In debt to dreams — Ken Ilgunas

Restlessness turned towards steady breathing. His teenage drama retreated to the dark. High above the layer of clay loam, the kind of soil that’s good for wheat crops in particular, sixteen-year-old Ken Ilgunas went to sleep.

Ilgunas found himself in a nearby suburban development. An unusual place to receive a call for the wild, but he stood before a blonde bundle of fat and fur. The grizzly grazed on his neighbor’s lawn to broke his mid day meal. The bear sprung onto thick muscles of its hind legs and inspected Ilgunas scrawny frame from head-to-toe.

This crouching animal was a threat, more than something protective. Ilguanas froze. It was the first time he encountered an animal other than your usual dogs or cats so close. He looked back. He went stiff, caught in a dream-like stupor. Then he let go of whatever kept him from moving.

Ilgunas transformed a sleep paralysis demon into life-affirming awe.

The first of recurring dreams came to the author, journalist and backcountry ranger when he was in high school. Something deep in his psyche was on edge, long after he awoke from the dream. Ilgunas started to see the bear in his sleep (and certainly when he couldn’t sleep), and not so many details, but tells me if he “didn’t do something about it, something terrible was going to happen.”

Ilgunas left his childhood home. He rejected creature comforts for a chance to grasp the sublime, under a layer of consciousness that few are brave enough to explore. Maybe he wasn’t that intentional about what would come from seeking, but he chased the “real world” outside of Western New York once he graduated college.

At the time, Ilgunas replaced air conditioning with natural cooling of the outdoors. He hitchhiked across North America. He tossed a 401k plan or yearly salary away. Ilgunas worked in Alaska as a backcountry ranger. Working to get out of $32,000 of unpaid student loans, he slowly made up ground on his paper trail. Then, two years later, he recommitted to higher education.

Ilgunas refused to go by the books or fall into more debt. He slept in a van for two-and-a-half years as a graduate student at Duke University. He wrote (and published) his own books instead. The author of ‘Walden on Wheels,’ ‘This Land Is Our Land,’ ‘Trespassing Across America’ and ‘A Walk Across Suburbia’ and ‘The McCandless Mecca’ now lives in Dunbar, Scotland.

Ilgunas, thirty-six, proves that a relentless pursuit for challenge, or the unconventional, pays off. Similar to the other “society drop outs,” the Chris McCandless, the Alex Honnolds, Cheryl Strayed, Aron Ralstons, the eccentric outdoors people who have to do things their way, Ilgunas sought another path away from convention, but only to come back to it. He admits he hasn’t showered today and asks to keep our Skype call on audio, but his goals are different. He’s coming to terms with new responsibilities and that “it’s unnatural to have those same drives” as a husband and father.

It’s nearly six o’clock in the evening. Ilgunas has a scruffy five-o-clock shadow, a lean build, brown hair and green eyes. The kind of eyes that I discover on our next interview (a video call), look at the camera and demand your honesty. He’s constantly flipping the script. He cares less to answer questions and more so, to understand me. It came across as an annoying resistance at first, but Ilgunas deflects every opportunity to spring his own ego. This is the kind of guy that makes you feel closer to nature and yourself, without having to do the arduous self induced labor that is required to cultivate an inner world.

“I never felt so intensely. I had no idea why I had an overwhelming desire to drive to Alaska. It took pristine, unmolested wilderness to recognize the surreality of the place.” This sounds like the kind of insight you have after eating a few magic mushies, but as I listen, I get the impression that he’s nothing, if not sincere. He speaks with authenticity and vulnerability that Brene Brown should be proud of, but holds charisma from a decade of public speaking that threatens her TEDx talks. Ilgunas has an openness. It draws you in. His freewheeling intimacy startles you, before you feel ready to respond.

His first name, Ken, fittingly means “the range of perception, understanding, or knowledge.” For most of childhood, his range was constricted. The son of elder Ken and Tina, younger Ilgunas grew up in a suburban town that touches Canada. Ken, a Scottish immigrant, lived in Scotland til his mid twenties. His mother, Charlotte, grew up in Western New York, became a nurse and moved to Canada for work. His family relocated to the American suburbs in 1989 and into a small district, Country Meadows. The way Ilgunas describes it, sounds like the kind of place that sucks in “Brady Bunch” families. The type that spends weekends insulated in ice hockey rinks. Who worship the holy trifecta on Sunday, Sears, The Bon-Ton and Save-A-Lot at Summit Park Mall.

Ilgunas says bucolic suburbia was “wonderful.” He reflects on his upbringing with a light hearted fondness but uses too many adjectives. “Nice middle class home, nice middle class families.” Ilgunas earned a Bachelor’s degree in English and History from the University of Buffalo in 2006.

This town, named after the growing of wheat, doesn’t offer a lot of diversity. Wheatfield, New York is ninety-seven percent White and less than one percent Black. “I’m reluctant to use the word fake, but it was something that seemed unreal. Like, the endless parking lots seemed surreal.”

His perspective sounds similar to David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College. ‘This is Water” reflects the same sort of commercialism. Wallace attempts to make meaning from a so-called banal existence but Ilgunas makes his own on parking lots. He doesn’t have that same tongue-in-cheek attitude or preach existential nihilism to a crowd. This is more personal.

Ilgunas was a cart pusher. His first job was to collect orange shopping carts, strewn across a giant Home Depot parking lot. “Maybe it’s genetics, to be introspective but I don’t think I had an inner world.” But he found refuge from pushing carts. Suspense was tucked between titles and closing credits. Without real adventure, tension nestled between an abundance of stories instead. He’s reluctant to analyze his character but says “I just wanted to be a movie critic. I’d watch a movie a night.”

Some people, especially lower class people, don’t seek adventure in stories. They seek a chance at redemption. The half million homeless Americans probably don’t pull novels off a bookshelf to reach a climatic moment. They seek economic and social mobility and security. But stories offer an escape from something while you can find pieces of your own character that makes it intoxicating.

Joshua Pryun, his childhood best friend, focuses on Ilgunas character as “prone to obsession.” He reinforces my belief that Ilgunas is a full-fledged dreamer. Pryun would watch a movie and “let it go after a few hours or days” but Ilgunas held on to the plot. “Every adventure, he thought about for a while.” Stories have a way of taking you out of your world and interrupt your plot.

Pryun makes it clear that their friendship is more than dueling for the “world champion” status of an obscure card game or striving to end his 0–19 record in their wrestling matches. They were two “scrappy, awkward kids” from New York who’s worlds were getting larger. Pryun admits that their bond deepened as they entered an even more uncontrollable world than the great outdoors. Dating. They relied on each other to understand a complex landscape.

Ilgunas returns to our Skype conversation. He states with an underlying discipline that his recurring grizzly bear dream meant something was missing. In high school, he “tested himself” but it wasn’t close to what his adult self sought later on. According to Pryun, Ilgunas wore shorts every day during the winter but Ilgunas later corrects me. He wore shorts “only during our winter street hockey games a few days a week.”

Somewhere in suburbia or in the parking lot, the call got louder. Louder than the call to rebel against pants. Ilgunas says “my dream of all dreams, my adventure of all adventures was to drive to Alaska.” Driven by internal and external romantic longings, he tested the author, Joseph Campbell’s idea. He applied ’the hero’s journey’ from ‘A Hero With a Thousand Faces’ to his own life, whether he realized it or not. He’s presented through his work as the great apostle of the free spirit, but his journey didn’t happen overnight or in his sleep. It wasn’t until Ilgunas turned twenty three that he went on his first hike.

He admits from the audio on my laptop “that’s messed up” to start hiking at twenty three but part of Campbell’s template is to resist the call. He apologizes intermittently for his introspective monologue and choppy sound bites but reflects, “perhaps it got to the point “that maybe I had to go on my own hero’s journey.”

This sounds like a fan following in the footsteps of Chris McCandless. He’s the 24 year old idealist who dropped out of his middle class suburban life, donated over $20,000 of his life savings, hitchhiked across North America and lived in a makeshift bus until his death in 1992. McCandless’ tragic story was told by Jon Krakauer in the January 1993 issue of Outside and later reproduced as a 2007 film directed by Sean Penn, giving rise to McCandless as a modern myth. Similar to him, Ilgunas sought outdoor experiences to test his will, but their intentions were different.

In the summer of 2005, Ilgunas drove up to Coldfoot, Alaska. Coldfoot sounds like something he must have made up, but he says bleakly, “the more money I borrowed [for college], I came to realize, the more freedom I had surrendered.”

He speaks about his travels and the debts he owes with serenity and intensity. His first job to erase his student debt was in a remote camp as a lodge cleaner with his friend Paul. He later picked up odd jobs as a maid, cook, and tour guide. He hitchhiked 5,500 miles across the continent, canoeed across Ontario, Canada with “voyageurs” (people who live and dress like the 18th Century fur traders), worked on a trail crew in Gulfport, Mississippi and then circled back to where his dream originated: Alaska.

He remains firm in his free-spirited and anti materialist ethic. “I really enjoyed and identified with him,” but “long had the dream to go up to Alaska before I even heard of ‘Into the Wild.’” It may be hard to remain original to individualist values when there are others with the same ethos, but Iguanas survived his travels.

McCandless went too far. Ilgunas sprawls with Homeric ambition and picaresque wonder, but he published a short novel, ‘The McCandless Mecca’ and makes it clear that his trip to Alaska was a journey he came back from.

His epic journey was delayed, it shares parallels to McCandless, but Ilgunas emanates independence. He holds conviction of a person who, when they come up with a radical idea, goes out and does it. Hitchhiking across America, working to pay off debt and van dwelling as a graduate student, prove that his ‘hero’s journey’ did not incubate from a man stuck with his head stuck in the clouds.

McCandless found freedom in the being of an itinerant lifestyle. Ilgunas focused his efforts to pay off a paper trail. He states in ‘Walden on Wheels,’ “I lived in a free country, but I didn’t know what it felt like to be free.” His own “call to the wild” should give hope to college students facing the burden of debt or Chris McCandless wannabes. He paid off his loans. He reclaimed his sense of freedom as backcountry ranger in the Gates of the Arctic National Park.

Ilgunas’ eye contact on Skype threatens my own sense of it.

1. Departure

True education is meant to develop an individual human being as a person, not as a means to serve the state or a specific industry or pay off loans. But Americans spend roughly $30,000 per student a year, nearly twice as much as the average developed country for higher education.

At twenty three, Iguanas came up with another idea.

He says it was “to see if I could — in an age of rampant consumerism and fiscal irresponsibility — afford the unaffordable.” He was determined to earn his Masters of Liberal Studies degree debt free. It’s not a surprise that he became the kind of person to live in a $1,500 vehicle. A full time van dweller. And, he made a promise. No loans. He wouldn’t accept money from anybody, especially not from his mother.

Iguanas speaks with an aura of reinvented hope. He states, “a liberal arts education allows us to examine the world in novel ways. It makes us better voters, less liable to be subjects of propaganda.” Striking that right balance between idealism and realism, Ilgunas angles the practical burden of student debt to balance his pursuit as a modern day myth.

His voluntary poverty could be seen as an act of delusion. He doesn’t bring up the larger issue of homelessness or van dwellers who don’t get to choose to live in a vehicle but says, “I think there are a lot of people who are more content and less ambitious. I see how those are good features of one’s character if you want to live a nice ordinary contented life. You’re kind of attracted to it and repelled by it at the same time.”

It’s arguably a privilege, to desire this faux-bohemian, four-wheeled lifestyle movement. There are over 553,000 homeless people in America. Van dwelling serves as a lifeline for society’s most vulnerable and provides a sense of community and shelter. They are the people who don’t choose the ‘opportunity’ to seize #vanlife. They live in a van to give their children some sort of roof over their head. Ilgunas choose to escape comforts that many lower class people fight hard to have a part of, but he admits it. His mom offered to pay for his rent and says his homelessness is an “opportunity.”

In a market driven society, where we are spent branding our future selves for a job that increasingly doesn’t exist because of automation, it’s unfamiliar to remain present to this habit of mind. The kind of thinking that liberal arts aims to cultivate. Few would want to learn about themselves through an opportunity to read, write and suffer in a van. But like transcendental authors he read about in class, Ilgunas chose a “primitive and frontier life” rather than a lifestyle similar to sixty-nine percent of Duke University undergraduates who come from the top twenty percent. Ilgunas parking permit was eighteen times cheaper than Duke’s dorm rooms. So, if the primary purpose of a liberal education is to develop a person’s intellect and imagination, for their own sake, and not for a financial reward, then perhaps he stays true to its function.

In the Winter of 2009, he carried out his most radical voyage. It didn’t require a lot of traveling. His journey was his destination. Ilgunas parked his 1994 Ford Econoline cherry red van on Duke University’s ‘Mill’ Lot for two-and-a-half years.

Ilgunas doesn’t align in either category. He’s not a mesmerized middle-class millennial or carries the desperation of a squatter. He’s the opposite of people that struggle but rejects the bourgeois. He has a beatnik vibe but what makes him stand apart from other liberal minded thinkers who drink anti-capitalism kool aid, is that he’s actually willing to put his ideas to practice.

2. Trials and Victories of Initiation

Ilgunas is different than McCandless or Wallace. He does this, he endures a real life ‘hero’s journey’ but shows me, through his novels and relationships, that he has a deep sense of purpose and family. He pursued a useless degree (that I’m in the midst of working towards) but Ilgunas has a stronger sense of personal identity than most. “I have this melancholy streak. I’m fighting my own nature. I wasn’t born a Buddhist, it’s a perennial work in progress.”

He evokes a sense of resistance to reality. What makes his van dwelling life so full of life in ‘Walden on Wheels’ is that it is narrated like a dream. He writes, “To me, Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t just a home; it was the reimagining of a life; it was the conviction that we can turn the wildest figments of our imagination into something real” (but most of his companions were found in the spine of his books and hadn’t seen the last two turns of the century).

The reality is that Ilgunas Econoline functioned almost perfectly as a monk cell. “It was a simple spartan atmosphere. I didn’t hang out with friends or a girlfriend or a baby.” With proud affirmation, Ilgunas says “the van encouraged me to live the life of the mind.”

The writer and public speaker wasn’t always full of details about his experience. The majority of his time at Duke was silent. Afraid that administration would force him into housing, he kept his van dwelling a secret. He didn’t tell a soul in Durham.

Christina Askounis, who taught Ilgunas in her ‘Travel Writing’ class, insists “he was quite happy doing that.”

3. Return and Reintegration with Society

He wasn’t afraid to write about his romantic lifestyle. He wrote about his typical day of eating. “Cereal with powdered milk, spaghetti stew with peanut butter, vegetable stew with peanut butter, and even rice and bean tacos with peanut butter.” He admits he slept in a sleeping bag, showered in Wilson Gym, rolled down his car windows for air conditioning and ate the bare minimum to pay for tuition.

Yet, in the liminal hours between waking and sleeping, Ilgunas social experiment in the Econoline slipped into a career. Maybe from loneliness or boredom or just to take another risk, he wrote an essay that released his secret called “I live in a van down by Duke University” for Askounis class. He connected his own constricting experience in the van to the issue of student debt.

The opportunity to become a real-life travel writer presented itself.

Askounis, impressed with his “determination” upon revealing the essay, asked “what’s your dream publication?”

He said that he’d always liked to get published in Salon.com. Askounis was largely responsible for lighting the jet fuel that propelled his career.

She pushed him to turn this essay into his Master’s project for the Liberal Studies degree and into his first published memoir in 2013. His first big break on Salon.com had more than 100,000 hits. ‘Walden on Wheels’ established him as a prominent new voice for travel writers. He received a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal, followed by features on websites like Bloomberg, Business Insider and Mike Huckabee’s website. Three different Fox News television shows asked him to come on. By the time Ilgunas graduated Duke University debt free, Ilgunas blurred the line between dreams and reality.

He still has trouble believing in his commercial success largely because his work is so much at variance with the sort of rampant consumerism that he writes against. I shared my first draft with him last week. He’s the 2016 Winner of the Nebraska Center for the Book Award but suggested that I take out “award winning” in his biography, three times.

Askounis recalls, “his books are not about attention. He wants to publish his books and propagate his ideas because they’re worth people’s time to listen to.” He remains committed to the ‘thing’ itself. Things like student debt.

Henry David Thoreau once argued, “it would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them.”

In 2020, the Mill parking lot at Duke is gone. Askounis hasn’t taught ‘Travel Writing’ since his class. Developers constructed over his van’s parking space and whatever reason Askounis had to teach that course “had been fulfilled.” There’s a Harris Teeter grocery store and luxury apartment complex in the lot. And, Ilgunas is in love.

It can be a pitfall sometimes, for people who feel strongly about the direction that they are taking and not stay open to change. Ilgunas has a tendency to resist the 21st century or any of the Instagram ‘Influencers In The Wild’ but has family roles to maintain now.

His ‘reintegration’ didn’t happen seamlessly or without more strange encounters with the weather, terrain, and animals of America’s plains. In September 2012, he strapped on his backpack, stuck out his thumb on the interstate just north of Denver, and hitchhiked 1,500 miles to the Alberta tar sands. Once he made it there, Ilgunas turned around and began a 1,700-mile trek to the XL’s endpoint on the Gulf Coast of Texas. This journey didn’t require a van, he completed his trek entirely on foot and walked almost exclusively across private property.

Ilgunas remains honest about his present, conventional lifestyle. He’s “not living a monkish life” or backpacking on private property. He made compromises to the unyielding drive and curiosity that fuel his hunger but still grapples with difficult questions about our place in the world.

“Why not name her whatever the hell we want to name her?”

I asked him about the etymology of his daughter’s name. His daughter’s name is Noa.

“Noa without an H.”

He makes contact with the punchy mind of his youth but today, far too many travel writers are populated by Millennials or Gen Z “influencers.” These are the people who go someplace they’ve never been before, share “Wanderlust” on Instagram and discover all sorts of useful facts or insightful wisdom by the time their post comes to an end. While Ilgunas wants to influence us, he cares more about what our personal responsibility is, as stewards of land.

In ‘Trespassing across America’ Ilgunas asks the public to consider, as members of a rapidly warming planet, how we are mere individuals up against something as powerful as the fossil fuel industry. I’d be surprised if Ilgunas’ daughter doesn’t grow up to have an urge to resist hashtag activism and follow her father’s footsteps.

Thoreau probably wrote about the future of humanity more clearly than I am. “When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next?” According to Ilgunas, his vision is one where he “lives with wilderness closer to [his] door. I want to be growing my own crops and vegetables. When I go to bed at night, I want to hear the coyote and bugs come to life.” He holds a sense of timeless wonder or maybe that’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s unhinged freedom but it makes me want to keep chasing after it.

He’s disappointed that there’s less space for the kind of “unmolested wilderness” that he found in a van in Durham. There’s an endless collection of castles and stately homes in Southeast Scotland, but convinces me that he’s “well adjusted.” He’s house hunting with his wife, Astrid, later this afternoon.

Ilgunas is a “regular person” for the time being.