Along with owing $32,000, I’d graduated with an unmarketable degree in history and English. Naturally, I struggled to find work and wound up taking a $9-an-hour job as a tour guide and cook at a remote truck stop called Coldfoot in Alaska’s Arctic. But while I took the job out of desperation, I’d accidentally placed myself in a near-ideal situation to pay off my debt. In Coldfoot, the nearest store was 250 miles away (eliminating all temptations to buy stuff), there was no cellphone reception (making a phone plan unnecessary), and workers got free room and board (no food, rent or utility costs). After a year, I had paid off $18,000. A year later, I got a better-paying seasonal job with the Park Service. After two and a half years of work, I was debt free.

But my journey wasn’t just a financial awakening. I had learned about subsistence living in Arctic villages, and worked with a 74-year-old maintenance man who lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban year-round. I began to bring into question what passed for “normal” down in the lower 48, especially when it often led to a lifetime of work, bills and Bed Bath & Beyond purchases. Out of debt, I felt for the first time that my life was my own, and that I could do whatever I wished with it.

And more than anything I wished to use this freedom to continue the liberal arts education that had put me into so much debt. While the cost of my education had chained my ankles to the steel balls of debt, the liberal arts had freed some other part of me. Between a Thor-eauvian van-dwelling experiment and studying the great thinkers, I thought Duke would help me become a better person. Living in a van wouldn’t just be a way for me to afford school. It would be an adventure. It would be my “Walden on Wheels.”

“Could I live in a van?” I asked myself one last time. Why the hell not?





THE SPRING SEMESTER would start in just a couple of days, so I spent a day making the van as comfortable as I could. I removed the two middle pilot seats to create living space, brought in a plastic storage container to hold my possessions, neatly folded all my clothes into my suitcase, and bought a big black cloth to hang behind my driver and passenger seats so that no one could see me inside.

I knew I had the personality for van dwelling. I’d developed a comfort with tight quarters, a sixth sense for cheapness and a tolerance for squalor that was (I hate to brag) unequaled. I had the physical constitution for it, too: I was blessed with a high tolerance for cold temperatures, practically no sense of smell and a bladder (I hate to brag) the size of a football.

But the first few weeks didn’t match up with my romantic vision of a Waldenesque life of ancient texts and quiet solitude. I was assigned to the Mill Lot, a parking lot in the middle of a busy shopping district, a mile from campus, in the heart of Durham. I parked in between a college bar and an apartment building within eyeshot of office windows where men and women in business attire, I worried, might discover me.