Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  In Flagstaff, they parked in a grove of tall pines. Linda posted pictures on Facebook so friends and family could see. “The dogs and I love it here,” she wrote. “What would you pay for a yard like this? It’s free.” Linda thanked Wayne for his help with a home-cooked dinner: Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy, served on Kansas City Railroad china from the 1930s that she’d picked up at an estate sale. Since the plates had lasted three-quarters of a century without chipping, she figured they were rugged enough to clatter around in her RV. Linda also got to hang out with Lori Hicks, a single mother with a heart condition who lived with her thirteen-year-old son, Russell, and their dog, Kaylee, in a 1995 blue Chevy Tahoe nicknamed “Babe,” after Paul Bunyan’s ox. Together they explored their new surroundings. While visiting Linda’s campsite, Russell and Kaylee found a giant elk skull. Meanwhile, Linda had given Lori a copy of Travels with Charley, which Lori was devouring. John Steinbeck’s tale of road-tripping in a pickup camper with his French poodle was popular among the nomads, and dog-eared copies passed from hand to hand.*

  A few days later, Linda had to move on again. Her next job, camp hosting at Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern Sierra, was about to begin. She drove ten hours the first day and stopped for the night at a Texaco in Tonopah, Nevada. Linda took the dogs out for a walk. Back in the RV Coco had a sudden seizure. The dog stiffened and shrieked, then fell limp and stopped breathing. Frantic, Linda pressed her mouth to the dog’s jaws and exhaled deeply. Soon Coco was conscious again, rigid but breathing. Linda pressed a bag of frozen vegetables to the dog’s back—she’d heard using an ice pack that way could alleviate canine seizures—and called her daughter. Audra had studied essential oils and recommended frankincense. Linda dabbed some on Coco’s paws. The dog’s muscles relaxed. Soon she was snoring. Linda kept watch for hours, monitoring the gentle rise and fall of her chest. The next morning Coco looked normal. Shaken, Linda began driving the final 150 miles to Mammoth.

  Sherwin Creek Campground was quiet when Linda arrived in mid-April. Her only visitors were deer and a truck transporting sled dogs to a film shoot. Within a week, wintry weather struck. Foot-long icicles dangled from the cab of her motorhome and heavy snow piled on top, more than Linda had ever encountered in the RV. But inside she was warm and dry—the newly repaired roof wasn’t leaking. Coco seemed healthy. All things considered, Linda reflected, life was good. On April 28, she celebrated her AA birthday—twenty-four years clean and sober. “Tears of gratitude fill my eyes as I write,” she posted on Facebook. “My oldest grandchild is twenty-one years old and has always had the miracle of a sober, loving grandmother. Prayers were answered . . . I am happy, joyous, and free.”

  Linda had once wisecracked that congratulating an alcoholic for not drinking was like praising a cowboy with hemorrhoids for not riding his horse. Still her page was flooded with affectionate comments from family and friends, celebrating the milestone. “Thank you for standing up against addiction and bringing light and awareness to a disease that has plagued our family for generations,” wrote Audra. “I love you very much.”

  Cash was tight but nothing could dampen Linda’s upbeat mood. She stretched her dwindling food supply, making stale tortillas into chilaquiles and old bread into a French toast casserole. Her non-perishables were mostly gone. Her fridge was down to four eggs, a half-gallon of milk and some condiments—ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and jelly—that she jokingly called “food to put on food.” Then her paycheck came and she stocked it up again.

  Linda and I spoke by phone in late May. “It’s a lovely day! My campground is full,” she said cheerfully. I asked how her hunt for land was going. The last scouting trip had been a bust, Linda explained. She’d shifted her focus to the area around Julian, California, an hour east of San Diego. “That’s out in the mountains, an old gold-mining town, and it’s beautiful out there,” she told me. “And in case the shit hits the fan, like all these preppers are thinking, it’s close to water. If we go to extreme droughts, water can be brought in. We never know about our weather.” Linda also expected to have more money for the project soon—she’d be camp hosting through early fall and then rejoining CamperForce. The wrist injury from her last stint at Amazon still hadn’t healed but, with her start date still months away, Linda was optimistic. A few weeks earlier, she’d helped rally a vandweller friend who wanted to join CamperForce but was fretting over whether she could handle the strenuous labor. “Don’t worry,” Linda had replied. “We’ll hold each other up.”

  Meanwhile Linda told me she was doing fabulously. “My whole life has been ups and downs,” she explained. “The happiest I’ve been is when I have very little.” We talked about her dogs, about how she hoped to refurbish her RV. Before long, though, she had to excuse herself (“Looks like I’ve got a camper coming to my door!”) and get back to work.

  * One guy at a Rubber Tramp Rendezvous campfire was horrified to learn I hadn’t yet read Travels with Charley; the next day he arrived at the van to lend me a paperback. Other entries in the literary canon of this subculture included Blue Highways by William Least Heat- Moon, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Halen

  WHEN LINDA STARTED HER JOB at Sherwin Creek Campground, I’d been interviewing workampers for about six months. In that time, I’d also scoured the media—online, print, and broadcast—for anything about the subculture. Much of what I found made workamping sound like a sunny lifestyle, or even a quirky hobby, rather than a survival strategy in an era when Americans were getting priced out of traditional housing and struggling to make a living wage.

  One segment on NPR’s All Things Considered began with a correspondent’s voiceover: “Santa, of course, needs elves to make sure he delivers his presents on time. Amazon.com needs workampers!” The reporter introduced one CamperForce worker living at the Big Chief RV Park in Coffeyville, Kansas. They spent most of the three-minute segment chatting about the joys of traveling cross-country and making new friends. The conversation was punctuated four times with peals of laughter.

  Other stories were less chirpy, but still they emphasized the thrill and camaraderie of the open road, sidestepping the challenges that had driven so many people to radically reimagine their lives. In a way, I couldn’t blame reporters for accepting what I also had found in my early interviews. A journalist who parachutes in for an afternoon to cover a story seldom gets close enough to hear any kind of truth. When I reached out to workampers for the first time, I was met with cheery platitudes. I got warnings, too. One CamperForce RVer agreed to meet me, but added that I’d better not portray him and his comrades as Americans in crisis. “There are plenty of indolent whiners, slackbodies, and layabouts who are happy to complain about nearly anything, and they are easy to find,” he wrote proudly. “I’m not one of those.”

  I saw a similar “no whiners” sentiment in Workamper News, a bimonthly magazine that targets nomads. “Do you need an attitude adjustment?” asked one headline. The column below it urged unhappy workampers with on-the-job problems to seek solutions by turning inward. “See if you can change your attitude and not let it get to you by soothing yourself with some of these statements,” the writer suggested. “ ‘We won’t be here forever. It’s a means to an end. We’re getting to travel, spend time in this area exploring (or visiting family), and living our dream.’”

  That pep talk was surreal, but not entirely surprising. Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime. Author James Rorty noted this during the Great Depression, when he traveled America talking with people forced to seek work on the road. In his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, he was dismayed that so many of his interview subjects seemed so unshakably cheerful. “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe,” he wrote.

  I’m not that cynical.
While it’s human nature to put on a good face in turbulent times—and to present that face to strangers—something else was also happening among the nomads. The truth as I see it is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges. This doesn’t mean they’re in denial. Rather, it testifies to the remarkable ability of humankind to adapt, to seek meaning and kinship when confronted with adversity. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, people not only buck up in times of crisis, but do so with a “startling, sharp joy.” It’s possible to undergo hardships that shake our will to endure, while also finding happiness in shared moments, such as sitting around a bonfire with fellow workampers under a vast starry sky.

  In other words, the nomads I’d been interviewing for months were neither powerless victims nor carefree adventurers. The truth was much more nuanced, but how could I access it? At this point,

  I was no longer a day-tripper. I’d spent many weeks up close with the workampers, documenting their stories across five states and then staying in a tent in Quartzsite as nighttime temperatures dropped into the thirties during their winter gatherings. Still I wasn’t understanding the story on the level I’d hoped for just yet—I hadn’t gotten close enough to truly grasp their lives. Doing that would require a fuller immersion, spending months among them, day in and day out, becoming a regular at some of their encampments.

  With my tent, I’d been able to live off-grid in the desert, but not out in the backcountry where most of the people I was writing about were boondocking. Tent campers were only allowed in areas near outhouses. That meant I ended up sleeping four miles away from the site of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, then commuting over to visit. To actually join the nomads I would need a more robust portable shelter—something that I could sleep, cook, and write inside, with at least a rudimentary toilet setup. In the parlance of RVers, my rig would have to be “self-contained.”

  For months I scoured Craigslist ads for old vans. Many looked great at first but turned out to be rusty or rotting, including one ancient RoadTrek whose seller told me he’d had years of fun in the rig he’d nicknamed “Porta Party.” At last something caught my eye: a white 1995 GMC Vandura with a jaunty teal stripe. (A friend later pointed out it was the same model as Mr. T’s van in The A-Team, so nostalgia may have exerted some influence.) For a decades-old vehicle, it was in fine condition, with just 64,000 miles on the odometer. Parked mostly on the California coast, it had not seen hard winters, and the interior had been converted for camping.

  The first time I stepped inside the van, it felt larger than the exterior suggested, as if it were somehow exempt from physics like the tardis in Doctor Who. The walls were upholstered in powder-blue velour. At the rear, a tiny dinette folded into a bed. The cabin contained a twelve-volt mini-fridge, small propane stove, and portable chemical toilet, useful amenities for boondocking. Overhead was a pop-top roof. When I undid the latches and raised the lid, I could stand upright, but any pretense of stealth evaporated—from the outside it looked like a canvas safari tent was riding piggyback.

  The van needed a name. In my encounters with vandwellers I’d already met Vansion, Van Go, DonoVan, Vantucket, and Vanna White—this was a pun-happy subculture. A friend suggested “Beethoven,” referring to the band Camper Van Beethoven. But that made me think of “Roll Over Beethoven,” a disastrous portent for driving. I named the van Halen instead. I was born in the late 1970s, when the rock group’s first albums hit, and tried to decorate with appropriate talismans, including a black velvet painting of Ernest Hemingway from a Quartzsite swap meet and a squirrel skull Linda found while camp hosting. A strand of blue glass “evil eye” beads I’d received as a gift dangled from the rearview mirror, the closest I’d get to a burglar alarm.

  Halen had come from a seller in California. My best friend, the journalist Dale Maharidge, met up with me to collect it. Together we traveled to his uncle’s homestead in the canyons of northern San Diego County. I drove Halen, struggling to acclimate to the nineteen-foot, two-ton behemoth. It handled like a boat, drifting sideways, demanding constant correction. (Staying on course made me so tense that my shoulders ached for hours after the first few times I drove it.)

  When we arrived, we parked Halen beside a citrus orchard and got to work. The easiest part was cleaning it up—scrubbing out hardened maple syrup that had drooled down the inside of a cabinet and removing minor surface rust with a wire wheel. The hardest work was putting in a hundred-watt solar panel. Many nomads mount solar panels on their rigs using rooftop cargo racks with side brackets. That wouldn’t work with Halen’s pop-top, so we had to do something that made me cringe: drill two holes through the pristine rear portion of the roof. The holes were necessary to install an aluminum frame, which would hold the solar panel and could tilt up at an angle to catch more sunlight when Halen was parked. After tightening down the bolts, I slathered the area where the holes had been with a tough waterproofing compound, praying it wouldn’t leak. Next Dale and I mounted a charge controller inside the van. We wired the solar panel to run through it, then into a pair of six-volt golf cart batteries we’d stowed under the dinette. These would provide power when I was boondocking. Last we installed an inverter, also under the dinette, to create the 110-volt power I would need to charge my laptop and camera.

  Halen the van in the desert near Ehrenberg.

  Briefly I worried all this preparation would prove excessive, but it didn’t when I found myself living in Halen episodically over the following two years of reporting, taking trips that lasted up to two months at a time. The journey spanned more than 15,000 miles, from border to border—Halen touched both Mexico and Canada—and from coast to coast.

  The first thing I would realize on the road was that, despite having interviewed many dozens of nomads, I didn’t know a damn thing about living in a van. The learning curve was steep and it never really tapered off, since the circumstances kept changing. Driving in the desert, I got Halen stuck twice, spinning the tires in soft silt each time until a passing Samaritan with a Jeep winched it out. High in the mountains, the van got stuck in a blizzard and its toilet and water tanks froze solid. Late at night on an empty Kansas highway, the alternator blew. The instrument panel dimmed as Halen lost power, coasting to a halt in front of a rest stop.

  Once near Fort Worth, Texas, I’d parked to get coffee when the sky turned green and tornado sirens began wailing. The barista gave advice: If you see a tornado, go hide in your basement. I pointed out the window to Halen—no basement—and we laughed. Later that day, I took shelter in Halen during torrential rains and watched with horror as water penetrated the seal above the rear doors and cascaded inside, swamping my bed and frying part of the electrical system I’d built. On another occasion, after a break back home, I returned to a long-term parking lot to find Halen ransacked. Someone had put a rock the size of a large potato through the driver’s side window, littering the cab with broken glass. Fortunately, there was nothing to steal but the black velvet painting of Ernest Hemingway and a bottle of really good hot sauce. Neither was missing.

  I inflicted many indignities on Halen: backing into a boulder, pulling out of a campsite with the pop-top still raised, and driving a couple blocks without realizing I’d pinned a large traffic cone under the chassis that dragged on the pavement. One time, parked near a Starbucks for WiFi, I tried installing a combination fire and carbon monoxide alarm. (Nomad Safety 101: Any live-in vehicle should have both a fire extinguisher and a carbon monoxide alarm.) But whenever I tried to mount it on the wall, a robotic female voice blared, “FIRE! FIRE! EVACUATE! EVACUATE!” My cover was blown; strangers stopped sipping lattes to stare.

  During one long reporting trip, I had to get a prescription refilled. My doctor called a drugstore. Later he told me that, when the pharmacist demanded my home address, he didn’t know how to answer and blurted out, “She’s living in a van!” The pharmacis
t let it slide, but the episode made me think. In America, if you don’t have an address, you’re not a real person.

  When I was in Halen, my address was everywhere. I slept at Flying J truck stops, Walmart Supercenters, a casino called Whiskey Pete’s, and an abandoned gas station; in barren deserts, mountain wildernesses, and suburban streets. Residential areas were the worst, because curious neighbors could bring trouble. After one night stealth camping in Mission Viejo, I awoke to the whine of an electric hedge trimmer. A landscaper was working a couple feet away. I lay in my sleeping bag, silent and motionless inside Halen, until his job was done. Later that day Linda and LaVonne teased me for being paranoid.

  Experiences like these were the background music to my reporting this book. Without living in Halen, I don’t think I would have gotten close enough to people to really hear their stories. But it’s fair to say that, in the beginning, I anticipated very little of this. I had no idea what I was getting into, though I did have the good sense to feel a little freaked out at first.

  It took a couple of days wrestling with the solar power system on the van before Dale and I finally got it to work. When everything was functional, there was nothing left to do but head out. It was already dark when Dale hugged me good-bye. I climbed into the driver’s seat and inched Halen away from his uncle’s homestead, past the dim shapes of citrus trees. The driveway was steep. Suddenly, the two-ton van felt staggeringly heavy. I clutched the wheel and rode the brake all the way down. At the bottom, my eyes blurred with unexpected tears and I wiped them on my sleeve, wondering if I’d ever feel comfortable piloting Halen, let alone living in it.