I had once asked Silvianne, the tarot reader, about her long-term plans. “In my mind, I’m going to be doing this forever,” she’d told me. “I don’t care if it comes to the Thelma & Louise thing and all I can do is drive over a cliff.”
I’d asked Iris, too. “Just find me dead in the desert,” was her reply. “Put rocks over me and let me go.”
Bob had a more practical plan for his declining years: “I’m going to dig a big, long trench and buy a cheap school bus and backfill completely over one side and over the roof, with windows on the south side. You can buy a crap school bus that’s not running for $500. It’s tough as nails and will last forever.” But when that wouldn’t work anymore, he planned to wander off into the wilderness and take his life with a bullet. “My long-term healthcare plan is bleached bones in the desert,” he said.
That desolate endgame also hinted at something larger: Bob wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilization. He believed that impending environmental and economic catastrophes would bring down human society. He anticipated a slump that would “make the Great Depression look like an afternoon in the park.”
While Bob weighed the fate of the overcrowded planet, some of his website’s readers worried that even vandwelling was getting too popular. They wanted Bob and other nomadic evangelists to stop talking about the lifestyle, concerned that more attention would make it harder to keep a low profile and possibly draw a police crackdown.
ONE AFTERNOON I drove to a taco stand in Quartzsite, owned by a guy who called himself the Grumpy Gringo. He’d been trying to sell the business for more than a year, kept dropping the price, but no one was buying. As I ordered my burrito, he told me he wanted to write a screenplay about old people coming to Quartzsite to die. When I looked startled, he told me the town had seen five or six suicides in the past year. “There’s nothing here,” he concluded bleakly. I took my food and left.
Back at the RTR, I caught up with Peter Fox, sixty-six, whom I’d met the year before. Then he’d been a vandweller in training, staying at the RTR in a borrowed Westafalia camper. After twenty-eight years in the San Francisco taxi industry as a driver, dispatcher, medallion holder, and manager, he had gotten squeezed out by Uber. “The sharing economy—the step-on-the-backs-of-the-little-people economy—has arrived,” he announced glumly. “I was at the point where I could no longer both pay my rent and eat.” He had tried to sell his medallion, which he thought would bring in about $140,000 after taxes, to retire on the proceeds. But sales were brokered by the city and demand for medallions was low. Peter was still on the waiting list. In the past half-year he had moved into a white Ford E350 twelve-passenger van he named the Pelican. (“Because they fly low and slow,” he explained.) Inside he had a statuette of Ganesh, remover of obstacles.
Peter hoped to find workamping jobs, so we carpooled to the Big Tent. I watched him approach one camp host recruiter—“I was forced into retirement and need to make money”—and then left him alone to do interviews. After grabbing a quick dinner in town, we started back to camp. “Around this time every night it hits me that this isn’t a vacation or a trip,” he told me. “This is it.”
Peter makes coffee in the open-air kitchen he set up near his van.
A couple days later we sat and chatted on a tarp outside his van. “I still feel the oscillation between fear and joy,” he said. We talked about the future. “Where do people go when they’re too old to camp or live in a van?” he mused. He told me he was grateful to a registered nurse at the RTR who had helped him by lancing an infection on one of his fingers. He thought it would be good if there were roving medical teams or way stations to serve nomads, particularly in state parks and other free places where people gathered. He also thought it would be cool to start a non-profit for aging vandwellers. Maybe someone would fund something like that? He wanted to call it the “Hello in There” Foundation, after a John Prine song by that name. I hadn’t heard it, so he pulled out a guitar and some sheet music and started to play. His voice swelled as it reached the chorus: a plea for interpersonal warmth and connection to ease the loneliness of old age.
What was his plan for the future? I asked.
“Don’t die. Don’t get old,” he said. “I don’t know.” If things got desperate, he added, a niece and nephew had offered to take him in.
AT THE END OF THE RTR, the nomads fashioned a little van out of a cardboard shipping box from Amazon. Everyone signed it. That night, they tossed the effigy on the bonfire. They called the new ritual “Burning Van” and commemorated it by singing lyrics they’d written to the tune of “Little Boxes,” the satirical ode to suburban conformity composed in 1962 by Malvina Reynolds.
Little vans out in the desert
Little vans all made of ticky tacky
Little vans out in the desert
Little vans and none the same
There’s a white one and a white one
And a white one and a flowered one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And there’s none two just the same
And the people are rubber trampers
The nicest people anywhere.
And they won’t be put in boxes
And they won’t be all the same
We are friendly
We are family
We love to get together,
In the desert, in the desert,
Where the terrain is all the same . . .
And we have no pavilion,
No bathhouse, no central stage
But we do have a fire pit where friendships are made
We’re all made out of ticky tacky
And none think all the same
The nomads enjoyed the ceremony and vowed to make it an annual tradition. Maybe next year, someone suggested, they should build the van out of plywood so it would burn a little longer.
LINDA GOT A REPORT FROM HER FAMILY. Her grandchildren were now staying in a tent next to the RV. During a bad storm, the rain fly lifted up, drenching them. Water had been coming in through the bottom of the tent, too. One of her granddaughters had tried vacuuming the floor to keep it tidy, without realizing she was drawing grains of sand through the fabric and creating tiny holes. They patched it up with duct tape. They were doing their best, she said.
Meanwhile Linda had some new challenges, too. She told me she’d started seeing a black spot in the center of her vision while driving at night. The instrument panel on the Jeep wasn’t working; she noticed this when we were driving along Scaddan Wash after a trip to town. “I’m screwed without a speedometer. Shit,” she said. “It’s always something.”
She and LaVonne had been trying to find workamping jobs for the spring. Linda thought she’d managed to secure another camp hosting job with California Land Management. When I was getting ready to leave the RTR, Linda got a call: The job, she was told, had been eliminated.
THAT’S WHERE I THOUGHT this story would end—with Linda back at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, restarting the seasonal cycle that governed her life as a migrant, among the tribe that had become like a family. Her new relationships grew even stronger in the weeks that followed, when Linda decamped with some of the nomads to Ehrenberg. There she came down with a terrible case of bronchitis. As she lay in the Squeeze Inn, too weak to cook, her off-the-grid neighbors arrived with food: boiled eggs, tomatoes, sausage. I’d seen similar caretaking the year before, when a nomad named Beth fell while stepping out of her van (aka The Beast), breaking her left arm. Two members of her “vanily” set up what they called “Camp Recovery,” helping her do many things that are impossible one-handed, from tying her shoes to fastening her bra, until she was well enough to move on.
A couple months after Linda’s illness, we were catching up on the phone when she said something that surprised me. She’d found land for her Earthship.
She’d seen an ad on Craigslist for five acres near the border town of Douglas, Arizona, on the western edge of the Chihuahuan desert and nine miles north o
f the Mexican border. This was an area she’d scouted earlier, after her first Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Back then she was convinced the region was too remote, too isolated. Now she felt differently. “The clock is ticking,” she told me. “How much time do I have to be healthy and strong enough to complete the task? It would be such a waste to never live in a home I built for myself.” Did she worry about feeling lonely, I asked? “Plenty of my friends run up and down that road and will come and see me,” Linda said, referring to her nomad tribe. “I won’t be there all alone.”
The parcel was in a rural district. There, homesteaders on four or more acres were exempt from county building codes. In other words, it was one of the zones Earthship inventor Michael Reynolds called “pockets of freedom”—places without red tape, where experimental architecture could flourish. It was also at an elevation of 4,200 feet, which meant summers shouldn’t get too sweltering. And if the heat got uncomfortable, there were opportunities for camp hosting in the surrounding mountains.
“Unimproved vacant land with very good legal access, and no electric, well or septic,” read the ad on Craigslist, which included photographs of endless raw desert with no other homes in sight. It also admitted some drawbacks. The roads bordering the property were overgrown with mesquite. One ran through a dry gulch, where flash floods were likely during thunderstorms.
Eventually the price won her over. The seller wanted $2,500 for the land, in bite-sized installments: $200 down and $200 a month, with no interest, until the total was met. A year earlier, while camp hosting in the San Bernardino Mountains, Linda had been poring over a self-help book, written by a start-up founder, called Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality. I had asked her why she was reading it. She told me she’d given it to her son-in-law, but he hadn’t seemed interested, so she’d dug into it herself. “I have a stalled project: my Earthship,” she said matter-of-factly. “What’s my obstacle? Finances. But is that really an obstacle?” She paused, took a thoughtful draw on her cigarette. Later she said she could announce her homesteading project at the RTR. Maybe people would come help her out. “Want to come stay on my land? The price is one tire packed with dirt per day!” she said, laughing. “Of course, I’ll make them pack more tires when they get here.”
An access road to Linda’s property disappears into the desert scrub.
When Linda first spotted the Craigslist ad, she was working as a camp host in the Sequoia National Forest, more than a twelve-hour drive away. (She’d been hired by California Land Management again; after the job she’d been promised earlier got eliminated, another one had opened up elsewhere.) She couldn’t go to see the land in person. So she went to the tax assessor’s website for Cochise County and entered the parcel number, which brought up the latitude and longitude, coordinates she plugged into MapQuest. In the resulting satellite image the plot was camel-colored and stippled with chaparral. Arroyos ran through it like creases in an outstretched palm.
After making the down payment, Linda posted to Facebook that she’d bought the land.
“YES!!! Making it happen,” wrote Ash, one of her vandweller friends from Amazon CamperForce. “Let us know when you need construction workers!”
“Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! I am jealous! We would love to swing by and help work on the build at some point!” added Wendy, another nomad, who lived with her boyfriend and their dogs in a “tiny house on wheels”: a former school bus they’d equipped with a composting toilet and a wood stove.
Linda planned to visit the land after finishing work as a camp host, before reporting to her next job, which was at Amazon. Her fellow camp host partner, a vandweller named Gary from the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, had become a close friend and wanted to see the land, too. He also planned to work at Amazon. Gary seemed to be sweet on Linda, though she went back and forth on whether she wanted a romantic relationship.
Could I go see the land with them? I asked. Linda agreed and I booked a flight to Phoenix. But just before the trip in mid-July, I learned their plans had changed. Gary had suffered a minor stroke. He and Linda had taken refuge with the RTR tribe in Flagstaff so he could recover. They decided to postpone the visit. Apart from Gary’s health, Linda worried about the heat down there. She’d expected temperatures in the eighties. The weather report showed 103 degrees. The Jeep’s air conditioning was busted. On top of all that, Amazon had assigned them an early start date of August 1, and they had to report to a warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, to join a CamperForce contingent that would grow to include more than 500 workers. They were planning a slow trip across the country, without driving during the heat of the day. “I’m just bummed I don’t get to go down there,” Linda said. She sounded exhausted.
I decided to go anyway. The plane ticket was already booked. Linda’s five acres were unfenced, open to anyone who wanted to visit. Besides, I figured a pilgrimage to the land might answer some nagging questions. Could the future Linda had already built in her brain become real on that blank patch of desert? Or was it an impossible dream?
My flight touched down in Phoenix on a mid-July evening during Arizona’s monsoon season. As passengers disembarked, a chorus of cell phones—including mine—blared emergency alert tones. Warnings flashed from the National Weather Service that a dust storm was approaching. Such storms are also known as “haboobs,” to the chagrin of some Arizonans who, in recent years, have protested the use of a meteorological term with Arabic roots. “I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob,” wrote one Gilbert, Arizona, man in a letter to The Arizona Republic. “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term [for what] is clearly an Arizona phenomenon?”
Outside the terminal, the air was stifling and blow-drier hot. The darkening sky was full of fine silt that diffused the white lights on the tarmac, giving them milky halos.
I adjusted the mirrors on a rented Toyota Corolla. (Halen was now parked back East with family.) Linda began texting. She’d just settled in for the night after reaching El Reno, an Oklahoma City suburb, 350 miles east from her previous stop in Tucumcari, New Mexico. She wanted to make arrangements for us to connect the following day.
Linda was still eager to see her land, but now that she wouldn’t be able to travel there until January, after the Amazon job ended, we had come up with another plan. After spending the night in Douglas, I would drive into the desert backcountry, getting as close as possible to her five acres. From there I’d set out on foot with a laptop and a smartphone, using GPS to hunt for the markers at each corner. If cell reception was strong enough, I would live-stream video of the hike directly to Linda’s phone. She could watch and give directions, pointing out any features of the land she wanted to explore, like a remote pilot at the controls of a low-tech, human-powered version of the Mars rover.
After puzzling out the time difference—Arizona eschews daylight savings—we agreed to begin the next day at one o’clock my time, three o’clock her time. Linda already sounded excited about the vicarious journey.
“Try to see the Gadsden Hotel while you’re in Douglas,” she urged. “It has marble pillars and Tiffany stained glass from when the area was booming with copper mines.” Then she wrote: “Are you driving right now?”
No, I said. The car was parked—I wasn’t texting and driving.
“Good,” she continued. “There’s a Super Walmart in Douglas, make sure you have lots of water.”
Water, sunblock, and a hat, I affirmed.
“If you get stuck out there . . . I could get ahold of the guy I brought the property from,” she wrote, then revised her thinking. “Don’t get stuck.”
If the dirt roads were too soft, I would just park back on the pavement and walk in, I told her. She seemed satisfied with that.
“Okay, get going, talk tomorrow,” she wrote. “You are one crazy woman. I can’t believe you are doing this!” And finally: “Goodnight.”
By nine o
’clock the air was clear and still. I drove southeast out of Phoenix on Interstate 10, reaching Douglas after midnight. The next morning I went online to the tax assessor’s website for Cochise County and pulled up a satellite view of Linda’s rectangular lot. I found the same area on Google Maps and plotted each corner of Linda’s land with a virtual pin. When those pins were saved to the map, their icons transformed into tiny gold stars. A rectangular constellation materialized in the desert, eight and a half miles northeast of my current GPS location, which appeared onscreen as a blue dot.
I topped off a water bottle and ventured into the hot midmorning. My first stop was Douglas’s main street, G Avenue, home to the magnificent historic hotel Linda had told me about. Around it, however, was an assortment of vacant buildings, peeling paint, fading façades, and plywood-covered windows. The sidewalks were deserted. It was hard to believe that this had once been the largest town in Arizona. Founded in 1901 as a smelting center to process ore from nearby copper mines, Douglas boomed for decades. Prosperity wasn’t permanent, though. In the second half of the century Americans grew aware of the health and environmental threats created by air pollution. Legislators funded research on the problem in 1955, leading to the Clean Air Act of 1963 and its extensions. But the local smelter, Douglas Reduction Works owned by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, managed to skirt the new federal standards until the 1980s. By then it had become the biggest emitter of sulfur dioxide in American manufacturing, belching out some 950 tons each day of the pollutant that causes acid rain. The smoke was so dense one doctor stopped encouraging patients to exercise, worried about the effects of heavy breathing. “When it gets really bad, your lungs feel slimy,” a coffee shop owner in nearby Bisbee told the Associated Press, while preparing to move his family away from the area.
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