Despite these efforts, many of the people who visit Quartzsite are struggling, not the kind of free-spending tourists it would take to revive the town. At the Church of the Isaiah 58 Project on South Moon Mountain Avenue, a biker-turned-pastor named Mike Hobby and his wife, Linda, started a seasonal soup kitchen to help them. After experiencing homelessness firsthand—a medical crisis drowned the uninsured couple in unpayable bills—they founded the church in 2003 with a mission to help the dispossessed. The program grew and now serves thousands of meals to elderly and homeless people from November through March each year. Unlike many church missions where guests aren’t served until they sit through a sermon—“ear banging” is what insiders call it—there’s no such requirement here.
Mike told me that transient old folks flock to Quartzsite because it’s “a low-income retirement town” and “a cheap place to hide.” Hide from what? I asked. His answers: shame, poverty, cold weather. In the desert, he explained, “they don’t have to worry about freezing out. They tell their kids they’re doing fine.”
One night when I visited, diners lined up with plastic trays to receive spaghetti with chicken cacciatore ladled on top, along with salad, garlic bread on hamburger buns, and apple crisp. They sat at long tables in a warehouse space behind the church that opened onto the parking lot. The mood was convivial. Retirees swapped stories with freight-train hoppers and bicycle tramps. Overhead on a hand-painted banner, a stick figure approached a doorway with red flames to the left and a golden cloud to the right. “Time Is Up!” it proclaimed. “Which Did You Choose? If You Don’t Choose Jesus, You Do Choose Hell.”
Over that dinner I met Leonard Scott, a former gas station owner who went by “Scottie” and wore his hair in a stringy gray ponytail under a “Jesus Is Lord” trucker hat. The sixty-three-year-old was living in a 1995 Winnebago: “I lost my empire”—two homes and a duplex he had bought as investment properties—“when the economy collapsed.” Scottie had worked at a hot spring in Tonopah, Arizona, to supplement his monthly $590 Social Security check, and was planning to join friends in the Pacific Northwest picking morel mushrooms, which he heard fetch $10 an ounce. Eventually, he added, he hoped to move to a beach in Kauai and live off fruit from the trees.*
The church is near the town food pantry. I spent some time there with Carol Kelley, an eighty-year-old widow who ran the place tirelessly from a cluttered desk below a wall covered in nutritional posters. “I will die in this chair,” she joked. An unexpected bonanza had arrived by way of an overturned semitrailer—crates of sugar snap peas, cucumbers, green beans, and mangoes—and she was foisting the spoils upon her visitors with the enthusiasm of a farm-stand operator holding a fire sale. A couple from Oregon came by. They were living out of a van. The woman told me her coffee shop business had gone under and they were starting over with nothing. She was good at painting pictures of dogs, so they were on the way to a nearby flea market, in hope of selling some of her work.
Carol sent them off with a box of vegetables. After they left, she looked stressed. It was tough enough to keep up with the needs of Quartzsite’s full-time residents, she explained, let alone the visitors. “Our little town has to feed all these people who wander here for the winter,” she said. “It’s not fair.” One of the regular volunteers chimed in, as if to steady her.
“We feed everyone,” he said quietly. “We treat everyone alike.”
FOR THREE WINTERS IN A ROW, I camped in the desert around Quartzsite—at first in a tent, and later in a van—to get acquainted with the nomads who live there for months on end. I managed to catch up with some of the same people during all three trips, including Barb and Chuck Stout, the music teacher and former McDonald’s vice president I’d originally interviewed in Nevada.
When Barb and Chuck showed up in Quartzsite for the first time, they were still recovering from their three-month stint at CamperForce. Like their coworkers, they’d faced a triple trial there. First came physical exhaustion. (“Muscles I never knew I had are shouting at me after ten hours of lifting, twisting, squatting, reaching,” Barb reflected.) Then came Kafka-style madness. (After forty-five minutes spent hunting for a bin with enough room to stow a product, Barb had to repeat “breathe, breathe” to stay sane in the warehouse, which she nicknamed “Amazoo.”) Last came flat-out survival: the stress of subzero temperatures in an RV built for warmer climes. (The rig’s water supply got cut off after a filter froze and burst. Then its pump broke. Chuck lost a day of work getting repairs done.)
After all that, they were ready for some Arizona sunshine. But as first-timers at “the Q,” they didn’t know where in the vast desert wilderness they should boondock. Another couple had invited them to an annual gathering called the Birds of a Feather Quartzsite Rally. They decided to check it out. What they found: More than eighty-five Bluebird Wanderlodge luxury motor coaches parked side by side in a giant circle, like the rays on a child’s drawing of the sun, in an area the rigs’ owners called “the nest.” Their front bumpers were pointed inward, aligned with X’s that had been scratched into the dirt at perfect twenty-five-foot intervals. When the gathering began, a dry erase board reading “Welcome to Q” was updated daily with a schedule of events from a “Ladies’ Walk” (the caption read: “walk, bitch, walk, bitch . . . ”) to a “Men’s Tech Walk Around,” a firearms session called “Tactical Shooting” and “Ray’s Prime Rib Dinner.” (A tongue-in-cheek note warned folks that, if they forgot to pay for their steaks, they’d arrive at the dinner to find “Ray donated your piece of heaven to the homeless in town!”)
The Stouts quickly learned that their 1996 National Seabreeze motor coach was an “S.O.B.”—slang for “Some Other Brand.” It was not allowed to join the members’ circle. They had to park off to the side. On some nights, they had their own bonfires.
Though the Stouts felt out of place at the rally, they quickly reconnected with a more welcoming tribe—one whose bonds had been forged by hard labor. An unofficial CamperForce reunion sprang up on a patch of desert called Scaddan Wash. Nine Amazonians and one retired police officer, who’d tagged along for kicks, sat in camp chairs and reminisced about warehouse work while munching on pork rinds, tortilla chips, baby carrots, and Barb’s homemade vegan egg salad sandwiches. They sang “The Twelve Days of Amazon,” a workers’ parody of the holiday classic that replaced “lords a-leaping” with “horns a-beeping”—a reference to warehouse noise—and added other gifts like “an ID badge for security,” “two pairs of gloves,” “three orange vests” and, eventually, “ten sore muscles.” Then they drew names from a hat to award door prizes: Amazon-branded swag including key chains, bottle openers, lanyards, and flash drives. (Offered a box cutter, I politely declined, explaining I’d have to fly home later.) Someone threw a blue plastic Frisbee and Sydney, the Stouts’ Australian shepherd and heeler mix, trotted after it. Folks mused about how, at Amazon, they’d been counting down the days until the season ended whereas in Quartzsite, it was easy to lose track of time altogether.
Barb and Chuck came to enjoy Quartzsite and made it into an annual pilgrimage. Like Iris, they found short-term jobs there. These included gigs at an RV show: picking up litter, guarding a vendors-only entrance, and staffing a booth that sold angler’s tools, sport beverage holders, and other novelties. Barb liked working that booth the best—she got to be a cross between a carnival barker and a Home Shopping Network host. She handed out samples of bloody Mary mix and nimbly demonstrated a device for tying knots in fishing line. Her boss encouraged showmanship. One time, when an elderly woman in a mobility scooter coasted up to the counter to browse, he grabbed a Liquid Caddy Ultimate Mug and Velcroed it to her prosthetic leg. Barb chimed in. “This will fit anywhere, at any time, on anything!” she exclaimed, then pointed to her boss. “He’s not kidding! He doesn’t pull your leg!”
The last time I saw the Stouts in Quartzsite, it was their third winter there. They were veteran nomads now. Seated at a bonfire, they performed a rite of joyful catharsis: burning their old bankr
uptcy papers.
* He’s not the first down- on- his- luck person to consider that. Hawaii’s largest homeless shelter operator, the Institute for Human Services, gets between 100 and 150 calls and emails a year “from people who are actually looking to be homeless here in Hawaii,” a representative of the agency told a local television reporter. The homeless population has grown by more than a third in recent years and now is higher, per capita, than anywhere else in the nation, prompting the governor to announce a state of emergency and the mayor of Honolulu to call for a “war on homelessness.” Meanwhile Hawaii’s tourism industry has been funding an initiative to fly homeless people back to the mainland.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous
THE TOWN OF NEEDLES, CALIFORNIA, is named after a range of sharp granite spires that rise up like jagged teeth. When John Steinbeck wrote about it in The Grapes of Wrath, he made the place just as hostile as its geography suggests. The Joad family stops to rest in Needles at a tent camp on the Colorado River, only to get hustled off by a sheriff’s deputy. Calling them “Okies,” he snarls, “We don’t want none of you settlin’ down here.” Ma Joad menaces him with an iron skillet. “Mister, you got a tin button an’ a gun,” she retorts. “Where I come from, you keep your voice down.”
Linda stopped in Needles on her way to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. She’d come straight from the Amazon warehouse in Fernley, eight hours away. Like the Joads, she was exhausted and hoped to sleep there. Unlike them, she planned to avoid getting rousted by police. That meant finding somewhere to park a twenty-eight-foot motorhome overnight, for free, without drawing attention. Needles didn’t have a Walmart. The next-best bet would be an all-night business with an active parking lot. Pulling off Historic Route 66, Linda checked the hours of a Basha’s supermarket at the Needles Towne Center strip mall. It closed early, but a hundred yards away stood a twenty-four-hour gym. The place didn’t look especially busy, but it would have to do. She parked across from its entrance and crawled into bed.
Linda slept through the night. In the morning she woke with an errand on her mind. While working at Amazon she’d accidentally let her motorhome registration expire—“I’m such a dingbat!”—and she needed to renew it before traveling further. So she mapped directions to the local DMV. The GPS on her phone led her down the road. It told her to make a U-turn. Then it had her drive some more. When the route guidance stopped, Linda was right where she’d started. She tried again, got the same result, and pulled into a gas station for help. The attendant pointed to an office near the corner of the strip mall. “I had parked in front of it all night,” Linda remembered, laughing. “I just didn’t see it.” Before long her motorhome was registered and cruising south on Interstate 95. Quartzsite was less than two hours away.
“Come to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous and you can take classes and learn plus make many great friends,” read an invitation on Bob Wells’s website. “In many ways we modern day vandwellers are just like the Mountain Men of old: We need to be alone and on the move, but we equally need to occasionally gather together and make connections with like-minded people who understand us.”
That sounded wonderful to Linda, who craved companionship. When she’d set out in her RV seven months earlier, financial survival wasn’t her only goal—she also dreamed about joining a larger community of people, folks who were willing to radically remake their lives in search of fulfillment and freedom. But at Amazon the graveyard shifts had been strenuous and solitary. Her days off were more about recovery than socializing, which didn’t leave much time for bonding with other nomads. Once Nevada’s bitter winter took hold—when temperatures dropped as low as –2 degrees—her neighbors at the Desert Rose had mostly hunkered down in their rigs, rather than hanging out in the RV park’s shared outdoor spaces. Linda was done with all that. She was ready for Quartzsite’s gentler climate, with its 70-degree afternoons.
Of course, good times were not guaranteed. Linda had never been to “the Q.” She didn’t know her way around the vastness of the desert encircling the town. She didn’t even have directions to the encampment. Unlike many newbies, who’d befriended RTR folks virtually by joining in conversations on Bob’s website, Linda hadn’t been a part of that dialogue. The only person she knew at the RTR was Silvianne. (Jen and Ash were off on other adventures and wouldn’t make it until more than halfway through the two-week event.) As a result, Linda was like a kid walking into a new school on the first day of class. She wanted to meet people. She wanted to learn things. But what if she didn’t fit in? Most of the group would be minimalist vandwellers, after all. Would they look kindly on her big, gas-guzzling RV?
She didn’t spend much time worrying, though. Instead she went online for instructions. “Hi, this will be my first RTR. Is there a map to the campsite, a calendar of events? Any help would be appreciated,” she posted on a Facebook page for the get-together. Someone replied with a schedule. Swankie Wheels linked what looked like a clip art treasure map, with the route to the RTR highlighted in yellow. It ended with a red “X” and the words “We are here.”
And so Linda set out to find what she hoped would be her tribe. The motorhome shuddered along Dome Rock Road East on pavement that seemed increasingly post-apocalyptic the farther she got from town. In places it was so battered and cracked that drivers gave up and used the shoulder instead. On her right was Scaddan Wash, public land that offered free fourteen-day camping. Rows of giant RVs clustered at the edge, making it look more like a tailgate party than a wilderness area. Farther along what remained of the asphalt stopped at an orange-and-white striped barrier. There Linda made a hard right turn onto Mitchell Mine Road, a gravel track that rose and dipped through the chaparral, pushing south, past the crowds and into the backcountry. After a mile and a half, a yellow sign appeared at the roadside. “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous,” it said, with an arrow pointing right. (The sign made finding the campsite easy by daylight. Getting there after dark, however, was hard on the uninitiated. During my first winter in Quartzsite, I tried visiting one evening and quickly got lost. When I spotted a campfire in the distance, I drove to it expecting the RTR, only to find a tribe of Rainbows and crust punks whooping it up over whiskey and weed. I sat and listened as a guitarist belted out a rollicking Kimya Dawson song: “The beer I had for breakfast was a bottle of Mad Dog! And my twenty-twenty vision was fifty percent off!”)
A sign points the way to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.
Linda cruised slowly into the camping area. About five dozen vehicles dotted the open desert, like tiny houses sharing the same vast backyard. Linda saw all kinds of vans—mini-vans, cargo and passenger vans, high-top conversion vans, wheelchair lift vans, box vans. One was a rental, with U-Haul graphics splashed on its sides. (This, Linda would later learn, was the temporary home of a vandweller-in-training who’d flown from Chicago to Phoenix, then picked it up for transportation and shelter during the event.) Amid the vans were some travel trailers, pickup campers and RVs, along with a few SUVs and sedans—even a Prius—set up for long-term mobile living. One bike tramp made do with even less: two wheels and a tent. There was a handful of more exotic vehicles, including a handmade wooden gypsy caravan, or vardo, that was painted seafoam green. Modeled after the traditional nineteenth-century horse-drawn wagons of the Romani, it was pulled by a pickup truck and was the home of a sixty-five-year-old shipbuilder from Oregon, who’d survived renal cell carcinoma and now kept afloat on monthly $471 Social Security checks.
In the middle of the anarchic settlement was a large campfire ring—the central gathering place. Not too far from there, Linda found a spot to park her RV near some scraggly trees. She began setting up camp.
The fleet of mobile dwellings made a striking display, and Bob later posted photos of it on his website. A reader marveled: “If I came across your pictures without the commentary . . . one might think that this is a report on a road warrior-ish future . . . post economic collapse where everyone has taken up living
in vehicles.”
Lou Brochetti stands in his handmade gypsy wagon.
This was the fourth time Bob had hosted a winter Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. It wasn’t easy being a guru. He’d spent months planning and spreading the word. As the event began, his work became more tangible. Along the road, he posted the RTR sign on heavy-duty stakes, which he sledgehammered into the ground to withstand desert winds. He photocopied a calendar with social occasions and a schedule of seminars he planned to teach. He set up a tipi-style tent with a five-gallon bucket, garbage bags, wet wipes, and toilet paper inside—a kind gesture for newcomers. He piled wood near the fire ring and, nearby, spread a blue tarp like a picnic blanket on the ground, weighting the corners with rocks. This would be the free pile. Vandwellers were always getting rid of things, trying to maximize limited space. New items would appear on the pile each day: blankets, books, a large straw sombrero, auto parts, flip-flops, a digital camera, tent stakes, plastic cups, Backpacker magazine’s Yosemite issue, T-shirts, pants, and one large terra-cotta flowerpot, whose new owner filled it with kindling, topped it with a wire rack, and used it to boil a pot of soup. Linda would end up browsing for books there, grabbing whatever sparked her interest, and showed me one of her finds, a paperback called The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill: A Closer Look at the Hidden Magic and Meaning of the Money You Use Every Day.
Bob didn’t profit off the RTR. His hospitality set a generous tone, attracting people who were just as eager to share their skills, resources, and experiences. A licensed cosmetologist gave donation-optional haircuts near the Chevy Astro van where she lived with her husband and two dogs. One RVer set up at a tiki bar with a neon sign, lawn flamingos, and a light-up palm tree, then hosted parties. Swankie demonstrated her solar oven—essentially a box with tanning mirrors for food—by baking everyone brownies, banana nut bread, and blueberry muffins. Mechanics taught basic auto repair skills. Carpenters hammered together bed frames and shelves to fit newly gutted vans. People with large solar panels gave away their excess power, leaving extension cords out so passersby could charge their gadgets. A deaf-mute woman ran an impromptu class in American Sign Language. One guy demonstrated how to fix tires. He brought an old steel-belted radial that participants could practice on, letting them stab it and plug the leak, over and over again, then sharing advice on portable twelve-volt air compressors. Linda especially valued these skills and, during another stint as camp host, would put them to use rescuing some forest rangers whose fire truck had a flat.
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