Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  But the winter didn’t let go so easily. There were mandatory fifty-hour overtime weeks. With Christmas coming on, the bins on all of the shelves were overstuffed with merchandise, a stower’s nightmare. “We were at 120 percent capacity for the last month and a half, so whenever you scanned a bin to try to put one thing away, the scanner would go ‘EE-nu! EE-nu! EE-nu! EE-nu!’ and you’d have to wait before you could try the next bin,” Ash said. “People were going around just like insane. There was nowhere to put anything, you wanted to beat your face against a wall.” Stowers had to keep hunting, frustrated, until they found the rare bins that had space. At the same time, supervisors were telling them to pick up the pace, to make “rate,” that “we’ve gotta get our numbers.” Amazon would later recount that this period was its strongest ever holiday season. On December 2 (aka Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving) alone, customers ordered some 36.8 million products—or about 426 orders a second—helping to bring the company’s overall sales for 2013 to a record high of $74.45 billion.

  Amid this Linda had a health scare. She had been holding up well, despite straining her right wrist with the UPC scanner. But on December 15, two weeks before her last day at the warehouse, she began having dizzy spells. She didn’t know what caused them. Other workers had been feeling that way, too, and some believed it was due to poor air quality in the warehouse. Linda toughed it out for an hour, but attempts at deep breathing weren’t helping, so a coworker escorted her to AmCare. There the medical staff took her blood pressure: sixty over forty-eight—low enough to call an ambulance.

  At the hospital in Reno, half an hour’s drive west, Linda underwent a CAT scan and an X-ray but received no conclusive diagnosis. “The nurse at the hospital said I could have compressed something on the vagus nerve,” Linda recalled. “That’ll make you pass out. You can get it from straining.” She sounded skeptical, since she didn’t think she had been pushing herself that hard. In any case, she was instructed to follow up with her primary-care physician. “Yeah, I’d do that if I had one,” she said, laughing. Like most workampers I met right before the Affordable Care Act took effect, Linda was uninsured. And since she didn’t have a ride back to the Sage Valley RV Park, she sprung $172 for a cab. For the next few days, she felt weak and took unpaid time off.

  CamperForce was winding down. Most workers left right before Christmas so they could celebrate with far-flung families. Linda volunteered to stay through December 30. She wanted to earn as much as possible. Besides, she wasn’t feeling festive. After more than four months on the overnight shift, she’d been bored into a fugue state interrupted only by pains radiating from her right wrist, the one wielding the scanner gun. The job was repetitive, mindless: shelve merchandise, point the gun at one item after the next, pull and hold the trigger, wait for the beep that meant the red laser had found its mark—the barcode—before moving on. What did it add up to, apart from a paycheck? Each item Linda scanned was a pixel in a picture that depressed her. Some CamperForce workers called themselves “Santa’s elves.” That gave them a way to take pride in their work because it meant they were sending out gifts, spreading joy. Linda didn’t drink the Christmas Kool Aid, though—she felt less like an elf, more like a cog in the world’s largest vending machine, and the experience left her numb. “I wanted to disconnect from Christmas after seeing all that junk,” she said. Apart from sending gifts to her grandchildren, she ignored the holiday. When the warehouse shut down for Christmas, so did she. Linda spent the day alone, resting in her RV.

  Beneath the fatigue, however, was a slow-dawning sense of pride. Linda had achieved a goal, getting through her first half-year as a workamper, completing two seasonal jobs—camp hosting and CamperForce—while acclimating to a frugal and nomadic life in her RV. She felt self-sufficient and free. But that was only the beginning. The next step was finding a tribe, a community, what some nomads called a “vanily.” The best place for that was the two-week winter Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, which was soon to begin in Quartzsite.

  “Let me get the hell out of here!” she thought. “Put the pedal to the metal. Let’s go!” Ready for a break and warmer weather, she set out for Arizona.

  As the rest of CamperForce rushed away from Fernley and into the New Year, one worker stuck around. That was Don Wheeler, the former jet-setting software executive who’d written me a proud paean about workamping and who appears here under a pseudonym. Don was the first member of CamperForce I met, a sharp and entertaining storyteller who spent long hours regaling me with tales of life on the road. He was originally scheduled to work his last CamperForce shift on December 21. His post-Amazon plans included passing through Quartzsite—he called it “Burning Man for geezers”—and visiting friends in the Colorado Rockies. But something very unusual took place instead. In what would become three years of reporting on CamperForce workers, I would never witness anything like it happen again—Amazon offered Don a full-time, year-round job. “Hey, I’m seventy, who else is going to hire me?” he joked by email. In company jargon, Don was about to become an “Amazon associate.” On the warehouse floor, he’d be what CamperForce workers and other temps called—with envy or sometimes derision—a “blue badge,” referring to the blue worker ID cards worn by permanent employees.

  In another email, he asked me to keep his name out of my writing. He explained:

  As entry-level apparatchiks, we may not even speak to the media on pain of death, dismemberment or worse. So now I’m worried. It was different before—as a workamper I could afford an insouciant, devil-may-care attitude toward the ponderous machinations of Corporate America, but now I am them. I need this job . . .

  I can’t afford to be famous. If I pop up on national media, even as a sidebar, HR will make short work of me and when I show up at the warehouse one day, my badge won’t let me into the building. That’s called the ACS (Amazon Cold Shoulder) and there is no recourse since I am an employee at will.

  I’m sorry for my seeming paranoia but HR is NOT my friend, however much they insist they are. Their role is validated when they get rid of the bad apples and troublemakers. I am not as brave as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (nor as good looking).†

  Within a few months, Don had paid off debts, gotten some long-deferred dental work, bought new glasses, contributed to his Roth IRA, and began saving for a Harley.

  * America’s appetite for sex toys— indicated by the sheer number and variety of dildos and butt plugs passing through Amazon warehouses— is a subject of fascination to many workers. And though most “adult novelties” get wrapped in black plastic as soon as they come off the loading docks, a few squeak past unnoticed. One CamperForce stower recalled gleefully the time she received a case of sixty suction-cup mounted dildos. She arranged them on the shelves with each one suctioned at the front of a bin and standing upright. “When you turned the corner, around that aisle all you see is these peckers,” she said, laughing. “Of course, we all had to go around, telling everybody, ‘Go look at C23!’” Usually she would have worried about pissing off management, but “it was the last two weeks of work there, so what are they going to say?”

  † When Don wrote this email, Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian dissident punk band Pussy Riot, had just been freed from a Siberian prison.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Gathering Place

  This was a peaceful place, this camp—a Garden of Eden on wheels, capable of picking its own latitudes and following the gentle weather round the year, a haven in which every occupant had brought his life into focus by compressing it into the minimum space, a miracle of internal arrangement plus mobility.

  —E. B. WHITE

  AS YOU DRIVE WEST ON INTERSTATE 10 into a January sunset, a strange vision appears in the desert. Thousands of gold specks glitter at the base of the Dome Rock Mountains, as if the peaks are surrounded by a vast reflecting pool. Up close, the sparkling dots break apart into a sprawl of RVs, their windshields catching the last rays of daylight. This is the town of Quartzsi
te, Arizona. Most of the year, it lies dormant, a lonesome outpost between Los Angeles and Phoenix with two truck stops and temperatures high enough to make you hallucinate. In the inferno of summer it has fewer than four thousand inhabitants. Visitors are outnumbered by tumbleweeds. But every winter when days grow mild and pleasant, hundreds of thousands of nomads stream in from all over the country and Canada, turning the town into a pop-up metropolis nicknamed “The Gathering Place.” Some of the arrivals are leisure-loving snowbirds—folks with generous pensions or lucky retirees whose savings made it through the financial meltdown of 2008—while others are survivors, clinging to the ragged edge of the social contract. Their circumstances are reflected in the range of dwellings parading along Main Street.

  Cars and trucks arrive towing all kinds of shelters, from shiny aluminum Airstreams to cargo boxes retrofitted with doors and windows, to teardrop-style trailers the size of pup tents. You might see a tiny house with gabled dormer windows and gingerbread trim mounted on a tandem axle platform, or a truck hauling a live-aboard sailboat that will get dry docked here as a makeshift apartment. There are dozens of decommissioned school buses. A few are still as yellow as a number-two pencil, while others are airbrushed with wilderness scenes or psychedelic swirls. Some have been converted into elaborate homes with couches and woodstoves. A handful are live-in businesses, including the Bus Stop Ice Cream & Coffee Shop—a rainbow-colored throwback that looks like it could belong to a latter-day Ken Kesey whose drug of choice is espresso—and a blacksmith’s studio with an anvil logo and the slogan “Recycling Society’s Waste by Hammer & Hand.” There are also rattletrap pickups with cabins built into their cargo beds, fancy fifth-wheel RVs with satellite dishes, and jalopies so overburdened with possessions that their chassis scrape the asphalt. Some of the vehicles are immaculate, with chrome trim sparkling in the sunshine. Others are pitted with rust, wheezing plumes of dark exhaust. A few convey pleas for donations. One station wagon with an empty gas can tied to the roof has been painted to read “HELP OUR FAMILY START A BUSINESS” and shows the web address for a Go Fund Me campaign. An old pickup camper has “HOMELESS SHELTER” and “GOD BLESS” written on the back in neat block letters. Below is a wish list: “NEEDS: GAS, CASH, BIGGER RV.”

  A pickup camper bearing religious inscriptions and pleas for help parks at the McDonald’s in Quartzsite.

  It’s worth noting—you can’t always size up folks’ economic circumstances just by looking at their RVs. Some of the dwellings parked around workamping sites, for example, resemble the kind of pleasure craft one might associate with well-to-do vacationers. When I started visiting the RV parks where Amazon’s CamperForce workers stay, I wondered, What are those shiny land yachts with satellite dishes doing here? And I learned two things: First, a few of the RV parks were also temporary homes for high-paid oil field workers, who had cash to burn on fancy toys. Second, plenty of folks don’t own their RVs free and clear. Just like in the housing market, it’s possible to overspend and get trapped in a debt cycle, struggling to make payments. And unfortunately, just like traditional homes, RVs can also go underwater.

  Traffic crawls. No one seems to be in a hurry, though. Along with the mobile homes are dusty all-terrain vehicles coming back from zipping around the desert—the riders wear scarves and goggles and look like they’ve been sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. Tractor trailers creep toward crowded truck stops, clogging the turning lanes. At intersections, elderly people on mobility scooters and baby boomers pushing small dogs in strollers wait for the crosswalks to clear. Dreadlocked teens and twentysomethings in weather-beaten backpacks sit on the curb. Their tribe calls itself by many names—crust punks, dirty kids, travelers, and Rainbows, a reference to the Rainbow Family gatherings that many attend. Some of the kids are hitching rides out of town—to Yuma, to Phoenix, anywhere. Others hold cardboard placards that ask for cash. They don’t call this panhandling, though. It’s “flying a sign,” or “jugging,” or “spanging”—short for spare-changing—and it’s what you do when the gas money runs out. Many of the older folks give them dirty looks, but others play along. A white-haired cashier at Dollar General rings up two six-packs of Miller Genuine Draft for a guy in a brown hoodie and blond dreadlocks; she laughs when he jokingly extends a palm full of colored stones in payment instead of dollars. A spirited debate rises on the post office line between a snowbird and a young drifter with a handlebar mustache. Are humans spiritual beings who transcend this planet? Or just fuck-ups trashing the earth? When evening comes, the kids retreat to desert encampments. They pass bottles of whiskey around the bonfire, strum guitars, roast hot dogs, roll joints, kill time.

  Most of the restaurants in town are packed by dinnertime, which starts in the late afternoon. At Silly Al’s, a popular pizzeria, seniors do the Electric Slide and listen to a house band, whose set includes a Barenaked Ladies song that begins “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a house.” On other days they sing karaoke. A wizened woman in a red straw hat rides her mobility scooter onto the dance floor and warbles “Lookin’ out My Back Door” by Creedence Clearwater Revival in a heavy vibrato. During the twangy guitar solo, she drives figure eights around the middle of the room and the audience breaks into cheers.

  The Main Street Eatery and Laundromat bustles with customers who show up to get fed, clean their clothes, even wash themselves. In back, showers cost $7 and come with a litany of posted rules: “Twenty-Minute Limit,” “No Smoking,” “No Dying or Tinting Hair,” and “No Shoes in Stall.” Cops hassle Rainbows hanging around the side door. A laundry customer rants about a comet that will destroy the universe (and how Obama can’t do anything about it). A grizzled old man sits in the parking lot, his back against a chain-link fence, throwing a rock for a Jack Russell terrier that dutifully retrieves it for him, over and over. “He’s a rockhound!” the man guffaws when he sees me watching. (Hunting for semiprecious stones in the desert—better known as rockhounding—is a favorite local hobby.)

  Restaurant owners aren’t the only ones scrambling to make a buck. Every year, vendors descend on Quartzsite, setting up temporary booths or reopening storefronts that closed for the off-season, posting signs all over town. “Mr. Motorhome Has the CLEANEST RVS in QUARTZSITE” claims one pitchman, whose photo appears on a series of posters, his grin unsettlingly white. “It’s not a mirage, the deals are real,” blare ads for a competitor, RVs for Less. “FREE PANCAKE BREAKFAST” reads a banner outside La Mesa RV, another dealership. Six mornings a week, seniors line up there for a hot meal in a room called the Silver Buckle Customer Corral, amid televised ads for motorhomes most cannot afford. (They treat the ads like soup-kitchen sermons—obligatory background noise to ignore.) There are dozens of RV supply and service stations, from waste dumping sites to solar panel vendors and roving windshield repair shops. Some use silly names to stand out: Passmore Gas, A Toe Truck, the RV Proctologist. Others make a loftier appeal. At Schartel Pinstriping Services, there’s a tent topped with a giant cross and a sign that says “Hope for America. America for Jesus.”

  Everyone’s angling for a quick payday, promising rock-bottom prices. “We Stack It Deeper & Sell It Cheaper,” promises one sign. “Everything Must Go!” says another. At salvaged grocery outlets—known as “scratch-and-dent” stores—shoppers find deeply discounted food past its sell-by date in crushed boxes and dinged cans. Behind the lurid pink façade of an outlet called Addicted to Deals, they buy DVDs—three for $10—and expired vitamins. “This place is freaking crazy,” one shopper wrote online. “It’s like a college dorm room and an abandoned Kmart had a forbidden lovechild, painted it Pepto-Bismol pink, and gave it a phrase for a name.”

  Quartzsite doesn’t offer much in the way of what city folks consider culture, but almost everyone visits Reader’s Oasis on the east end of Main Street. The bookstore is owned by septuagenarian nudist Paul Winer, who has skin like burnished leather and wanders the aisles in nothing but a knit codpiece. When it’s cold, he dons a sweater. Paul c
an afford to keep his bookstore going because, technically, it isn’t a permanent structure, and that keeps the taxes down. It has no real walls—just a ramada roof above a concrete slab. Tarps span the space between them. Shipping containers and a trailer are annexes. Trailer Life magazine called it “the ultimate in Quartzsite architecture.” In an earlier career Paul toured as Sweet Pie, a nude boogie-woogie pianist known for his sing-along anthem “Fuck ’Em If They Can’t Take a Joke,” and he still performs spontaneously on a baby grand near the front of the shop, not far from a discreetly covered adult book section. There’s a Christian section, too, but it’s in the back and Paul usually has to help people find it. “They follow my bare ass to the Bible,” he declares.

  Those seeking more old-fashioned religion go to the other end of Main Street, west of Reader’s Oasis, where a purple and white big top houses Last Call Tent Ministries. At 7 p.m. revival meetings, a traveling preacher strums a gold Stratocaster while spreading the light of Jesus. “That light’s gonna be seen around the world!” he whoops. “It’s not just contained in this tent. It’s not just contained in Quartzsite. It’s not just contained in Arizona. It’s laaaarge! Bigger and better!” After each service, parishioners approach the pulpit to be anointed with oil. The preacher speaks in tongues and grips their shoulders, prompting the faithful—including one woman on crutches—to fall limp into attendants’ waiting arms.

  Tens of thousands of nomads partake each year in the winter spectacle that is Quartzsite. The town has only three small motels, but more than seventy RV parks with names promising relaxation: Arizona Sun, Desert Oasis, Holiday Palms, La Mirage, Paradise, Winter Haven, the Scenic Road. (The last has a motto—“Enjoying Life in the Slow Lane”—that sums up the general sales pitch.) They charge on average $30 a night for a parking spot on asphalt or gravel with hookups for water, electricity, and sewage, access to showers and laundry rooms, sometimes WiFi and cable TV. Many parks ban guests who are underage—which means “born after the Eisenhower administration”—and post warning signs that read “55+.” When a reporter for The Scotsman newspaper wrote about this scene, he called it “Jurassic Trailer Park.”