Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  In the summer of 2013, LaVonne rented a car and borrowed a tent to attend a smaller version of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous near Flagstaff, Arizona. On her blog, The Complete Flake, she described it as a transformative experience:

  I found my people: a ragtag bunch of misfits who surrounded me with love and acceptance. By misfits I don’t mean losers and dropouts. These were smart, compassionate, hardworking Americans whose scales had been lifted from their eyes. After a lifetime of chasing the American Dream, they had come to the conclusion that it was all nothing but a big con.

  She liked it so much that she bought a van. It was a 2003 maroon GMC Safari with 129,000 miles on the odometer. She picked it up for $4,995 in a used car lot in El Cajon and named it LaVanne. The rear seats became her couch and bed. She set up a kitchen on the tailgate. Her goal was to get out of debt, pay off the van, and build an emergency fund while living within the means of her Social Security and trying to write a memoir. Two months before she met Linda, she moved into LaVanne and went to see Bob. Making the shift was hard at first, with many cold nights. Bob lent her a warm sleeping bag and then insisted she keep it, telling her “I don’t like it.” Now LaVonne was enjoying her first RTR as a full-fledged vandweller. Two new friends had helped her install a solar panel on the roof of LaVanne. She had volunteered to lead the group’s daily walks, which left at 8:30 each morning from the fire ring. Once she issued an open invitation to her campsite for a scrambled-egg-and-potato breakfast. I showed up with orange juice and eggs. LaVonne shot me a skeptical look. Folks weren’t sure how they felt about a journalist hanging around, she said. They worried I’d make them look like “a bunch of homeless vagabonds.” I told her that wasn’t my agenda and retreated to chat with some of the other diners.

  Around that time, LaVonne and many others in camp were looking forward to an event that overlapped with the RTR and attracts thousands of nomads each year: the Quartzsite Sports, Vacation & RV Show. That name was too long, so everyone just called it “the Big Tent.” With more than two hundred exhibitors, it felt like a giant infomercial. Barkers in headsets demonstrated Vitamix blenders and rubber mops. Booths peddled cures for an alphabet of ills, from anxiety and arthritis to backache and bunions, gout and heel spurs to sore muscles and sciatica. One vendor promised to help owners of upside-down motorhomes, with signs reading “We’re the solution for getting you out of your RV payment.” There were tables for the American Association for Nude Recreation, Twin Peaks RV Insurance, and America’s Mailbox, a business that offered “mail forwarding and home base services” for itinerants who needed a South Dakota address, fast. Other stands offered lint rollers, super glue, pet ID tags, firearms training, and massage pillows.

  There were also recruitment tables for workampers. Amazon had sent representatives who took down names and gave out souvenir pads of sticky notes with CamperForce’s smiling RV logo. Concessionaires for the Forest Service were there, urging passersby to apply for jobs as campground hosts. Some were interviewing candidates and making site assignments on the spot. One representative had uniforms to give new employees. A temp firm called Express Employment Professionals sought laborers for the annual sugar beet harvest. “If you’re willing to fill out an application, then you’re hired for the coming season,” the recruiter told me. “We would hire you today.”

  One of the more eye-catching tables had a backlit sign that said “Adventureland.” A three-panel display below it showed photos of gray-haired amusement park employees wearing blue polo shirts and plastic name tags. Smiling workers sat in the front car of the Tornado rollercoaster, rode an old-time locomotive, hung out at the Chicken Shack fast-food station, and held giant plush carnival prizes. Scattered among these snapshots were cartoons—yellow smiley faces, a dog mascot with a lolling tongue—and printed slogans:

  Feel Like a Kid Again!

  Hey Workamper, It’s Time for Fun!

  Camping + Working + Smiles = Fun!!!

  Based in Altoona, Iowa, Adventureland had sent recruiters to hire around three hundred workampers to run its rides, games, and concessions for wages ranging from $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. The park owns a neighboring mobile home park where laborers were encouraged to stay, for a fee. From June to September, the rate was $160 a month; employees who stayed until the season ended would get their August and September rent waived.

  Adventureland’s managers had been hiring transient older workers for nearly two decades and appreciated their upbeat attitude. “I think some workampers could carry on a conversation with a telephone pole because they have the gift of gab,” gushed the park’s human resources director, Gary Pardekooper, in a 2012 video interview with Workamper News. “We like it, and our guests like it.”

  I’d only ever met one former Adventureland workamper; I spoke with her when she was working for Amazon in Fernley. She was not a fan. “The management was horrid and the public was really really bad and the weather was brutal and it was Iowa and it was hot,” the sixty-two-year-old woman blurted, adding that many of her coworkers felt mistreated and quit. “There was a dude that was so pissed he jumped into his motorhome. His awning was out and staked down but he just drove,” she added, cracking up as she described how the canopy flapped in the wind.

  I didn’t know it then, but the next year I’d get a chance to stop at Adventureland during a cross-country road trip in mid-July. The afternoon was humid, with temperatures in the nineties, and the air shimmered with heat. The theme park looked like a candy-colored mirage between green cornfields and Prairie Meadows. (That was the name of a racetrack casino complex next door.) The employee campground was planted with ash trees. Many of the RVs there sported American flags and displayed license plates from around the heartland—Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota. A couple of camping tents were set up in the back. There seemed to be a handful of long-term inhabitants among the nomads—you could tell by the weeds that had grown up around their tires and the mature tomato plants thriving in five-gallon buckets.

  Inside the park the staff seemed evenly split between local high school students and the elderly. There were numerous souvenir shops. One sold T-shirts that said, “Wanna Taco ’Bout Jesus? Lettuce Pray” and “God Is Greater Than Any Failed Plan Debt Disease Army or Mountain Standing in Your Way.” At another one, a sixtysomething clerk spoke excitedly about a recent wage increase that had taken everyone by surprise. They were now getting $8.50 an hour. She and her coworkers speculated that it came from peer pressure, since Walmart had just started paying $9 an hour. Though she’d come here for part-time work, she added, the company was understaffed and had her on a full-time schedule. (That explained why, in the middle of the season, there were still signs up around the park reading “Now Hiring! Fun-Filled Summer Job. Work with All Your Friends!”) Changing the subject, I asked if she had a favorite ride. “My favorite ride is if someone gives me a ride on a golf cart home,” she quipped.

  Another clerk, seventy-seven, said she used to be an Adventureland recruiter. She was proud that advanced years and age-related disabilities didn’t seem to hold back her fellow employees, adding that she currently had a close coworker who was eighty. “I had someone who was eighty-six in my department at one time,” she said. “We had a man in a wheelchair, who was capable of counting using the clicker, so they had him stationed at the water park. We had a one-armed man who was a supervisor of all the rides.” Over at the Tornado rollercoaster, the ride operator wore wire-rimmed bifocals and a broad-brimmed straw hat. He told me he was eighty-one.

  Not even the most upbeat attitude, however, could ward off tragedy. Less than a year after I visited Adventureland, a workamper died from an on-the-job accident there. Retired postal carrier and pastor Steve Booher, sixty-eight, was helping passengers disembark from the Raging River ride when the conveyor belt carrying the rafts started up prematurely. With one foot still on a raft as it lurched forward, he fell from the concrete loading platform onto the conveyor belt, fracturing his skull.

  Adventurel
and reopened the Raging River the next day. Following an investigation, state workplace regulators sent the park a violation notice two months later. It called for safety upgrades and a $4,500 fine.

  AFTER THE BIG TENT OPENED, the mood at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous shifted. Until then the days had passed languidly. Now they sped by. More people started disappearing on day trips to town. When they were in camp, questions hung in the air. Where are you going next? When will I see you again? Did you find a job? The fourteen-day limit for free camping would end soon and, this year, there was no getting around that. On the first day of the rendezvous, a BLM ranger had showed up to issue permits and take down everyone’s license plate numbers. Soon campers would have to move at least twenty-five miles away.

  The diaspora was about to begin. A few folks would leave by themselves. Others banded together in small, traveling groups. In some years, the beaches of Baja were a favorite among those fortunate enough to have passports and gas money. Often a delegation would visit Slab City, an encampment of squatters, outsider artists, and snowbirds on the site of a former military base near the Salton Sea that calls itself “The Last Free Place.” (The RTR outpost there got nicknamed “Friends of Bob.”) Others would go toward the Yuma area. One popular camping spot there was Fortuna Pond, which was tranquil by day but felt like something out of The Twilight Zone after dark, when the fields glowed lurid green under the bright lights of crop dusters that droned loudly all through the night.

  When the RTR ended, Bob took down the official sign. Silvianne boxed up the leftovers on the free pile—including the large straw sombrero, which no one wanted—for a local thrift shop. Linda made coffee and I drank a cup with her. She showed me a new solenoid a friend had helped her install. It would allow her to charge the RV’s house power off the overflow from her car battery when she was driving. Soon word came that Bob had left for his next encampment in Ehrenberg. He’d invited anyone who wanted to follow him there. Linda hustled to break down camp. She hugged Jen and Ash goodbye. The girls planned to wander the Southwest until their next gig, working at Rocking 7 Ranch in the mountains just east of the Salinas Valley or, as Ash referred to it, “Steinbeck Country.” The ranch was part of an international network called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), whose members trade food, lodging, and training for labor from volunteers, who called themselves WWOOFers. After that they’d drive farther inland to their next paid job, camp hosting in Sequoia National Forest.

  Linda followed Interstate 10 west toward the Colorado River, exiting just before the California border near a Flying J truck stop. She turned onto the frontage road, continued past a Dead End sign. Here the landscape was stark and echoingly empty. The ground was covered with gravel. Vegetation was sparse; the deserts around Quartzsite had been a Garden of Eden by comparison. Tucked away from the unpaved entry road were ancient weather-beaten RVs. Flat tires and general disrepair suggested they’d rolled in years ago and never left, their inhabitants settling down to stay year-round. Technically the Bureau of Land Management had a fourteen-day limit on camping here. But that rule—and the area in general—went largely overlooked by both visitors and patrols, probably due to its conspicuous lack of charm. Not many campers found the location desirable, which benefitted the few solitude seekers who did. In dozens of visits, I never saw a ranger or heard of anyone getting asked to leave.

  Rigs were parked further apart here than at the RTR. Introverts were recovering from their two weeks of intense socialization. Some of them still got together for morning coffee meetings. After one of those, I found Silvianne, hanging out in her rig with Layla the cat, reading a book called Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth.

  “How many people do you think are here?” I asked.

  “No one knows!” she replied cheerfully. “That’s the whole point. It’s off-the-radar America.” Though campers were widely dispersed, coming and going regularly, the number seemed to hover around fifteen. I also bumped into LaVonne. She was warmer than at the RTR, more relaxed. She laughed and shrugged at her earlier suggestion that an outsider might size up the group as “a bunch of homeless vagabonds.”

  “What is it about the idea of homelessness that is so emotional?” she mused. “Some people would consider me homeless. I don’t. I have shelter.” At the same time, she explained, she felt guilty about putting herself in a different category, as if it might reinforce the larger social stigma.

  By now LaVonne and Linda had hit it off so well that they’d decided to try working together. Linda’s next job camp hosting would start in the spring at the Sherwin Creek Campground in Mammoth Lakes. Meanwhile the Big Tent was still happening and had a table with recruiters from California Land Management. On Linda’s advice, LaVonne and another job-seeking nomad—Trish Hay, a fifty-nine-year-old living in a Nissan Sentra—planned to apply there for work.

  That afternoon I sat with Linda as she heated dishwater in a tea kettle. She should have had on-demand hot water, she explained, but someone in Nevada had sold her the wrong kind of battery—an engine-starting battery instead of a deep-cycle one—to run the house power for her RV, which meant there wasn’t enough juice to pump water from the storage tank under the couch to the sink. She was glad to be in Ehrenberg but didn’t want to stick around as long as LaVonne, who planned to follow Bob with what remained of the RTR crew. Meanwhile Bob was sticking to his regular routine—staying in Ehrenberg until the heat came and the rattlesnakes woke up, then moving to the higher elevations of Cottonwood and Flagstaff. Linda had some important errands to accomplish before her next job, including searching for land and emptying an old storage unit. So before too long, she said good-bye.

  After her departure, LaVonne posted a photograph of Linda on her blog and wrote:

  Another new friend has moved on, and I am sad all over again. One by one, they are leaving for other places. I will see some of them again, I’m sure, but this sadness is an inevitable consequence of nomadic living. People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang onto them forever.

  Here is Linda May, everyone’s surrogate mother, who fed us French toast and made us laugh. There is no one who doesn’t love Linda. She is off to find a piece of land where she plans to build a sustainable, off-grid Earthship home. I have promised to help build it (i.e., pound dirt into lots of tires), just so I can spend time with her again.

  AFTER LEAVING HER FRIENDS, Linda traveled 380 miles southeast to the deserts of Cochise County, Arizona, where building codes were loose and land was cheap. She hoped to find a few acres for her Earthship but, after hours of exploring, felt disappointed. The area was too isolated. Coming off the high of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous—all those warm feelings of community and connectedness—she was not interested in a hermit’s life. “Nobody’s going to come visit me here,” she thought. “I’d better find land where family can come, because that would be the idea of the whole thing, so that it’s accessible and we can have gatherings.” She spent one night stationed in a parking lot near the Mexican border. Then she got back on the road.

  Next Linda went to clear out a storage unit she’d been renting for four years in the Phoenix suburbs. (“I would like to just throw a match in there, I think,” she’d reflected earlier.) She loaded a moving truck with the contents and went to a friend’s five-acre property in New River, Arizona. She set aside mementos—a kindergarten watercolor of a catlike creature from her grandson Julian, a birthday card from her younger daughter Valerie with a pinup girl in a cactus bikini. “You’re still looking sharp!” it quipped. But everything else—the old record player, the matching glass lamps with tufted shades, the piles of cookware—had to go. She held yard sales. After deducting the cost of trucking everything to New River, her take for the first weekend was $99.75. “I will never rent a storage unit again,” Linda vowed. Not long after, she wrote to me, sharing a quote she’d seen online and found poetic: “Inevitably bouts with obstacles offer discoura
gement as you cut every tether holding you from freedom.”

  Meanwhile the Rubber Tramp tribe had migrated from Ehrenberg, where it was getting uncomfortably hot, to the Prescott National Forest near Cottonwood, which was three thousand feet higher and around ten degrees cooler. There the vandwellers spread out. Some parked in the open, on a hill with views of sun-dappled mesas. Others nestled more stealthily below, in a wooded patch out of the wind. Bob, Lavonne, and Silvianne were there, along with some of Linda’s other new friends. They included Atli Pommer, thirty-four, a former transit bus driver living in a Chevy Astro named after the 1960s’ singer Donovan, and Sameer Ali, sixty-five, who had lost his halal goat farm amid rising hay prices from the western drought and now lived in a van with his Chihuahua, Mr. Pico. (A practicing Muslim, Sameer made his faith portable with an iPhone app that issued calls to prayer five times a day. It also displayed a Mecca-facing compass that he used while parking, so his van was always oriented in the proper direction for worship. “There’s an app for everything,” he marveled.)

  When the yard sales were done, it was already late March. Linda went to Cottonwood, showing up just in time for a pizza party. Bob managed to feed eleven people on $28 with pies from Little Caesars. Afterwards, they walked off the meal with a hike under sunset-pink skies. The group of nomads was mostly female—seven women to three men and a teenage boy—and Bob later remarked that, in a culture that had long discouraged female independence, this seemed like a good thing.

  A forest ranger appeared in camp the next day. Puzzled, he inquired whether the group was a club—“I guess we are!” Sameer replied—and asked the length of their stay. Bob told a white lie: They’d only been there four days. (In truth it had been just over two weeks.) The ranger noted their license plate numbers and left. This meant the clock would start ticking on the fourteen-day limit for free camping, so now the tribe had to decide where to wander next. They settled on the Kaibab National Forest near Flagstaff. At an elevation of seven thousand feet, it would be much cooler there. Meanwhile the roof of Linda’s RV was in poor condition. She hoped to patch and reseal it before the move, since liquid rubber cures faster in warmer temperatures. Another member of the RTR tribe, a professional painter named Wayne, clambered up on the roof and applied the sealant with a long-handled roller. The job was done just in time.