If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worst-case scenario like after a plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”
Or perhaps the problem was racism? I asked some nomads if they’d seen examples of it in their community. Most said they hadn’t observed anything overt. One vandweller, however, recalled when a longtime RTR attendee insulted a black friend of hers, calling the woman a “darkie.” Other nomads stepped up to condemn the bigot, but the damage was done and the woman left camp. Concern over that episode lingered, sowing seeds of unease. A cardinal rule at the forum on Bob Wells’s website was “Don’t ever attack, belittle, or denigrate anyone.” What if the nomads couldn’t manage that in the temporary community they’d created together offline, in the real world?
Ash, Linda’s friend from Amazon, mused on Facebook that “a vast majority of us vandwellers are white. The reasons range from obvious to duh, but then there’s this.” Linked below the post was an article about the experience of “traveling while black.” That made me think: America makes it hard enough for people to live nomadically, regardless of race. Stealth camping in residential areas, in particular, is way outside the mainstream. Often it involves breaking local ordinances against sleeping in cars. Avoiding trouble—hassles with cops and suspicious passersby—can be challenging, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card of white privilege. And in an era when unarmed African Americans are getting shot by police during traffic stops, living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might become a victim of racial profiling.
All that made me think about the instances when I could have gotten in trouble and didn’t. One time I got pulled over at night while reporting in North Dakota. The cops asked where I was from and recommended some local tourist attractions before letting me off with a warning. In general, people didn’t give me grief when I was driving Halen. I wish I could chalk that up to good karma or some kind of cosmic benevolence, but the fact remains: I am white. Surely privilege played a role.
After the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, I followed the tribe over to Ehrenberg. One night, sharing supper in a neighbor’s van, I realized we were using her toilet bucket—which was covered and sealed—to support the tray that held our food. Back home, an impromptu table like that might have bothered me. Here it was a detail that dissolved into the background. We were in a tight space, using what we had.
A couple weeks later, after making arrangements to store Halen at a long-term parking lot, I flew home to New York. Reoccupying my Brooklyn apartment felt weird. When you’re living in a space as small as a van, claustrophobia eventually gives way to a den-like coziness. The walls are close, the windows are covered, almost everything you need is within arm’s reach. It’s womblike. Waking up in the morning brings a sense of security, even if you don’t immediately remember where you parked the night before.
All that made my homecoming more jarring than expected. For a few days I awoke in my bed profoundly disoriented. The full-sized mattress seemed too wide. The walls were too far away, the ceiling too tall. All that empty space made me feel anxious, exposed. The sunlight streaming into the bedroom felt too bright. One time, still half-asleep, I briefly mistook my window for the rear windshield of the van.
After the first week home that confusion faded. Then something else took its place: I missed Halen and the nomads. I wanted to get back on the road.
CHAPTER NINE
Some Unbeetable Experiences
BACKCOUNTRY CAMPING WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. Soon the van opened up other territories to explore. During my last trip to the desert, I’d gone back to visit the “Big Tent”—the RV show where recruiters sought workcampers for jobs all over the country. There a smiling woman handed me a flyer that said “Be Part of an ‘Unbeetable’ Experience!”
The annual sugar beet harvest had baffled me for a long time. It sounded like tough work for aging bodies, incongruous with the gray- and white-haired wanderers who were drawn to this RV show. I took a closer look at the flyer, which included a quote from an unnamed worker describing the job as “a little strenuous, but not really hard.” That didn’t tell me much. Most of what I knew about the job came from talking to people around Quartzsite.
“It was cold. It was snowy. It was wet,” Gretchen Erb said as we sat together in her 1999 Fleetwood Bounder RV. On the overnight shift in Minnesota, she’d stood outdoors in subfreezing temperatures to collect paperwork from truck drivers and “take samples”—that is, fill heavy-duty vinyl sacks with thirty-pound loads of beets, then haul them to a workstation, where they would later be collected and shuttled to a lab for testing to assess their sugar content. Another worker, sixty-two-year-old Brian Gore, told me about the harvest in Montana, where he drove a Bobcat loader with a broken-off door. Through the opening, he got pelted with sugar beets—including one the size of a grapefruit—that flew off a malfunctioning conveyor belt. “I was taking a beating from all those beets!” he exclaimed. He compared it to being strafed by “an automatic potato gun.” Still, he continued, he’d probably do it again because he needed the money. “The short time frame makes it tolerable,” he added. “I think if you look to the far distant future and you’re still slinging beets, that would rot your brain.”
Recruiters at the Big Tent seek workampers for the annual sugar beet harvest.
So I took an application from the recruiter. Why not? I figured. I’d spent countless hours talking to nomads about their seasonal jobs but had yet to see any of the worksites firsthand. I had no illusions: Sampling this kind of labor wasn’t going to magically turn me into a workamper. But at the very least, immersion might help me understand more deeply the lives I’d heard so much about.
Months later, my application was accepted by Express Employment Professionals, the temp agency that hires workers on behalf of American Crystal Sugar. So I began reading up on the industry. The United States is one of the world’s largest producers of manufactured sugar, and sugar beets account for 55 percent of that yield. (The rest comes from sugarcane.) More than half of the country’s sugar beet fields—some 680,000 planted acres—lie in the Red River Valley, which spans western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. That region is home to American Crystal Sugar, the nation’s biggest beet sugar company. This region is a national anomaly, boasting nearly full employment, which makes hiring workers very difficult. (The challenge had been even greater when the Bakken oil fields were booming.) For this reason, American Crystal seeks itinerant workers who can come—bringing their own homes—from far away to work the autumn harvest.
Equipped with that information and two pairs of heavy-duty work gloves, I arrived during the last week of September at Drayton Yard, a massive sugar beet storage and processing facility in North Dakota near the Canadian border. For beet producers throughout the Red River Valley, the first two weeks of October are a race against the weather. Borrowing military jargon, they call it a “campaign.” The battle starts at midnight on October 1. Farmers rush to pull beets from the fields before the ground freezes, hoping temperatures stay cool enough to stave off rot. Twenty-four hours a day, semitrucks bearing several tons of cargo apiece speed along local highways to storage facilities. Haulers are heaped above the brim. Spilled beets litter the roadside for miles in every direction. Haggard drivers chain-smoke to stay awake. Traffic snarls. Accidents happen. Some locals blame the crashes on state regulations that allow inexperienced farm workers to haul multi-ton loads of produce without the commercial driver’s licenses required of most truckers. At peak, American Crystal’s more than three dozen receiving stations get some fifty thousand truckloads a day.
I was assigned twelve-hour shifts on the ground crew at “Piler Number One.” Our station was inside “the shed,” a colossal refrigeration facility that resembled an open-ended airplane hangar with a concrete floor. Already a pile of beets towered toward the ceili
ng; our orientation trainer estimated it was about twenty thousand tons, brought in as part of a smaller “pre-pile” crop before the main harvest. This season’s beets, he added, were coming in larger than the year before; they were seeing beets the size of basketballs.
Many of the other stations were outdoors. We were told we were lucky because we’d be protected from rain or snow, but there was a trade-off: The noise and fumes were worse. Inside, the cloying smell of muddy beets mixed with dust and diesel.
When trucks arrived at Drayton Yard, they got weighed at a shack called the scale house and then lined up at our station. We waved them in one by one to pull up beside the piler, a giant clanking contraption that looked like a small factory mounted on tank treads. A huge hopper locked into place behind each truck to receive its load of beets. From there, the beets rode a conveyor belt into a tumbler that knocked off excess dirt, dumping it back into the truck. They continued along yet another conveyor belt, traveling up and away from the piler on a long boom that resembled the arm of a construction crane, flying out its open end onto the top of a three-story beet mountain. Over the course of the harvest, that mountain would get much longer. To give it room to grow, the piler occasionally inched backward on its treads. By the end of the harvest, the heap of beets would be the length of two Boeing 747s parked end to end and roughly as wide as the planes’ wingspan. A forced-air ventilation system would help keep the pile near freezing as the beets awaited trips to the refinery.
The process was thunderously loud, rushed, and messy as hell. Our job involved constant cleanup: shoveling masses of spilled beets—some the size of frozen turkeys—back into the hoppers with pitchforks and agricultural scoops. (Standing around was discouraged: “If you can lean, you can clean!” was one manager’s favorite slogan.) When the repeated lifting got too hard, we’d give up on the shovels and scoop smaller loads with our hands. If we didn’t move fast enough, our overseer—who wore pink cowboy boots and a full face of makeup to work—would blare a WWII-submarine-sounding horn from the elevated control booth, as if she were arming the torpedoes, and then make frantic shoveling gestures through the window in our direction. Meanwhile the conveyor belts that churned over our heads shot beet bits and clods of dirt at everything in range, spattering our yellow safety vests and green hard hats. When I raised my left hand to signal a coworker about an oncoming truck—it was hard to hear even when we shouted over the din of the machine—an apple-sized beet pocked me hard on my wrist. Another part of our job was keeping the floors free of dense and slippery mud using snow shovels, which constantly got stuck in it and took a full-body shove to dislodge. We also had to take samples, the task Gretchen had told me about. What she hadn’t mentioned was that it involved holding each vinyl sack open below a vertical chute coming off the piler; the beets rocketed down into the bag and keeping it steady meant bracing your self for impact. It felt like catching bowling balls in a pillowcase.
The hardest bit was cleaning the piler. Our supervisor powered down the giant machine so we could all climb inside and scrape out the main chute with our shovels. The mud was intractable and, when it finally budged, it peeled off in leathery strips as thick as tire tread. Our overseer yelled at us to “put some muscle in” and explained that we only had fifteen minutes. Downtime was expensive.
After two days of orientation came a twelve-hour work shift. When it was over, I drove back to my campsite in the dark, past an “UNBEETABLE EXPERIENCE” harvest recruitment sign. My whole body hurt, especially my back and shoulders; old injuries and strains I’d long forgotten about had been newly invigorated. This surprised me, since I was thirty-seven and in reasonably good shape, and there were retirement-aged people working at some of the stations. I hoped for a hot shower—we’d been promised access to bathing facilities—but that part of the campground was still under construction. I cooked dinner in the van and fell asleep in my clothes with a splitting headache. I woke up at dawn the next day to begin what would be an even more eventful shift. A seven-foot metal pole from a broken harvester arrived hidden in a load of beets. It got sucked into the piler. By the time our overseer called an emergency shutdown, the pole had traveled partway up the first conveyor and was nearing the giant tumbler that shakes dirt off the beets. If it had gotten there, it could have done serious damage to the machine—and quite possibly to those of us standing on the ground nearby. Later that day, a coworker fell on the slippery concrete and had to file an accident report because his knee swelled up.
My working neighbors at the campsite included Dan, sixty-nine, who left his job as a Walmart truck driver in 2006 due to medical problems. Dan told me he had to plead with the foreman to get off the night shift, since he was going blind in his right eye and needed daylight to get around. His wife, Alice, also lived in their motorhome, but she had been diagnosed with ALS in January and could not work. There were other older people in the campground but also fiftysomethings and workers my age and younger. To the immediate right of my van a twentysomething couple of crust punks were living in a matte black pickup truck with New Jersey plates, eating cups of ramen noodles, and sleeping in the cab. I also met a goateed worker who was riding his bike through the RV camp and called himself Overdrive. He talked a bit about his philosophy. “In the morning if it’s raining you can wake up and say this is a shitty day or you can say this is a great day,” he said. “I choose to say, ‘This is a great day.’”
Stressed, sore, and covered in dirt, part of me felt obligated to the people I’d met and wanted to tough it out through the end of the campaign. But no matter how long I stayed, the experience wasn’t going to initiate me into the ranks of real workampers—I’d be going home at the end to write. By now I’d seen—and especially felt—enough to know that the workers I’d met had not exaggerated their experiences. So one night after my shift, I told the foreman I wouldn’t be back. She didn’t seem surprised; attrition was common. A few days later, I would learn that most of the coworkers at my piling station had also quit. I would also hear about a woman at another station who’d broken her wrist. With a twinge of guilt, I’d feel relieved that hadn’t been me.
I drove away from Drayton Yard in the dark, past a stream of semitrucks heading the other direction. In the rearview mirror, the refinery’s red neon sign read “American Crystal Sugar.” It glowed through the steam billowing up from the plant. That night I sprung for a hotel in Grand Forks. There I enjoyed a hot shower, smoked a joint, and dozed off while trying to watch a movie. One of those things turned out to be a mistake.
I’D SENT OFF AN APPLICATION for CamperForce around the same time I’d submitted one for the sugar beet harvest. Getting the Amazon job required a pre-employment drug screening, a practice that has always struck me as invasive and degrading. The whole thing seemed even more absurd when I envisioned aging RVers across the country submitting bodily fluids or tissues for analysis in order to get precarious, low-wage, temporary work.
I had already researched Amazon’s testing policy online and found employees talking about a “cheek scrape” test. In this kind of screening method, most drugs, including marijuana, are only detectable for a matter of days. I figured I’d be fine, since I had told Amazon I could report for work beginning in November.
Back home, I got an email from CamperForce setting my start date: November 4 at the Amazon warehouse in Haslet, Texas, near Fort Worth. A couple days later, after passing the criminal background check, I received another message giving me seventy-two hours to complete a drug test at a lab on Atlantic Avenue, close to my apartment. No problem, I thought. But the email also revealed an unpleasant surprise: I was getting a urine test.
Marijuana can show up in urine more than a month after smoking, since the metabolites lurk in your fat tissues. My test was scheduled for a week and a half after I’d smoked in North Dakota. For a cheek scrape, that would have been fine. For a urine test, it was shaky. I ordered a ten-pack of THC test strips from Amazon and gave one a try. The line signifying a drug-negative resu
lt appeared, but it was dishearteningly faint. The instructions said any stripe at all—no matter its shade—was grounds for passing the test. Mine was barely visible, though. I didn’t want to risk it.
There was only one foolproof way to pass: smuggling clean urine in. Luckily, I still had nine unused THC test strips. I distributed them to friends and loved ones. Soon I found a donor, who provided a clean sample. I stored it in a tiny travel shampoo bottle. On the day of the test, I stashed the bottle in my underwear and put on skinny jeans to hold it in place. When the deed was done, a technician said I would receive the results in forty-eight hours.
I never heard back from the lab, but days later an email came from CamperForce: I was clear to work. Soon, I was back in the van and bound for Haslet, Texas.
ORIENTATION BEGAN on a Wednesday morning, with our thirty-one-person group gathered in a classroom at the Amazon warehouse. “You’re going to be doing really physical work here,” warned our instructor. “You’re probably going to do a thousand squats a day, and that’s not an exaggeration. Buns of steel, here we come! Right?”
A few trainees chuckled. We sat at long tables in alphabetical order, like schoolchildren. Most of the crowd was north of sixty. I was the only person under fifty, one of three workers without gray hair. Managers at the Haslet warehouse, we were told, had requested eight hundred CamperForce workers and got more than nine hundred applicants. Nearby trailer parks, however, didn’t have enough space to accommodate the army of nomads. Another idea—renting a local cow pasture—had been summarily rejected. (Can you imagine that field, frozen in one of Texas’s famous winter ice storms, with hundreds of elderly workers lacking electric, water, and sewage connections? A PR nightmare!)
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