I dropped out of Temple and I don’t regret it

In the fall of 2012 I enrolled, as so many recent high school graduates did, in a college I didn’t feel a particularly strong calling to and in a major I had no real passion for. But whatever it was I wanted out of life, surely immediate enrollment in a four year school would get me there, because that’s the standard for any high school graduate with a decent head on their shoulders, and anything short of that is a tragic waste of potential, right?

I had no idea how wrong I was.

After just one measly semester I had racked up $10,000 in tuition and room/board. And this was attending a relatively affordable, in-state public university with the aid of a few grants. The pursuit of The American Dream, only attainable by an ever-increasingly cost-prohibitive bachelor’s degree, was burying me deeper and deeper into a pit of financial woe with no apparent alternative.

Then, all of a sudden, it hit me! A speeding car, that is.

On the first day of spring break I was returning home from a day at the Air & Space Museum in DC (that’s how all the cool kids spend their spring breaks, right?) late at night when my motorcycle broke down along a fairly busy road with no shoulder. Not even 10 minutes after calling for help, I was clipped by a driver who evidently was unable to see a flashing motorcycle and a 6’6″ man in a reflective jacket. My leg was snapped in half and my ACL, LCL, and MCL were shredded, along with some nerve damage and a ruined pair of new steel toe boots, which I shed more than one tear over the loss of. The driver kept right on going and never even tapped the brakes, though I’m almost positive my guttural scream at least rattled his windows.

Lying in the Johns Hopkins emergency room higher than Jerry Garcia from an elephant dosage of morphine I quickly came to terms with the facts. I was no longer an independent bright-eyed college freshman. I was a penniless and crippled college dropout facing amputation. Though the herculean efforts of the staff were enough to save my leg, nothing could reverse the blow that had been dealt to my life plan. It was time to start doing some situational reconnaissance.

Of course, I was unable to continue the semester in my current state, so I filed a medical withdrawal, which, thanks to the brilliant and compassionate folks in the registrar’s office, meant I lost every scholarship I had due to dropping all of my classes.

This “affordable” public education was becoming more and more cost prohibitive by the day. So, in a move of desperation, I applied to the local trade school as a fallback plan. When I got accepted with a full ride, everything changed.

In high school, it’s a sort of unspoken rule that only rednecks and deadbeats go to trade schools. While that stigma isn’t entirely unwarranted, one shouldn’t discount the quality of a trade education as a stepping stone to success. Over the course of my two years at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology I applied myself and excelled. I became president of student organizations, created a freelance engineering business for myself, worked an administrative role on-campus, and soaked up as much information as I possibly could by regularly taking over 23 credit semesters.

I don’t say this to brag, but only to demonstrate what kind of results can be achieved when you take the path less traveled. By the time graduation rolled around I had received numerous job offers, but I had something better in mind.

Rather than enter the nine-to-five rat race at 21 years old, I decided to embark on an adventure that so few people these days do: I was going to live my life the way life is meant to be lived.

At the same moment that all of my classmates were walking at graduation, I was barreling across Texas through a hail storm and impending tornado in a 21-year-old pickup truck with 270,000 miles on it. I spent the next month exploring the Wild West; hiking the Grand Canyon, camping in Yosemite, drinking crystal-clear glacial runoff in Montana, and breathing in sulfur at Yellowstone. I woke up to frost on my sleeping bag, to bears rustling around camp, and to sunrises on the some of the most unadulterated wilderness the lower-48 have to offer. It was an extraordinary experience that, regretfully, fewer and fewer people are choosing to expose themselves to. Perhaps the late poet Sylvia Plath articulated it best when she wrote “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”

But the rebellion against the traditional education path didn’t end there. There is no denying that there is much to be learned in lecture halls, in labs, and in the quiet stacks of the library. But as so many college-graduate vagabonds have confided to me, there is exponentially more to be learned off campus. Temple cannot teach you how to remain calm under dire stress, but breaking down on a motorcycle hours from the nearest town can. Temple cannot properly explain the vastness of the universe, but gazing up at millions of stars from a cold tent in the desert can. No institution can teach you more about yourself than extended solitude can.

And so, armed with this knowledge, I began the journey of a lifetime: a solo motorcycle journey across Australia.

Uprooting yourself is never easy. There will never be a convenient time to sell everything you own, never an easy way to cut off relationships, but sometimes such drastic measures are necessary to prevent a stagnate existence.  As John Shedd once said, “A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are built for.” It was time for a change and, for better or worse, I would never be the same. I packed my things into two backpacks, hopped on a train to the airport, and didn’t look back.

The first destination was the idyllic island of Hawaii. There I spent two days partying with international backpackers and touring the Big Island and all of its nooks and crannies. But it just didn’t feel like an adventure. All restaurants and shops accepted US dollars and, with the exception of the ubiquitous “mahalo” greeting, everyone spoke American English. This was not a strange new land, this was not a challenging place to navigate; it was a resort, and I wanted to get out. And get out I did.

A little over a day later, I touched down in the barren void of Australia called the Northern Territory. 95 degrees and dry as a bone, this was the outback climate I had been anticipating. The people spoke a strange dialect and their skin was like sun-cracked leather. They drove massive off-road vehicles and swore like sailors. I could tell I was going to like this place.

Over the course of the next two months I assimilated as best I could and, if I do say so myself, did a damn good job. In no time flat I was honking at bloody bogans, hooning in my ute, pounding stubbies, and chucking sickies. The daily challenges of learning new lingo and cultural subtleties kept me on my toes and I absorbed an immeasurable amount of information. I picked up a number of strange gigs to make a bit of cash, including grilling thousands of sausages at a Greek festival, replacing carpet in an aging casino in the dead of night, and running computer-controlled woodworking machinery under the watch of a psychotic manager with a serious Napoleon complex. During this time, I acquired a motorcycle and fabricated some parts to make it better suited for long-distance touring. Finally, the time had come.

The vastness and inhospitableness of Australia truly cannot be understated. The first few days were grueling, with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees and a relentless headwind hell bent on blowing me off of my steel steed. I passed thousands of kangaroos and wallabies in various stages of decomposition from years under the oppressive sun, and routinely found myself dodging startled emus running along the road. When the sun fell each day, I pitched a small tent and lay out beneath millions of shining stars. This was living.

For three months I straddled my roaring engine over 17,000km around Australia. I rose when the sun did, I covered massive distances, and I slept in the dirt each night. For two weeks, I volunteered and lived at a developing wildlife sanctuary up in the mountains. In the mornings I would construct new buildings and harvest bamboo, and in the afternoons I made tea, read Jules Verne, and drank cheap beer with a retired man who used to create pyrotechnic shows for ACDC concerts. Due to the exposed nature of the cabin I was living in, I regularly trapped cane toads who made their way inside and had to play music constantly so as to deter snakes from entering. Creedence Clearwater Revival was my weapon of choice, naturally, though I occasionally threw the Best of ABBA onto the record player.

Once I decided my time at the refuge had come to an end, I booked a ticket to New Zealand and rented an old, derelict campervan. For 14 days, I toured the South Island and drank with countless hitchhikers and backpackers, rafted through glowworm caves, and felt the ground rumble as glaciers slowly traversed the earth. The towering mountains, endless fields, and winding rivers were awe-inspiring and really put my entire existence into perspective, as fatalistic as that may sound.

Once back in Australia I fired up the bike and rode through downtown Sydney, gazing at the Opera House and Harbour Bridge in all their splendor. A few days later I found myself working alongside a Canadian, a Brit, and a Pole at a small summer camp, tending to a dozen horses, a hundred head of cattle, and the very irritable resident wombat, Wally. The bane of my existence at Snowy River Camp was Bambi, a rescued deer who would stop at nothing to eat anything even vaguely edible, including pages from a book as they’re being read (Sorry, Kerouac. Nothing personal).

My next stop, even stranger than the ones before, was with a biologist in Adelaide who specializes in bats and had just returned from two years living in Jordan. My days with him, though few, were spent splitting a seemingly endless supply of firewood, tending to an apple orchard, and utilizing various OSHA-condemned methods of fending off bees from his private apiary (swinging a blunt hatchet wildly ended well for no parties involved). After a long day of work we shared bourbon, read poetry, and swapped travel stories about our respective journeys through the sunburned country.

I savored every day with the biologist, partly because he was a remarkably interesting guy and partly because looming ahead of me was one of the most unforgiving environments Australia has to offer: the Nullarbor Plain.

1,200kms long, the Nullarbor (literally translates to ‘no trees’ from Latin) Plain is barren, devoid of any towns, and the killer of many an inattentive driver. It was scorching hot, it was ruthlessly vast, and it was perfect in every way. There was no jaw-dropping scenery (save for the Great Australian Bight), no idyllic fields, and certainly no beauteous spots to pitch a tent. What the Nullarbor could offer, however, was unrefined wilderness, ample opportunities for introspection, and the most pristine night sky you could imagine. In a way, the least visually stimulating part of the trip proved to be the most memorable from a personal and emotional standpoint.

The remaining few weeks were largely dull and monotonous, though there were a handful of notable incidents including, but not limited to, a Maori man named Beetle giving me a gram of weed, getting caught in the most hellish lightning storm conceivable, riding a camel on the beach at sunset, and being eaten alive by peacocks in the middle of the night.

But that adventure has concluded, and I am back in Pennsylvania after riding the rails from California. I am living in the back of my pickup truck, which allows me total freedom to travel and teaches me about myself more and more every day. Before I return to school in the fall, I have plans in the works for multiple cross-country road trips, including one to Alaska.

While I certainly was not a big fan of my situation at the moment, leaving Temple was the best decision I’ve ever made. Of course, it’s an extremely positive experience for many people, but Temple was toxic for me. I have learned exponentially more living on the road than I ever did living in 1940. Life is meant to be lived, don’t squander yours by simply going through the motions expected of you.