All you have to do now is focus on the road, I told myself. You’ve got a full mug of coffee, GPS on your smartphone, and a destination you’ve been excited about for months. And so the van wound slowly back through the canyons, on the way to visit Linda.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 2014, Linda was couch-surfing at a small apartment her daughter and son-in-law had rented in San Clemente with her teenage grandchildren. The rear window looked onto Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base. Strains of “Taps” could be heard at sunset and sometimes live-fire artillery drills ran through the night. (The family hadn’t yet gone to their next rental, the house in Mission Viejo where Linda was staying when she bought—and moved into—the Squeeze Inn.)
Linda’s RV was street-parked and gathering tickets. Raccoons had chewed a hole in the fuel line. She had discovered this while pumping gas—startled, she’d looked down and seen a puddle growing around her feet. Linda had expected to be back working at Amazon’s Fernley warehouse this season, but her wrist was still a mess from the year before, so she had to cancel. Cash was tight again.
The evening I arrived, over my protests, Linda treated me to dinner with her family at a Mexican restaurant. As we left, a busker outside was playing the pop hit “Royals” by Lorde. Her violin case lay open on the curb, and Linda handed each of her two granddaughters a dollar bill to drop inside. Back at the apartment, the family said I was welcome to bunk indoors. Linda was already sleeping on the couch, though. One of her granddaughters occupied a walk-in closet. As if I’d done it a thousand times before, I said I’d sleep in the van, which was parked in a lot beside the apartment building. Linda leashed her two dogs and the family’s Chihuahua, Gizmo, for their last walk of the night. Together we strolled across the parking lot. As we neared Halen, I grew anxious. At that point I’d only slept one night in the van—on the homestead in San Diego County—with no strangers or traffic around. This was my first night parked in the open. What if neighbors called the cops? What if someone tried to break in while I slept?
A searing pain jolted me from those thoughts. Gizmo had sunk his teeth into the back of my right thigh. I tried laughing it off. Earlier Audra had called him an “ankle biter,” but I’d taken that as an endearment, not a warning. The wound stung badly. I tried to make light of it but, inside, my worries curdled into panic. Was the dog up to date on his shots? I didn’t want to offend anyone by asking.
I said goodnight, slunk into the van, and closed the shades before digging into a care package from a friend in Los Angeles. Tucked under a small American flag and Irish Spring soap were Band-Aids and a half-used packet of Neosporin. I shucked off my jeans, expecting a bloody puncture wound. There was no broken skin, though—just a nasty bruise. That should have comforted me, but it didn’t. I brushed my teeth and curled up in my sleeping bag, thinking about something Bob Wells had written in his book. “For most people, their first night sleeping in a van is so far out of their comfort zone, it can be very difficult,” he’d explained. “Your fear will magnify every sound (and there are a lot of them) and you may not get much sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you will be disoriented and wonder where you are.”
I hadn’t thought those words would apply to me. After all, I was just a writer with a digital camera, recorder, and notebook, not someone making a radical lifestyle change. I planned to live in my van for months, not years.
Cars swung through the parking lot, strafing Halen with their headlights. The shades glowed bright white as each approached, dimming to red as the vehicles passed. Shadows wheeled around inside the van. Was that driver slowing down? Was this one parking too close? Did they know I was in here? I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but it was hours before sleep came.
A TAP ON THE WINDOW startled me awake. It was morning. A familiar voice called, “Hell-ooo-ooo!” Linda was walking the dogs again. She had coffee brewing upstairs. Groggily I pulled on some clothes and followed her to the apartment. She pointed out the shower and handed me a pink patterned towel. “Here, just out of the dryer,” she said. “Polka dots, because polka dots make you happy.”
We took Halen for a drive. Linda let me buy us breakfast burritos at her favorite take-out place. We brought them to the beach, where we ate and chatted while watching surfers bob on the swells. Back at the van she gave me a brief parking lesson. While piloting a nineteen-foot cargo van was elementary for Linda, thanks to her six months as a professional trucker, she could tell it still freaked me out. Next she directed me to a thrift store to outfit the van with cooking supplies. I rummaged through a bin of mismatched flatware, while Linda found me a bargain on a Dutch oven and a percolator. Later that afternoon, we said our good-byes.
My next stop was Quartzsite, where I planned to boondock in the desert for a couple months, which would include the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. That gathering was still weeks away, though. I had no idea where to park until it began.
Then a potluck dinner invitation arrived via Facebook. It was from Charlene Swankie, the seventy-year-old vandwelling guru better known as Swankie Wheels. We’d met briefly the year before and I’d read about her adventures on Bob Wells’s website. I was thrilled. Swankie’s camp would be a soft place to land. Plus she was a boondocking expert, someone to learn from.
“Kidnap Linda and bring her with you,” Swankie joked. I explained that wasn’t possible—Linda was broke, without a functional vehicle, and had politely declined my offer to drive her there. So Swankie asked me to pick up some hot dogs instead.
Arriving at her camp, I saw Swankie was no stranger to mentoring first-time vandwellers. She’d already adopted a protégé this season, a twenty-seven-year-old named Vincent Mosemann. Before long, he was telling his story.
Until two months earlier, Vincent had been living with his mother in Billings, Montana. Though he yearned to be on his own, renting an apartment didn’t seem realistic. He had more than $25,000 in student loans from an unfinished degree, despite working two jobs during college—as a lab monitor and a barista—to stay afloat and making a foot-long Subway sandwich last for two days’ worth of meals when cash got tight. Three years into his studies his parents had divorced. When Vincent went to reapply for financial aid, he had to get a signature from his father, who was nowhere to be found. So Vincent dropped out. After moving back home, he took a job at a group home for autistic adults, but it didn’t pay much. He figured there was only one way he could live independently. So he bought his mother’s minivan, a 1995 Plymouth Grand Voyager LE. He gutted the interior, added linoleum flooring, curtains, shelves, and a sleeping bunk. He named it “Tillie,” after the train in The Little Engine That Could that says, “I think I can, I think I can.” Then Vincent set off on a journey.
“I hit the road to learn how to stand on my own two feet,” he explained.
Vincent was bound for Quartzsite. There he planned to meet Swankie, whom he’d befriended in a Facebook group for nomads. She had invited him to camp near her—but not with her—at the La Posa Long Term Visitor Area in the desert south of Quartzsite, which is where I later joined them.
After making him that offer, she was flooded with worry and regret. Swankie cherished her solitude, so much that she had bought a skull and crossbones flag to fly when she didn’t want visitors. Vincent, on the other hand, was hypersocial. He described himself as having “LPS,” or Lost Puppy Syndrome.
Vincent arrived the day before Halloween and parked next to an arroyo. It was right across from Swankie’s campsite, which looked like an outdoor living room, with a weatherproof rug, chairs, cargo trailer, and shade canopy. Alongside it was her van, furnished with a bed, a computer desk, a freezer, and a microwave she could run from an inverter while running the van’s engine. The roof held a kayak and a solar panel. On the rear door was a sticker from Planet Fitness, the gym chain she’d joined for access to showers.
Swankie gave Vincent a spare tent to store his food and supplies. He helped her install a cabinet in her cargo trailer to use as a pantry. She coached him t
hrough setting up a solar panel. When Vincent bolted it to his roof, he used drilled-out pennies—they were cheaper than washers. Swankie also let Vincent use her rented post office box. That gesture meant a lot. Her own family would no longer accept her mail, she said. For Vincent, who is a transman, a mailing address was crucial. His therapy required a shot of testosterone in the thigh every two weeks. Refills came by post. Other good things showed up in the box, too, including a Christmas care package from his mother: a batch of homemade snickerdoodles and a tiny replica of a red-brick fireplace crafted from a Saltines box, with a dollhouse-sized fir tree perched on top.
Swankie and Vincent were quite the pair. The vibrant, gray-haired vandweller stood at least a head taller than her bearded young apprentice, who had a testosterone molecule tattooed to his wrist, and a mischievous smile with a gap on the upper-right-hand side. Pulling that tooth had cost $250, Vincent told me, while a crown would have been $1,000. For many nomads I met, missing teeth were the badge of poverty of which they were most ashamed. Some tried to avoid smiling when my camera came out, or asked me not to share pictures that revealed empty sockets. (It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.) But Vincent called the gap his straw holder. He flashed it with pride. “Anyone who has a problem with it isn’t someone I’d want to hang out with anyway,” he explained.
Vincent and Swankie enjoy a campfire in Quartzsite.
Vincent and Swankie shared a defining trait—neither abided snobs. Swankie recalled one desert evening when she was enjoying a conversation with folks who lived in luxury motorhomes. They asked about her RV. She said it was a van. Pleasantries ended abruptly. “They got up and left their own campfire,” she said, shaking her head. On another occasion, Swankie joined the Wandering Individuals Network, only to learn that the group wouldn’t add her blog to its online roster of members’ websites. The reason? Her blog included a detailed tutorial on using a five-gallon bucket as a toilet. So she quit.
Just like Vincent, Swankie didn’t need friends like that. Her encampment was growing. After dinner that first night, I wound up staying there in my van. So did Kat and Mike Valentino, both forty-seven, who lived in a blue 1991 Ford Econoline named Katvandu with their nine-year-old son, Alex, and a pet ferret named Ronnie. Months earlier, they had been living in Washington when Kat, an Army veteran, got rushed off her job as an Albertson’s manager in an ambulance with what was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. She was still trying to get on disability, a process that would end up taking three years. Meanwhile, Mike had been working for $9.40 an hour at a frozen vegetable processing plant, but his contract was nearly up. They feared for the future.
For a long time, Kat had been checking out RVing and vandwelling online. She’d written on Facebook, “I can’t decide if it’s sad or hopeful that SO MANY of the folks I talk to in my various RV groups are going full-time because of financial hardship. I suppose it’s bittersweet. The new freedom . . . able to live while reinventing oneself. Thank goodness for the deep and varied Tribes out there that offer so much guidance, advice, stuff, and willing ears. Is this the evolution of the former middle class? Are we seeing the emergence of a modern hunter-gatherer class?”
The Valentinos ended up in a couple of filthy short-stay motels. Some of the neighbors sold drugs and turned tricks. It was no place for a family. So they bought the van and took off a couple weeks before Vincent began his own odyssey. So far things seemed to be going alright. Kat explained to me that Alex was being “roadschooled,” the nomadic equivalent of homeschooled. He was a brilliant, inquisitive kid with a precocious sense of humor but grappled with social issues related to Asperger’s and had been bullied in public school. Now he was telling everyone he wanted to start his own democratic nation. The capital would be called “Vandweller City.”
One of the hardest moments came in Quartzsite, when temperatures dropped into the twenties overnight. Kat and Mike ran out of gas from running their van to stay warm; the fuel gauge was broken, so they couldn’t tell how fast the tank was emptying. At this point they were camped near Swankie and Vincent, who’d been doing the same thing. I copied the strategy, idling Halen’s engine while blasting the heat, then crawling into my sleeping bag. I’d sleep for a few hours, wake up freezing, and repeat the processes. Throughout the night, I heard the chorus of vans, intermittently sputtering to life and then going quiet again.
Later I ended up buying a Buddy propane heater—a popular choice among vandwellers—but it didn’t help much overnight because it isn’t safe to run a standalone propane heater while sleeping. In small living spaces, incomplete combustion from heating or cooking—combined with limited ventilation—can create a lethal buildup of odorless carbon monoxide. This can happen unnervingly fast in a van. One time, when I’d just extinguished my Buddy and began drifting off, a high-pitched screeching split the night. It was the carbon monoxide alarm. I hadn’t been venting the heater well enough. I flung open the doors and windows and stood outside in the desert, shivering in my pajamas, until I figured it had aired out enough and was safe to reenter.
The morning after the Valentinos ran out of gas trying to stay warm, Vincent drove them to town to fill a fuel jug. They returned with more than they’d planned—spoils from the Quartzsite food bank, including apples, sausages, and a bag of spring mix salad the size of a pillow.
Two days after Christmas was Alex’s tenth birthday. Swankie threw him an ice cream party. Around the same time, Vincent landed a part-time job at Dollar General for $9 an hour. On the side, he’d been selling aprons and reusable grocery bags he made on his sewing machine, which he’d converted to run on a treadle instead of electricity. He gave one of the aprons to Alex as a birthday present, along with a copy of The Lord of the Rings. Alex was ecstatic. And suddenly, Vincent seemed like less of a kid.
Later Kat wrote to thank everyone for “thoughtful gifts and lots of laughter. From people I hadn’t met until a couple of months ago. I am touched, humbled, and overwhelmed. This is what a family looks like. . . .”
It echoed something Swankie had said earlier. “Once you stay in Swankie’s camp for more than twelve hours,” she’d told me, “you’re family.” She did have a way of making newcomers feel included. One day, she led a bunch of us in our vans to visit petroglyphs carved into a nearby rock face. There was something exhilarating about that trip, our caravan fanning out behind her. Driving Halen, watching dust rise from the tires ahead of me, felt like being part of a posse riding horseback into the open desert. Later that day, when a member of our party got stuck in a ditch, Swankie hauled his vehicle out using her own van and a strap of nylon webbing.
When it was time for the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, we all drove over to the backcountry behind Scaddan Wash. This was my second time at the gathering. I found myself noticing things that hadn’t grabbed my attention the year before—in particular what I referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “the unbearable whiteness of vanning.”
Swankie had joked earlier that RTR felt like a “white van convention” and, in a literal sense, this was true. Most of the vans were painted white, glinting in the bright desert glare. Since commercial fleets often use white vans, the vehicles are ubiquitous. They are easy to buy secondhand and blend in just about everywhere, making them a popular choice for vandwellers. Living in a white van comes with its own set of challenges, though—what one guy at the RTR called the “creepy factor,” the cultural stereotype that connects them with child molesters and other noxious predators. A fifty-three-year-old contractor from Salem, Oregon, told me that, after his business collapsed and he moved into a white Ford E150, his friends nicknamed him “Rape-O Van Dan” and started asking him for candy. The friends meant well, but their jokes stung.
It’s also common for vandwellers—regardless of vehicle color—to get harassed by passersby who assume they’re up to no good. As I write this, on
e guy in an online forum just recounted waking up after midnight to harrassment from strangers who had no reason to bother him. They were shaking his van and yelling “Come on out, you fucking pervert!” and “We’re gonna kick the shit outta you!”
But white vans weren’t the only thing on my mind. I’d been noticing something else, which I’d continue to think about long after the RTR. It would also come up much later, when I showed my snapshots from the event to a friend, an African-American photographer whose work deals with race and colonialism. He observed, “Almost all the people in these pictures are white.” He wanted to know why.
I did, too. By then I’d met hundreds of folks living this way—workampers and rubber tramps and RVers from coast to coast. And while a handful were people of color, they clearly represented a micro-minority in the subculture.
So why was the crowd so white? Members of the nomadic community have wondered the same thing. On Amazon’s official CamperForce Facebook page, photos of laborers show mostly white faces, prompting one black RVer to post a comment. “I’m sure Afro-Americans have applied for these positions,” he wrote. “I don’t see any in Amazon’s pictures of employees.”
I wondered if the lack of racial diversity had something to do with the fact that camping attracts a disproportionately white audience, a trend borne out by studies from the U.S. Forest Service. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of privilege to regard “roughing it” outdoors as a vacation. The satirical website “Stuff White People Like” sums it up like this:
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