It's Personal The Thoreau Experiment Freedom, independence, adventure, self-sufficiency—these were the words that ran on repeat through my head as I pondered my newest harebrained scheme: living out of my van by the reservoir in Boulder, Colorado, for a whole summer. Regardless of the fact that my friends and family seemed to pepper their conversations about my plan with entirely different words—homelessness, showers, rapists, heat waves—I was excited about the idea. I was enamored with my inspiration, Henry David Thoreau, who had also managed to live in modest accommodations by a body of water and write about it. I mostly admired his dedication, his stick-to-itiveness. This is the very sense of commitment that my generation seems to lack—painfully—and I wanted to prove that I, as a representative of that generation, could commit to something besides a season of the newest reality TV show. At the beginning of May, I put my plan into action. I parked my van, filled only with some clothes, my laptop, and all the bags of trail mix my mom had piled in the back to assist me, in a spot next to the water. The rest of my belongings I put in storage, and I looked forward to a summer of contemplating the meaninglessness of stuff. I’m talking about physical stuff, of course—like needless amounts of shoes, piles of DVDs, drawers full of kitchen utensils, bottles of beauty products—but also the stuff with which we fill our time and our minds. For inspiration I turned to one of my favorite passages in Thoreau’s Walden: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand . . . Simplify, simplify.” Well, so far, so good. I was simplifying, right? Or was I? I did have some peaceful, simple moments living in the van. Often, to take in the sunset and the early-evening tranquility, I would lie on the dock right outside my door. The smell of grass cooling after a hot day, the sound of crickets chirping, and—if I lay still enough—the occasional blue heron swooping overhead made it easy to feel close to nature. The roof of my abode sometimes gave me a front-row seat to the shooting stars and the developing storms in the distance. But there were some downsides as well. That summer was one of the hottest we’d seen in recent history, and crawling into the van at night sometimes felt like crawling into a soda can that had been lying in the sun all day. To make matters worse, I had to wait until well after dark before I could open the windows to get a cross breeze going to cool down the van. If I opened them any earlier, I risked heavy infiltration by the reservoir’s mosquito population. And there was one other glaring negative side to living out of my car: feeling vulnerable. One of the most disturbing manifestations of this sensation occurred the day that I realized that the dilapidated maroon Chevy parked across the lot from my van was not an abandoned car but instead contained a gnarled, bearded man who seemed to do nothing but stare eerily in my direction. After a week or so of hiding out except to go to work, feeling almost like a prisoner, I brought over one of my bigger male friends to discourage the lurker’s behavior. All my friend had to do was walk in the direction of his car, and the stranger started it up and peeled out of the parking lot. I never saw him again. But the feeling of exposure that had begun to develop even before the experience was heightened by it, and it never rehow safe I really was, I couldn’t shake feeling unsettled and disconcerted about not having a real home. These thoughts plagued me. Was there something wrong with me that I was having trouble coping with this sense of naked isolation? Did it make me weak? Less of the strong woman I told myself I was? These questions revealed some key differences between Thoreau and myself. First of all, Thoreau’s cabin was conveniently located less than a mile from his sister’s house. Some historical accounts assert that he walked to her house nearly every day for company and a hot meal. Thoreau’s cabin was also conveniently not located on the edge of a town known for its high number of sexual offenders. And Thoreau was not a woman. I realized that while I bought into what Thoreau was talking about on a philosophical level, it just wasn’t happening on a practical one. Partially, I blame myself, but mostly I blame society. (I am a product of my generation, after all.) The thing is, if you’re going to give the finger to the pigeonhole society has put you in, as it were, you can’t half-ass it. I had successfully pulled myself out of the housing paradigm but had exited neither the professional nor the social one. And so I was constantly jumping back and forth between lives. I was professional writer/marketing woman by day and homeless philosophical mosquito-hater by night, not to mention creeped out by my unwelcome neighbor. If anything, I had complicated things, not simplified them. After four months in the van, I decided to call it quits—I made it through the whole summer, after all. I rented an apartment and filled it with the stuff that had been stored away. I had a refrigerator, a shower, a couch, a bed, a fan—I had it all. I had given in to homefullness, but I felt liberated because instead of worrying about everyday survival I could focus on the more evolved aspects of my life, like working and playing, friends and family. There are some nights that I miss the wildlife, the shooting stars, and the sound of rain on a metal roof, but I think I’d miss my apartment more if I gave it up. “But men labor under a mistake,” wrote Thoreau. “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” And he’s right. Of course he’s right. Factitious cares: bad. Finer fruits: good. It’s just that, to me, a sense of belonging somewhere is one of the finest fruits out there. Adventures still wait around every corner; I just like knowing I can come back home when I’ve had my fill. |
 |
|
|
|
 |
