Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  One of the most active members of “Live in Your Van” was a gregarious wanderer called Ghost Dancer. On January 1, 2002, Ghost Dancer was parked outside a McDonald’s on Highway 41 in Vincennes, Indiana, in his home, a brown 1989 Ford F150 pickup. He’d heard that the changeover deadline for message boards was the end of the day. He worried: Were his new friends, already scattered across the country, about to lose their clubhouse on the internet? Not knowing what would happen was eating him up, like the buildup to Y2K writ small. Yet he had done nothing to prepare.

  When the solution came, it seemed obvious: Why not create a new gathering place before the old one went dark? To do this, Ghost Dancer couldn’t just stroll into McDonald’s with a laptop. For starters, he didn’t own a laptop, and WiFi hotspots wouldn’t be ubiquitous for another a few years. So he jury-rigged an internet connection between the pay phone and the limited equipment he carried in the truck. “Freejack style,” he called it. The setup relied on a Konexx acoustic coupler: a device that attached to a pay phone handset to receive and transmit analog data by holding a microphone to the earpiece and a loudspeaker to the mouthpiece. The other end of this coupler was plugged into a WebTV box, which had a built-in modem and offered basic browsing services; such boxes had started appearing in the mid-1990s, when computers were more expensive and less intuitive. To save space, Ghost Dancer had hung the WebTV from his CB radio. From there, it was connected to a thirteen-inch Philips television sitting on the passenger-side floor. After hours of fiddling with the setup, he fed thirty-five cents into the pay phone to get online, then logged into Yahoo and started a message board called “Vandwellers: Live in Your Van 2.” He was proud of that success, a bit of cyber-McGyvering that became a well-worn tale and led one popular blogger to call him “vandwelling’s founding father.”

  Ghost Dancer sits in the van that is his current home.

  Only later did Ghost Dancer realize he’d screwed up. Working across time zones, he’d blown the purported deadline by a few hours. It didn’t matter, though. Members followed him over to the new message board. And though Yahoo never shut down the original “Live in Your Van,” it became a virtual ghost town, overrun by adult-industry spambots that hawk “casual encounters” and “kinky cybersingles” to an audience of none. Meanwhile, “Live in Your Van 2” attracted thousands of newcomers, including Bob Wells, and kept gaining momentum. In the four years following the 2008 economic crash, the ranks more than doubled, growing to 8,560 people. A description of the group read:

  VanDwellers is the meeting place of [a] far-flung tribe. It is the Circle of Elders, the Nurturing Cradle for those who find themselves entering this cultural world by choice or by circumstance, the place for the Rites of Passage of newbies, a place where the Hunters and Gatherers of Information share the bounty with the tribe.

  Their conversation spread across platforms. In 2010, a member of the Yahoo tribe started a Facebook group called “VanDwellers: Live in Your Van,” with a similar mission statement appearing in a FAQ file:

  It is all about caring, sharing, giving of knowledge, forming friendships and looking after one another.

  The same document also raised the thornier issue of participating in a mutual-support network whose members were frequently strapped for cash:

  Most of us in the group are poor. When disaster strikes it often leaves us with nothing or no money and depending on the kindness of relatives, friends and sometimes strangers. While we don’t want the group to turn into a cyber-begging den, from time to time when people are broke and are desperate they will ask the group to help. We encourage you to use your own judgment here as to what you can and want to do.

  On Reddit, a thread called “vandwellers” began in 2010 and grew to include more than 26,000 readers. On YouTube, dozens of do-it-yourselfers competed to be the Bob Vila of vandwelling, showing off tricks for transforming humdrum passenger vehicles into well-appointed cabins on wheels. Some websites compiled tips and updates from travelers across the country, feeding them into searchable maps of nomad-friendly places. One of them, FreeCampsites.net, logged idyllic places in nature where visitors could stay for free, from small city parks to sprawling national forests. Another, AllStays.com, tracked businesses that allow overnight parking, from truck stops to casinos, Cabela’s sporting good outlets and Cracker Barrel restaurants. It also sold a smartphone app dedicated to “Wallydocking,” or boondocking at Walmart.

  Walmart has long endeared itself to RVers by letting them stay overnight in its parking lots. Some believe founder Sam Walton, an avid bird hunter, started the tradition in solidarity with outdoorsy types. Others think it’s a canny strategy to capture more shoppers. Either way, nomads appreciate the invitation, though it frustrates paid campgrounds and RV parks that don’t like losing business. The policy, however, isn’t in effect everywhere. Some Walmarts are located in cities that ban the practice. Others have revoked the privilege because visitors started overstaying their welcome, setting up barbecues and lawn furniture, building semipermanent encampments. In March 2015, a melee between police and an eight-member family of Christian musicians from Idaho, who’d been living out of their Chevy Suburban in the parking lot of the Walmart Supercenter in Cottonwood, Arizona, ended in a struggle over an officer’s gun that left one of the travelers dead. The store started rousting overnighters after that. (“It is so sad that a few morons have to ruin a good deal for everyone,” wrote the editor of the RV Daily Report website.) Some Walmarts are in a gray zone, struggling to manage the swelling ranks of nighttime visitors—many living out of automobiles—brought on by the precarious economy. Food trucks from an outreach group called Mobile Loaves and Fishes make regular visits to the retailer’s parking lots around Austin, Texas. “Customers of Walmart probably get wigged out a little bit by people sleeping in their cars in the Walmart parking lot,” Alan Graham, the organization’s founder, told a local radio reporter. “But god bless [management] for continuing to allow that.”

  With thousands of Walmarts across the country, how is a bleary-eyed traveler supposed to keep track of which ones are welcoming? The AllStays “Walmart Overnight Parking Locator” app marks every store in the United States and Canada with a little “W” icon. Some are red. Park there and you may get rousted or, worse, towed. Most are yellow. Clicking on them brings up user experience reports, like the following from a Walmart in Pahrump, Nevada:

  #5101 Supercenter

  Jul 2015: Stayed fine in my van. There were two other traveling vans.

  May 2015: One other RV. Permission was granted by night customer service manager. Parked near truck dock by first concrete island with trees. Many trucks delivering early in the AM, so give them plenty of room.

  Sept 2010: Manager welcomes RVers. Park in the south end of the parking lot and be careful not to block their delivery trucks.

  The little “W” icons and notes feel like an updated version of hobo signs, the glyphs used by drifters to share place-based knowledge in what passed for crowdsourcing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marked on walls and doors with chalk or coal, sometimes carved into trees, the signs warned of threats—zealous police, vicious dogs, bad water—or pointed out resources: safe campsite, kindhearted lady, work available.

  The proliferation of blogs through the mid-2000s encouraged otherwise solitary travelers to chronicle their adventures before a wide audience, giving rise to microcelebrities. Among the earliest and most prolific was George Lehrer, aka “Tioga George,” a cancer survivor who began posting in 2003 when, in his mid-sixties and lacking the income to afford both his apartment and food, he moved into a twenty-seven-foot Fleetwood Tioga Arrow motorhome with solar panels and satellite internet. On his blog, The Adventures of Tioga and George, he and his trusty rig were “The Greatest Vagabonds in the History of the World” and ventured forth with a stirring motto: “Never pay rent!” George posted whimsically about his travels with “Ms. Tioga” (his RV) and their crew of similarly anthropomorphized companions:
Mr. Sony Mavica (a camera), Mr. Chips (a desktop computer), Mr. Sunny (a solar power system), Mr. Data­Storm (a satellite antenna), Mr. Dometic (a fridge), Mr. DeLorme (a GPS system), and so on. Often he’d write several updates over the course of a day, from tales of befriending fellow travelers to battling an infestation of tiny ants, to getting shaken down by crooked cops in Mexico, where he especially loved to travel. He posted detailed accounts of his income and expenses, including revenue from Google ads. (In August 2010, it topped $1,300). He wrote movingly about the suicide of his son, David, and reminisced about sleeping on the dining room floor at David’s tiny home after the recession of the early 1990s wiped out the company that had employed George to sell AutoCAD software. Less than a decade after George started writing, his blog had attracted some seven million visits.

  Tioga George influenced a generation of boondocking bloggers. They included Tara Burns, a twentysomething sex worker in a ’98 Chevy Astro. Her popular blog, Hobo Stripper, chronicled what it was like to “live in a van and drive all over the country getting naked for cash.” When she wasn’t traveling between strip clubs with Bro, her border collie, she was at the keyboard, instructing readers how to sell a lap dance or how to change an engine’s cooling system water pump. Another crowd favorite was RV Sue & Her Canine Crew, the blog of Susan Rogers, a sixtysomething retired math teacher from Georgia who credited Tioga George with inspiring her to hit the road. Posting daily dispatches from a ’05 Chevy Express van towing a seventeen-foot Casita trailer, she accrued a lively following and, in 2012, made national news after her blog helped reunite Rusty Reed, a military veteran living out of a camo-painted pickup camper, with his lost shepherd mix dog, Timber, in Arizona. Pursuing what she called “low-budget, high-experience living” and “living on less and enjoying life more,” Sue became a role model to many readers. “I think of RVSue as my RV Fairy Godmother,” wrote one blogger who lives in a truck camper and calls himself ZenOnWheels. “Through Sue’s humor and humility I read story after story of her daily life on the road and, slowly, over many months, realized that yes, I could definitely do this too,” he added, expressing gratitude for her “openness, kindness, and darned good storytelling.”

  Like Tioga George, Sue shared financial reports that, starting in 2013, included income from ads on her site. By the end of that first year, it wasn’t unusual for her to earn more than $1,000 a month. Sometimes this agitated less popular bloggers who’d tried monetizing their own posts with little success. (While most readers don’t seem to begrudge traveling bloggers compensation for the work they do, it’s easy to see how ads running on minimalist, anti-consumerist sites might sometimes seem off-key. On Cheap RV Living, for example, a post called “Getting Rid of Stuff” with a quote from Bertrand Russell—“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly”—strikes an odd chord positioned beside a column of Amazon links flogging such products as a twelve-volt portable stove and a “luggable loo” toilet seat.)

  Inevitably the online conversations between kindred wanderers spilled into real-world gatherings. As the nomads met over campfires in forests and deserts around the country, they began to form the kind of improvised clans that the novelist Armistead Maupin called “logical”—rather than “biological”—family. A few even called it a “vanily.” For some of them, spending holidays together became more appealing than reuniting with actual kin. A typical scene: Christmas dinner on a barren, moonscape-like stretch of desert near Interstate 10 in California draws more than a dozen vehicles, whose inhabitants range in age from their twenties to seventies. They share a fifteen-pound turkey that has been deboned, halved, and cooked on a pair of portable grills, with sides of mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce and two kinds of pie, until even the dogs licking leftover crumbs from the plates are sated.

  Much of the action was happening out West, but get-togethers—also known as GTGs—were also coalescing back East, from Ohio down to Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. When folks caravanned from place to place together like wagon trains of yore, setting and breaking camp along the way, they called it a “roving GTG.” In 2011, Bob organized for the first time what became one of the most anticipated gatherings of the year. The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, or RTR,† was inspired in part by the rough-and-ready mountain men of the nineteenth century, who spent much of the year in hardship and isolation, trapping critters in remote places but reuniting each year at an annual fur-trading rendezvous. Held on public desert land near the town of Quartzsite, Arizona, for two weeks in January, the winter RTR was a chance for nomads to share skills and stories, make friends, and mentor newcomers to the lifestyle. Vandwelling aspirants sometimes showed up with tents or borrowed vans to learn everything they could before hitting the road themselves. The event was free and awareness spread mostly by word of mouth.

  Bob Wells holds a map of national parks during a talk on boondocking at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.

  For this community, making an effort to gather in person was no trifling thing. Members spend much of the year scattered across the country. Often they lack the gas money to drive long distances in a straight shot. And many consider themselves loners. Among the hermits, RV Sue has cultivated an especially solitary reputation, pleading with her blog readers not to drop in on her campsites unannounced, explaining that “blogging suits me well because I can interact with all kinds of interesting people without having to actually meet them.” Some of her fans have written about coming across a familiar seventeen-foot Casita during their travels—then realizing who that trailer belonged to and immediately hightailing it in the other direction.

  Some folks who attend the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous deliberately park on the outermost edge of the camping zone, while others can only handle human company in small doses and stay for a short while rather than the full two weeks. When Swankie arrived at an RTR session wearing a T-shirt that said “Introverts Unite: We’re Here, We’re Uncomfortable, and We Want to Go Home,” she got smiles and nods of acknowledgment all day.

  Increasingly Bob Wells found himself the de facto social coordinator for this growing band of isolates. And after the rendezvous dispersed each year, some of them started migrating with Bob to his next campsite. (Many free public camping areas, including where the RTR takes place, enforce a fourteen-day limit; when that expires, you’ve got to move to a new site at least twenty-five miles away.) Bob welcomed them, and they parked at a respectful distance to give him space. When a blog reader noted that folks had taken to following Bob around and referred to them, tongue-in-cheek, as his “disciples,” he joked back, “Despite my best efforts at mind-control, brain-washing, and manipulation, I still don’t have any disciples!”

  Bob’s tone wasn’t always so upbeat, though. In a more serious conversation with a reader, he wrote, “I think you are right, many, many more people are going to be forced into a much simpler life. My goal is to help them make the transition as easily as they can and hopefully eventually find joy in it, just like so many of us have.”

  BROWSING CHEAPRVLIVING.COM, absorbing the tales of transformed lives, Linda had a revelation of her own. “Holy crap!” she thought. “If they could do it, I’m sure I could, too.” Bob made extreme frugality sound like a path to freedom: liberation instead of deprivation. Or in Linda’s words: “Living a life of plenty with what you have.” Besides, even as a solo traveler, it was clear she would never be truly alone—there was a whole band of wanderers to meet, including many solo women around her age who were also on the road. Together they were a subculture, building their own set of customs, experimenting with survival strategies and circulating the best ones, writing a playbook for life on the underside of the economy. That kind of fellowship was important to Linda. “I’m a real social person,” she explained. “I didn’t feel like I would be out there by myself lonesome and depressed and just scraping by. My life could be exciting and fulfilling and creative.”

  Linda began dreaming of the right vehi
cle and browsing Craigslist. She looked at dozens of ads and found one strong candidate, but she didn’t have enough money to buy anything yet. So her oldest grandchild, who is autistic, ended up purchasing it for himself, lured by the promise of cheap rent: $500 a month plus electricity for a space in an RV park that wasn’t too far from his parents and three siblings. Linda was glad to see him get it since he had few other options for living independently. “Part-time at Burger King is not enough money to live on,” she said drily.

  Then came a windfall. Collin, Linda’s son-in-law, worked in sales for a commercial storage firm that installed everything from gun and evidence lockers to museum archive cabinets, often on government contracts. He noticed a gap in the plans for an upcoming project at a Veterans Affairs hospital. New signs were going up throughout the facility, but no arrangements had been made to do the prep work: tearing the old signs down, patching and painting the walls beneath. So Linda’s daughter Audra took on the job and delegated some of the work to her. “Fifty dollars an hour to paint and prep for the VA hospital was such a blessing to me,” Linda recalls. Within a couple months, she’d amassed $10,000.

  In April 2013, Linda was perusing Craigslist when she saw a 1994 El Dorado motorhome with teal and black stripes. With only 29,000 miles on its odometer, the twenty-eight-foot RV should have been worth about $17,000. The asking price, however, was just $4,000.

  Excited, Linda set up a meeting and brought along a girlfriend for moral support. Together they checked out the RV. The outside was in reasonable condition, apart from rotting tires and a football-size crater in the loft above the cab on the passenger side. It had been patched with a smear of caulk that looked like dried toothpaste. (“That caulk didn’t need to be there,” Linda reflected. “I don’t know what he was thinking. We call that ‘building material abuse.’”) The owner explained that he had been driving on a crowned road—high in the center and low on the sides, which made the vehicle tilt outward—when he collided with an inward-leaning telephone pole.