Most folks who stay in Quartzsite don’t bother with the RV parks, though. Instead they gather on the local equivalent of a low-rent district—the public lands just outside of town—like pioneers swarming the site of a latter-day gold rush. (“The old rush,” the same Scotsman reporter quipped.) There they camp on the hardpan mix of dust and gravel known as “desert concrete.” Rather than pay for amenities, they boondock, using solar panels and gas-powered generators for electricity, hauling their own water in jugs and tanks. What creature comforts they sacrifice are made up for by the scenery. They park beside giant, open-armed saguaros that grow thick and tall as telephone poles; from a distance, the cacti look like giant hitching posts for the motorhomes. They cluster along the edges of desert washes, seeking out rare patches of shade among the creosote, mesquite, ironwood, and palo verde trees. For neighbors they have kangaroo rats, Gambel’s quail, lizards, scorpions, and roving packs of coyotes, whose nighttime yipping competes with the hum of their generators. (There are rattlesnakes, too, but most are dormant and won’t stir until spring, when shimmering waves of heat scour the desert, clearing out most human visitors.) As the campers settle in, they put out welcome mats, barbecue grills, and lawn chairs; unfurl awnings, Astroturf lawns, and weatherproof carpet; fly colorful flags and set up fenced-in dog runs. It looks like a sprawling tailgate party, a spectacle that National Geographic once called “America’s Largest Parking Lot.” It’s earned other nicknames, too, including “Spring Break for Seniors” and “Poor Man’s Palm Springs.”
This open desert is federal territory. Run by the Bureau of Land Management, it includes free camping spots that welcome nomads for up to two weeks at a time. After that, they have to move along to another patch of federal desert at least twenty-five miles away, or to the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area, which is just south of Quartzsite on more than eleven thousand acres. Staying there costs $40 for two weeks or $180 for up to seven months. The camping permits are brightly colored stickers with images of a roadrunner and a giant snowflake. Once applied to windshields, they seem to stay there, identifying Quartzsite’s far-flung nomads to one another during the off-season like badges from a secret society.
It’s estimated that more than forty thousand RVers dwell in the desert near Quartzsite from December through February. Bill Alexander has watched them come and go for what seems like forever. The outdoor recreation planner and lead park ranger at the Bureau of Land Management’s Yuma Field Office, he’s been working in this region for seventeen years. And after all that time, he says, he’s still impressed by the campers’ neighborliness. “We can have that guy who rides up on a bike with his dog on a leash and throws down his tent next to a guy in a $500,000 custom-built motorhome, and they get along just fine,” Bill told me. “That ability to coexist is based simply on their desire to enjoy the public land, and the fact that it belongs equally to the guy riding the bicycle as to the guy in the motorhome.”
His observation echoed the thoughts of Iris Goldenberg, an Amazon CamperForce worker I’d met in Fernley. At sixty-two, Iris was living in a ten-and-a-half-foot Carson Kalispell sport trailer that she shared with Madison, a Shih-Tzu; Pancho, a lovebird; and Kaspar, a loquacious African Grey parrot named for a sixteenth-century theologian. We were all crammed in there together, chatting, when she brought up Quartzsite. I’d never heard of it before. Like Bill, she was fascinated by the blurring of class lines. That’s no small thing against the backdrop of modern America, where income-segregated neighborhoods are on the rise, isolating—and insulating—the wealthy from the poor. Quartzsite isn’t like that. “It’s anybody’s yard,” Iris explained. “Whatever you have, you’re welcome.”
Iris Goldenberg holds her parrot, Kaspar.
When Iris first told me about Quartzsite, she rhapsodized about how healthy she felt in the dry climate and how affordably she could live there. Apart from the inexpensive camping, it’s an easy place to land short-term employment—temporary towns need temporary labor, after all—at a time of year when workamping gigs are scarce in most of the country. One of her jobs was washing dishes for $8 an hour at Sweet Darlene’s Restaurant & Bakery (motto: “Great Food, Reasonable Prices”), where early-bird diners start lining up at 4 p.m. each Friday for a fish fry and, in the kitchen, stacks of dirty plates teeter toward the ceiling. Iris has also worked at a Chinese food takeout trailer called Rockin’ Wok; when I went to visit her there, she came running out with a handful of fortune cookies.
Though the desert draws out civic spirit, people are still people—they mark their turf and splinter into tribes. Using rocks to draw fake property lines is a well-established tradition. Stones also get arranged into shapes and initials, a sort of landscape tattoo. Campers create neighborhoods with names like “Coyote Flat” and “Roger’s 1/2 Acre Lazy Daze Homeless Camp” and post homemade signs, from tidy wooden plaques that look like they were made in a high school shop class to hastily lettered paper plates duct-taped to wooden stakes.
So far as tribes go, there are dozens of desert “rallies”: gatherings of RV clubs whose members share common traits. Some of these organizations are age-based. One of them, called Boomers, is for members of the postwar generation, though so many RVers fit that profile, it almost seems beside the point to have a club. Other groups, including Xscapers and NuRVers, target a slightly younger demographic—the giveaway is the erratic spelling and capitalization, a dot-com-era dog whistle. There are additional sects for fishermen (the Roving Rods), disaster relief volunteers (the DOVES), and gays and lesbians (Rainbow RV, with no relation to the traveling kids called “Rainbows”). There are singles clubs including the Wandering Individuals Network, SOLOS, and Loners on Wheels, the last of which has very strict rules. “If there’s any hanky-panky, you get kicked out,” one member told The Victoria Advocate, a Texas newspaper. The Loners’ credo instructs everyone to “conduct yourself as a mingling single” and states that “members of the opposite gender, not blood related, must not occupy the same camping unit.” There’s even a dedicated group in the desert for nudists. A seventy-five-acre zone at the southern edge of the long-term visitors’ area, called The Magic Circle, is surrounded with posters reading “ATTENTION: BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDE SUNBATHERS.” (Quartzsite denizens have jokingly referred to it online as “wrinkle city” and “floppy and saggy town.”)
Other camps are made up of matching rigs. Dozens of La-Z-Days RVs, Casita trailers, or Montana Fifth Wheels park together, forming same-species herds amid an otherwise anarchic sprawl of vehicles across the desert. Encountering such groups is like stumbling on suburban tract housing—with its cookie-cutter neighborhoods—in the middle of nowhere.
THE LONDON FINANCIAL TIMES called Quartzsite “one of America’s more bizarre and seriously demented places.” But Quartzsite is not a national aberration. You’d be hard-pressed to find a town that is so quintessentially American—hyper-American to the point of caricature. Here the native inhabitants are mostly gone and, in their place, visitors snap up souvenir dreamcatchers made in Pakistan and beaded moccasins from China. Winter doesn’t exist. Soothsayers and spiritual seekers and discount shoppers come together around the shared belief that the best way to escape life’s problems is by filling up the gas tank and hitting the road. Quartzsite has always been a refuge for travelers, outsiders, people trying to reinvent themselves. And it has perfected the art of the boom and bust cycle.
The town traces its roots to 1856, when white settlers built the private Fort Tyson to repel Mojave Indians. The fort later became a stagecoach stopover, Tyson’s Wells, whose ruins are now the site of a tiny museum next to Silly Al’s pizzeria. (The town has two other museums—one featuring a collection of chewing gum from all over the world and another with military memorabilia—but they seem less popular.) In 1875 the memoirist Martha Summerhayes stayed at Tyson’s Wells overnight and described it as “most melancholy and uninviting. It reeks of everything unclean, morally and physically.” When the stagecoach was discontinued,
the settlement became a ghost town. In 1897, it was revived amid a mining boom, when the post office reopened and the municipality got a new name: Quartzsite. (It was supposed to be “Quartzite,” after the mineral. The “s” was a typo that stuck.)
Quartzsite’s most famous historical figure was a Syrian-born camel driver named Hadji Ali. Buried in town after his death in 1902, he is better known by the nickname “Hi Jolly,” an American bastardization of his name. Ali was recruited in 1856 to the U.S. Army’s camel corps, a brief experiment using the notoriously cantankerous beasts to ferry cargo across the Southwest. (At some point camels even carried mail from Tucson to Los Angeles. The program was abandoned in 1861 with the start of the Civil War.) Hadji Ali’s grave marker is a pyramid made of quartz and petrified wood with a steel dromedary on top; all together it stands about ten feet tall. A plaque on the front reads: “THE LAST CAMP OF HI JOLLY, BORN SOMEWHERE IN SYRIA ABOUT 1828” and “OVER THIRTY YEARS A FAITHFUL AIDE TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT.” It’s rumored that the ashes of Topsy, one of his camels, are buried with him.
Apart from maybe the naked bookseller, Hadji Ali is Quartzsite’s most famous citizen. In tribute, the town uses his camel as an unofficial mascot. Visitors to Quartzsite pass monument-sized welcome signs that sport metal dromedaries like the one on Ali’s tomb. One of the local trailer parks calls itself the Stuffed Camel. Near the western end of Main Street, automotive wheel rims and other debris have been welded together into a large sculpture of a camel. And Quartzsite celebrates an annual Hi Jolly Days parade; in more prosperous times, it was a full-blown festival that included, in different years, demolition derbies and camel races. At the Quartzsite Yacht Club—a bar and restaurant with off-track betting whose motto is “Long Time No Sea”—the owner’s son used to don a head-to-toe camel costume and get loose on the dance floor as a band played “Hi Jolly,” a folk hit by the New Christy Minstrels that depicts the camel driver as both a tireless worker and a skirt-chasing bon vivant.
But Quartzsite’s quirky history wasn’t enough to keep the town from sinking into obscurity. By the mid-1950s, the population had shrunk to just eleven families. Then, as the story goes, it was resurrected by heaps of junk and pretty rocks. Widespread flea markets started here in the 1960s after a station wagon broke down on Interstate 10. The driver, a mother traveling west with four young daughters, couldn’t afford repairs and sold her kids’ toys for cash. Others followed her lead, hawking wares off the tailgates of their pickups. This grew into a sprawling bazaar. In 1967, a town improvement group started a gem and mineral show called the Pow Wow, capitalizing on the influx of shoppers. The event became so popular that many credit it with bringing Quartzsite back from the brink of extinction. Over time, it was joined by numerous flea markets and swap meets. During the winter, they crowd acres of blacktop and hardpan desert that stand empty the rest of the year. There is the Greasewood Park n’ Sell. The Prospector’s Panorama. The Main Event. The Sell-A-Rama at Tyson Wells. It feels like a hoarder’s estate sale, with tables offering cattle skulls, cast-iron cookware, and concealed carry women’s handbags.
At one such vending area, the Hi Ali Swap Meet on Main Street, I encountered Sharen Peterson, seventy. Everyone called her Chere (pronounced “Sherry”). She was using old wooden doors as tables to display the odds and ends she had for sale. These included a katana, an elk hide, Hawaiian shirts, and housewares she no longer needed, since she was living in a Ford E350 van. Scattered among her wares were scraps of paper on which she’d written bits of bumper-sticker wisdom: “Due to rising cost of ammo do not expect a warning shot” and “We’re not snowbirds, we’re snowflakes.” Browsers passed through. One bought four shirts for $17. “The world would be a better place if everyone wore Hawaiian shirts!” Chere exclaimed. Another paid $25 for a brown and turquoise flatware set that Chere had gotten for $20 in Santa Barbara. “It’s the only addiction where you can get your money back!” she said of thrift-store shopping.
Chere wore a baseball cap studded with gold and silver pins of a seahorse and other marine life, with blond braided pigtails poking out underneath. Her eyes crinkled at the corners and she had a permanent tan, possibly a legacy of surfing Manhattan Beach just south of Los Angeles in the 1960s. (She still has wallet- and poster-sized pictures of herself in a Gidget haircut and bikini, sidled up to a yellow longboard.) Back then, she reminisced, it was easier to get by. She lived by the rule of twenty-fives: “Hamburger, cigarettes, and gas were twenty-five cents a gallon, twenty-five cents a pack, and twenty-five cents a pound.”
Chere had been staying in the van ever since she was forced to sell her house in Minnesota. She’d bought the house in 1989 and, for twenty-three years, was a live-in landlord there, renting out extra bedrooms to cover expenses. Then she got caught without a necessary permit and had to stop, which meant losing the house. “The bureaucrats are getting ridiculous,” she lamented. She’d originally planned to live on equity from selling the place. But her home, which had been appraised for $300,000 in 2002, went for just $140,000 in the wake of the housing crash. After the mortgage and broker’s fees, there wasn’t much left over, but she was making the best of it. Her van had originally been a fifteen-seater. She told me it was like living in a mobile mansion with picture windows all around, except the view was constantly changing. Her Social Security was $600 a month, after a $100 deduction for Medicare. “I seem to have enough for gas,” she said, laughing. “If I don’t, I just stay in one place.” She crammed all her clothes in three plastic bins in the van and also rented a $600-a-year storage unit. She said she was paying $300 a month for her swap meet space, along with $50 for a town vending permit. When she wasn’t at the swap meet in Quartzsite, she sold jewelry on the Santa Barbara seaside, where a season pass cost just $100 but didn’t include the period between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. each day, when the beaches were closed. Where did she go during those hours? “I hide,” she said matter-of-factly, explaining there were many places to park unobtrusively and that, unlike an old hippie van she once owned that was covered in stickers, her current home was plain white, attracting no attention.
A couple days after we first met, Chere and I got together for dinner at the Quartzsite Yacht Club. Chere ordered a double hamburger, eating just one of the patties. The second she wrapped carefully in a napkin to bring back to Skittles, a dog she’d been watching for another vendor who’d left on a quick trip to Phoenix. She made a side salad from the burger fixings—lettuce, tomato, and onion—topping them with a blend of ketchup and mayo that looked like Thousand Island dressing. She drank two O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beers and sipped a glass of ice water with lemon. When the meal was over, she refused to let me pay her share and then carefully poured the remaining water into a Styrofoam takeout cup. It was cold and refreshing and ice was a small luxury, since she couldn’t make any in the van.
We walked back toward the Hi Ali swap meet together. When I asked where she slept at night, she replied that it was easy to stay in her van, which was parked just across from her vending tables. Nobody bothered her there. She told me I was crazy to live in New York and that she was grateful she wasn’t stuck in a “concrete jungle” somewhere.
“If the birds can live in the park—or they can live in the city—then why can’t I?” she said. “We don’t have to live wherever people are supposed to live—that’s what it’s all about!”
LIKE A LOT OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA, Quartzsite has come on hard times. Amid the bustle of commerce on Main Street, you can also see businesses that didn’t make it. A restaurant has been boarded up. At one gas station, the paint is chipped and faded into pastel; the pumps appear to have been abandoned for decades.
Old-timers say the high season used to bring so many RVs to Quartzsite that you could cross the desert by stepping from roof to roof. But attendance has gone down sharply in recent years. No one seems to know quite why, but everyone has a pet theory, from local political strife, to property tax hikes and increased fees for flea market vendors, to the U.S.�
��Canadian exchange rate and fluctuating gas prices. Some think the thousands of rockhounds who visit Quartzsite’s gem and mineral shows are defecting to similar events in Tucson. Yet others believe it’s symptomatic of a larger economic malaise, meaning fewer people can afford long drives in a gas-guzzling motorhome, let alone the luxury of free time.
“As a Quartzsite native, I remember the early 1980s when we would have over one million visitors during the height of the season. Now it is more around 300,000 people,” Philip Cushman, the president of the local chamber of commerce, told me in an email.
“It is ironic that before air conditioning, people were content to camp out in the desert for six months. Now as soon as it hits 100, folks are in a mad rush to go somewhere else,” he said, adding that “the demographics of winter visitors are changing. The World War II generation was content to play bingo, go to dances, go rockhounding, and volunteer in our several community service organizations. As the Baby Boomers replace them, we observe that they want more things to do or they get bored.” He’s not willing to believe that Quartzsite’s best days are over. In recent years the community has experimented with new events like the Grand Gathering, a four-day grandparents’ celebration where 631 attendees stood (and sat) in the form of a giant “Q” to set a Guinness World Record for Largest Human Letter.
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