The recession had not been good to us recent college graduates, who had been promised the world if they just got a good education. It was especially brutal for idealists like me, who wanted to make social change. Psychology had been a way to help people, a balance of the philosophy and science I enjoyed. But there wasn’t a job market without graduate school, and I already had enough student loans. As the eldest son of immigrants, my mother widowed, it was expected of me to step up.  I needed to help out and I wanted to make my family proud, and I wasn’t doing either.  So I took odd jobs: market research and analysis, database administration, SAT tutoring, delivering food, and computer repair. Nothing that got me on the successful career track I wanted.

I’d had my dream job for about six months, working as a case manager in a residential treatment center for children.  I loved it, and made a decent wage, but little did I know I was on a sinking ship; our facility was so far in the red that the controlling corporation shut it down. I spent the last few weeks making sure the kids had a place to go.  Where I would go next — that was another question.

I came out to California with little more than hope and an incredibly generous offer from my extended family to help out. I  scored my first interview for a social work-related job in Oakland. I showed up that day excited and full of passion. I left feeling a little sick: I was up against moms, people with master’s degrees, and even a Ph.D.  I didn’t have a shot, and I knew it.

All of that is what brought me to the palm reader in the East Bay. I was skeptical, of course, though she earned by dubious trust by telling me eerily accurate information about my family and my love life. Then she told me what I already knew about my interview.

“You’re not going to get what you came here for,” she said.

Great, now what?

“You’re going to have to do something you don’t expect.  You’ll have the career you want and even get to be creative with it.”

What was she talking about? Was I going to be a rock star?

“Well, if you want more time, I can charge you the full half-hour rate …”

No, I was ready to leave. I’d gotten what I’d come for.

Now, I’m not sure if it was some self-fulfilling prophecy or if I was witnessing bona fide intuitive magic, but her words triggered a desire to make a change and reinvent myself.  Being well-versed with technology and right in the middle of Silicon Valley, I made some more Web-related pursuits. I finally received a promising email for an internship at a publication looking for someone with decent Web skills and a desire to learn.

I made my way to the office in downtown San Francisco and was greeted by a friendly girl in the front.  I looked around the reception room and saw a bunch of awards, honors and recognitions. The door read: Salon.com.

I couldn’t shake a nervous excitement. This was a website I read regularly, and I was in its office. They wanted to talk to me.

“You’re really overqualified for this,” my interviewer kept saying. Later she would become my boss, mentor and great friend.  “You won’t get paid, and I can’t guarantee this will turn into a job either.”

I didn’t care. I just wanted an opportunity.

“When do you want to start?” the woman asked.

“Well, how’s tomorrow?”

My family wasn’t nuts about an unpaid internship. But I had a little bit of money still leftover, and some great cousins who were willing to put me up. I began by working a few hours three days a week, but I quickly found myself staying at the office as much as the full-timers. My compensation came in the form of experience, peanut M&Ms, bagels on Friday, and all the black coffee I could drink. But more important, I was learning how a site like Salon operated, what sort of bugs and technological challenges websites face every day, the various streams of revenue available to online publications. I grew to enjoy the weird rapport of the office. Every afternoon the San Francisco office had a contest to guess traffic numbers. Meanwhile, on the daily editorial call from New York, staff members interspersed reports of upcoming stories with jokes about making cats into bongs.

Eventually, word got around that I knew a little bit of programming, and I was launched on more challenging projects, like figuring out how to rewrite Salon’s website on a more modern technology and take more than a decade of old data with it.  My knowledge had to grow rapidly; I took it upon myself to make sure I was familiar with every aspect of this new project.  I was cramming programming books on the weekends, familiarizing myself with software I had never used before, searching Google for answers to all my technical problems, and making heavy use of the guess-and-test method to make things work.  I worked so hard to make myself a valuable asset to the engineering team.

It paid off: I got hired. I was ecstatic.  Ibrahim Madha, Product Engineer.  Not only did I have a great job but I made my family proud.  It was something every Asian immigrant parent dreamed of — a son who was a doctor or an engineer.  My mom was bragging about me again: “My eldest works for a website in San Francisco and he still calls me every day.”  My younger brothers weren’t making fun of me for being a total bum anymore, and they even admitted I was smart.  Three months of working for nothing had paid off, and I had a brand-new career that I was actually pretty good at.  Not bad for a corny hipster kid from the suburbs of Dallas.

This career move has not been without its challenges.  I haven’t had so many all-nighters since college (although my cubicle is much more comfortable than the library basement floor).  The pace is fast; no time for screw-ups.  We had a website we needed to support while building an entirely new one, which meant a lot of sleepless nights and round-the-clock work schedules.  At one point, I became so frustrated with making new bits of functionality only to find them broken a few weeks later that I threatened to jump off my apartment balcony.  Luckily, I live on the second floor.

If you had told me two years ago I’d be out here in San Francisco doing this job, I would have laughed, delivered your pizza and scoffed at the bad tip you gave me. I had no idea that the politics and culture site I read every day was going to be the place I found my next career. How could I? It’s so easy to get discouraged these days with the constant barrage about our broken economy, soaring debt and an unmovable job market.  But what I’ve learned is that when it comes to work, dreaming big is just as important as learning to adapt and be practical. I didn’t end up doing what I dreamed, but I did what I was good at, what made sense. And it turned out to be pretty amazing anyway.

I was in ninth grade when I first started having sexual relationships. I was lying, sneaking out of the house, drinking several times a week. I did well in school and went to classes but I was in search of something — an empty feeling I tried to fill up with alcohol and drugs and parties. It wasn’t just about my father leaving. I’d been sexually molested when I was 6. I lost the closest boy I knew in high school when he accidentally shot himself at 17. By college I was picking up men in bars, going home with them in a blackout. I’d been used so many times I started to be like: I don’t care. These guys are the ones who are being used.

I was 22 and working in hotel management when I found out my grandmother had cancer and had four months to live. She wasn’t even 60 at the time, and we were really close. I decided to quit my job and move back to take care of her. The night before I left, some friends and I rented out this penthouse suite at the Hilton for a huge party. I was sniffing coke, and people were passed out all over, and that morning I went to the bathroom and my nose was bleeding. Here my grandmother is dying of cancer, and I thought, “Who are you?” I hated myself. I hated what I did. Everything about my life — I hated it.

What happened next, I don’t know how to explain it. My grandmother had started going back to church and begged me to go. I didn’t want to go at all. I thought it was some crazy cult. But by the end of the service, I was asking God to take hold of my life and make me who he wants to be. Save me from myself. I was so self-destructive. I needed something bigger than me to intervene. It’s impossible to describe this to someone. To be honest, I don’t remember much of that day. But I felt at peace. I began to see how the stuff I went through, there was purpose in it. My role was to help other young girls.

But I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, exactly. I tucked it away in my heart. My grandmother passed away, and I went back to my job in hotel management. I met my husband, got married, had two children. Being a mom teaches you about selflessness. Kids need you so much. You can’t be selfish and be a good mom. I was waiting for a moment when I could finally do what I knew was my calling. One day, about four years ago, I just knew it was time to start. Nobody could convince me any different.

I began working with another girl who had a similar story. Together, we started outreach to strip clubs. We had success with it. We incorporated and became a nonprofit and developed a board of directors. About three years ago, I started hearing the term “sex trafficking” in the media. But I thought, “Well, that’s something that happens over there in some other country.” When I got online, I learned there was a problem in the U.S. and there was little being done to help. I went on a mission trip to Bangkok and came back with even more of a passion to help people here. I contacted Shared Hope International, a leading group fighting sex trafficking in the U.S., founded by former Rep. Linda Smith. They compiled an extensive national report on domestic minor sex trafficking that showed how so many girls were being lost in the system or juvenile detention. It got a lot of media attention. I called their offices and told them we had this little nonprofit ministry and were considering opening a shelter, and they came alongside us and supported us financially and allowed us to ask questions as we launched.

I met with Linda Smith early on, and she said something that has always stood out. She told me, “These girls don’t identify as victims.” She was trying to show me the reality. These girls aren’t always the lovable types. They might cuss at you and spit at you. At the time I thought, why would anybody be unappreciative? But after two years of running a shelter for domestic minors I can tell you she was right. These girls don’t want to be poor pitiful little victims. They bond with their pimps. They see themselves as strong. And they are. They’re survivors.

Right now, we have two shelters. One is for minors and one is for girls over 18. “Sex trafficking’” is the legal term. Some shelters call it survival sex. Some places call it child prostitution. We don’t use that term because we think it’s a child that has been prostituted. So, the way the law reads, if you’re under 18, you don’t have to prove forced fraud or coercion in a sex act. If anything of value has been exchanged in a commercial sex act — it doesn’t have to be money, it could be a runaway out on the street who was put up in the Hilton for the week — that is considered sex trafficking. Most of our girls come to the house from referral systems — law enforcement, social workers. Usually she’s been in and out of juvenile detention centers more than one time.

People always want to know the numbers of girls out there. The U.S Department of Justice says over 100,000. The Center for Missing Children will say definitely over 100,000, but it could be up to 300,000. Until we have more trackable data, these numbers are going to be thrown out there. I like to just tell people, think about that one girl. Think about the four we can take in our program. Each girl represents a life.

We have a really structured program. We home-school them. They get four hours of education, two hours of life skills each day — everything from making jewelry to sewing. They make craft projects and keep 100 percent of what’s sold. They go to counseling. They take trips off-site. Some of the girls do equine therapy. Some do art therapy. Some do cheerleading, basketball. In the evening they have about two hours of free time. In the past year, the longest we’ve had a girl stay is eight months. And the shortest is two weeks.

People ask about the role of religion, and it’s not like I try to coerce them because I’m a Christian. But I’m definitely open with my experience, and what’s helped me, and that’s my faith. I want to use my story to help them know that they can overcome this.

I went to this nonprofit grant-writing workshop and all these people were complaining about how money wasn’t coming in like it used to. We’ve doubled our money from last year. It’s funny how things have always worked out for us. When we decided to launch Hope House, we had enough to pay the deposit and the first months’ rent, but that’s it. We had no promise of money. But we’ve always made it. We plan. We budget. We’re very frugal and smart about donations and we get a lot of services and in-kind gifts. We run the whole program for under $150,000 a year. Next year our budget is about $200,000 because we needed a little more. But the recession really hasn’t hurt us.

We continue to do strip club outreach. We make calls to women who advertise on Backpage ads. We work with law enforcement in the city. If the girl is a minor, we give the information over to law enforcement so they can do a raid. One of the girls we called last spring had been missing for a year. Her mom had no idea where she was. She was in a hotel room by herself. We called her ad. Her pimp had just beaten her up. She was 19. She had $50 and that was it. That night we got her on a plane and got her back to mom. She did have a relapse and went back to the pimp for a brief time, but she maintained communication with our outreach director. She started college this spring, and she’s so amazing. I think we need to understand that relapse is a part of the healing process. Too many times, people are like: Oh, she backslid. But working with teen girls in this population we have to understand that, sometimes, they do want to go back to their pimp for a brief time. They’ll try again later. We’ll be here. We’re not going anywhere.

We’ve had minors who feel like they made this choice themselves. They think, this guy presented an opportunity, and I took it. They don’t understand that they were victimized. We had a 12-year-old whose ad said she was 22. Or I’ve talked to a 22-year-old who says that she’s choosing this life, but when you hear her story — she’s been sexually abused, she’s been gang-raped. So what led to that choice? With every adult prostitute I’ve met, none of them have said this is what I always wanted to do. They’ve always had some messed-up situation at home. Sometimes it’s all they know. I had a girl tell me last week, my mom was a prostitute, my grandmother was a prostitute. She was 15 years old.

When the girls are working it’s easy for them to disassociate. That’s not even them. It’s a different person. They often get more upset when they talk about their mom. It’s been really eye-opening to see the loyalty these girls show their mothers. Most of these girls, their fathers aren’t in the picture. But even the moms surprise me. They never call, never write. It’s like, here’s my kid, so glad it’s not my problem anymore. And these girls still say, “My mommy sent me a letter and it never came.” Or, “Mom is so busy, she’s really tired after work, she doesn’t want me to wake her up by calling.” The reality is, Mom doesn’t care.

But I’ve also seen so much hope in these girls. Everything they’ve been through, and they’re still here. You’ll hear a story and think, this is the worst story I’ve heard. And then I’ll hear another one that is worse than that. They’ve been through so much trauma, but they’re still smiling. When they come in, their makeup and nails are done. They’re in heels. It’s so amazing when I see them just laughing, just wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Last year we took one girl to the Fun Depot, this place where you race cars and bumper boats. She’d been a prostitute since she was 12 years old. She was like, “I feel like a kid when I’m here.”

I look back at my own life and I think, would I change anything? I probably wouldn’t. If I hadn’t been through these things, maybe I would be more critical. Maybe I would be more judgmental. I think of all the times people could have given up on me. But now, I’m here and I love that I can make an impact. All of our stories and our journeys, they might not be what we would have chosen. But what can we learn from it?

As told to Sarah Hepola.

The Monday we returned to the city, Brian lost his job. In retrospect, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The small architectural firm he worked for served very high-end clients. And we were at the start of a national — and eventually personal — implosion. After some debate we resolved to move south. Brian would work on the house, and I would continue to telecommute to my job in Boston.

One night, we were making dinner and realized we didn’t have any feta cheese. In the city we could step outside at any hour for such a need. Baguettes, olive oil — those were all available for purchase at any corner grocery. But that seemed laughably bourgeois now. The following day, as I was retelling this to a talkative coffee shop owner, he said there used to be a grocery store next door.

He told me of George Bowers, a man who hopped the train from New York City to set up a prosperous grocery here in the 1870s. In 1881 George expanded to his second, and final location, which was next to the present-day coffee shop.

I casually noted that it would be good to have a neighborhood grocery again, and thought that was the end of the conversation. But a short time later the coffee slinger and his New York transplant wife decided to reopen Bowers’ store: Would we like to be the “passive” minority partners? It seemed like an opportunity to invest in our new community and solve the where-can-we-walk-to-buy-feta “problem” at the same time.

It was great: We rebuilt George’s original location as a turn-of-the-century grocery, complete with dark wood and marble; we featured local and specialty foods. We “reopened” George’s old grocery to much fanfare.

The business partnership, however, was a disaster. We discovered our partners could barely tolerate each other. They couldn’t keep agreed-upon schedules and regularly disappeared. To complicate matters, they also owned the 130-year-old building our shared business paid to renovate. Their enthusiasm for the project quickly centered on collecting the rent.

A month after we opened they closed their coffee shop next door. “Bad economy,” they explained. The closure left our fledgling business deserted three blocks from any other business. Overnight the market crashed and the money dried up.

Our partners turned their attention to their roster of ramshackle rental houses and decided to hold George hostage: “We’re the majority owners. We’re closing this business unless you pay us to leave.”

So there we had it: two bad choices. Pay these jerks to leave, or service a bank note on capital improvements made to their building and the start-up costs of a 3-month-old business.

In the end, we paid them to leave. This decision put tremendous additional debt burden on the business each month. Before we could celebrate taking control of the new business, we were met with new challenges.

I lost my job as content strategy director for a banking start-up. We stopped work on the house. Our heater died during the coldest winter on record. The cat’s water dish froze solid inside our old, drafty house. Twice.

When we could no longer afford health insurance, we bought life insurance. Eventually we couldn’t afford that. We drained our savings and maxed out our credit cards. Those damn student loans still caused me sleepless nights.

Besides, we had a business to save. Our inventory disappeared because we were eating it to survive. Our electricity and water were shut off. It got bleak. Very bleak. But we kept going.

Eventually, things started to change. A community of strangers started showing up in our shop. They became customers. Some became regulars. Some became friends.

We dismantled the parts of the business we didn’t like, and worked to grow in new directions.We borrowed bridge funds from our local micro-lender. We were recipients of generosity from unexpected sources. We hustled. We got great advice and experienced a few lucky breaks. We bought more inventory. We fixed our heater. We got current on our bills.

On May Day, 2009, we crawled from the wreckage and got married at the courthouse under a smiling portrait of John Wayne.

This summer we moved to a better location. We’re in an old schoolhouse at the intersection of our neighborhood and downtown. We expanded with a cafe and patio beer garden. We feature live music four nights a week. We still work very hard. But now, George is working for us, too.

Starting a business in a small town continues to teach me many lessons. I have a new appreciation for people across this country who work so hard and sacrifice so much to operate independent businesses. These are tough and determined people. Every day they work against damning statistics of failure. I know; I’ve lived it.

George Bowers Grocery has also taught me a great deal about community. Specifically, how tightly connected we are, economically and emotionally. We are grateful for our neighbors’ ongoing support. We are also thankful to live in a community that values entrepreneurship enough to put the money on the table when the banks would not (thanks, Staunton Creative Community Fund).

George has taught me how much I value living in a walkable city where my economic efforts directly impact the health and happiness of my neighbors. It’s a role I didn’t imagine but have grown to love.

My employers assumed I was headed to work for a competitor. When I told them I had decided to wander the country and live in a trailer, the laughter ensued. Surely I couldn’t be serious. But I certainly was: I packed up my dog, some camping gear and my camera. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I only knew I wanted to find my creative soul, which I lost when I decided to play by the rules of the corporate world.

Each morning on the road, I woke up and decided where I wanted to go. I didn’t have a set agenda or plans on how long I would be gone or what I was planning to do. I have to admit it wasn’t the best idea to venture out this way, but I wanted that freedom. At the time, I didn’t have an iPhone with handy applications to find my way. Instead, I relied on a road atlas that didn’t always warn me how things were going to be at the little tent symbol.

I started writing a blog so loved ones — mainly my mother — would know where I was and how I was doing. But I didn’t stay in one place too long and by the time I settled in a campsite, I usually didn’t feel like writing. Rather, I felt like drinking to toast myself on a job well done. That year, I took photographs with my point-and-shoot camera and when I did write posts, I made sure everyone knew I was having the time of my life and that leaving my job was the best decision I ever made. But in quiet hours, as I settled into my campsite, the questions sneaked into my head. I obsessed about details; I wondered what I was doing. I drank cocktails to quiet my doubts. It was exhausting to keep up my online persona as the happy adventurous spirit while I secretly stressed about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I didn’t want to quit traveling — but I did decide to quit drinking.

For the next two years I wandered the country without the trailer, without the alcohol, and with lessons learned from my first year. This time, I decided to camp in a tent instead of a trailer. A car was easier to maneuver and the trailer brought unwanted attention. I posted more and more photographs, and comments began shifting from, “You quit your job to do what?” to “What a beautiful photograph!” I always shrugged off these compliments. I would say, “It’s just a point-and-shoot camera.” In my mind, I didn’t have the right equipment or background in photography for serious work. But now that I wasn’t spending my evenings sinking into an alcohol buzz, I had a lot of time to pick up a new hobby, and photography presented itself. I wasn’t taking pretty pictures of sunsets or ocean views. I took photos of bird feet, tumbleweeds, my dog, Max, and odd sights along the road. The compliments kept coming.

While traveling, I didn’t keep up with the news of the world, but I knew the recession made it an uneasy time financially for me as well as for the entire country. I’d had the foresight to save my money for years before I decided to quit, but as my safety net grew smaller, I knew my time wandering around with seemingly no purpose would have to come to an end. Lucky for me, I found an entirely new revenue stream — one I never saw coming.

A Facebook friend suggested I go camping with a group of women who gathered annually with their Airstreams calling themselves the “Silver Sisters.” I didn’t know anyone, but I connected with them right away. I ended up taking pictures all weekend long. I sent the photos to people at Airstream, who liked them so much they wanted to publish them in their magazine. At the same time, a photo I took on that trip was selected for a group show at MOPLA (Month of Photography, Los Angeles). This was a huge honor and it validated a little of what people were telling me. I began to wonder: Could I actually make a living doing this?

Airstream hired me to be the official photographer of an annual event in its factory in Jackson Center, Ohio. A year and a half after I stopped drinking, I sold my 188-bottle wine refrigerator and my entire wine collection to buy a new camera. It was the best trade I’ve ever made. I bought a Canon 5D Mark ii. Portraits I took of another women’s camping group, “Sisters on the Fly,” were published in Trailer Life magazine. Soon after, the photographs I took at the Silver Sisters rally were featured in Airstream Life magazine.  I continued to travel, and the people I met opened doors I did not know existed before. I met a wonderful couple who offered to let me stay at their home in Maine if I ventured up there. I took them up on their offer and met their neighbors, whom I adored. I wrote a blog about them, which caught the interest of Maine: The Magazine, where I continued to contribute. Every opportunity led to another.

In 2011, I got more serious about photography. I continued to learn how to use my camera and decided to document the many characters I met on the road in portraits. Eventually, my passion turned to environmental portraits. This year, I had photographs published in Dog Fancy, Trailer Life and Airstream Life, which included two magazine covers.  An image of mine was selected to be in the Art of Photography show in San Diego over the summer  (15,444 entries and 109 photographs selected) and other photographs were selected for two exhibits (“Dreams” show in December 2011 and “Portrait” show in February 2012) at the Center of Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colo. Earlier in the year, the Long Beach Arts Council selected a group of my images of Long Beach to be in a permanent outdoor installation at its newly renovated transit mall in the heart of the city. And lastly, another photograph was chosen by Photographer’s Forum to be in its hardcover book, “Best of 2011,” coming out in December.

I used to try to convince people that quitting my job was the right thing to do, but I don’t have to do that anymore. The fact is, I have learned to live with less, and while I know I won’t be making the same amount financially, that is fine with me. I know, in my heart, it was the right thing to do for me. It can be scary to be out here, particularly during a recession, but being my own boss has its rewards.  I don’t have to answer to anyone but myself. I am not suggesting that you should quit your job to hit the road, like I did. For me, I made the decision only after careful consideration. But because of this experience, I’ve reconnected with my creative soul. I’ll never leave it again.

It was 2:30 a.m., and I had been up for nearly 24 hours. All I’d eaten that day was three frozen burritos and a Styrofoam cup of ramen noodles. I’d forgotten what day of the week it was, because days of the week don’t matter when you’re fishing. The three of us on deck hadn’t said a word in hours. We retreated into our minds to cope with the misery of the night. I kept asking myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”

I racked up huge debt going to a high-priced, second-tier university for my undergraduate education. I thought I’d made the most of my college experience: I spent a semester abroad in Paris and was the editor of the student newspaper my senior year. I earned a double major and a solid GPA. But after I graduated, I found myself broke as hell and living paycheck to paycheck. I got a job covering the city beat for a daily newspaper in Salinas, Calif. Not a bad gig at a time when journalism jobs were dwindling. But as I kept grinding away at a job that didn’t even require a high school diploma, I was drowning in $100,000 of debt.

Back on the boat, freezing water knocked me in the face. I had been so caught up in my thoughts I stopped paying attention — a rather dangerous situation while fishing. The wave pushed my hood back and soaked my entire upper body. My crew mates laughed as I shivered and cursed. I couldn’t wait to get a few hours of sleep. I couldn’t wait to have a shot and a beer at the sleazy bar at the foot of the harbor, and I couldn’t wait for the season, only a few weeks old, to be over. Yet I loved the work and the sleep deprivation. The raw cold and the crab was a small cost for the chance to finally afford my future.

I had worked steadily since I graduated college in 2005, after about a year of volunteering, internships and working for free to get the experience to earn a decent wage writing. But after three years of making around $35,000 a year – first as a legal assistant and Web editor and later as a journalist – I was unable to make a single payment on my private student loans. And this was before the recession. I liked my job, even if I had to write the occasional fluff piece to fill space, but given my financial situation, I didn’t see much future as a journalist. I needed to make at least $65,000 a year to have what most financial planners would consider a “manageable” debt burden, and given the deteriorating state of newspapers that salary was years away.

AW, a good college friend, had been living what seemed to be the ideal life, working on fishing boats in Alaska during the summer and traveling the world during the winter. He told me I should quit my job and start fishing. I heard that deck hands were regularly making $10,000 a month during a five-month winter season. That was enough to hook me. Eventually, I left my job at the paper.

But life generally does not go as planned. I was fired from my first job on a light boat in the supposedly lucrative Southern California squid fishery. Squid fishing is done at night with small boats that shine high-powered lights on the water to attract the spawning squid, and large fishing boats, seiners, harvest the squid with large nets. It was three-and-a-half weeks of harsh electrocutions — shocks that were the likely cause of death of another man a year and a half later — a crash course in diesel mechanics and cabin fever. The old, obese skipper told me I was not man enough to work on fishing boats because I had refused to dump contaminated diesel into the ocean. Then he booted me.

It was like I had been caught up in gold fever — I gave up one life in pursuit of another that was largely built on fantasy and best-case scenarios. The dreams of quick money were dashed. I had soft hands, no experience and little clue of how to handle myself on a boat. Maybe that’s when my better judgment should have kicked in, but I have always lived by the words of William Blake: “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity.”

Still, I had to pay down my debt somehow. My 100 grand is more than five times the national average of $19,839, according to findaid.org, but I am not alone. The Occupy movement that has captured the attention of the country is a response from many people in the same situation — young, educated, highly indebted with few prospects for work that will allow repayment without hardship. I’m surprised we haven’t seen this sooner, given that the costs of education are steadily rising while opportunities for gainful employment are dwindling. Surely our economic model will have to change: Can we really keep trudging along in a country where a lucky few reap enormous profits from the debt bondage of the many?

Discouraged by my first fishing experience, I went back to the daily grind. I spent six months waiting tables, slinging espresso and sending resumes and cover letters into the ether of the recession. That’s when I received a call from AW. If I could be in Alaska in two days I would have a job fishing for Dungeness crab and salmon over the summer. I was dead broke with few options, so up to Alaska I went.

When I arrived in Wrangell, I was overwhelmed by a land of fantastic beauty in the middle of the southeastern panhandle, full of thick temperate rain forests, steep snowcapped mountains, an abundance of wildlife and rich in native Tlingit culture. Coming from progressive-radical circles in the Bay Area, however, I was not ready for life in Palin country.

A month later, I watched the skipper, Captain Ron, shoot a seal swimming alone in the water 30 yards away from the boat. I was shocked and disturbed. Captain Ron hated anything that ate salmon and didn’t pay for it. Therefore, seals, seal lions and otters had to die. In a perverse twist of logic, he actually liked organic products, because farmers’ use of pesticides kill vulnerable salmon eggs, and they don’t pay for the damage.

Captain Ron was an eccentric, gnomish-looking man who wore a uniform of his own making. I would never see him in anything other than a hickory shirt, Prison Blues jeans and suspenders — classic Northwestern logger attire. He looked upon me with suspicion, since I was a writer who called California home. Most other fishermen eyed me that way, too.

The summer started off with 10 days of Dungeness crab fishing, which is a comparably easy fishery with lightweight 60-pound pots in protected inside waters. I had always prided myself on my physical fitness, but that fishery wore me down. At the end of the 10 days my arms ached with tendinitis, my sinews inflamed by the constant pushing, pulling, lifting and throwing of the pots. I recovered and spent the next two months seining for salmon.

That first summer was more or less miserable. I loved the beauty of the environment, but I hated most of the people. A common truism of those who call the Bay Area home is that they are easily offended and have an overdeveloped sense of indignation. That was certainly the case for me. I was quietly enraged by any hint of racism, sexism, homophobia and general bigotry, and I was often lost in the normal conversations of the hyper-masculine industry.

But if fishing can teach anything, it is how to cope with the uncomfortable, both physical and mental. In fishing, you either deal with the aches, pains, cold and exhaustion — or you find another job. The same with enduring long periods of time in a confined space with people you may not like.

I made $12,000 in three months. It was far less than I had expected, and after I had paid a few bills I found myself dead broke again. Nine months later I was reluctantly back in Alaska, unable to find decent work in the time away from fishing. I had tried to delve into the dirty world of finance with my BA in economics. I was even offered a job at an alternative investment firm in San Francisco; once they saw my credit history, the offer was promptly rescinded.

Within a few weeks back on the boat I realized something had changed. I began taking great pleasure in the work of the body. I had found myself as the person on the boat with the most fishing experience and was given the title “deck boss.” I was learning what I needed to know to be a career fisherman and I wanted to fish more. It’s said by many that commercial fishing gets into your blood; once you start you can’t stop.

I have spent roughly 18 of the past 20 months living and working on a boat, fishing for salmon in Alaska and for crab in both Alaska and Washington. I’ve put on 15 lean pounds, and have not suffered the dull ache of tendinitis again, even with the 130-pound Dungeness crab pots used on the Washington coast. The large chunks of money and rent-free living have been a boon to my finances. While still broke, I am now only 70 grand in the hole, nearly all private loans.

I write this in Mexico, where I am taking an intensive Spanish language program at the Universidad de Guadalajara. It is something I have wanted to do for years, and it is something I would not have had the time or money for in my old life. Life is not — nor should it be — all that one wants and desires. Yet it feels good to be able to accomplish many of my wants and desires with a job I never even imagined I’d have.