All senior year, I kept saying it; "look, I'm not going to college unless I can do it without debt. Even then, I'm really not sure." Well, I'm here, a picture-perfect story, hard-luck poor kid going to college with no loans at all. I'm at SUNY Plattsburgh majoring in Expeditionary Studies. It's a sweet program.
Back home, I didn't have a ton of friends. Spent most of my days out in the woods by myself, and if with anyone, with my two best friends. We functioned tribally, watching out for one another and working, playing, and living together for the past 12 years. In school, I'd joke around with people and be generally affable, but I didn't care enough to make any "real" friends, mainly because I just didn't give a shit. I was busy with my own stuff, namely training myself to take to the rails like my father did and still does. From age ten I basically put myself through what I called "hobo college", training myself in the ways of the woods and eventually moving into the city, working with dumpster diving and studying train maps. In the summer I'd ruck 40 miles a day as conditioning, and when I wasn't doing that, I was either in the woods or on the farms, working.
Now I'm here, surrounded by people, and in the city, and I don't know what to do. All semester, I've lived like a recluse, reading more about vagabonds of the past, memorizing rail links throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico, and fine tuning my pack's baseweight to a glorious 7.3 pounds (!!!). My schedule is dumb fucking easy, no early classes and they're all super easy. I really enjoy them though, it's the rest of the experience I hate.
-Being around people all the time (mostly long island pricks... fuck LI people)
-No farms to work at, so my body is limp, I'm fat, and out of shape
-The food is deathly. Back home, I eat good. Raw milk, garden vegetables, venison, home made bread
-I only spend 5% of the entire time in classes. The rest is just silly stuff.
-I loathe the city, streets and that. I'm a wide-open-spaces kinda guy. You know, an American.
The list just goes on. Yeah, I party, get laid, have fun. But it gets old real fast. I'm thinking about dropping out and buying a tipi to live in on a stretch of my uncle's land and working on farms/scrapping metal/throwing wood until I've got a few grand. Then I'm gonna take the money and travel with it for a year or so, come back, work, and then travel again. Repeat, repeat. I've filled literally dozens of notebooks on the finer details of how I'm going to do it. While I'm not so bold as to say I've listed everything that I need to consider, I've got enough information and knowhow to pull it off. I'm actually getting really excited as the semester passes and I'm closer to getting my tipi. Got a ski instructing gig again this season that's gonna pay nice and be really fun. Plus, it's a free pass.
Anyway, that's my story thus far. And this isn't to say I won't return to college, I certainly will when I'm older, but at this chapter of my life I'm not ready. I also failed to mention that I'm something of an autodidact, my grandmother (who I lived with for most of my life) was a librarian and I read most of the books in there through the years. Public school taught me to read, and I took it from there. Now that I'm in college, I can't go to the library because it's too crowded and I can't focus. I read less now than ever before. When I get out, I'm getting back to the library and re-reading a few letters of the encyclopedia for sure.
Anyone care to share their college experiences, negative or positive? Perhaps you'd bestow a bit of advice to me? I'd really love to make this work, but I feel like I can't.