Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  In the end, managers scrounged up a limited number of RV spots at a dozen trailer parks within a forty-mile radius. They hired 251 CamperForce workers, as many as they could fit. Some new hires got stuck commuting ninety minutes a day, on top of their ten-hour work shifts. One woman living in a white Ford van told me she planned to “stealth camp” in Amazon’s parking lot twice a week, saving gas and time.

  Our trainer—herself an RVer and CamperForce veteran—apologized for the hassle. She said Amazon was thrilled to welcome us. “Campers are known for their integrity, attendance, and quality,” she explained. “We know what it’s like to put in a hard day’s work. That’s what Amazon is banking on. They’re getting this experienced group to come in and kick booty!” Our cohort, she added, was known for “the CamperForce effect”: a can-do, Eisenhower-era work ethic that rubbed off on younger, less-experienced laborers. In the days that followed, however, our team seemed to have little effect on our disaffected millennial coworkers. Like the twentysomethings, we mostly gave off vibes of “tired” and “bored.”)

  At least we brought a wide range of experience. Keith, sitting to my left, was a sixtysomething minister with ten children (five were adults and the others lived in his RV). Charlie, seventy-seven, told me his knees were shot from years of working as a mechanic for a copper mining concern. Ed and Patricia, married for more than forty years, had retired in the late 1990s from jobs as a motorcycle cop and a mail carrier.

  Together, we trained to work in a department called Inventory Control Quality Assurance, or ICQA. The job sounded benign: scanning merchandise so it could be matched against digital inventory records. But we quickly learned that our warehouse—the largest in Amazon’s network, according to our trainer, and comparable in size to more than nineteen football fields—was a maze of hazards. Over twenty-two miles of conveyor belts shuttled boxes around the interior. They sounded like a freight train and jammed easily. We were told to keep our hair pinned up and to avoid tying sweatshirts around our waists, lest they get caught in the rollers, and the ID badges that dangled from our necks were on breakaway lanyards to avoid strangulation. A horn kept blaring over the din. When I asked what it meant, a coworker said a jammed belt had just been fixed and was starting up again.

  Barb and Chuck Stout, whom I’d last seen in Quartzsite burning their bankruptcy papers, were working in Haslet, too. Chuck was stationed near one of the conveyor belts when a cardboard box flew off, knocking him flat. His head hit the concrete floor. Soon medics from AmCare, the in-house medical service, were hovering over him. They said he didn’t have a concussion, so he could return to his job in the receiving department, walking fifteen miles a day. (Chuck, Barb, and I later reconnected at a Buffalo Wild Wings between shifts. They said that, before I arrived in Texas, union organizers had been campaigning in the warehouse parking lot. For about two weeks, managers gave twice-daily lectures warning workers to stay away from them and, above all, not to sign anything. Information about employees who engaged with organizers would end up in the union’s database and be used to “track” and contact them, Chuck remembered the managers saying.)

  During orientation, we also learned that our facility was one of ten distribution centers where Amazon was using robot “sherpas.” The 250-pound orange contraptions look like giant Roomba vacuum cleaners. They’re technically “drive units,” but most people call them “Kivas,” after the name of the manufacturer printed on their sides. They scoot around inside a dim cage—after all, robots don’t need light to see—on a floor nicknamed the “Kiva field.” Their job: ferrying open-faced shelving columns full of merchandise to stations operated by humans along the perimeter. No one, except for members of a labor unit called “Amnesty,” was allowed to enter the Kiva field, even when products tumbled off the shelves there. Regular workers were allowed to fish for such items from outside the cage using an “Amnesty Retrieval Tool.” (Despite the highfalutin name, this was just a paint roller on a five-foot pole. Every station was equipped with one.) When I expressed interest in trying my hand at it, I was told that I would have to wait: Wielding the Amnesty Retrieval Tool took special training.

  I’d heard a lot of hype about the Kivas. They were either an efficiency expert’s wet dream, an innovation to free humankind from mindless toil, or they were the harbingers of a jobless dystopia where manual labor became obsolete as the wedge between rich and poor grew into a wall.

  The reality was less polemic, more slapstick, like an updated version of Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Our trainers regaled us with tales of unruly robots. Kivas had gone AWOL, escaping through a gap in the fence. They had tried to drag a stepladder away from a station while a worker was still standing on it. On rare occasions, two Kivas collided—each carrying up to 750 pounds of merchandise—like drunken European soccer fans bumping chests. Sometimes the Kivas dropped items. Sometimes they ran those items over. In April, a can of “bear mace” (basically industrial-grade pepper spray) fell off one robot’s payload and got crushed by another. The warehouse had to be evacuated. Paramedics treated seven workers outside. Another was rushed to the hospital with respiratory problems.

  Apart from marauding robots, we were told to beware overexertion. “Prepare to be sore!” a poster warned. One of our trainers joked that you could call it a good day if “you didn’t have to take more than two Tylenols the night before.” Wall-mounted dispensers labeled “Lil’ Medic” offered free generic pain relievers. If you wanted the brand-name stuff—or, say, a bottle of Five-Hour Energy—you could buy it in the break room.

  We got a tour of the building. The walls featured murals of Amazon’s warehouse mascot—a blob-like orange cartoon called “Pecy: Peculiar Guy”—and Orwellian slogans, including “Problems Are Treasures” and “Variation Is the Enemy, Takt Time Is Key.” (“Takt” is business jargon. Defined as “the desired time that it takes to make one unit of production output,” it is used to regulate the pace of work.) A large calendar revealed that, so far in November, there had been at least one safety-related “incident” each day. Our guide pointed out a “wall of shame” with anonymous profiles of disgraced workers. Each was illustrated with clip art: the black silhouette of a head overlaid with red block letters that read “ARRESTED” or “TERMINATED.” One worker had stolen iPhones, smuggling them out in his steel-toed boots. Another got caught eating merchandise instead of putting it on the shelves (exactly $17.46 worth of food products, the profile helpfully revealed). Regimentation was the rule. We were told to walk in paths that were marked with green tape on the floor; when someone cut a corner, our guide scolded him. When I stopped to use the restroom, the inside of my stall had a chart with a color palette ranging from pale yellow to terrifying puce. It instructed me to find the shade that matched my urine and suggested that I should be drinking more water.

  I spent a week at the warehouse. The cognitive dissonance was intense. At the start of each shift, a blonde, ponytailed manager in her twenties chirped “Helllloooo, campers!” to our cohort of mostly elderly workers, while her assistant coached us through stretches. Afterward, I scanned barcodes on everything from dildos (manufacturer: “Cloud 9” model “Delightful Dong”), to Smith & Wesson Gun Wraps (available in granular and rubberized textures) and $25 AMC gift cards (there were 146 of them, and they had to be scanned individually).

  On one occasion, a Kiva robot carrying a column of shelves rolled toward my workstation. There was a whiff of nauseating perfume, and then a cloud of it, growing denser as the robot drew nearer. For some reason, the smell reminded me of . . . college? When the shelves parked in front of me, I found eighteen boxes of patchouli incense waiting to be scanned. The odor stuck to my hands. I gagged, finished the job, and pushed a button to send the robot away. Three other robots had been waiting in line to the right of it, like patient Labrador retrievers. As the stinky shelf departed, a new, much fresher one slid into place. But five minutes later, the patchouli-bearing robot returned. I re-scanned everything quickly and it left
again. Five minutes later, it was back. I couldn’t decide: Was this proof that humans are smarter than robots? Or was the robot patronizing me with round after round of redundant object counting—perhaps it would take the best two results out of three? After I dispatched the shelf for the third time, my shift was over. I joined my coworkers to leave. They could smell the incense. “Saturday Night Fever!” Keith, the minister, pronounced.

  I remove the contents of a robot-borne shelf to scan the barcodes.

  The following night’s shift would be my last. For a few hours I worked with the Kivas again. I tried to lull myself into a meditative state. Another CamperForce worker, a white-haired septuagenarian, had told me earlier that she was on the verge of quitting because she found the robots so maddening. The Kivas kept bringing her the same shelf to scan. The situation resembled my patchouli problem. After it happened to her three times, the shelf began going to her husband, who was working at a station twenty-five feet away. He got it six times in total. She told me this outside the break room, as we walked past a cheerful-looking member of the cleaning crew dusting lockers. Trailing off from her story, she stared at the worker and demanded, “How’d she get that job? I’d rather do that! I’d rather clean toilets!”

  Toward the end of the night, a manager asked me to scan items in “Damageland,” where all the broken merchandise gets exiled. But the readout on my handheld scanner insisted I was supposed to be driving a forklift. (I do not know how to drive a forklift.) The manager didn’t know what to do. We kept rebooting the scanner. Finally I made it to Damageland. After a few hours taking stock of dented cans, broken boxes, and a novelty gift called a BUTT/FACE towel, my shift was over.

  I walked past three other CamperForce workers who had given up altogether on the scanners’ erratic commands. They sat listlessly outside the bank of shelves, with their backs to the wall. It was time to quit, but I hadn’t decided how to do it yet. Now a perverse urge arose. There was one act, we’d all been told, that led to instant termination. What if I ran headlong, heedless and free, onto the Kiva field? I’d fantasized about it earlier that week. What would it feel like to dash down those dim aisles, dodging busy Kivas, like I was doing some kind of proletarian parkour routine? How long would the Amnesty team take to catch up with me? What would happen when they did? (Stranger things had occurred. Later on, I’d hear about two amorous workers who got fired after attempting a tryst on the Kiva floor.)

  But I’d come here to gather stories, not to enact a scene from Braveheart. And I didn’t want to lose my notes. These had been carefully collected on a pad in my back pocket. I’d also dictated observations, sotto voce, to an audio recorder concealed in a pen and shot video with a camera that looked like a key fob. Both devices hung on the lanyard with my worker ID badge.

  I walked to the security station at the warehouse exit. After putting the lanyard—and its cargo—in a TSA-style basket for keys and loose change, I slid it down a ramp to the guard while stepping through a metal detector. I paused nervously, looking back and forth between the guard and the basket, but she barely glanced at the items. Instead she looked at me, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “What are you waiting for?” So I told her “goodnight” and left.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TEN

  The H Word

  A FEW WEEKS after Linda moved into the Squeeze Inn, LaVonne was parked alone in San Diego. She’d been stealth camping there. Her morale was low after a hard few months. Her former home—the maroon 2003 GMC Safari named LaVanne—had broken down after the last Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, leaving her stranded in Ehrenberg with no money for repairs. Making matters worse, she still owed a few thousand dollars in payments on her now-worthless van, which had died several times before. She decided to stay put and wait on her Social Security checks. Lori, the woman who lived with her son in a Chevy Tahoe, took LaVonne on grocery runs. LaVonne also found solace snuggling a new travel buddy: a rambunctious puppy named Scout, from a litter recently whelped by Lori’s dog.

  LaVonne ended up living in the dead van for nearly a month and a half, as temperatures rose and the tribe thinned around her. Finally she could afford a tow to the repair shop, where she was quoted $3,000 to fix the engine. That was more than she could pay. Walking Scout nearby, she spotted a nearly new twelve-person Chevy Express on a used car lot. A salesman emerged from the office. He said he could help her get a loan even though she had bad credit. This is not surprising—subprime auto loans have surged in recent years.

  LaVonne wasn’t sure about the terms, but what choice did she have? “If I didn’t get it, I was going to be homeless,” she later told me. She named the vehicle LaVanne Two.

  That experience had been an unwelcome brush with the dreaded H word: Homeless. Most nomads avoid the label like a contagion. They are “houseless,” after all. “Homeless” is other people.

  But even after she escaped Ehrenberg and returned to familiar San Diego, Lavonne felt haunted by the word. On her blog, The Complete Flake, she wrote:

  -When you live in a van in the city, people think you’re homeless.

  -When people think you’re homeless, you start to feel homeless.

  -So you start hiding in plain sight . . . doing everything you can to appear “normal” . . .

  -So when the obviously homeless old man you have observed hiding his trash bag of stuff in a bush near your van every morning smiles and says hello like he knows you, it is unnerving to say the least.

  -Because you realize you have joined the growing club of people who live on the streets, and there is not so much difference between the two of you after all.

  A few days later, LaVonne followed up with a guilt-wracked confession. She explained in a new post that she’d been relying on payday loans to survive the month and, at $255 each, they were due in a week with $45 interest apiece. She was upset and ashamed. Her RTR friend Sameer, who was traveling with Mr. Pico the chihuahua, wrote back quickly:

  I wish I was in your vicinity so I could give you, my sister, a hug. I would like to let you know that you are not alone in this situation. I can remember myself and Mr. Pico sitting in the forest in Dolores, Colorado, eight days before payday with the needle on the gasoline tank reading almost empty, five days’ worth of food and two days’ worth of water . . .

  . . . Accepting poverty and the fact that you are probably considered poor, it’s a hard thing. We were presented with this lifestyle as being exciting and innovative and it is. However, the truth of the matter is most of us are doing this because of our financial situation . . . Here are some words of advice from your brother Sameer’s point of view . . . Leave California and the streets of San Diego where you are considered homeless. Remember in the desert or the forest you are camping. . . . Come to the desert or the forest and live with your own people who love and care about you.

  From your brother, Sameer

  Sameer and LaVonne were not naive. They know that, in the eyes of the law, they are homeless. But who can live under the weight of that word? The term “homeless” has metastasized beyond its literal definition, becoming a terrible threat. It whispers: Exiles. The Fallen. The Other. Those Who Have Nothing Left. “Our society’s untouchables,” LaVonne suggested on her blog.

  “In the beginning, I worried about people’s perception of me living in a van,” Sameer told me once in an interview. “I didn’t want to be defined as ‘homeless.’” That word gave him trouble. One time he drove the van to visit his sister for Ramadan. She ended up throwing him out, deciding he was a “homeless bum” who didn’t set a good example for his nieces and nephews. “I thought my family might be kinder.” He trailed off, then continued: “How we define ourselves is really important. If you’re driving down the road calling yourself homeless, or any other negative label, you’re in trouble. Paul Bowles wrote a book called The Sheltering Sky. He described the difference between tourists and travelers.” There he paused. “I’m a traveler.” In his book, Bob Wells draws a bright line between vandwellers and th
e homeless. He suggests vandwellers are conscientious objectors from a broken, corrupting social order. Whether or not they chose their lifestyle, they have embraced it. On the other hand, he explains, “A homeless person may live in a van, but he isn’t there because he hates society’s rules. No, he has one goal and that is to get back under the tyranny of those rules, where he feels comfortable and safe.”

  Sameer sits in his van with Mr. Pico.

  The idea of choosing one’s destiny, as it turned out, was a big deal. I heard this time and time again—no matter how narrow the options one had to pick from, choice was key. Ghost Dancer, who ran the vandweller group on Yahoo, put it to me like this in an interview: “The economy is not getting better. You have a choice—you can be free, or you can be homeless.”

  Social stigma is only part of the issue. Bad things can happen to those who live nomadically—things that are worse than sticks and stones. In recent years America has put unprecedented pressure on people who don’t live in traditional housing. The New York Times reported the following in 2016:

  A battery of laws that effectively criminalize homelessness is sweeping the nation, embraced by places like Orlando, Fla.; Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Manchester, N.H. By the end of 2014, 100 cities had made it a crime to sit on a sidewalk, a 43 percent increase over 2011, according to a survey of 187 major American cities by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The number of cities that banned sleeping in cars jumped to 81 from 37 during that same period. The crackdown comes amid the gentrification that is transforming cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Honolulu, contributing to higher housing costs and increased homelessness.

  Such laws prioritize property over people. They tell nomads “Your car can stay here, but you can’t.” In communities across the country, whether this might express a dark shift in civic values has been left largely out of the debate.