Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  And it’s not just happening in the cities. “Economic profiling” has also been taking place on public land. In Arizona’s Coconino National Forest, rangers have been interrogating campers in vans and RVs about their home addresses. Anyone who appears to be a permanent nomad—a sticker indicating a vehicle has boondocked in Quartzsite is considered a giveaway—can be ticketed and evicted for making “residential use” of the forest. Meanwhile, The Statesman Journal recently reported that the Forest Service is developing a smartphone app that allows citizens to report the locations of suspected long-term campsites.

  Negative attitudes toward rubber tramps are nothing new. In the mid- to late 1930s, as house trailers surged in popularity, the media seized on their inhabitants as a growing threat to middle-class morals. They were a mobile menace. Freeloaders. Mooches. Spreaders of disease. Rootless. Drifters. Idlers. Parasites. Shirkers.

  “The gasoline gypsy pays less for social services than any other citizen in these tax-ridden United States,” complained the editorial board of The New York Times in 1937.

  “Who should bear the responsibility for the wandering hosts, living briefly here and there as squatters, rootless as air plants, paying no taxes, creating a new kind of motor slums?” asked Fortune magazine in the same year.

  One manufacturer, Caravan Trailer, lampooned that sentiment by giving a tongue-in-cheek name to its $425, eleven-foot-long economy model: the “Tax Dodger.”

  But the trailer fad of the 1930s passed. Most of its adherents settled back down amid a reinvigorated economy. Many of the modern nomads I’ve interviewed, however, say they’re never going back. They have no plans to get reabsorbed into mainstream housing. And that means many will have to live in hiding, on and off, until they die.

  LaVonne got “the knock” once that spring while stealth camping in San Diego. It could have ended up worse. Officer Nunez was friendly. He wanted to make sure she was alive, he told her. He needed to know she wasn’t running a meth lab. LaVonne knew she was lucky. Her van looked new and clean. Her dog was adorable. She was white. He didn’t write her a citation. Officer Nunez did, however, take down her name, her license plate number, and the make and model of LaVanne Two. That meant her cover was blown, and she’d soon be moving on again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Homecoming

  TWO WEEKS AFTER I left CamperForce in Texas, it was Thanksgiving. I called Linda to check in and wish her a happy holiday.

  The news was bad. Her family was getting evicted from the house they were renting in Mission Viejo. Her son-in-law had lost the short-term disability benefits he’d started receiving when vertigo and migraines forced him out of his office job a year earlier. They couldn’t pay the rent, so Linda gave them her old motorhome, which had been sitting in storage. (She’d almost sold it over the summer, but the offer had fallen through.) She was glad they could use the twenty-eight-foot El Dorado, but worried about it accommodating two adults, three teenagers, and four dogs. The plan had her daughter Audra and son-in-law Collin sleeping in the bedroom, grandson Julian in the loft over the cab, granddaughters Gabbi and Jordan on the fold-out dinette, the dogs wherever.

  The family prepared to sell off their possessions, emptying the two-thousand-square-foot house and its attached garage. “It was like, you know, the hoarders on TV,” Linda told me. Audra gave each of the teenagers a Rubbermaid tub. Anything they wanted to keep had to fit inside. Linda helped arrange a massive yard sale. There were boxes of clothes and books, boogie boards and bed frames. Dresses hung neatly along a wall at the edge of the lawn. Julian, a talented musician, parted with most of his gear including a beloved accordion. Jordan, an aspiring make-up artist, let much of her extensive wardrobe go. (“She’s still not in love with this idea,” Linda said drily.) In two weekends of yard sales they made $1,000. A few shoppers saw the Squeeze Inn parked in the garage and asked for a price. Linda was flattered by their interest but said it wasn’t for sale.

  While Linda put on a good face, the crisis had worn her down. “I was getting exhausted,” she told me. “I am still helping, but I’ve pulled back.” Meanwhile Thanksgiving dinner was still happening in the now-empty home. Costco and Ralph’s had run out of turkeys, she said, but the family would do just fine with ham.

  In late December Linda and I spoke again. She told me that LaVonne had come to Mission Viejo and helped her get the family settled into the RV. After that Linda was ready to go back on the road. Everyone was sad she wouldn’t be around for Christmas. Audra cried.

  Linda and LaVonne drove from Mission Viejo to Slab City, the sprawling squatters’ encampment by the Salton Sea. They’d been hearing about it for years and wanted to visit. When they arrived, it was too dark to look around, so they pulled over to sleep. In the morning they saw trash strewn everywhere. They drove off in LaVonne’s van to hunt for a nicer campsite. LaVonne had a Facebook friend staying at the Slabs. When they found her, she told them matter-of-factly that they’d been sleeping “where the meth heads hang out.” Linda’s heart sank. The Squeeze Inn and her Jeep were still over there. What if someone broke in? They raced back to find out. Linda’s home was fine, but the uneasy feeling remained. She and LaVonne left immediately to reconnect with the Rubber Tramp tribe in Ehrenberg.

  After a few weeks of stress, catching up with friends felt good. Linda and LaVonne planned to stay in the area and rented a mailbox together. (They split the cost on their credit cards, Linda explained, adding that you can’t borrow money from LaVonne because she’ll never let you pay her back, though she’s always glad to share: “When her monthly check comes, if someone needs $50, she’ll give it to them.”) After a heart-to-heart about the stigma of low-income living, they both posted on Facebook pages a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five:

  America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

  One night LaVonne misplaced her purse in the van. Losing things in small spaces is surprisingly easy—some of her friends had nicknamed the phenomenon “Vandweller’s Black Hole”—so she shrugged it off and went over to the Squeeze Inn to see Linda, who gave her some chocolate. (“I love Linda. She is the friend I’ve wished for my whole life—no judgment, no agenda, just pure friendship, love, and support. Plus, she feeds me,” LaVonne later blogged.) Feeling a sudden pang of worry, LaVonne went back to the van. As she feared, she’d locked herself out. The keys were in the ignition and her dog Scout was still inside. She and Linda tried prying open the doors, to no avail. They went to see Bob, but he had no suggestions. The called AAA, but the dispatcher wouldn’t send someone into unpaved backcountry. Since Scout had food and water, they decided to wait and solve the problem by daylight. LaVonne fell asleep on the Squeeze Inn’s tiny mattress beside Linda, who recorded her snoring. She played it back to LaVonne in the morning—“it sounds like ­purring!”—after the fire department extricated Scout from the van. The poor dog had defecated everywhere, so LaVonne spent most of that day at the Laundromat.

  On Christmas Eve, a couple dozen people showed up for a potluck. Linda met Swankie Wheels for the first time. Kyndal, who gave haircuts at the Rendezvous, made her friends laugh with an art installation: Rocky the Snowman, a pile of stones with a carrot nose. LaVonne and some friends discussed plans to visit Los Algodones. (Linda wanted to go but had to get a passport, which meant first renewing her driver’s license that had expired in June using her new address, the post office box in Ehrenberg.)

  On Christmas morning, Kyndal and her husband handed out gifts—packets of handy wipes decorated with holiday bows and candies—while Linda made a special breakfast for LaVonne: pumpkin pancakes with cranberry sauce, a concoction suggested by Swankie.

  Linda caught me up on m
any things during that December phone call. She’d paid $30 for a carbon monoxide detector but had dropped it in her pee bucket. She’d recently finished reading Cyndi Lauper’s eponymous memoir. Over in Quartzsite, at the Long Term Visitors Area, an RVer and his two cats had barely escaped an electrical fire that incinerated their home and all his possessions.

  LaVonne makes pancakes in her van.

  Linda wanted to know if I was coming to the 2016 Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. It was a couple weeks away. She would be there, returning for the first time since her inaugural experience in 2014 when we’d first met. I told her I wouldn’t miss it.

  DRIVING IN THE DARK on Mitchell Mine Road, I spotted a pair of red strobing lights in the distance. Linda had set out emergency flashers so I could find the RTR campsite at night. It was already ten o’clock when I pulled up in Halen, but she came out to collect the lights and say hello. We went into the Squeeze Inn and she poured me a glass of water. One of the blindingly bright flashers wouldn’t turn off. “Put it in the fridge!” I joked. She did.

  By the time I got there in mid-January, the RTR was nearly halfway over. It had started slow due to rain, which hampered socializing and forced the nomads to take shelter in their rigs. But the weather improved. Before long, the population was about four times what it had been during Linda’s first visit two years earlier; Bob later estimated 250 people came. A few of the old-timers and hard-core introverts were staying away because it felt so much bigger. Trying to leverage their greater numbers, one nomad had started a pool for an upcoming Powerball drawing. The $1.5 billion jackpot stood to be the largest prize in lottery history.

  Many of the old seminars repeated, but there were also new events, including a session on living in small cars, as a cheaper and stealthier alternative to vandwelling. Among the presenters was David Swanson, sixty-six, a former professional potter who’d developed severe arthritis in his hands and now got by on Social Security disability payments. Eighteen months earlier, he’d moved into a 2006 Prius that had been totaled and salvaged before he bought it for $6,000.

  “My cooking and sleeping are the two most important things to me, and that’s what makes me feel like I’m on a retired-guy adventure,” David told his audience. “I’m seeing the world! I’m having a great time! As long as I have a nice bed, as long as I can cook, I don’t feel homeless, which I otherwise am.”

  David showed the group how he’d replaced his front passenger seat with a sturdy counter: a slab of two-inch teak from his former work table, on which he’d made hundreds of thousands of pots. Now he used it as a surface to fix meals with an induction hot plate, which he plugged into a power inverter that ran off the car’s battery. At night the counter became a platform for his inflatable camping mattress and sleeping bag. For privacy and blocking light, he’d made a dark curtain with button holes along the edge, which hung on hooks over the windows. To create extra space, he had a custom tent that connected to the back of the vehicle when its rear gate was lifted.

  He also described the Prius’s most significant advantage as a home—it’s essentially a smart power generator on wheels. Even when he’s sleeping, he can run the vehicle’s heating and cooling systems off the built-in battery, with the engine automatically kicking in once or twice an hour to charge it.

  Once he got used to the setup, David said, living in his Prius allowed for many comforts. “If I pull up at Starbucks in the morning and use their WiFi, I can have my coffee ready before I could get it by going in there and standing in line,” he explained, chuckling. For evening entertainment, he added, “I’ll sit in the driver’s seat with my little tablet—I have it Velcroed up to the visor—and put the seat back and there’s movie night.”

  A few days after the small vehicle seminar, the RTR prepared for another first-time event: a community talent show. Linda lit candles inside brown paper bags weighed down with gravel, creating a row of homemade footlights that flickered warmly around the impromptu stage. The action began at sunset. There was music—a nomad pounded out rhythms on her djembe, another played Tibetan singing bowls, and a guitarist crooned a Bottle Rockets’ song that went: “A thousand-dollar car, it ain’t worth shit. You might as well take your thousand dollars and set fire to it.” There was comedy—from a monologue about an octopus trying to make love to a bagpipe to a recitation of one-liners including “Camping is an expensive way to look homeless.” A shirtless contortionist clasped his hands behind his back and then dislocated his shoulders to rotate his arms over his head, bringing them to the front of his torso. A karate expert chopped a wooden plank in half with his bare hand. One loud drunk kept interrupting and yelled “Julio! Julio!” at a dog that kept trying to hump a dancer’s leg. Audience members gave the man dirty looks, which accomplished nothing, before shushing him and pulling his dog offstage.

  The mood was cheerful, but with a darker undercurrent than I’d felt before. At one seminar, Bob had mentioned REAL ID, the program that was tightening security standards for driver’s licenses. For years, nomads had been establishing residency by using the addresses of local mail-forwarding services. Now many DMV clerks had started looking up each address online. If it belonged to a business, they demanded an actual residential address. Intended to root out terrorism, this also made things harder for nomads, pushing them to come up with bogus information—to claim they lived at a family or friend’s place or borrow the address of a random property they’d seen was for sale.

  “The government wants you to live in a house,” Bob warned them. “They know what we’re doing and they’re tightening the grip all the time.”

  Around this time I found myself wondering: What would become of all these people? In particular, I wondered if Linda was still gungho about building an Earthship. A few months earlier, she’d mentioned that her search for land had shifted again—to Vidal, California, near the Colorado River—but at the RTR she hadn’t been talking about it much. When I asked, she sounded a bit tepid and told me she’d recently gotten rid of some of her books on Earthships during the purge in Mission Viejo.

  Over the years, I’d heard nomads discuss chipping in together on a communal piece of land, but plans never seemed to materialize. I knew a couple people who’d gotten off the road by falling back on their adult children, who’d either taken them in or rented apartments for them. Not everyone had offspring, though. And the next generation had financial woes of its own. Some of the adult children were barely able to support themselves, let alone their parents.

  I had heard about an assisted living center in Texas that welcomes RVers who can no longer drive. Called Escapees CARE, it is annexed to Rainbow’s End, a larger RV park in the town of Livingston. (“Is it true that CARE is where you go to die?” reads a bleak question on the facility’s F.A.Q. page.) Residents stay in their own motorhomes. Renting a spot there, however, costs more than $850 a month. Optional adult daycare services add another $200 each week. That was far out of reach for most folks I’d met.

  Some of the stories I heard were scary. Iris, the nomad who lived with a talking parrot, recounted how an acquaintance named Ron drank himself to death while boondocking in a Walmart parking lot thirty-six miles from Quartzsite. No one found his body for a month, she said. An Isaiah 58 Project volunteer, Becky Hill, had mentioned an eighty-year-old who had taken shelter at their church for three months. He turned up dead in his RV in the desert near Ehrenberg. “He had no one to help him along,” she lamented.

  A CamperForce worker I’d interviewed four years earlier had just died that February. When I first met Patti DiPino, she was fifty-seven and stowing merchandise on the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas. She invited me to chat in her 1993 Ford Montera motorhome.

  Patti told me she’d spent fifteen years as a bookkeeper at a Denver construction company, then got laid off when it shut down in 2009. Around the same time, she lost her house in a messy divorce. So Patti moved into her RV and tried to climb back into the full-time workforce. Certain her three de
cades in office administration would count for something, she sent out thousands of online applications over the next few years. But the job market wasn’t kind to an unemployed woman in her fifties. Nothing turned up.

  Patti poured me a cup of black coffee. She talked about Sammy, her beloved five-pound Chihuahua, about spending time in Quartzsite, about her plan to apply for a job at Adventureland. She shared a joke: “Bookkeepers never die, they just get out of balance.” She told me about her hobby, knitting lap blankets to comfort wheelchair-bound soldiers who’d lost limbs in Afghanistan. (One of her daughters, a Navy veteran, had offered to distribute them at a base in California.)

  Patti was glad for the $10.50 an hour she made at Amazon but didn’t want to spend her earnings there. “I tell people, ‘You know what? Don’t go to Walmart, don’t buy on Amazon. Go down the street and buy from a mom and pop, and start hurting the pockets of the big guys,’” Patti said. “I mean, the rich are getting richer while we’re sitting here getting poorer.”

  Patti didn’t want to wander for the rest of her life. She dreamed of a permanent community. “What I’d like to find is kind of a school that I can get some county to offer to senior citizens to let us build our own gardens and produce our own methane, our own fuel, and stuff like that,” she explained. “And I have a kitchen so what the heck, we can cook. People don’t know how resourceful we can be. We’ve got the garden, so guess what, we’ll can food, because some of us know how to can. We learned years ago.”

  Patti was sixty when she died. From what I gathered, she’d been receiving radiation treatment for cancer. On her Facebook page, one of her friends posted a memorial tribute that moved me nearly to tears:

  You are finally debt free and living in your forever home! No more freezing in the desert or in Kansas! No more cramped spaces. Like I always say when I hang up the phone: I love you Patti. I will miss you dearly.