sell a story about a dude secretly living in his goddamned van, then, well, I simply don’t have what it takes.

Frankly I thought I was sitting on a pot of gold when everyone else just thought I was taking a dump. What must I do to show these New York City-ites that this was going to be a good book?

I was numb. I could neither feel gloom nor hope—just a steady nothing mixed in with a dash of dread.  So when one publishing company showed interest, my reaction could best be described as “meh.”

My agents and I had a conference call with that company’s editor. He seemed really enthusiastic. He said he once built a canoe. He said he had wondered why we all go into debt. He got it. Finally, someone fucking got it! But I was still so numb and detached—I would not let my hopes get up again.

Amid the rejections, there were a couple more publishing companies that showed interest. Okay, I might have a chance, I thought.

After the proposal had been in publishers’ hands for a few weeks, my agent told all others who hadn’t responded that they had to make their decision soon. He set a specific day.

Game day (December 2011)

I think we are most content in our working lives when we play a useful role, especially when this role is in accord with our passions, and when it provides us with an arena where we can exercise our unique abilities. We feel best about our work when we do something that other people cannot.

Maybe I was merely “molting,” but I wanted writing to be my role. I was happy writing for myself or for a small (but wonderful) blog audience, but when I’d write for a larger audience, I’d often fall into a “writing nirvana.” I’d forget about everything else. Me and this Microsoft Word document would become one. I’d be so wholeheartedly engaged in the project that I wouldn’t want to check my email or eat or go to bathroom. I just wanted to write; and knowing that these words might make someone laugh or think made the work feel meaningful.  

The happiest year of my life was probably when I was the "arts editor" for my undergraduate school’s newspaper, The Spectrum. I loved writing columns, dreaming up stories for the staff to write, thinking about the layout… It printed three days a week. And at night, before a workday, I couldn’t wait for the morning to come. I'd never felt that way before and I don't think I've ever felt that way since. That’s how much I loved that newspaper and my job. Since then, I’ve known that writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to feel that same sense of anticipation for the morning every night.

So on the day that I was to find out if I got a book deal, I was numb, but I wasn’t so numb that I’d forgotten what was at stake. I just felt powerless. I’d done all that I could do. My fate was in someone else’s hands.

The phone call

My phone rang.

“Hello Ken,” said my literary agent.

“Hi P----.”

“Well, I have news.”

“Okay.”

[There were several companies who were interested in bidding, but I must refrain from divulging specific information.]

“[Unnamed publishing company] has made a bid. What do you think of $-0,000?”

While 15 percent of it would go to the agents, I knew my impoverished days were over for a long time.

While I’d like to say I accepted the news nonchalantly—like a good gentlemen—my response was far from classy.

“ARE YOU SHITTIN’ ME??!! Oh my god. Holy fuck. Holy fuck!”

Some moments when by.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Yes,” my agent said, laughing. “They want to publish your book. Would you like to accept?”

“Ha. Yes, of course.” 

Epilogue

Within a couple days, I had flown to NYC for the afternoon to have a lunch with my agents and my new editor. The following weekend, to celebrate, my pals and I got drunk in my friend Quaz’s basement playing beer pong and flip cup.

I needed to recommence editing, so I moved back down to Acorn Abbey in Stokes County, North Carolina, where I’ve gone over the book 3-4 more times. The van is still here. I had the oil changed and it runs as well as ever.

Currently, the book has 22 chapters and 90,000 words. I’ll be sending it to my editor soon and it should be “done done” within the next few months. It will be available in hardcover and ebook next year, ideally in January of 2013.

I cannot name the publisher quite yet since the contract has yet to be signed, but I’m excited to work with them. It’s a big-name, and one y’all will be able to recognize. I’ll announce it as soon as I can.

While I’ve been avoiding full-time jobs these past many years, I've done so with the hope of setting myself up with a job I really cared about—a job where I’d be happy to work 12 hour days. And now that I have that, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier than I have been these past two months. Every night, I look forward to the morning.

But with the pleasures of having a book deal come the stirrings of anxiety—a good anxiety—but one that will grow and grow and grow as I begin to worry more and more: What if people don’t like it?

To get a book deal (Part 1 of 2)

My cell phone rang.

It was late December 2011. I was in my old room in my parents’ home in Wheatfield, New York. I’d been waiting for this phone call for hours.

Scratch that.

I’d been waiting for this phone call for two whole years.

Scratch that.

I’d been waiting for this phone call for my whole adult life.

The phone call was from my literary agent.

Today was the day he'd receive “bids” from publishing companies that wanted to publish my book. It was uncertain if we’d get several bids or if we’d get any bids at all.

To get to this point, I’d quit my job as a ranger. I’d given up $30,000 in possible paychecks. I was nearly broke and I had no backup plans other than to skip country and roam the world as a wandering bum. I’d put all my eggs in this book deal basket.

“Hi Ken,” he said.

“Hi P----.”

“Well, I have news.”


The Salon piece (December 2009)

The “journey to publish a book” began the day I sent an article about living in a van to an editor at Salon in December 2009. When the Salon editor read it, she immediately sent it to her agent (let’s call him Jerry), who was in the process of selling one of her books.

Like the editor, Jerry instantly recognized the potential in my article. Before my article was even published on the Salon website, I received an email for him, inquiring if I wanted to adapt the article into a book. He offered to represent me.

He wrote: “I do think a book elaborating your Thoreauvian themes would have broad appeal, to publishers and readers alike, and I would love to discuss the possibility of a book with you.”

At that point, I’d known for a long time that I wanted to be a writer. There was nothing complicated about it: I loved writing; I loved doing stuff worth writing about; and I got a kick out of sharing that stuff with other people.

Maybe I didn’t have the talent, but I knew I felt “a calling.” It was writing.

So when Jerry put the idea of a book into my head, I swooned. This was all so wildly surreal. While I’d wanted to write books, I didn’t think anything I’d done quite yet merited a book. This changed everything. Maybe I can write a book about living in a van?

In a matter of 24 hours, I'd went from being an no-name bum living in a parking lot at Duke, who had little professional writing experience, to a bum who could now boast of having a freakishly popular article, an agent, and the real possibility of a book deal.

It was one of the happiest moments of my life.


Creating a proposal (Summer 2010)

The first step in getting a book deal is creating a “book proposal,” which is a large 50-100 page document that contains everything from an overview of the book, a bio, a marketing plan, an annotated table of contents, to a sample chapter. The proposal, once completed, is sent out to various publishing companies. Oftentimes, there are no publishing companies that want to pick it up. This is usually when a book dies. Sometimes, though, one or several publishers will make a bid. This is when a book is born.

After my Salon piece, I spent the rest of the 2010 Spring Semester dreaming about my book. While I didn’t think I had enough material to do a whole 70,000-word book on living in a van (because living in a van is actually quite boring most of the time), I began to think about other possibilities, like if I included a series of flashbacks about my past, when I was paying off my debt in Alaska and other strange places. Maybe I’d have enough material that way?

As summer approached, I had a big decision to make: Do I go back to work in Alaska at my well-paying Park Service job—a job where I got to do cool things, protect wildland, and leave with a solid $15,000? Or do I put everything I have into this book thing?

Because Jerry made me feel pretty confident about getting a book deal, I thought it was worth the risk. I chose the book thing. I moved into David’s abbey in rural North Carolina where I began writing my proposal. I had it my mind that I’d have the proposal finished and a book deal in my hands by summer’s end.


A trip to NYC (August 2010)

As the summer months went by, I began to “see” the narrative arc of my book. I knew where I wanted it to start (the moment I had to begin paying off my student debt), but I wasn’t too sure about when I wanted the book to end. Arbitrarily, I decided to end it after my first semester in the van. It took a lot longer to plan a book out and write a proposal than I'd expected, but I knew it wasn't a big deal if I didn't get a book deal by summer's end. I was still a graduate student at Duke, so my coursework was my #1 priority. I came to Duke to learn, not to earn.

Jerry and I were still emailing each other on a regular basis. While I didn’t think the proposal was done, I wanted to get his thoughts on what I had so far, so I sent the draft to him and—to make this whole book project feel “real”—I took a bus to NYC to meet him.

We met at a deli somewhere in Brooklyn. He was a dapper, 40-year-old man, dressed in a clean pair of slacks and a tight Oxford shirt. I was wearing my best summer wear: an old ratty Coldfoot tee and a decrepit pair of sneakers that should have been thrown out years before.

We talked about the proposal for a while over a plate of sweet potato fries. He said it was a good “first draft,” but I had to work on some things. I needed to develop my characters more. I needed to think more about my narrative arc. I needed to change the tone of the story.

I liked Jerry for his forthrightness. He seemed genuine and smart and well-experienced. A good guy to have in my corner.

I wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about the proposal by conversation’s end, so I asked, “What do you think my chances are?”

“Ken, I'm working with you because I know this will be a book.”

A weight was lifted off my shoulders; my whole body breathed a sigh of relief.


My Liberal Studies Final Project (Spring 2011)

I shelved the book for the 2010 Fall Semester so I could focus on tutoring and studying for my classes. At the end of that semester, I only had to fulfill one more obligation to get my degree: I needed to write my “final project.” I thought this was a grand opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: I could write my book and get my degree if I made my book the final project.

So I moved back into David’s for the semester, where I began writing a 70,000-word book. I still had the same narrative in mind that I’d outlined in the proposal, though I thought the book would work best if I got creative with the chronology, jumping back and forth in time.

It would be about two things: 1) The first was my two-and-a-half-year journey to get out debt. I’d take the reader to places like Coldfoot, on long hitchhikes, a voyage across Ontario, Mississippi, and back up to Alaska at the Gates of the Arctic National Park. It would be an adventure narrative, a travel memoir, always with the goal of getting out of debt in the background. 2) The second part would be my Duke vandwelling experiment, which would be an extension of my get-out-debt journey, but would be more reflective, more stationary, more Thoreauvian.

Jerry and I had stopped corresponding over email, but I figured that that was only because I was focused on school work. Still, though, I was a little concerned.

I emailed him if just to maintain relations and to tell him that the book was coming along.

“I’d love to see whatever you’ve got,” he responded. “The most important thing, of course, is that the proposal is really strong. Keep at it and thanks for the update. I’m here if you have any questions.”

After I thought I finished Chapter One (which I would end up editing and overhauling no less than 100 times), I sent Jerry an excited email, including the chapter.


The drought (March – June 2011)

After I send him that chapter, Jerry stopped responding to my emails. And my phone calls too. I didn’t know what to do. I inferred that Jerry wasn’t emailing me anymore because he didn’t think my writing was good enough.

Of course this was extremely upsetting. Not only was I losing confidence, but I was running out of money, too. Because I hadn’t worked the previous summer and because I wasn’t tutoring anymore and because of a few unexpected van repairs, all of a sudden I was down to $300.

I had some big decisions to make. Should I sell the van for money? Should I work with the Park Service this summer? I was also offered a job in Durham to work for a magazine that would pay in the high $30K’s. Should I take that?

I decided: no, I'm not going to take any of these jobs; I’m going to see this thing through; I’m going to pursue my dream. I have an agent and a good idea for a book, I justified. It was worth the risk. Plus, my writing professor and final project adviser—the wonderful Christina Askounis—told me she thought the book was good, and with enough revising, it might get published. With her and others’ encouragement, I decided that I’d keep working on the book after graduation.

But as my relationship with Jerry regressed, my confidence receded.

It had been two whole months since I sent my chapter to Jerry and I still hadn't received a response. Christina, though, told me not to worry too much. “Agents are notorious for taking longer than they say they will,” she said. “Try not to read too much into it.”

I was worried, though. If anyone could gauge whether or not I could get a book deal, it was a professional agent.

I sent another email to Jerry and left a message on his phone. I finally—finally!—got an email back from him saying he’d read it over the weekend.

And then another two weeks passed with no word from him. My professor reminded me that this was normal and that sometimes it takes agents literally months to get back to writers. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to figure my life out. I decided I’d send one last email. If he didn’t respond—fine—I’ll find a new agent.

Hey Jerry,
With graduation over and having $800 to my name, I'm eager to get the proposal going. Have you had a chance to look it over? If you still would like to work together, please let me know. 
Hope you're well, 
Ken

The agent search (July 2011)

“You have seemed a bit subdued the last few times I've seen you,” my professor wrote. “I suppose that’s to be expected as this part of your life comes to a close, but I couldn’t help wondering if there was something apart from all that weighing on you. Please know that you have a friend in me, and, if you need one, a confidante.”

I was feeling a bit worn down. The process wasn’t going the way I thought it would. I’d lost my agent, and with him, all my confidence. Plus, I didn’t think the book was any good at all. While it was good enough to pass as my final project, I knew it was still far from being a book that someone would buy on a bookshelf.

I was now in Coldfoot, Alaska; I was their “writer in residence.” Everyone was working around me and making money. The park rangers were being sent out on patrols and cashing huge paychecks. Soon, I’d begin guiding part-time, and later, dishwashing in Deadhorse, a sister camp to the north.

I had hoped to have a book deal last summer, yet I wasn't any closer to having one now. I’m running out of money, I’m washing dishes, my life has no direction. I began to pursue a girl that summer, but this loss of confidence was beginning to leak into other parts of my life. I was losing a sense of self-worth; I felt insecure and weak.

I spent almost all of my non-working time revising the proposal. It was far easier to write the proposal now that I’d written my first draft of the book. I knew exactly who my audience was and what I was trying to accomplish. The tone of the book wasn’t serious and meditative as I once wanted it to be; rather, it was light and self-deprecating. It was kind of a Bill Bryson meets Liz Gilbert meets Jon Krakauer (except not nearly as good as any of the above).

I asked Christina—who’s a published author—for advice on finding a new agent. She sent some emails out to her writer friends, and sure enough, I soon had the email addresses of three “good” agents. Meanwhile, my friend JanaLee said she knew some agents, so she let them know about me.

On July 1, 2011, I sent my proposal to three agencies. The first two would never respond. Twelve days later, I received a frantic email from the third:

Hey Ken,

Thanks for submitting this to us. I just wanted to write you to say that my able assistant flagged your submission from our slush pile, and it was best proposal I’ve read in a long, long time. I’ve recommended it to the partners in our agency with an almost hysterically enthusiastic memo that I hope they will heed. 

We are a very small agency that must be extremely selective in our new client intake, and I don’t make final decisions on taking on new clients. They might not feel the same way as I. But I do hope you’ll grant us the privilege of considering your book carefully for the next week or so. Have you submitted this to other agents?

Just minutes later I got another frantic email from the owner of the agency. Her excitement, her sense of urgency, her avarice was palpable:

Reading asap. In touch shortly. Does any other agent have this?


[This is Part 1 of a two-part series. For Part 2, click here.]

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

[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)

[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.