As an adult, Linda had become a very busy, impressively high-functioning and increasingly hard-core alcoholic. Briefly she dabbled with meth—not so much for the speedy high but because it enabled her to consume the ever greater quantities of alcohol she needed to get drunk.
Linda had tried to quit and backslid a couple times. But after one all-night bender, she couldn’t take it anymore. She returned home around 6 a.m. Her children watched wordlessly as she came inside. “Their faces told the story though—the disappointment,” Linda recalled. “It’s horrible to wait for somebody to come home. You expect them to come home, and they don’t come home. It’s not a nice thing to do to people that you love.”
After that, Linda rededicated herself to quitting with a new vigor. This time it stuck. When she worried about slipping between AA meetings, she called her sponsor. Oddly, that’s how she learned some of the same techniques that helped her keep going through long shifts at Amazon. She became an expert at focusing on whatever challenge lay immediately ahead, parsing large problems into bite-sized chunks until she felt she could manage anything.
“Are your dishes done? Okay. Go do your dishes then and call me back,” her sponsor used to tell her. Linda would scrub the plates and glasses until they gleamed, then call again. “Did you make your bed?” was the next question. Linda went and did that, too. And so on, and so on, until she had muddled through.
LINDA WASN’T THE ONLY ONE having a challenging time in the warehouse. On October 1, Nevada OSHA received a complaint about workers getting back injuries from lifting heavy boxes. A week later, two inspectors went to the Fernley facility. They reviewed the company’s injury logs and walked around the plant, escorted by Amazon managers. The visit took no more than four hours. The case was closed later that day, with an official report concluding: “The facility had numerous strain injuries including back strain, but nothing out of the norm for this type of work setting.”
Apart from exertion, Linda said her biggest challenge was tedium. She played mind games to carve up the hours. “I’m only staying here five more minutes, then I’m leaving. I’m quitting. This is it!” she told herself over and over. That’s how she lasted until a couple of hours before sunrise, when her shift ended. Then she and her coworkers clocked out and exited the building through a station with metal detectors and security guards, part of the company’s antitheft strategy. (Mark Thierman, a Reno attorney, represented a group of temps from Amazon’s Fernley and Las Vegas warehouses who claimed they were owed back wages for the time they spent waiting in line to pass through the company’s security stations, up to thirty minutes a day. While the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision the following year.)
Despite the boredom, Linda was grateful for one part of her job. “The best thing was the camaraderie,” she said. “I made friends there.”
Amazon is where Linda first met Silvianne, the astrologer who would later work with her as a camp host in the San Bernardino Mountains. Before Silvianne arrived at Fernley for CamperForce, she had written on her blog:
Scene 1: Leaving northern New Mexico, headed towards northern Nevada for a seasonal workamping job as a warehouse associate for the online lynchpin of the Evil Consumer Empire, facing a temporary adventure in the belly-of-beast. A drastic although necessary step to fund the first stages of the journey. . .
Silvianne was one of Linda’s neighbors at the Sage Valley RV Park. There she often walked Layla, her cat, using a leash with a pink harness. The habit had made her something of a local celebrity. Even on the floor of the warehouse, people approached her and asked, “You’re the one who walks the cat, aren’t you?”
Like Linda, Silvianne was a stower on the night shift. As a self-described type A personality, she found the job maddening. Often all bins were full. There was nowhere to put things, no way to do the work well, and it made the warehouse feel like a version of Kafka’s castle designed to torture perfectionists. Silvianne had been watching Orange Is the New Black and found herself comparing the inmates’ lives with her own. In the beginning, she cried two or three times a week. (“I’m an emoter,” she explained. “It was so embarrassing. It’s because I care too much.”) Her back hurt all the time, which was new—apart from a twinge or two in her catering days, it had never bothered her before. And she was one of many workers who had problems with static shocks. Rolling a cart full of plastic bins through the warehouse seemed to build up a charge, she later explained. One time she wheeled over to a bank of metal shelves and tried to stow a book on the top level. Her hand glanced over the metal and a jolt coursed up her arm, which recoiled reflexively, sending the book flying into her face. This left her with a fat lip and bleeding gum. The book had landed face down on the floor. When she looked down at it, a photograph of a Tibetan monk smiled up at her from the back cover. “This is my goddess’s sense of humor,” she later reflected. (This problem wasn’t new. Fernley employees had been filing formal complaints about getting shocked by the shelves for two years by the time Silvianne joined CamperForce. During state workplace safety inspections, Amazon officials said they knew about the problem and had bonded the shelves to grounding rods, along with installing tinsel on the carts to help them discharge electricity. When the shocks continued, they applied a product called Staticide to the floor. A company official stated this “had reduced the instance of static shock to employees.” The inspectors called for no changes.)
Linda also befriended Jen Derge and Ash Haag, a couple in their late twenties who arrived at Sage Valley in early October. They were living in the Manatee, a navy blue and white 1995 GMC high-top camper van, bought on the way to Nevada for $4,500. The seller had shaved $1,000 off the asking price. After having it on his lot for six months, he wanted it gone.
Jen Derge and Ash Haag pose with their van, the Manatee.
Jen recalled how Linda first summoned them out of their van to say hello, and how she’d breeze past with calls of “pancakes, pancakes!” to announce she was making enough breakfast to share. “You know Linda,” Jen said. “She is the social hub!” When Ash was waiting for a special letter from her niece—it was addressed “To Auntie, Miss Jen and Van”—it was Linda who first heard from the front desk of the RV park that it had arrived. “So Linda busts into the bathroom and is like, ‘Are you in here?’ and I’m like, ‘Yes!’ And she’s like ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like ‘I’m having private time, Linda!’” Ash recalled. “She’s like, ‘You have mail!’ I love her.”
Before becoming nomads, Jen and Ash had rented a house together in Colorado Springs, where both grappled with spells of depression and were increasingly disenchanted by their job prospects.
Jen had grown up watching her parents work at King Soopers—a Kroger-owned grocery store—a job her father hated. “We want better for you kids,” they always said, urging her toward college. Independence was important to Jen. In high school she started working as a bagger and courtesy clerk at the grocery store for around $6 an hour. Later she earned an associate’s degree on scholarship. But she couldn’t see the point of going further. “It’s the same story everywhere,” she said. “You see all your friends who get their bachelor’s degree and higher and they can’t get a job. So I just don’t see a reason to go back even though I love learning. Just the money part of it, going into debt . . . the idea of it just scares me so bad, I don’t want to.”
Jen took jobs at a craft shop and some used bookstores and then became a school library assistant. In that role, she ended up working under a library software administrator for the largest district in Colorado Springs. Jen loved the position. “It was so much fun, communicating with all these librarians, getting into their computers and showing them all this cool stuff,” she said. But it quickly became evident that her boss, who held a master’s degree, was getting pushed into retirement, while Jen was taking over the same level of work at a much lower wage.
“The older generation that has
advanced degrees, they’re cleaning them out and putting techs into those positions. It’s very sad for the people who have those degrees who’ve worked so hard for them,” Jen said. “I felt like I betrayed my boss by taking her job, because she was an amazing lady.”
At the same time, Jen figured she’d never be able to get a job like the one her boss held—it was getting reclassified to a lower-tier position—regardless of whether she went back to college. “Why go to school when the workforce is only entry-level positions?” she mused.
Meanwhile, Ash had watched her own parents fall out of the middle class after her father, an electrical engineer with a six-figure salary, got laid off in 2001. He was too proud to take a lower-paying job, at least before the family’s finances were depleted. Then he ended up driving school buses in the morning and working at Walmart at night.
“Anyway, I’m seeing my parents in their mid-sixties with no retirement, you know, everything that they built over their entire life just disappeared. And then with the recession you see that happening to more people,” Ash said. Though she’d always considered herself a “follower,” she began to worry that, even if she adhered to all of society’s rules for living an upright middle-class life, she’d have no guarantee of stability. She was skeptical that Social Security would be around to support her generation in old age. And though she had a couple 401(k)s and a Goldman Sachs IRA that her parents set up during her childhood, she worried that, by the time she needed them, they would be worthless.
Ash was also grappling with student loans. The $30,000 she’d borrowed had mushroomed with interest to $37,000, all for a degree she hadn’t completed after six years of classes. She’d felt obligated to go straight from high school to college—even though she believes “you don’t know what you want, you don’t know what you need, and you don’t know who you are” at that age—and ended up studying everything from art history to physics.
During and after college, Ash worked at a mom-and-pop pharmacy that to her had felt like a family. But a leadership shakeup had changed her supervisors’ attitudes; she watched as loyal, longtime staff got pressured to quit. “Our society is turning to that a lot,” she said. “They don’t want long-term employees, because then you do have pensions, then you do have to keep giving them cost-of-living increases and, if they’ve been working for the company a long time, they’re going to want a merit-based raise.” The new management, she said, “literally wanted disposable people. And to make disposable people you have to have a disposable job. And so everything became automated.”
Meanwhile, Jen had been scouring the internet for alternate ways to live. She’d researched minimalism and the tiny house movement. She’d also come across CheapRVLiving.com. Gradually, she began thinking she’d found a way out. To Ash, moving into a vehicle and becoming a nomad wasn’t initially the most appealing choice. She thought of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Farley plays a vandweller and motivational speaker named Matt Foley. He warns kids to shape up unless they want to end up living in a van, too. “My first thought was that we were going to be like that guy, saying ‘I live in a van down by the river!’” Ash said. Despite this, she came to embrace the idea.
The plan was to alternate between work and adventuring while living in a Subaru Impreza hatchback, a hand-me-down from Jen’s mother. As it turned out, that wasn’t an easy car to turn into a home. Though the rear seats were collapsible, there wasn’t enough space to lie down unless you crammed stuff into the foot wells behind the front seats, creating a headrest. Still, Jen and Ash prepared the best they could. Jen cut black wool felt into panels that could be Velcroed over the windows for privacy. To pare down their possessions, they put a message on Craigslist—CURB ALERT: FREE—and hauled everything they no longer needed out to the lawn. The posting told people to come at 9 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., everything on the lawn had disappeared. “If you say, ‘It’s free,’ people will find a use for everything,” Ash said. “Somebody even picked up the trash!” (She figured that was a mistake.)
Their first adventure was hiking the Colorado Trail—more than 480 miles from Denver to Durango—nonstop for fifty-two days. Then they headed to the Amazon warehouse in Fernley. Initially, they planned to do CamperForce while living out of the Subaru. (“That wouldn’t have worked,” Jen said, matter-of-factly. “We would have quit.”) Fortunately they found the van. Buying it, however, left them pretty much broke.
After they got settled at the Sage Valley RV Park, the couple decided to bike to the warehouse for their first full-length work shift. They figured it would be fun, since the route was mostly flat, and also help them save on gas money. But then one of Jen’s tires got a slow leak. They had to stop every fifteen minutes to pump it up. The trip took three hours but they still made it in time to start the ten-hour shift. When they got out at 5 a.m., it was dark and cold enough to make their teeth chatter. They stopped at Walmart to get extra layers of clothing and then biked alongside rush-hour traffic into a blinding sunrise. “We were known forever as the girls that rode their bikes to work,” Jen said, laughing. After that, they decided to stay near the warehouse during the week to save on gas. They parked the Manatee at Walmart or a gas station, returning to the Sage Valley RV Park only on their days off.
As stowers, they found that all their recent hiking experience helped. Still, Jen said, “it takes a while to get used to all the bending but you get the muscles after a couple of weeks. You see all these older people there and you’re like ‘Oh, gosh, if they can do it, what am I complaining about?’”
Ash found the work “monotonous and isolating.” To help alleviate the tedium, she sometimes entertained herself by creatively matchmaking items as she shelved them, putting, for example, a case of condoms next to a case of pregnancy tests. She used the wish list feature on Amazon’s website to catalog “all the amazing and awe-inspiring shit we put on shelves.” These included live waxworms, a five-pound gummi bear, a diver’s speargun, a book titled Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women, a butt plug attached to a plush foxtail, a pound of obsolete U.S. coins, a set of cotton briefs with four leg holes called “undies for two,” and a Batman-themed dildo.*
By late October, temperatures in Fernley had dipped below freezing. Flurries dusted the trailer parks around Halloween. Real snow arrived a week before Thanksgiving. The bitterest weather hit in December—there were single-digit temperatures and one miserable –2-degree night. To sleep in the cold, Jen and Ash began wearing every piece of clothing they owned, then burying themselves in a collection of quilts and sleeping bags, along with a comforter and a down army blanket. On work nights, when they were stealth camping near the warehouse, they ran a Little Buddy propane heater for ten minutes before bed; holding their feet over it, they’d watch the sweat from hours of walking turn to plumes of steam. Though the night shift left them feeling like “Amazombies,” they were grateful they’d chosen it. “During the coldest part of the twenty-four-hour cycle, we were going to be inside a heated environment, and that’s a major thing,” Ash said.
When wintry weather hit the Sage Valley RV Park, Linda had a CamperForce neighbor, Carl, who lived in a tent. He was on the day shift. Since Linda was in the warehouse all night, she urged him to just sleep in her motorhome where it was warm—she’d been running a heater off the park’s electricity to save on propane—but he always said, “No, no, no. It’s comfortable, I’m good.” Meanwhile, even the experienced RVers were having a hard time. Some of them had tricks to stay comfortable, such as wrapping water hoses in electric heating tape and covering windows with reflective bubble wrap insulation. (A few years later, Amazon created a webpage for CamperForce applicants called “Winterizing Your Rig” that advised covering windows in shrink-film and putting reflective insulators over vents. Links were provided so readers could purchase both materials at—where else?—Amazon.com.) But there were limits. Linda disconnected her water lines. When she tried to unplug her sewage hose, she found the waste inside
had already frozen. “There was a huge poopsicle just sitting there. I was like, ‘That’s nasty!’”
Phil and Robin DePeal, the Michiganders who used to own a scrap business, were fighting a similar battle. They bought a floodlight and tried using it to thaw out their iced sewage hose, to no avail. Meanwhile one of Linda’s heroes—Jim Melvin of the blog Jimbo’s Journeys, which had pointed her to Amazon’s seasonal jobs—rushed into town to buy an electric pet-bed warmer and a space heater for Chica, his two-pound Chihuahua.
Linda began fantasizing about her next destination, which would be warmer and less exhausting. Like many of her neighbors, she planned to camp on the public lands surrounding the town of Quartzsite, Arizona. That region, a migrants’ Shangri-la in the Sonoran Desert, drew tens of thousands of winter visitors and hosted various events through the season, from sprawling acres of swap meets, to shows for rock collectors and RV enthusiasts, along with hundreds of looser social gatherings. Linda couldn’t wait to check out one of those get-togethers, the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, which happened there in January. When she mentioned that to Jen and Ash, who had heard of the event but were still figuring out what to do after Amazon, they decided to join her. “I had not solidified that plan of RTR but then when Linda said it, I was like ‘Okay we have to do it,’” Jen recalled. Silvianne planned to go, too.
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