December 9, 2009
This past September I updated the original list to reflect more of the things I wanted to do. One of the things on the original list that I was not interested in was to live in a van. The News and Observer recently had this article about a Duke grad student that is living out of a van on Duke’s campus. The story is below and go to the full story here to get an idea of the practical issues you would encounter if you ever decided to live in a van for a year (or two)…
Among the criteria Ken Ilgunas used when deciding where to go to graduate school: Would the local climate allow him to sleep in his van?
Yep, that’s right. Ken Ilgunas lives in a van. In a Duke University parking lot. That’s as specific as Ilgunas gets. See, he’s doing this as a social experiment, to see if he can get through graduate school without debt.
Which means he’s keeping a low profile. Or at least he was until he blew his own cover this week in this story featured prominently on the salon.com website.
Oh, and he has his own blog where the 26-year-old, who is enrolled in Duke’s liberal studies graduate program, has chronicled his adventures.
Ilgunas grew up in a suburban, middle class family in Niagara Falls, NY. Mom’s a nurse, dad’s a factory worker. It was a good life but left Ilgunas wanting something more.
“I felt there was something vapid about the suburban lifestyle,” he told me this week. “People work 40 hours a week and come home and watch TV. There’s no beauty or poetry or adventure in that sort of life. I recognized I wasn’t getting something out of that lifestyle.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Ilgunas is inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his “Walden,” classic, a tale of inner peace.
“He’s my guy,” Ilgunas said of the author he dressed up as this past Halloween. “I have a nasty man-crush on him.”
So Ilgunas has spent much of the year in his 1994 Ford Econoline he bought on Craigslist for $1,500. He “retrofitted” it by pulling some seats out. He converted the back seat to a bed.
Cozy!
He gets his mail at a campus post box, and he stays connected to the world using his laptop at the library or elsewhere on the totally-wired campus.
By the time you read this, Ilgunas will have left the parking space he has called home for four months to head to the North Carolina mountains for some outdoorsy winter-break adventures. But he’ll return to Duke next semester and hopes the campus cops won’t crack down on him, now that his story is out there.
I marked this one off of my list because I am simply one of those people that need the comforts of home, or at least a hot shower every day. However, for those that can pull it off, it truly is an accomplishment. Think you could live out of a van?
Uh…no. I too need at the very least a daily HOT shower. Now…if it were one of those cute little conversion vans fitted for camping (that included a hand-held shower), I might consider it. Key word there being “might”.
GREAT post!
Well at least it’d answer the your place or mine question. I would only live in a van if it had that awesome fake wood paneling on the outside. That’s just how I roll.
(PS – Great writeup)!
Just want to make clear that I did not write that but copy and pasted from the N&O article. I tried to make that clear but I don’t think it’s as obvious in the posting.
Miranda, Ha! That’s how you ROLL!!! Classic!